Free Archangel's Storm by Nalini Singh Page A

took time to reply, her gaze tracking a small troop of angels coming in to land on the balcony below. “She might have figured out a way to control the rate of infection, some way to make certain of their loyalty.”
    “If she has, she’ll be unstoppable.” The last time Lijuan had risen, the rest of the Cadre had banded together to execute her, only to inadvertently help her in her strange evolution—now, she was no longer wholly corporeal. “I must find some way to strengthen my new ability.” The sheer life of it, born of his tie to his consort with her mortal heart, was inimical to the death that was Lijuan’s touch.
    “Too bad we no longer have the element of surprise there.”
    Running his hand down the silken tail of her hair, he smiled. “You will always provide surprises, Elena. You are my secret weapon.”
    She laughed, eyes dancing. “Did Jason say anything about Neha when he contacted you?”
    “The blood vow means he cannot speak of that which happens in the fort, unless the information becomes public.”
It is a matter of honor.
    I understand.
“I just hope he’s safe.” Worry was a shadow across the dark gold of her skin. “The way Neha looked the last time I saw her . . .” A violent shiver.
    “Jason is a survivor.” Raphael didn’t know everything of what had happened to Jason as a child, but he’d put together enough pieces to understand the other angel had lived through things no child should ever have to experience.
    Elena glanced up, as if she’d heard something he wasn’t aware of betraying. “You’re still worried about him.”
    “Unlike Dmitri,” he said, releasing her to walk to the very edge of the balcony, his mind filled with images of a young angel with wings of lush black who had barely spoken when Raphael first met him, “Jason has never been in danger of becoming jaded.”
    Having come to stand beside him, her wing brushing his in an intimacy he’d accept from no other, Elena said, “You think that’s changing?”
    “On the contrary. The reason Dmitri became so jaded was that he tasted every sin, drowned himself in sensation.” The endless round of pleasure and pain had been an effort to escape a loss that had brutalized the other man, but the end result was a kind of emotional numbness Raphael had thought nothing would ever break, much less a mortal with a fractured spirit.
    “Jason by contrast,” he continued, “immerses himself in nothing.” Raphael had known him too long not to realize that even the lovers Jason took touched nothing of him beyond his skin.
    Elena blew out a quiet breath. “He’s like that all the time, isn’t he? Part of the world . . . but apart. A shadow who never becomes too involved.”
    Raphael had no need to voice agreement, because it was the truth. His spymaster might not be jaded, but he was numb in a far deeper sense. “To survive eternity,” he murmured, “Jason needs to find some reason to exist beyond duty and loyalty.”
    He cupped the face of the woman who was his own reason for being, who made immortality seem an iridescent promise rather than an endless road. “Such things are powerful and not to be dismissed lightly . . . but they are not enough to thaw a heart that has been encased in ice for near to seven hundred years.”

9
    J ason looked out through a window of the palace that was his residence for the time being, his attention on the small enclosed garden on the mountain
side of Mahiya’s palace. It was a spot he’d had to cross the center of the house to see, and one the princess had made no effort to point out to him when she’d shown him to his suite. He could see why.
    Unlike the structured courtyard behind him, this hidden area, tucked between the palace and the high defensive wall that protected the fort, appeared to have been set up as a pleasure garden long ago, complete with irrigation channels that kept the wildly blooming plants luxuriant in spite of the desert sun, then forgotten,