Nalini Singh: Archangel's Storm

“Who will you gift it to?” Jason had asked at the time.

Dmitri’s response had been a sardonic twist of his mouth, the hardness in his eyes akin to the gems he held. “A woman whose spirit dazzles brighter than these stones.”

The necklace had graced none but the honey-skinned neck it now encircled.

“For this amazing dream of a dress,” Honor continued, stroking her hand down the fabric. “I don’t know how you found it so early in the morning. It fits like it was made for me.”

“No thanks are necessary.” So much of life he spent on the sidelines—many times out of choice, sometimes because he didn’t know how to belong—but he’d needed to be a part of this day when a man he respected, and who was as close a friend as he was capable of having, claimed this woman for his own.

“Jason can find anything,” Dmitri said, walking over to slide his arm around Honor’s waist. “The winds talk to him, tell him where to go.”

Honor laughed, husky and warm, and then she was being embraced by Elena, the hunter’s wings iridescent in the white light of morning. Stepping a little to the right, Jason met Dmitri’s gaze. The vampire shrugged, the words unspoken but not unheard.

No one will ever believe it.

No, Jason thought, no one would. Even he had thought himself mad when he was a boy on the verge of adulthood. It had taken reading Jessamy’s history books once he arrived at the angelic stronghold that was the Refuge to understand he’d inherited his mother’s “ear,” her ability to sense things happening hundreds of miles away, across oceans and beyond mountains. It was how she’d always had stories to tell him about people in the Refuge, though they lived on an isolated atoll surrounded by the shimmering blue of the Pacific.

“I will write this story down for you, Jason. You must practice your reading.”

He had. Over and over, until the parchment disintegrated, he’d read those stories and the others in the books in the house. Then he’d copied the words out on wood, on flax, in the sand, forcing himself to remember that he was a person, that he should know how to read. It had worked . . . for a while.

“I’m happy for you, Dmitri,” he said now, allowing the ghosts of the past to fade into the background. “This is my gift to you and your bride.”

As Dmitri glanced down at the small note card Jason passed across, Honor’s second—a long-legged hunter who had unique gifts of her own—came to join Elena and Honor, and the women laughed and began to talk all at once.

“A safe place,” Jason said when Dmitri looked up from reading the address on the card, the sun glinting off the simple gold band he wore on the ring finger of his left hand. “Where no one will find you.”

Understanding whispered across the sensual lines of Dmitri’s face. Moving a small distance away from the women, he said, “I shouldn’t be surprised at what you know, and yet I am.” He slid the card away. “How certain are you of the security?”

“The house is mine, and no one has found it in two hundred years.” Hidden in the dense forests of an otherwise uninhabited mountain, it could only be reached via a very specific route that he now shared with Dmitri, mind to mind. Even aerial entry is impossible unless the angel in question knows how to find a particular small clearing. He gave Dmitri the coordinates. Without that, severe damage to the wings as a result of the thick canopy—and the safeguards hidden within—is a distinct possibility.

Dmitri’s eyes gleamed. Good. His next words were spoken aloud. “I didn’t know you had another home in this country.”

“I don’t.” He had houses he used when needed, but home was a concept that had no meaning to him, though Dmitri likely assumed he considered his apartment at New York’s Archangel Tower home. “You’ll be safe there, and you can be private.” Honor’s transformation from human to vampire would take time, and while Jason knew Dmitri would ensure she navigated it in a deep sleep, safe from any suffering, he also knew the other man would not leave her side during the process. “There is no need to take a guard unit.”

“I wouldn’t trust those words coming from anyone’s mouth but yours,” Dmitri said, his face angled toward Honor. “I don’t know when we’ll use your gift. I have her promise . . . but I will not rush her on this.”

“You want to.”

“Yes.” Unvarnished ruthlessness. “But you see, Jason, it appears I have a fatal weakness when it comes to Honor—even should she change her mind and decide to remain mortal, I can’t force her and still live with myself.”

Jason said nothing as Dmitri walked back to his wife, who looked up to offer him a smile Jason had seen her share with no other. Her friends moved away to give husband and wife a moment of privacy, but everyone continued to linger on the luxuriant green of the lawn, the birdsong a delicate accompaniment to the murmur of conversation. Champagne was sipped, greetings exchanged, friendships renewed in the glow of the joy that came off Honor and Dmitri.

Unlike the others, Jason felt exposed out here in the sunlight, the unrelieved black of his wings a target, but he didn’t give in to the compulsion to fly up high above the cloud layer, where no one could see him. A minute later, when the winds began to whisper, he listened.

A single word. A name.

Eris.

The only significant Eris that Jason knew of was husband to Neha, the three-thousand-year-old archangel, the sole member of the Cadre who had chosen to follow the mortal ceremony of binding. Eris was also her consort, but he hadn’t been seen in public for some three hundred years. Many believed him dead; however, Jason knew the male lived, imprisoned in a palace inside Neha’s sprawling fort. Except for when he’d attempted to escape early on in his captivity, he had not been physically harmed.

Neha loved Eris too much to hurt him.

It was also why she hated him so violently for his betrayal.

Eris.

Sliding into the shadows of the trees that edged Raphael’s property, a welcome respite from the light, Jason took out his cell phone. In earlier centuries, even with his considerable mental abilities, it had taken him days to communicate with his men and women, weeks to gather a single piece of information. Technology made it so much simpler—unlike some angels of old, and though his chosen weapon remained a sword, Jason did not abhor the modern world.

Now, he saw that he had a number of missed calls that must’ve come in during the ceremony, while his phone had been in silent mode. All were from Samira—she was a servant with clearance to work in Neha’s private quarters and technically his highest-ranking spy in the other archangel’s court, though Jason had his doubts about her continued efficacy. “Samira,” he said when the call was answered. “What has happened?”

“Eris is dead.” A hushed whisper. “Murdered inside his palace.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, but he was found an hour ago. Neha has not left the body. Mahiya is by her side.”

Jason had never spoken to Mahiya, but having done a subtle investigation when Neha first adopted her just over three centuries ago, he knew the princess was of Neha’s bloodline. That relationship was accepted knowledge, but the facts behind it had long been buried. Many in Neha’s own court chose not to remember, not to see the truth—that Mahiya had been born of Nivriti, sister to Neha and dead as long as her child had been alive.

No terrible secret that . . . except if you knew the name of Mahiya’s father.

Eris.

Though Mahiya was the fruit of Eris and Nivriti’s forbidden relationship, she was, to all outward appearances, treated as a beloved princess by her aunt, the title a courtesy to elucidate her status as kin to Neha. “Is there anything else?”