Archangel's Storm by Nalini Singh Page B

knife that was the presence of his illegitimate child, and Nivriti lay dead in some forgotten grave, her flesh rotted to dust and her bones bleached white.
    The only one left who’d be pained by the mere sight of Mahiya . . . was Neha.
    Mahiya had to keep the archangel from remembering that as long as possible. She was almost ready to escape the fort.
Almost.
But almost wasn’t good enough when an archangel hated you with a spite that had survived three centuries, a spite that was a caustic flame dipped in poison. The only
purpose she currently served was in keeping watch on Jason. The instant she failed in that task, she’d join her mother below the earth, the maggots feasting on her flesh.
    Jason said nothing to her apology, shifting to walk back out and upstairs to the main door. He didn’t shorten his stride to accommodate her, and she found herself almost running to keep up, the neat folds of her sari flaring out in front of her. Breathless, she wondered if he sought to humiliate her before the guards. If he did, he’d be in for a long wait—the guards had seen her in far more humiliating positions.
    The crack of a whip.
    Fire on her back, sticky liquid trailing down her broken flesh.
    Jason came to a sudden stop ahead of the still-closed doors, his voice shattering the memory of the punishment meted out to her in Neha’s inner courtyard, the whip wielded by the Master of the Guard.
    “My rooms?” he asked, his voice so pure, she found herself wondering, not for the first time, if he ever lifted it in song.
    “In the palace across the courtyard,” she said, barely managing to keep her wing from sliding across his as she halted her own forward momentum.
    Jason was not a man any woman would touch without invitation.
    Now, reaching out, he opened the door and waited for her to exit. Courtesy, she thought—he’d given her his back earlier, had clearly written her off as a threat. She was too practical to be insulted. If Jason wanted to hurt her, she could do nothing to stop him. Hundreds of warriors, angelic and vampiric, might live in the fort, but the only offensive or defensive training Mahiya had came from what she’d been able to glean by covert study of their training sessions.
    And no one, not even a woman determined to protect herself in any way she could, could learn to be a master fighter simply by watching, then attempting to copy those movements in the privacy of her bedroom or up in the isolation of the mountains. However, to ask for help would be to pay a price she couldn’t ask anyone to pay.
    Her first fledgling friendship as an adult—two hundred years ago—had resulted in the angel in question having both his arms and his wings excised for an outwardly unrelated offense. Mahiya would never forget the way his blood had coated the stone of the warriors’ courtyard, darkening the granite to near-black even as his screams echoed off the walls of the surrounding barracks.
    Mahiya had understood the brutal lesson, had never again attempted to build bonds with those in the fort, until many believed her a creature of conceit. Better that than to have their screams ringing in her ears as that young angel’s did to this day, though he was long healed.
    “No one ever sees Jason coming. No one.”
    The overheard words reverberating in her mind as she reached the courtyard, she heard him say something to the two angels at the door before he reappeared at her side. She glanced at his wings as they crossed over to the mountainside palace, expecting to see them silvered by the waning moon as were the black filaments in her own wings, but there was only darkness at Jason’s back—if she hadn’t known him for an angel, she’d have thought the spymaster a vampire.
    Blinking, she stared, though it was a rudeness. “How do you do that?”
    He didn’t ask her to explain what she meant. “A natural gift honed by time.”
    Conscious that this predator—fascinating and darkly intriguing—was deadlier