“No, birds.” Her fingers spasmed on his as the poison whip came within what looked like a hairsbreadth of Nivriti’s face.
Suddenly the sky was full of fire. Their wings crisped, angels screamed and fell, crashing onto city roofs. Jason knew that while their bodies might be broken and burned, the majority would survive. So long as the head remained attached to the body and the flames were extinguished before they reached the internal organs, the charred, blackened remains would continue to breathe, continue to suffer.
“Neha’s new ability,” Mahiya whispered.
The fire winked out as quickly as it had exploded across the sky, but Nivriti’s troops had been decimated, though Nivriti herself had been fast enough to avoid the cauldron of flame. Now, she did something with her hands and a web of acidic green identical to Neha’s poison whip snapped out to wrap around the archangel, wings and all.
Neha fell.
Right when it appeared she’d crash onto the burning city below, she snapped the bonds, halted her descent, but Nivriti did not relent, continuing to entangle her in that clinging green web. It seemed to Mahiya that she heard Neha scream in rage as the archangel broke the bonds again and again before releasing the poison whip once more.
Nivriti dodged, wasn’t fast enough this time, and the poison touched the edge of one wing. However, contrary to the known impact of the poison on ordinary angels, she didn’t sicken and fall. Instead, she shot higher into the sky.
Neha followed, her wings ablaze with power, her hands wreathed in green. Nivriti turned, dropped a net of green filaments that wrapped around Neha, encasing her entire form. The archangel struggled, a fly caught in a web, and again she fell, but this time, the green turned white and cracked off her in pieces brittle as glass.
Ice.
The second aspect of Neha’s new abilities—but like the fire, it appeared limited, for the archangel did not attempt to freeze her opponent out of the sky.
“Jason.” Mahiya leaned into him, his wing sliding protectively over her own. “My mother should be dead, shouldn’t she?”
“Yes.”
Yet Nivriti continued to evade Neha.
A moment later, she did more than that. She threw the sticky web at Neha once more. Clearly confident she could neutralize it, Neha made no effort to dodge the net. But this time, the green strands blazed incandescent, and the archangel’s scream was of such agony that every fighter in the sky froze in place.
Mahiya reached out a hand, to whom she didn’t know. It just seemed terribly wrong that they should kill one another. Because Neha, flames licking around her body, had broken the trap at the last second—and Mahiya’s mother was close enough that she couldn’t avoid the strike of the poison whip.
It wasn’t a direct hit, but it did damage.
Mahiya stifled her cry of loss, but Neha didn’t follow the strike with a deadly second hit, her flight path erratic. “She’s badly injured.” Impossible—Neha was an archangel. And yet . . .
Fire licked the sky again, fell onto the city to set more of it alight. The sticky green threads her mother flung out in return, one of her wings dragging, missed Neha to alight on that same city. Screams rose up from the ground, eerie and anguished, the city beginning to glow orange as the flames took hold.
Mahiya’s blood filled with horror, a ravaging need to do something gripping her throat, images of the toymaker’s innocent son circling in her mind. Right when she would’ve spoken, Jason spread his wings. “I must stop this.”
“Yes.” Between them, Neha and Nivriti would devastate the city and keep going, both too angry and enraged to give up, though it was clear they were injured enough that it might yet be lethal. Ignoring the hows and whys of how her mother could’ve harmed an archangel, she squeezed Jason’s hand. “We need to stop this. For now, these are my people and I will not let them burn.”
She’d readied herself to fight, but Jason touched her jaw in a fleeting, unexpected caress before giving a curt nod. “Neha’s side is in as bad a position as your mother’s. Seeing her hurt demoralized them.”
“I have value as a hostage again.” Mahiya nodded. “I’ll stick close to you.” It bloodied her to think of Jason hurting in order to protect her, but as he understood her need to do this, she understood he was a man who would never allow his woman to go into danger unaccompanied and unshielded.
Mahiya?
That tenderness again, something she never heard in his physical voice.
Yes?
Do not get hurt.
It was an order, followed by a hard kiss that left her breathless. Intending to pull her weight, Mahiya picked up the crossbow she’d dropped, along with a case of ten spare bolts she hung over her arm. She’d purloined an old crossbow from the guard several decades ago, on the rationale that unlike swordplay or hand-to-hand combat, it was something she could teach herself.
In the intervening years, she’d had to steal replacements, but her plan had worked. She’d managed to sneak in target practice in the mountains at least twice a month until her last crossbow broke five weeks ago. I’m no expert, she said to Jason, but I usually hit my target.
Good. I’ll need you to watch my back.
With that unexpected statement, he led her on a low flight path over the blistering heat of the city, until they were positioned between Neha and Nivriti. She’d assumed he’d fly up to where they fought, somehow attempt to stop the battle, but he drew his sword, pointed it downward. A second later, black lightning crackled along his arms and over the hands he had fisted around the hilt of the sword, and she realized he was shoving his midnight power down through the conduit of the blade.
A trickle of sweat poured down his face, his biceps rigid . . . and shadows began to coalesce throughout the city, thick and heavy, snuffing out flame, stopping agony. People screamed at the river of soft black until they saw it sheath burning victims, smother the flames before moving on. Then they tried to direct it to their own homes and shops, but the shadows were driven by the mind of an angel whose body contained a level of power that stunned, and they went where they were most needed.
To people. To animals. To buildings in which living beings were trapped.
When an openly aggressive fighter arrowed toward Jason, she didn’t hesitate or bother to wonder to which army he belonged. Lifting the crossbow, she put a bolt through his wing, sending him into an uncontrolled spiral that ended with him crashing into a burned-out roof. Mahiya winced but notched a second bolt into the bow, and when the next aggressor headed their way, she took aim and fired.
Maybe she was no fighter, but she would not permit anyone to hurt Jason.
She’d just dispatched the second angel before he could fire his own crossbow, when Jason shuddered and raised his sword. “The worst fires are out,” he said, his voice a rasp.
Wonder at his strength, the way he’d used it to save, not harm, had her throat thick with emotion. “You’ve given them a fighting chance.” She could see fire trucks pouring water over the buildings that continued to burn, people racing to the lake to create a chain of buckets.
Jason’s face was drawn as he turned to her. “Keep shooting at anyone who comes at you, and wait for my signal.” With that, he flew straight upward to hover between the two warring women.
Trusting his skills as a warrior, she didn’t argue. Please be careful. A single strike from either the poison whip or her mother’s acid green web, and he’d crash to his death, but he didn’t so much as flinch when the twins hit out at one another, the strikes passing inches from the edges of his wings. As Nivriti recovered to throw another strike at Neha, only for it to veer toward Jason when her arm faltered, he deflected it with a ribbon of black flame that seemed an extension of his sword.
Now, princess, he said and her title sounded like an endearment. They’ve exhausted their energy for the time being.
41
Mahiya pumped her wings upward, making certain to keep to her mother’s side of the battle line, so as not to provide Neha with an easy target. Jason gave her an almost imperceptible nod when she reached him, and she knew he was relinquishing the reins, an acknowledgment that she knew the players far better than he did.
“You are destroying the city,” she said to Neha. “You are killing your own people.”
Wings continuing to glow, Neha looked down, frowned, and waved a hand. A thin layer of ice formed over the places where the noxious green of Nivriti’s web had begun to bubble through roofs and walls . . . and people. It froze, then seemed to break off in inert pieces. Neha waved her hand again, but the fires Jason hadn’t smothered continued to burn, the archangel’s ability to create ice apparently exhausted.
It wasn’t only fatigue that marked both women.
Neha’s wings and body bore raw wounds from the same acid, her cheek gouged on one side to reveal her jawbone, her left wing sporting a palm-sized hole that would’ve crippled most angels. Meanwhile, blood of near black seeped from Nivriti’s nose and ears, even the corners of her eyes, the poison in her bloodstream attacking her from the inside out.
“Your forces are decimated,” she said to her own mother, wanting Nivriti to turn around, to see how many of her people were dead or viciously injured. “And you are fading.”
Nivriti swept out a hand, the burst blood vessels in her eyes having turned her gaze crimson. “Get out of the way, child.”
“I am not the child here.” Mahiya held her position, speaking to them both. “You are at a stalemate, and soon, you’ll be wrestling each other on the ground with the mortals watching as they would a circus act.”
Frozen silence from both Neha and Nivriti.
Then her mother started to laugh, and it was awash with near-manic delight. “That would certainly not do for your vaunted dignity, sister dearest.”
“It would suit you very well” was Neha’s cutting response, grooves of pain bracketing her mouth as one of the minor tendons in her left wing appeared to give way. “You have ever wanted to perform.”
Nivriti shrugged, wiped her bloody nose on her sleeve. “At least I did not believe a great act for truth and take a man who did not love me as my consort.”
“No, you only bore his child and stayed faithful while he rutted like a tomcat.”
Mahiya had the strangest feeling of being caught in the middle of a sibling squabble. Except this squabble had already cost hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives. “My father,” she said with a deliberation designed to offset their emotion-fueled dialogue, “was a man beautiful enough to enchant a heart of stone, but he was not strong, was not worthy of either one of you.”
“My daughter speaks the truth.” A great bitterness in Nivriti’s expression, an ugly thing that could eat a person up from the inside out. “I did you a favor, sister. He was lifting the skirts of one of his no doubt many whores inside your fort when I came to rescue him. So I returned with a few gifts.”
Neha hissed and snapped out the poison whip, but weakened as she was, it didn’t go far. “It was not your place to render judgment.”
