“Well, well, well.” Neha rose and walked down the shallow steps below her throne to shake her head. “Such a waste that you will never rule. Yes, the helpful Lijuan thought to play me.” A flash of teeth. “But she forgets, I have played this game for millennia, too, and I know how to get what I want.”
Jason was near certain there was, in truth, no true secret to accelerating the development of power, that Lijuan had simply taken advantage of the Cascade effect. At least nine thousand years of age, she’d had millennia to mine the Refuge library for such secrets, even had she not come into her power at a time when several Ancients yet sat on the Cadre. They could well have told her of the Cascade.
Such a plan would befit the Archangel of China’s intelligent, devious mind, but to bring it up now would be to make Neha look the fool, so he kept his silence and considered his report to Raphael. Though he couldn’t speak of the Lijuan–Neha connection, he could now discuss Neha’s new abilities—her display over the city had made them public.
“If you wish to keep my favor, Jason,” Neha said, sari whispering along the carpet as she walked to the window that looked out over the courtyard garden, “you will discover how Nivriti was able to do what she did, and then you will tell me.”
“I do that and I become part of your personal war. Raphael would not be pleased.”
“Do you always do what pleases Raphael?”
Jason knew the arch question was meant to prick his pride, but the fact was, he served Raphael out of choice, not compulsion. “I will leave your territory tonight,” he said, his tone even.
Neha’s wings flared, the indigo filaments catching the light, before folding neatly to her back as she turned to hold his gaze. “Tell me, when did you gain the ability to use shadows in such a fashion?”
He said nothing, for she could expect no answer. The truth was, what he’d done tonight was only one aspect of his strength—he could use the black lightning in a far more violent way. “Do you wish me to carry a message to Raphael?”
A sigh, a faint smile. “Tell him his spymaster’s faultless service has made me rethink our quarrel. I say Raphael is no longer my enemy.” She allowed the viper to crawl down her arm, twine itself over her skin. “Safe journey, Jason. I will attempt not to hurt Mahiya too badly when I find her.”
* * *
“I will attempt not to hurt Mahiya too badly when I find her.”
Jason understood Neha’s words had been meant to torment him. It wasn’t the first time someone had attempted such, but it was the first time they had found their mark. No matter his decision to give Mahiya time with her mother, he knew that was not what he was going to do, even if part of him said he used Neha’s taunt as an excuse.
Flying high and fast, he made certain no one tracked him from the fort. Only when he was dead sure he was alone in the skies, did he come down on the dawn-lit grasses of a jagged mountaintop, the biting winds attempting to rip his hair from its tie. Ignoring the chill whip of air, he took out his cell phone and put through a call to Raphael.
Raphael was quicker than Neha, perhaps because he’d been directly impacted by the events of that spring. “The world was in tumult when Caliane rose to wakefulness,” he said the instant he heard of Nivriti’s ability to harm Neha. “The chaos was put down to the disruption caused by her waking, but what if it was the confluence of two events, the reappearance of an Ancient concealing the emergence of an archangel?”
“I thought the same,” Jason said, recalling the violent storms that had hit the world, the sea rising in a fury, the plates of the earth shifting, ice falling when it should’ve long thawed, “but I didn’t sense the same depth of power in Nivriti that I do the Cadre.” The prickling consciousness of being in the presence of something other.
“And Neha would’ve known if her sister had become Cadre,” Raphael said. “One archangel always recognizes another—but from what you say, it appears she is in the dark about the origin of Nivriti’s abilities.”
“Yes. It could be that as Neha’s twin, Nivriti has a capacity to harm her that no other angel possesses—along with a certain resistance to Neha’s own abilities.” Twins were beyond rare in the angelic population, and Neha was the first archangel he knew of who had been born with another. “We have no guideline against which to judge the bond that ties them to one another.”
A short pause. “Should Nivriti believe herself Cadre, she’ll seek to join our number soon enough,” Raphael said thoughtfully. “Unlike Neha, the rest of us are not disadvantaged by a blood connection—it’ll take but a single meeting to answer the question of her strength. For now, continue to have your people keep a watch on her, on them both.”
“Sire.” Ending the call, Jason turned his ear to the wind, listening for the fading echoes of a retreating army . . . and the shimmering, stubborn hope of a princess whose presence he missed tucked against his mind.
42
Mahiya didn’t know what she’d expected of her mother’s base, but it wasn’t a fortified palace complex hidden in a mountain valley a bare four hours away on the wing. However, it made perfect sense—Nivriti couldn’t have covertly flown a fleet in the dark over a much longer distance. The vampiric ground troops, their journey longer, had traveled to the city in vehicles that wouldn’t stand out on the roads and now retreated in the same fashion.
They brought with them the dead and the less critical of Nivriti’s injured, Rhys and Nivriti’s senior general having negotiated a short window in which the fallen could be retrieved. While Nivriti was constrained to depart the city immediately, she’d sent half her angelic battalion to the ground—supervised by Rhys’s men—to rescue and carry home the worst injured, vampires and angels both. That unit was approximately two hours behind them, the ground vehicles almost half a day.