Jason, more than anyone, understood that such taboos could be broken, but doing so came at a price. “Executing you without due cause, and while she is clearly sane, would make her a pariah among our kind.” And Neha was a social creature, one who valued her connections around the world.
Sipping at tea that must be tepid by now, Mahiya met his gaze. “I’ll keep my silence, but your reputation precedes you. As the days continue to pass with no result from you, she’ll become suspicious.”
As it turned out, coming up with a way to allay Neha’s distrust was the one thing Jason didn’t have to worry about—because the crimson of blood violently spilled hadn’t yet stopped flowing.
* * *
Shock and sorrow both colored Neha’s eyes when she joined Jason beside the crumpled body discovered on a rooftop terrace on the other side of the courtyard from the Palace of Jewels. The weak postdawn sunlight washed everything in soft gold, made it appear a macabre painting. In the center of the painting lay a vampire dressed in a pair of black silk pajamas, the straps of her camisole ripped to expose heavy br**sts, her skin gray with death.
Her legs were twisted and broken, as if she’d fallen or been dropped from a height. However, the position of her body made it impossible to confirm whether she’d begun her descent from the sky or from one of the small ground-to-air defense towers mounted around the fort—the nearest one was at the right distance. Jason would speak to the guard who’d been on duty in the predawn hours, but instinct said the victim had never been in the tower, her fall arranged by an angel.
In spite of her exposed br**sts, the attack didn’t appear to have been sexual. The damage to her clothing had most likely occurred during the struggle. Unlike Audrey, this victim’s head wasn’t attached to her body; it had rolled to settle against one of the latticework barriers where he’d seen several exquisitely dressed women leaning and laughing yesterday as they looked out over the edge into the courtyard below. Today, the only sound he could hear was that of a woman’s jagged sobs, while in his line of sight lay splatters of congealed rust red where the head had bounced and rolled after being dropped.
She was looking at him from the other side of the room, her pretty dark brown eyes filmed over with a whiteness that was wrong. The stump of her neck was crusted with blood where it sat on the table in the corner, as if placed there for just this purpose.
Unsurprised by the echoes of horror that resonated through time, Jason locked the memory shut behind shields he’d had a lifetime to build, and continued to look at the body that lay in front of him, not one long gone from this earth.
This woman’s chest had been left unmolested, her heart still within her flesh, but in one thing, this body and Audrey’s were identical. Though the crush injuries caused by the fall obscured most of the bruises, Jason could tell the victim had been beaten with pitiless brutality before death. When he turned her over to look at her back, he saw that her spine had been ripped out to lie broken against blood-encrusted skin. He eased her back down with gentle hands, certain she’d been conscious for the beating, the torture, paralyzed and helpless as a babe.
Rage and violence, the killer’s fingerprint was unmistakable. “Do you recognize her?” he asked Neha, aware she had only just returned to Archangel Fort after Eris’s mountaintop funeral. From the heavily damp hair scraped into a knot at her nape and her simple tunic of pale blue paired with white pants, she’d been bathing afterward as was custom, when she received word of this death.
“Her name was Shabnam.” The archangel’s tone held raw grief. “She was one of my longest-serving ladies-in-waiting.” Crouching down beside the vampire’s head with its ravaged skin, uncaring that her wings scraped the cool marble and the blood that stained it, she reached out to close Shabnam’s eyelids over hazel eyes dulled in death, using a dot of power to make sure they remained so. “I scattered Eris’s ashes less than an hour ago while his mother sobbed, and now I must inform Shabnam’s people of her murder.”
Jason heard the anger beneath the grief, and it was another puzzle. “Will you tell me about her?”
“She was a butterfly,” Neha said, rising to her feet, her movements heavy, as if she was weighted down with sadness. “A pretty ornament who cared for glitter and sparkles. She was not dark of heart or wise of politics. The only reason she made it so high in my court was that I enjoyed her sense of innocence.” A twist of her lips. “Of all the women who serve me, she was the most harmless.”
Yet she had been killed with terrible cruelty. Jason wasn’t arrogant enough to think he could read all of Neha’s moods, but her sorrow appeared genuine. And while he could see her murdering Eris in a jealous rage, it beggared belief that she’d spill innocent blood while preparing to say her final farewell to her consort. Even if she had done so in a grief or guilt-fueled madness, she had no need to pretend. Brutal as it was to say, Shabnam had been Neha’s to kill.
“Do you believe it to be the same person who murdered Eris?” Neha asked, the cold blade of an archangel’s anger a faint nimbus of light burning off her wings.
“Perhaps.” Jason rose from his crouched position beside the body. “Or it could be an attempt to use Eris’s murder to cover an unrelated crime.” Shabnam had surely been a stunning woman in life. “Did she have a lover?”
“Yes. But Tarun is gone to Europe on a task for me—he could not have done this.”
Jason made a note to confirm Tarun’s whereabouts himself. It might be a truism, but the lover was most often the one responsible for the murder of a woman, mortal or immortal. Some darkness knew no boundaries. “Anyone else who might hold a grudge against her?”