by Ella Summers
“Perhaps.”
“If I had the power to manipulate everything and everyone to my wishes, I’d be able to do it in a way that even you did not suspect, Colonel,” I pointed out.
He said nothing, but the optimist in me thought his face looked contemplative. Maybe he was starting to realize I wasn’t his enemy.
“I don’t know what to make of your escape from the Black Forest,” he told me. “But I do know that many of your successes are inexplicable. I will be watching you closely.”
So much for not seeing me as the enemy.
“If you’re guilty, I will find out.”
“So, I take it I have to look forward to you breathing down my neck for the duration of this mission?”
“Yes.” He spoke the word without a hint of shame or pity, just as was expected of an angel.
“Nyx knows you are investigating me?”
“The First Angel does not share my suspicions about you. She believes you to be the perfect soldier.”
“If she thinks I’m the perfect soldier, why did she send you on this mission with me?” I asked him.
Colonel Dragonsire glanced at my wings. I’d already tried to make them vanish after their rather sudden emergence, but they weren’t cooperating. Which just made me look guilty.
“Nyx sent me to protect you.”
I hadn’t expected that answer.
“But why you and not my father or some other angel?” I asked.
His bronze brows lifted at my question. Though most angels rarely asked questions, the Master Interrogator’s job was exactly that. He was the one who asked questions. He probably wasn’t used to people asking him anything. Even people who weren’t tied to his interrogation chair would be too scared to dare utter a single question, let alone the barrage of questions I’d unloaded on him on this, our first meeting. Honestly, I had no idea why I was questioning him. It must have been my desperate desire to fill the resounding silence. And to prove my innocence to him.
“Never mind,” I said quickly.
He surprised me by answering my question. “I might suspect you, Lightbringer, but until I know for sure, I will have your back. Because of my experience with dark angels, the First Angel has instructed me to be your shield on this mission, and I have every intention for both of us to come back alive.”
If he was my shield, then why did he feel like a spiked mace hovering over my head? Even so, I felt…relieved? Colonel Dragonsire had a nightmare reputation, but he was also known to be a man of his word. A man of honor and duty. If he said he had my back, he wouldn’t stab me in it. If he decided I was guilty, he would at least do me the honor of stabbing me in the chest.
“Your mind reasons well,” Colonel Dragonsire said. “In that, at least, you are living up to your reputation.”
I frowned at him. “And you are living up to yours, Master Interrogator. I’m not one of your prisoners, so stay out of my head.”
“One more thing,” he said, ignoring my protest. “There’s another reason Nyx has chosen us for this mission.”
“And that is?”
“Major Doren.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nyx sent you to rescue your friend. And she sent me to rescue my betrothed.”
I blinked in confusion. “You and Eva?”
“We will be married next week,” he told me. “Now let’s go. You have not yet mastered the power of flight, I hear.”
His eyes panned down my wings again. He was probably wondering how he’d gotten stuck on a mission with a novice angel who couldn’t even make her wings behave.
I tried not to feel inadequate. I’d only gotten my wings yesterday after all. It was perfectly normal for a new angel to take days, if not weeks, to master the magic of flight. No angel had ever managed to fly the next day.
Still, I found myself disappointed. I’d researched the matter thoroughly before my transformation, compiling a myriad of physical and magical exercises designed to strengthen my control over my wings. I’d dutifully performed them—up until I’d received the First Angel’s summon to Sydney. Honestly, I’d really thought I would have made more progress by now, but my wings were proving to be quite resistant to my every attempt to tame them.
“I have made progress,” I told Colonel Dragonsire. “I can lift a few feet off the ground and set back down without landing on my ass.”
Usually.
He didn’t comment on my stellar accomplishment. Instead, he said, “Then we’ll need to get to the Sienna Sea the old-fashioned way.”
6
Dragonsire
My hands gripping tightly to the railing, I leaned over the edge of the airship. Far below, trees covered the land as far as I could see, a dense forest canopy swarming with hidden dangers. I hadn’t spotted any monsters yet, but I knew they were there. These wild lands weren’t called the plains of monsters for nothing.
That knowledge didn’t darken my mood. There was something about being up high in the sky, the wind in my hair, the breeze kissing my skin. It just felt right.
“Angels are supposed to be in the air.” Colonel Dragonsire came up beside me. Resting his arms on the metal rail, he looked out across the vast expanse. “We’re not meant to be stuck on the ground.”
There was a strange look in his eyes as he spoke, almost wistful. He probably wished he were flying under the power of his own wings rather than standing on the deck of a flying ship. He did seem like the sort who wanted to be the driving force behind everything. He definitely wasn’t someone who stood idly by, waiting to be driven around.
I wondered how he got along with Eva. She liked to be in the driver’s seat too.
“How did you and Eva meet?” Something—probably curiosity—compelled me to ask him that. “She’s never mentioned you.”
“Major Doren and I have not met. Our magic tests came back as compatible, so the Legion decided to marry us in the hopes that we would produce offspring with high magical potential. As soon as Nyx got the results, she arranged the marriage. I’m not compatible with many people.”
Imagine that. It must have been the ego.
His lips curled up like he’d heard my thoughts again. I wasn’t sure if I should be glad that the Master Interrogator could smile—or very, very worried.
In any case, I’d have to be careful around a powerful telepath like Colonel Dragonsire. I needed to be vigilant in keeping my thoughts in check. That was just another thing to worry about, along with my rebellious wings. I’d thought I was pretty good at masking my thoughts, but he seemed to hear them anyway.
“You’re not completely terrible at it,” he told me.
What a stellar compliment.
“Your magic is still adjusting to being an angel, which is throwing you off canter,” he said. “I catch only snippets of your thoughts. The rest I glean from your body language and facial expressions.”
Yes, the Master Interrogator sure lived up to his reputation.
“You could try to not read my thoughts and dissect my body language,” I told him.
“I could.” He braided his fingers together. “But I won’t.”
“Because you don’t trust me.”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
I wasn’t surprised. Paranoia was requirement number one on the Interrogator job description.
Still, his statement felt almost personal, like he’d been betrayed before. Someone close to him had hurt him. I was sure of it. But who?
A lover?
No, I decided. That didn’t fit. I was suddenly sure it had been a friend, someone he’d looked up to. Someone he’d trusted and admired. Almost revered.
“Careful.” That single word, spoken softly, pulsed with more power than a chorus of war cries. He was warning me not to dig there.
I felt tempted to poke that hornets’ nest anyway. Yes, Colonel Dragonsire was a big, bad angel with all the requisite prickles, an Interrogator who shrouded himself in his work, in unearthing traitors. But, somehow, I was
now certain that he acted this way because he’d been betrayed; he wanted to make sure nothing like that ever happened again to him or anyone else. That behavior was so…human.
“I am not human,” he said, his voice as cold as his eyes. “I gave up my humanity long ago.”
“I know.”
“You’re not human either,” he told me. “You are an angel.”
“We angels aren’t supposed to hold on to our humanity. We’re not supposed to feel anything.”
His grip on the rail tightened. “You never stop feeling.” His hands pulled away, revealing the hand-shaped dents in the metal. “You just feel…differently.” He looked down at his hands like he didn’t know what to do with them.
I was hit with a deep, inexplicable need to pat him on the shoulder, to heal the pain in his soul. But I didn’t reach out. I didn’t touch him at all. Angels were funny about personal space. He might have taken my friendly gesture as an attack. And, besides, no one hugged the Master Interrogator. It just wasn’t done.
He met my eyes for a moment, then his gaze flickered away, staring out to the horizon. We stood there in silence—with no sound but the whistling wind and the gentle hum of the airship—the minutes dripping by.
“We’re about to have company,” he announced, finally breaking the calm.
“Darkstorm?” I followed his gaze over the ship’s edge.
But it was not a dark angel that I saw there. It was a herd of wild birds.
No, not birds, I decided, looking more closely. They were flying dinosaurs, each one as big as a wolf. Their shimmering scales were in a state of constant flux, changing color from purple to green to gold, depending on which way the sunlight hit them.
“No doubt the beasts are here to gorge on the magic powering the ship,” Colonel Dragonsire said.
“No doubt,” I agreed.
Monsters were attracted to magic. They fed on it, craved it. Hunted it. They wanted it so badly that, every so often, a particularly crazy beast threw itself against the big magic barrier that separated the plains of monsters from civilization. The force of the impact vaporized the monster in an instant.
As the flock of dinosaurs looped over the ship and dropped into a sharp dive, Colonel Dragonsire waved his hands through the air in a wide arc, weaving his spell. The front two flying beasts bounced off an invisible wall of telekinetic energy and crashed into each other. Completely paralyzed by the psychic spell, the pair of dinosaurs tumbled toward the ground.
The rest of the flock swerved to avoid the psychic barrier, changing course toward me now. I drew my sword. Lightning sizzled to life on it. I swung it, the tendrils of charged magic snapping out from the blade, crackling through the air. My magic blast hit one of the beasts, then forked out from its body, hitting two others. The air smelled of burning metal and roasted dinosaurs.
Two beasts zigzagged around our spells and tackled Colonel Dragonsire to the deck. Wooden planks creaked and split as he wrestled and rolled with them in a tangled blur of black and green light. He moved faster than anyone I had ever seen, angels included.
Certain he could take care of himself, I grabbed a handful of powder from two of my waist pouches and tossed it at the flock. The two powders ignited with a boom, colliding into a vortex that sucked up most of the remaining dinosaurs.
By now, only two beasts remained, but they weren’t giving up. They came at me from both sides, bowling me over. My ribs groaned as my side crashed against the deck. Cringing in pain, I leapt at one of the dinosaurs as it came around for another pass. I grabbed onto its smooth, scaly body, holding to it just long enough to saturate it with my magic, then I jumped back down.
By the time my feet hit the deck, the dinosaur didn’t look like a dinosaur anymore. Courtesy of my magic, it now most closely resembled a red sky penguin. The other dinosaur saw the little fluffy creature and froze for a moment before it let out a shrill screech and shot toward its favorite prey. The sky penguin spun around and zipped off. The dinosaur took chase. They’d be miles away before my spell wore off, and the dinosaur realized the penguin it was chasing was actually its mate.
“That was a very thorough shifting spell,” Colonel Dragonsire commented, the bodies of the two dinosaurs who’d tackled him balanced over his shoulders. It looked like he’d killed them with his bare hands.
“Glad you approve,” I replied, even though his face didn’t look particularly approving. No, he looked contemplative. Like I was a threat he was assessing. Well, he had promised that he would be watching me closely.
“To fool the dinosaur, you had to change not only its companion’s appearance and the way it moves, but also its scent and the sounds it makes. You shifted its entire sensory spectrum.”
“Not the entire spectrum. I don’t usually bother with taste. To do that, I’d have to know how the beasts taste, and I’m not nearly so dedicated to my work that I’m willing to taste every monster that I want to shift.”
Colonel Dragonsire hefted his dead dinosaurs higher, then hurled them over the side of the ship. “That’s not what I hear.”
“Oh?” I said, trying not to cringe.
In my early days at the Legion, some of the other soldiers had taunted me mercilessly for my attention to detail. A few of them had even claimed my research involved some pretty disgusting experiments. Had those vile rumors reached Colonel Dragonsire’s ears?
“From all accounts, you are very dedicated to your job,” he said, his eyes as hard as blue diamonds.
“I try to be,” I replied, averting the Interrogator’s penetrating stare.
It was then that I saw the damage his tumble with the beasts had done to his body. His vest was in pieces. Crimson stains told me the dinosaurs’ talons hadn’t just shredded the leather; it had slashed his skin too.
“You’re wounded.”
He looked down at his torn clothing. “It would appear so.” He peeled the shredded leather off his body and tossed it to the floor. My gaze dipped, tracing the hard muscle of his shoulders, down to the taut contours of his chest, across the ridge of his… I blinked, forcing my eyes to focus on the bloody wounds that marred his skin.
I reached out to him.
He stepped back. “What are you doing?” he demanded, his voice hard.
“Healing you.”
“I can heal myself.”
The Legion’s Interrogators lived and breathed paranoia, but the Master Interrogator had turned mistrust into an art.
“You can’t reach them all,” I told him. “There’s a nasty gash on your back.”
He stretched his arm over his shoulder, reaching for the wound.
I grabbed his hand. “Stop moving, Colonel. You’ll only aggravate your wounds.”
He glared down at my hand. “I said I could heal myself.”
I didn’t back down, and I didn’t let go. I’d had a lot of experience healing obstinate angels—and convincing them that their inability to stand meant it was time to extricate themselves from the battlefield. Angels made horrible patients. They really were their own worst enemy.
“What if I promised not to stab you in the back until after the mission?” I said.
Damiel Dragonsire, Master Interrogator, the Fury Angel, actually snorted. His tense muscles relaxed slightly. “Very well.”
Warm, golden magic glowed on my hands. I traced my fingers across his wounds, healing them one by one.
“You know, you have to trust someone,” I said as I healed a deep laceration on his shoulder blade. “No man is an island.”
Colonel Dragonsire glanced over his shoulder at me, his expression guarded. “Perhaps no man is an island, but every angel is,” he challenged. “You would do well to learn that. Being so quick to trust people will only get you killed. I’ve been at this for a long time. I know what I’m talking about. Trust me.”
“Trust you? I thought I shouldn’t trust anyone.” I smirked. I just couldn’t help it.
To my surprise, he laughed. The sudden movement caused my hand t
o slip off his back.
“Hold still,” I scolded him, returning my attention to healing. The wound on his back was already knitting together, so I circled around him to take care of the one that marred the left side of his chest.
He watched me work, his expression almost perplexed. “Most people are afraid to touch me.”
I looked up, meeting his eyes. “Most people are afraid to speak to you too.”
His eyes hardened. “Indeed.”
Was that a hint of remorse I detected in his voice? Was it possible that he actually missed the personal connections Interrogators so openly shunned?
I brushed my fingers across his final wound, then backed away from him. “Good as new,” I declared as the healing glow faded from my hands.
He looked himself over, checking my handiwork.
“Worried that I missed a spot?”
“No,” he replied. “You have a reputation as a competent healer.”
“Ah, so you’re admiring my work then?” A smile tugged at my lips. “Maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two from it.”
He gave me an odd look. If it had come from anyone else but Damiel Dragonsire, I’d have labeled that expression as ‘perplexed’. But the Master Interrogator did not get perplexed. Or did he?
“Thank you.”
I blinked. I could scarcely believe my ears. Had Damiel Dragonsire just thanked me?
“You’re welcome,” I said quickly, before he changed his mind and decided healing him was part of some evil ploy. “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Not for a skilled healer like you.”
“I wasn’t talking about healing you,” I told him. “I was talking about you trusting me to heal you.”
“Trust is…”
“A double-edged sword?” I offered. Why was I smiling? This was no time for smiling.
A soft, deep grunt hummed in his chest. “I prefer single-edged swords myself.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Life is simpler that way.”
“Life isn’t black and white, Colonel. It’s layers of delightful complexity,” I told him.
“That is an ironic statement coming from a second-generation angel, a soldier of light.”
