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.”
“You dare say that?” Nivriti attempted to spray her with the acid, failed. “After you played judge and jury?”