Archangel's Storm

check. To show even a hint of care toward Mahiya would be to end this negotiation before it began, and unless the Cascade had altered matters, this aspect of Neha’s power was very weak. She could not hold Mahiya for long. “Because what I have to tell you will provide you with far more satisfaction.”
    “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.”
    *  *  *
    M ahiya 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
    N eha’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