A pause, then a small nod, her voice no longer cool when she said, “I’ll wait for your return.”
Strange what those simple words did to him as he flew off the balcony and up into the diamond-studded jet of the night sky. There, he hovered invisible against the stars and listened. His gift wasn’t one he could call up on command, but he could put himself into the optimum frame of mind to trigger it. Now, he did just that, the capricious winds whipping strands of hair from his queue and pasting the thin linen of his shirt against his body.
Whispers began to filter through to his mind minutes later, a thousand small fragments that meant nothing. Patient, he allowed the river of sensory input to flow around him. Then he caught a single whisper that wasn’t a word so much as a sense. Shifting into the wind, he flew over the ridges and valleys of the mountains, following an instinct honed to a keen edge by near to seven hundred years of life.
Nothing stood out about the valley where the trail stopped cold, but he came down under the moonlight nonetheless, careful to land with a stealth that was as innate as breathing. Swathed in shadows, the land betrayed none of its secrets . . . until the wind shifted.
Dusty decay, but no scent of rot.
Catching the line of the breeze, he traced it back to a tumble of gray stone, some of the rough chunks the size of small cars. The sheer rock face above told him their origin, though enough time had passed that the hardy grasses evolved to survive this harsh climate had grown to above his knee around the rocks.
It was, he thought, sheer luck that the body had fallen into a crevice when it had been dropped. Or the remnants of it in any case. The long skirt set with hundreds of tiny mirrors would otherwise have been a beacon in the sunlight. As it was, that girlish skirt was shaded by the rocks, the majority of the body caught in a fissure created by two adjoining hunks of stone.
The blood had dried and flaked over the time she’d lain here alone and forgotten, her long blonde hair dry but paradoxically shiny, her face unrecognizable. However, the shade between the rocks had preserved enough tissue on her face and body that he could speculate as to the fact she’d been severely bruised. The rocks could be responsible for the damage, but Jason would bet she’d suffered the abuse prior to death. Because this killing, like Eris’s, had been about fury, about rage.
The viciousness of it was such that even the decay and the foraging of small animals and birds couldn’t hide the fact that she’d been stabbed over and over. Where the skeletal structure of her body lay exposed to the elements, he could see the notches the blade had cut into her bones, marks of an ugly violence that would last long after the maggots had cleaned up what remained of her flesh.
Audrey had clearly not been the strongest of vampires, because while her heart was gone—ripped out by a brutal hand if her splintered rib cage was any indication—her head was still attached to her body. That head had been cracked and damaged, the skin of her neck shriveled to mummylike dryness where it wasn’t missing, but from what Jason could see, the damage had been caused by birds and rodents eating at her flesh, not by an attempt at decapitation.
Her hands were bone now, no way to tell if she’d worn a ring on a particular finger, but he could as easily glean that from a photograph now that he knew her name. Walking the area around the body, he saw nothing else of note. It went against his every belief to leave her here, but he could not risk bringing her to the fort as yet. Neha’s response was unpredictable—things could get deadly very quickly unless he did this exactly right.
And Audrey was long past being hurt. He had to consider other lives now.
“Whatever happens, I’ll make sure you get home,” he promised, before shifting back to a more open part of the valley and rising into the night sky.
Mahiya’s balcony doors were open as if in invitation, and when he entered, it was to find her seated on a cushion on the living room floor. She’d changed from the sari into a tunic of vivid aquamarine teamed with slim cotton pants in plain black, her hair gathered in its familiar knot at the nape of her graceful neck.
In front of her sat a low table carved of dark wood and inlaid with the merest glimmer of fine gold around the edges, on top of which stood a pot of tea alongside a tray of mixed savories and sweets, and two cups. He halted, disappointment curling through his body. “You’re expecting someone.”
Mahiya’s laugh was warm. “I am expecting you.”
He hadn’t been caught off guard for a long, long time. “How did you know when I would return?” Swirls of steam rose from the fine black tea she’d begun to pour.
“A good host learns her guest’s rhythms.” She waved a slender hand bare of rings but circled by two glass bangles the same shade as the tunic, toward the flat cushion on the other side of the table “Please, sit.”
He wondered if she sought to seduce him, decided it unlikely—her tunic was too modest, the mandarin collar high, her sleeves elbow length, and her face scrubbed clean. Thrown a little off-balance by the fact she’d gone to all this trouble, he nudged aside the cushion and took a seat directly on the floor, his wings draping over the smaller jewel-toned cushions thrown around, the fabric soft against the bottom of his wings. “You must have a sensory gift of some kind to have anticipated my arrival with such accuracy.”
“What? No.” Her startled look transformed with the second word into an honesty so rueful that he knew she would’ve preferred to claim a gift. “I was watching the skies for you. So you see, there is no mystery after all.”