Archangel's Storm

rare few jewel blue filaments that echoed Mahiya’s own feathers. The familial connection showed itself in other ways, too, but only to someone who knew what it was they searched for, and those old enough to deduce the truth also knew never to speak of it.
    To everyone else, Mahiya was a distant descendant of Neha’s the archangel had taken in out of kindness after the death of her unnamed parents. That the newborn child had appeared eight months after Eris’s incarceration and Nivriti’s assumed execution had further distanced any connection that might’ve been made by most. Few could imagine that Neha had been cruel enough to have kept her sister chained through the months of her pregnancy, but Mahiya had heard the story from Neha’s own lips.
    “A gift on your hundredth birthday.” The archangel’s smile caused a chill along Mahiya’s spine. “The history of your becoming.”
    Angels didn’t easily die, but a female angel was most vulnerable after childbirth, especially a childbirth where her womb had been cut open with a rusty blade, her baby literally torn out of her by uncaring hands, her internal organs left to spill to the floor. Add in a lack of food and water, and the thin, thin air at the top of the distant mountain fort where her mother had apparently been held, and Nivriti had stood no chance.
    Even then, powerful as she’d been, it must’ve taken her years of agony to starve to total death.
    “You give offense by existing,” Neha said at last, and it was an almost absent comment. “Tell me about Jason.”
    Mahiya did, and it was the truth . . . what she spoke of it in any case. As Jason had pointed out, she could hardly accuse Neha of murder and hope to live. “He appears to be upholding the vow,” she concluded, “and working to unearth the identity of the murderer or murderers.”
    Neha’s eyes focused on some distant aspect Mahiya couldn’t see, the silk sari Neha wore now a cool champagne bordered in bronze, the folds pinned with neat precision on her shoulder by an antique brooch. Her blouse was a bronze that echoed the border, the cut perfect, the intricate back work necessary to accommodate wings done with such precision that the fit remained flawless.
    No one, Mahiya thought, could say the Archangel of India was not the most elegant of creatures, but Mahiya alone understood the vindictive depth of hatred that had driven Neha for so long. It hadn’t surprised her in the least when Anoushka was found guilty of crimes against a child—the angel had watched her own mother raise a child for the sole purpose of vengeance after all. Kindness to a thousand other children could not eradicate the evil taint of that single heinous act.
    “Do you mourn your father?” Neha asked into the silence.
    “I mourn who he could’ve been.” There had been promise in Eris, and perhaps if he’d had better guidance as a youth, as a husband, he might have fulfilled it. That was as much forgiveness as she could give him, because he’d been an adult, too, had made his own choices.
    “In that we are in agreement, child of my blood’s blood.”
    Mahiya went motionless—it never augured anything but ill for her when Neha referred to the ties that connected them. However, today, the archangel simply tilted her face to the burning heat of the sun, allowing it to wash over the golden brown of her skin, imbuing it with warmth. At that moment, Mahiya could imagine why her people saw her as a benevolent goddess.
    “I first met him when I was an angel of a thousand.” The words were soft, her gaze on a past long gone. “At four hundred, he was barely an adult to my mind, and I treated him as such. Irresponsible, I thought, but beautiful and with such masculine charm. Our paths did not cross again until I had become an archangel, and Eris a man elegant and confident.”
    A hot desert wind waved over them a second later, breaking Neha’s reverie. “Have you ever loved, Mahiya?”
    Knowing what was coming, she steeled her spine. “No.”
    “Not even Arav?”
    There it was, the blow that reminded her of a humiliation that had crushed her young heart, threatened to fracture her fledgling spirit. “I was a child then. What did I know of love?” However, she’d learned that pretty words were not to be trusted—and that she had a strength she’d never before understood.
    “My daughter is dead,” Neha said, in an apparent non sequitur, “and so is my husband and consort. Some would say I am