“I can tear your mind apart like the rice paper of Lijuan’s lands.”
“No,” Jason said. “You can’t.” He felt it then, her mental touch shoving against his shields, clawing and hard.
Her eyes widened, anger replaced by fascination. “Incredible. It is as if your mind wears an onyx carapace.”
Raphael had said something similar to Jason when he’d attempted to reach Jason’s mind in order to—ironically enough—teach him how to protect his thoughts from invasion. No one they’d consulted, not even Jessamy or the healer, Keir, had ever seen or heard of its like in an angel so young.
“Perhaps”—Keir’s wise eyes in that too-young face—“you created it before you ever knew it to be an impossibility. An instinctive defense.”
Jason had always thought Keir had the right of it. Alone and scared when he’d been little more than a babe, he’d had to learn to protect himself from a world too big, too dangerous, too empty. “You can kill me,” he said, because that was true, “but in doing so, you lose the information I hold.”
“You would make an enemy of me out of a frippery?”
Jason heard Mahiya drop behind him, knew she had to be hurt, but still he didn’t turn. “I do not think you’ll consider me thus after you hear what I have to say.”
* * *
Mahiya sucked in pained breaths of air, at least three of her ribs cracked. Pushing up from her crumpled state on the ground into a sitting position, she took as deep a breath as she dared. It felt like knives stabbing into her liver, but the haze cleared from her eyes to bring Jason and Neha into sharp focus. The archangel’s face was cold, Jason’s a mask, his tattoo dramatic under the sunshine.
All at once, Neha laughed, and it was a true laugh, full of delight. “I knew I had chosen well.”
Mahiya’s blood went cold, realization a chill rain in her veins.
“I can offer Jason something Raphael will never be able to match.”
Jason wouldn’t realize, wouldn’t understand, but she knew that look on Neha’s face, had seen the calculation in it before, after quarrels with Eris. None of that had ever come to anything, but now Eris was dead.
Swallowing the pain that threatened to splinter her thoughts, she tried to reach Jason’s mind. She’d never before dared this, for it presumed an intimacy he did not wish to share, but he had to know what he faced.
When her thoughts hit the unyielding glossy black of his shields and ricocheted back, panic beat at her with fluttering wings, but she told herself to be patient, to be calm. If she didn’t succeed, Jason could inadvertently insult Neha and in so doing, forfeit his life.
I won’t let her kill you, Jason. I won’t.
Taking another deep breath, she tried to reach him again, realized with a dash of desperation that she was far too weak to have any impact on a shield so solid it was beyond adamantine. It was unlikely he even noticed her attempts, especially when from what Neha was saying, the archangel, too, was attempting to batter his defenses.
Retreating, she threw every part of her mind into coming up with some other way to either gain his attention or create a diversion.
Are you hurt? A voice, pristine as a bell . . . and inside her head.
The wonder of the fact he’d initiated a link might have paralyzed her had she not been so afraid for him. No, I’m fine, she lied, able to taste the gleaming obsidian of his rage. Jason, listen, there is something you must know.
Silence, but the connection remained open.
She cares nothing for me except as the toy she called me, but she wants you.
Neha isn’t the first archangel to want to poach my skills.
No. She held her breath, released it in a quiet rush as pain stabbed at her chest.
You are hurt.
A few broken ribs won’t matter if we both end up dead, so listen. She doesn’t want your skills, she wants you—for her new consort.
36
Neha’s voice broke into their silent exchange. “I did not expect such a weak creature to intrigue you so, but it is undoubtedly a fleeting interest.” That quickly, Neha dismissed Mahiya. “What I offer you is far more than you can imagine.”
She’s mad.
Mahiya blinked at Jason’s flat assessment. No, Neha is sane. Coldly so. She knows you’ll be a strong, dangerous, intelligent consort. Jason was a man any woman would be proud to have by her side. And you are beautiful. Neha has always been drawn to beauty in a man. Though Jason was a na**d blade to Eris’s pretty ornament.
Only madness would make her blind to the fact that it would be a very stupid man who’d accept the offer of a woman who imprisoned her last consort for three hundred years.
Mahiya’s mouth threatened to fall open. Well, when you put it that way . . .
“I need a consort,” Neha said, walking to the edge of the garden once more, her gaze on the lake, its surface a mirror of the blue sky touched with curling edges of red and orange. “I do not want you for a lover, so you may keep Mahiya as a diversion if you wish, but I am offering you power you will never gain in Raphael’s court.”
Jason was quiet for a long moment. “I did not expect such an offer,” he said at last, as if Neha had caught him unawares and he sought time to get his thoughts in order.
Yes, Mahiya thought, watching Neha’s face as she turned back to Jason. That was the right tack. To refuse her outright would be an insult the archangel would not forget, never forgive.
“A consort must walk beside an archangel,” he added. “I prefer the shadows.”
“My last consort was a creature of the light, shining and handsome, and he betrayed me.” Brittle words.
Some assistance, Mahiya Geet.
Startled at the tenderness in his mental tone, something she’d never heard in his spoken voice, it took her a second to reply. She’s still in love with Eris, and you’re too proud a man to be with a woman who mourns another.
I am?
Her lips twitched. Jason’s laughter was hidden deep within, where the light did not often reach, but it was there. You are, she said firmly, taking advantage of Neha’s preoccupation with Jason to get to her feet.
“This time,” the archangel continued, “a consort who stands in the shadows would suit me well.”
Jason bowed deeper than Mahiya had ever seen him bow, his wings spread to their full breathtaking width, the colors of sunset playing over the jet in a display that turned it into a canvas of black flame. When he rose back up, his expression was as inscrutable as always, but his voice gentle. “I am truly flattered.”