“Chance the door would be stiff with disuse, give him away. He oiled the hinges for us prior to leaving.” He went into another alcove, came out with a bag she assumed Venom had stashed. “Weapons, should we need them.”
Rubbing at the fine grit on her face, cobwebs no doubt dusted over her hair, she dropped her bag in the corner and entered the open space in the center of the unbroken part of the temple. “I can’t leave.” The unvarnished words simply spilled out, before she was even aware of making a choice.
“I know.”
A terrible ache blossomed in her chest at his simple acceptance.
“If the world suddenly changed and she stood in front of me, I would run into her arms just like that little boy.”
It would’ve been smarter to stay silent, to not push at his boundaries, but a life of walls and secrets was not what she wanted with her spymaster. “Will you tell me?” she said, asking him to share a piece of his history with her, even if he could not share his heart. “How she died?”
* * *
Jason leaned against the wall at the back of the ruined temple, his ears cocked to the wind. It brought a single word.
Nivriti.
Not long to wait, he thought, guessing the vengeance-driven angel had a spy in the fort who’d informed her the instant her daughter was out of Neha’s reach and no longer at risk of being used as a hostage.
His eyes lingered on the woman who stood with her back to a column that had survived the vagaries of time, her face a study in strength and vulnerability intertwined. Waiting for his answer, waiting for him to tell her of a nightmare he’d shared with no person on this earth. But this princess had nightmares of her own.
It could be that that was why he spoke. Or perhaps it was because of the luminous warmth at the back of his mind that was Mahiya’s presence. He should’ve blocked her out, was certain she didn’t realize she’d maintained the connection since he first allowed her through his shields. But he was loathe to cut her off—it felt as if she’d tucked herself into him. Not prying, not in any way aggressive, just curled up against him as she liked to be in bed, her hand on his heart.
“My mother’s life,” he began, taking strength from that gentle radiance, “was stolen when I was a boy whose wings were yet too big for his body.”
* * *
Trembling, Jason made himself stop looking at the rust that wasn’t rust, and pulled himself out of the hole, closing the trapdoor with careful hands—and averted eyes—so it wouldn’t make a noise. And then he stood staring at the wall. He didn’t want to turn and see what lay on the other side, what he’d pushed off the top of the trapdoor. But the wall was splattered with the rust that wasn’t rust, too. Tiny bits of it had begun to flake off, baked by the hot sun pouring in through the sky-window.
Stomach all twisted and his heart a lump, he looked away from the wall and to the floor, but it was streaked with pale brown, his feet having made small prints on the polished wood. The dirt inside the hole hadn’t been wet. Not until after.
After the screams went quiet.
He closed his eyes, but he could still smell the rust that wasn’t rust.
And he knew he had to turn around.
Had to see.
She was looking at him from the other side of the room, her pretty dark brown eyes filmed over with a whiteness that was wrong. The stump of her neck was crusted with blood where it sat on the table in the corner, as if placed there for just this purpose.
He didn’t scream.
He knew never to scream.
Instead, he looked at the chunk of meat that had been blocking the trapdoor. It wore a silk sheath of brilliant amethyst.
Amethyst. That’s what his mother always called her favorite color. Amethyst.
It had taken him a long time to say it right, and she’d always laughed in delight when he used the word, her shining black hair dancing in the sunshine.
The mat crackled under his feet, and he realized he’d moved, realized he was dragging the meat wearing the amethyst top to the other part that matched, that he was adding her arms and legs, the ripped and bloodied feathers of her silvery-white wings, his chest straining with the effort, the pieces too heavy for his small body. But he had to do it.
The sun hadn’t dried out the bits in the shade and hidden from direct light, and his hands became slippery with dark red once more. When her head slid out of his hands and thumped on the floor, he bit hard on his lip and picked it up again, stroking back the hair that had gotten in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mama.” He had his mother’s hair, her skin, her eyes, she always said so. But today her eyes weren’t right, weren’t smiling as they always did when they turned his way.
Finally settling her head where it should be on her body, he knelt down on the mat that always made crisscross patterns on his knees and said, “Wake up now.”
His mother was an immortal, just like him. Only four hundred and sixty-five years old, but that was old enough.
Angels lived forever.
That’s what his mother said the mortals said, but she said angels simply lived a very long time.
He shook her shoulders, her brown skin cold instead of glowing with warmth. “Wake up.” He tried not to remember what else his mother had said, but her words whispered into his mind, spoken in the lyrical language of the island where she’d been born and lived until she was taken to school in a place she called the Refuge.
“Angels can die. It is a difficult thing but not impossible. Especially for younger angels.”
Now he looked at the chunk of meat wearing the amethyst silk, and he knew what that hole in her chest meant. Her heart was gone, ripped out. Her stomach, too, had a hole. And her head . . . it hadn’t been too heavy for him to lift. Because there was a hole in it, too.