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.
This complex, Nivriti told Mahiya after they landed in the predawn dark under the watchful eye of the small squadron she’d left to stand guard, had once been hers—and was now again. “Neha allowed it to fall into ruin.” A pleased statement. “The surrounding village dried up without the palace’s custom, and so the area is a barren, forested wasteland.”
“A perfect place to hide an army.” Entering the palace, Mahiya took in the ancient tapestries, as well as the paintings that had been created using the walls themselves as a canvas—of elephants and horses ridden by sword-wielding vampiric warriors, and angelic maidens shy of smile but with weapons in their hands.
The once brilliant colors were now pale ghosts, the jewels worn by warriors and maidens both dull rocks. It was clear the tapestries and the carpets that covered the stone floor were as old as the paintings, but the surviving pieces had had the dust beaten out of them to reveal works of faded splendor. The walls and floors of the palace itself had also been scrubbed until the beauty of the building, full of intricate carvings and lacework windows, made further adornment an indulgence not a necessity.
“Neha’s greatest weakness has always been arrogance,” Nivriti said after pouring a glass of water from a nearby pitcher, drinking it down. “She has never believed I could be her equal, and so she left no guards on me or on the places that have always been, and will always be, mine.” Words as hard as the stone of her stronghold. “Now she has learned better.”
An angel, his left wing dragging as a result of a burn across its upper half, walked in then. “My lady,” he said. “I am sorry to interrupt, but we must talk about our defensive plans with so many injured.”
Nodding at the male, Nivriti waved Mahiya away. “Go find a place to rest, child.” Her eyes dropped to the crossbow still in Mahiya’s hand. “You will not need that here, but I’m glad my daughter is not a useless ornament.” With that, she was gone.
Mahiya took the chance to explore the palace. What she found was that it was as close to an impregnable fortress as you could get and still be a place that was clearly home for Nivriti and her people. High perimeter walls, but soft rugs on the floor. Weapons everywhere she looked, but a kitchen that permeated the rooms with mouthwatering smells.
When she made her way to a balcony at the back of the palace, she saw both a working well and healthy fruit and vegetable gardens inside the defensive walls. Though the skies were still gray, a vampire had already begun to work the gardens, and he told her the water in the well was sourced from an underground reservoir. “No way for anyone to poison it.”
Such precautions wouldn’t protect the stronghold against aerial attack, but the mountains around the valley were set up with ground-to-air weaponry Mahiya guessed had been hidden until the assault on Neha, and there was only one road leading in. It was a place meant to hold under a siege, she thought as she walked back inside the palace.
Though no one appeared to be paying attention to her, guards came out of nowhere to redirect her path when she tried to go down a particular corridor. They also took her crossbow, saying they’d get it cleaned for her.
Using her best princess smile, she said, “Of course,” and left without argument.
It took an hour of watching and waiting, but the lingering guards were eventually called away on another task, and it took her but ten seconds to make it to the doors and through. The rooms beyond were locked with old-fashioned bolts and padlocks, bars on the small windows cut into the doors.
A sudden chill in her bones, she looked into the first window.
A bloodsoaked and unconscious angel lay within, his wings pinned to the floor by bolts pounded through the feathers, tendons, and muscle. Horror a crushing weight on her chest, she forced herself to walk to the next cell—to find a vampire hanging from his wrists by thick chains, beaten and bloodied, his head slumped forward on his chest. She recognized them both from Archangel Fort. Neither was powerful enough to be immediately missed, but both were old enough to have knowledge of the inner workings of the fort.
“Mahiya.”
Having heard the tread of Nivriti’s boots, she didn’t startle. “You broke these people.”
“Neha would do the same to mine.” Ice, rigid and brutal. “She did far worse to me.”
It was at that instant that Mahiya admitted the thought she’d nurtured in a secret corner of her heart—that the murders of Eris and Audrey, Shabnam and Arav, had been an aberration, that her mother did not harbor the ugliness of cruelty in her bones. “Will you release them now?”
“No.” Nivriti reached through the bars to wrap that sticky green web around the vampire’s throat.
“Mother, stop.” She gripped Nivriti’s hand, pulled, but it was too late, the substance already on the prisoner.
As Mahiya watched horrified, his skin and muscle and bone dissolved into bubbling white until the body fell away from the neck. The only mercy was that the male never gained consciousness. “That’s . . .”
“More merciful than what Neha would’ve done to him had he crawled home.”
“Your power was to do with birds.” It was the plea of a child desperate to save something of her dream of her mother. “With living things.” Not this sadistic death.
The smile that touched Nivriti’s eyes was tinged acidic green. “The ability died,” she said flatly. “But buried in the earth, I found comfort in other creatures.” She shifted to the cell that housed the angel. “They sacrificed their lives when I needed sustenance, and shared their strength with me.”
“No! Please!” Again, Mahiya attempted to halt Nivriti as her mother—almost desultorily—flicked the deadly green web onto the angel.
But her mother was over three thousand years old, her power vast even in the aftermath of battle. It was an unequal contest, one Mahiya could not win. Trembling, she forced herself to watch, to remember this death, as the angel dissolved into nothing. He and the vampire both deserved epitaphs, both deserved not to be simply erased out of existence.
Sighing, Nivriti went to touch Mahiya, shook her head when Mahiya stumbled back. “How did you stay so soft under my sister’s loving hand, hmm?”
Because I didn’t want to end up like her . . . like you. Her heart broke again, as she realized that some childhood dreams had no hope of ever coming true.
“Never mind. I am here to take care of you now.” Nivriti looked over her shoulder. “Escort my daughter to her room. She should rest.”
Mahiya allowed herself to be shown to the clean and, by the standards of the palace, luxurious room. It was clear she was being given honor as Nivriti’s child.
“I am here to take care of you now.”
Sitting down on the four-poster bed, grief a knot in her throat, she wrapped her fingers around one of the carved wooden posts that had been polished until they shone, and then she thought. About who she was, what she wanted to do with the immortal existence that stretched endlessly in front of her.
Regardless of what Nivriti believed, she was no child. She had fought for her freedom from an archangel. Jason had helped her achieve that freedom, and perhaps she wouldn’t ever have gained it on her own, but even faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, even after a lifetime with an archangel who wanted to crush her spirit, she’d refused to surrender. And with her spymaster, too, she was the one who’d driven a bargain when she held but a single fragile card.
“You need to give me something in return. I can’t surrender the most valuable piece of information I have without gaining something equally valuable in return.”
She’d spoken those words, demanded he treat her need for freedom with respect.
But now, once again, she found herself in a prison. There were no locks, no ill will from Nivriti, but her mother had made it patent she saw Mahiya as a babe. Someone who’d be kept safe in this palace, have her wings clipped, and be shut away or ordered into silence when it came time for the adults to talk. Protected from the harsh realities of life.
“Escort my daughter to her room.”
Already, Mahiya could feel an oppressive sense of suffocation constricting her rib cage. “It is too late, Mother,” she whispered, and it was a decision she’d needed to make before she could carry on with her life. “I have not been a babe for a long time.”
Sadness tore through her veins at all they had lost, the time they could never reclaim. But there was also a sweet, sweet relief, the leaden guilt in her stomach at the thought of abandoning Nivriti leavened by the knowledge that to build a relationship with her mother, she’d have to leave her. It was the only way to force Nivriti to see her as a woman grown. A woman who loved a spymaster with wings of black.
Had Jason known? That had she flown away from Nivriti on the battlefield, she’d have forever wondered what her life might’ve been like with her mother? That her guilt at deserting a woman who had survived a nightmare, and who looked at Mahiya with love in her eyes, would’ve been a constant pain in her chest?
Her lips curved, because of course he had—Jason thought four steps ahead. Hope bloomed, but fingers tightening on the post, she forced herself to be rational, to remember he’d parted from her without any indication he intended to find her again. Even if he did, he couldn’t guess that she’d have come to her decision, be ready to leave only hours after arrival. Loyal as he was to Raphael, he’d most probably already left the subcontinent to make his report.
Which meant Mahiya was on her own.
Drawing in a deep breath, she stood and took stock of herself. She was a little tired from the flight to the palace, but not exhausted, as the army had moved at a slower pace to accommodate their injured brethren. Nevertheless, it would be smart to rest, regain her full strength—except that she wanted to leave now.
Even the most loving restraints were still chains that sought to hobble her.
Departing now did give her one small advantage—the secondary angelic unit, with their injured cargo, had arrived as she was being escorted to her room. Her offer of help had been declined, and from their condescending smiles, she was fairly certain it was because the guards thought she’d faint when she saw the damage, never realizing the things she’d witnessed in Neha’s court.
Everyone else who could be spared was tending to the wounded, the palace’s defenses the thinnest they would ever be. It was her best chance to slip away—because the fact was, she didn’t think her mother would simply let her go. Not when Nivriti believed her a child unable to care for herself. Mahiya’s eyes burned, and she wondered if her mother’s blindness was willful, if she tried to find the babe who had been stolen from her so very long ago.
