by Ella Summers
“I’m considering Darkstorm’s motivation for making Major Doren fall in love with him.”
“He fell in love with her and gave her the potion to make her feel the same way?” I suggested.
“His aims appear more calculated.”
“Well, say he captured Eva to gain control over Storm Castle. But then he fell in love with her. So he gave her the potion to make her love him back. And loving him meant she would help him win Storm Castle. Two birds, one stone. Just like an angel.”
Damiel smiled darkly. “You will be throwing stones yourself before you know it, Cadence.”
He was probably right. After all, I was an angel now too. And the daughter of an archangel. I guess you could say angel logic was in my blood.
“We can sort out Darkstorm’s motivations later,” Damiel decided. “If we can free Major Doren’s mind, that will significantly increase our chances of making it out of here alive.”
“There’s a remedy that can reverse the effects of a love potion.”
“Without our powers, we can’t mix potions; we can’t infuse magic into them,” he reminded me.
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I have a stash of prepared potions. Darkstorm’s guards didn’t find them when they took our weapons. One of them is a powerful mind-cleanser. It should reverse the effects of the love potion.”
“Should?” Damiel repeated. “Sound strategies are not built around the word ‘should’, Cadence.”
“Well, right now, ‘should’ is the best that I’ve got.”
He sighed. “It will have to do.” His hand closing around my hip, he leaned in closer. “Major Doren is heading our way.” His nose brushed against mine. “Put the remedy in her glass.”
My gaze flickered to Eva. She was walking toward us, a graceful bounce to her step, not spilling a single drop of the red wine in her glass.
I pressed my forehead against Damiel’s. “The guards are watching closely,” I muttered against his lips. “I’ll need a distraction.”
“You shall have one. Go free your friend,” he said, his teeth nipping gently at my lower lip as he pulled away to visit the buffet table.
The guards on the upper level watched him, their eyes narrowing with suspicion as he set his hand down on the table. Beastman, who’d just emerged from the airship, changed direction, making a beeline straight for him.
“Love is in the air,” Eva said with a dreamy sigh.
“I suppose.”
“Not so long ago, if you’d told me that I would be marrying Hugo Darkstorm, I’d have laughed in your face. But here we are.” She giggled.
“Here we are.” I felt decidedly less giddy about it than she did.
“Love is so unpredictable.”
Her gaze slid from me, over to Damiel. Beastman was interrogating him; he was sure Damiel had hidden something nefarious on the table. All of the guards were focused on Damiel. Even Eva was looking at him. This was the best chance that I’d get.
I reached down to the band around my thigh, hidden away under my shorts, and pulled out the potion vial that contained the antidote to the madness clouding Eva’s mind. I knew it by feel, by the distinctive pattern of bumps on the glass surface. I palmed the vial and tucked my hands behind my back.
Eva returned her attention to me. “When they told me I was supposed to marry Colonel Dragonsire, I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to reunite with my true love.”
“So you knew Darkstorm before?”
“Of course. You don’t think I would marry a man I’d just met, did you?” She giggled. “You must think me very silly, Cadence.”
Not silly. Just under the influence of a very powerful love potion.
“When did you meet Darkstorm?”
“Hugo and I met three years ago.”
Around the time she was captured by the Dark Force. Had she been under the influence of the love potion all that time? I looked back, sifting through my memories, trying to find any sign that she’d changed, that she was under the dark angel’s spell.
But there was nothing I could remember. Had I missed the signs? Could I have stopped all of this from happening? Could I have prevented this calamity? Guilt tugged at my heart.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Eva said, smiling.
I sincerely hoped not. I doubted she’d willingly drink the antidote to the madness ailing her. My hands still behind my back, I subtly flipped the vial hidden inside my palm.
“I know I am going against the Legion by leaving to marry Hugo, but if I’d stayed, I would have been going against my heart,” she said. “Hugo is such a misunderstood man. He’s actually very gentle. Thoughtful. Tender.”
I couldn’t slip Eva the antidote soon enough. Listening to her wax poetic about the virtues of her ‘tender’ mass murderer was just too much to take.
“He took you from Storm Castle?” I asked.
“I told him I would come to him. He couldn’t wait, not when he’d heard I was to marry Colonel Dragonsire. I can’t really blame him, you know. If our places had been reversed, I would have done the same.”
“You would have killed your beloved’s commanding officer?”
“What?” For the first time, the everlasting smile faded from her lips as confusion crinkled her brow.
“Colonel Starfire is dead,” I told her.
“No.” She shook her head. “That can’t be right. There must be some mistake.”
“Why don’t you ask your husband?”
She looked across the room, scanning the crowd for Darkstorm. Beastman and the guards were still focused on Damiel. He was doing a damn good job of looking suspicious. While everyone was looking away from me, I popped the top of the vial and emptied the contents into Eva’s wine glass. Then I chucked the empty vial into a nearby vase.
Eva and Darkstorm were blowing kisses at each other from across the room.
“Love is so freeing, Cadence.” She glanced from me, to Damiel, to me again. “Grab it while you can and never let go. Talk to him.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She gave me a knowing smile. “Tell him how you feel about him.”
“Damiel and I are working together. That’s all.”
“Damiel?” she repeated, her lips curling up. “Interesting.”
“There’s nothing between us.”
“Please, Cadence. You two are completely into each other. Even if I didn’t know you, I’d have to be blind not to see it.”
I didn’t fail to note the irony that I was getting relationship advice from someone under the influence of a love potion.
“Do it now,” Eva said. “Before it’s too late.” Then she went off to join her new husband.
I glanced toward the buffet table. Damiel’s eyes met mine. Staring into those pools of hard sapphire, I realized my attraction to him couldn’t be explained by our shared peculiar magic. Right now, our magic was silenced, but the draw I felt toward him was as strong as ever. There was definitely something more than magic between us.
No, there is nothing between you, declared the cynic inside me. My inner cynic sounded a lot like my father.
Damiel and I would cure Eva and then we’d all go back to the Legion. Eva would marry Damiel, just as the Legion commanded. The hard cold fist of reality clenched around my heart.
Damiel had said it didn’t matter, that the arranged marriage meant nothing. But I couldn’t take a lover knowing he would be sleeping with someone else, even if it was just for procreation, even if it was only for a few days every decade or two. I just…couldn’t share. Not someone I cared about. Or someone I was beginning to care about.
That way lay only heartbreak. Just the thought of Damiel with Eva, kissing her…
No! Jealousy flared up in me, burning through my veins. If it hurt this much already, how would it feel later on? I had to distance myself from Damiel.
And most of all, I had to focus on the mission now.
Realizing that Damiel had hidden nothing more tha
n a used cheese wrapper on the table, the guards huffed off in disappointment. It was almost as though they were looking for a good fight. Damiel didn’t have his magic right now, so it might have been the guards’ only chance of defeating the angel.
Damiel came up beside me. “You give them far too much credit. Magic or not, they have no chance of defeating me.”
“Your magic is back?” I asked, realizing that he’d read my thoughts.
“Not fully. Not enough to depend on it in a fight.”
All across the room, metal clinked against glass, signaling that a toast was about to begin.
“If you’d collect your ego, hotshot, things are about to get interesting,” I told Damiel. “Ready?”
He gave me a flat look.
Of course he was ready. Silly me for daring to ask.
“If we ever train together, I won’t ask if you are ready before I strike,” I said. “I will just attack. That would serve you right.”
As we moved toward the head table, he said, “I would like to train with you.”
I looked at him in surprise.
“Your record indicates you would be a worthy opponent.”
“Damiel Dragonsire, if you bring up my record one more time, I’m going to hit you over the head with it.”
His blue eyes glistened. Something about the prospect of sparring with me had gotten him excited. Or maybe it was our impending fight against the pirates.
“To my lovely bride,” Darkstorm said, lifting his glass in the air. “The light of my dark existence.”
Giggling, Eva drank at the same time the dark angel did. The whole room of pirates—all two-hundred-and-fifty-plus of them—drank from their glasses too. I watched Eva, waiting for something to change. Waiting for the moment she would finally come to her senses.
Nothing happened. Eva still gazed at Darkstorm as though he were the center of her universe.
“It didn’t work,” Damiel said quietly.
I frowned. “I can see that.”
Darkstorm blinked, stepping back. He glanced down at his glass, then at Eva. Back and forth, over and over again, his eyes flickered from one to the other.
He had Eva’s glass, I realized, the one I’d poured the remedy into. I could see the mark of her lipstick on the rim. And Eva had his glass. They must have swapped sometime while they’d been making out in front of all their wedding guests.
Darkstorm blinked again, looking at Eva like she’d grown horns.
“It did work,” I muttered.
“You,” Darkstorm growled at Eva. “What did you do?”
Eva smiled coolly at him, calculation burning in her eyes.
“The remedy worked,” I told Damiel. “We were just wrong about which person had to be cured.”
Darkstorm lunged toward Eva, but his attack cut off midway when he suddenly dropped to his knees. His shaking hands hit the floor. Convulsions shook his body for a moment, then he just seized up and fell limp to the floor.
All around the hangar, the guards were convulsing on the ground. What the hell was going on?
Eva looked across the room at Darkstorm’s dying army and declared coolly, “Well, it’s about damn time.”
14
Diamond Tear
I looked up from the pirates’ convulsing bodies, meeting Eva’s cold dark eyes. “What did you do?”
“They were all poisoned.” Damiel lifted a wine glass from the ground and inhaled. “With Nectar.”
The food of the gods. Nectar poisoned roughly half the people who drank it in the Legion’s initiation ceremony. And those were people predisposed to survive. Outside the walls of the Legion, the death rate was higher. Much higher.
Damiel sipped from the wine glass, then handed it to me. “Drink. The Nectar will counteract the effects of the magic-blocking potion they gave us.”
I emptied the glass in a single go. Immediately, I felt my magic returning, like I was reuniting with an old lost friend.
Eva knelt beside Darkstorm’s body. Nectar was pure poison to dark angels, killing them within moments if it was not removed from their bodies quickly enough.
“What are you doing?” I asked Eva as she swiped a dagger off the dead dark angel’s body. There was something unusual about that weapon, a peculiar sheen to the black blade.
When I moved in for a closer look, Eva’s grip tightened on the dagger’s hilt. Blue flames flared up across the blade.
Damiel set his hand on my arm, holding me back. “Careful. That is an immortal weapon.”
It was rumored that the blue flames of the immortal weapons—called angelfire—had the power to kill angels. Or even gods.
“The dagger is called Diamond Tear,” Eva said. “Darkstorm stole it out of hell’s treasury right before he went rogue. Nyx sent me to retrieve the weapon.”
“That is a lie.” Damiel’s words dropped like a stone in the silent hangar.
The walls began to shake.
“Are you doing that?” I asked him.
“No.”
“We must hurry,” Eva told us. “Darkstorm magically-linked this fortress to his life energy. If he dies, the earth opens up and swallows the buildings whole. Assuming the structures survive the quakes.”
Wow. That was one complex self-destruct spell.
As rocks came tumbling down all around us, Damiel and I exchanged loaded looks. Together, we released a wave of telekinetic energy that wrapped around the crumbling walls, holding back the rocky avalanche.
Damiel glared at Eva, his eyes as hard as granite. “Who sent you to steal the dagger?”
“Nyx.”
His voice dropped to a savage, inhuman timbre. “The truth.”
“It is the truth.” Tears poured down her cheeks, her brow crinkling in pain.
Damiel didn’t let up. The merciless jaws of his siren magic chomped down on her. “Who sent you?” His voice, cruel and terrible, seemed to reverberate from every direction at once.
Eva clenched the dagger, trying to break free of his spell. She couldn’t move an inch. Blood trickled from her nose.
“You’re hurting her,” I said.
“That’s the point.”
I cringed at his total indifference to her pain. What if Damiel’s perpetual distrust of everyone ended up killing Eva?
He set his hand on my shoulder. “I trust you, Cadence. Now you need to trust me. I know what I’m doing. She isn’t even close to dead yet.” His head snapped back to Eva. “Who sent you?”
Her lips buzzed violently as she fought Damiel’s compulsion, as she struggled to hold in the words that threatened to explode from her mouth. “Sonja! It was Sonja!” she finally spluttered.
“The demon who commands the Dark Force?” I asked.
“Yes,” Eva said. “Darkstorm stole the dagger from her. She wanted it back. She tasked me to do it.”
Damiel’s magic crackled in the air, popping against my skin. “How long have you been Sonja’s pet?”
“I never was.” Eva didn’t look at Damiel. She looked at me. “I let her think I was working for her, but I was stealing the dagger for the Legion.”
“You were stealing it for yourself,” Damiel said in a menacing whisper.
“No.” She ground out the word. “To fight for the Legion.” The words spilled out of her mouth now, fast and hurried. “If I’d had an immortal weapon back when the Dark Force took me, when they brought me to Sonja, she wouldn’t have been able to…do what she did.”
“She tortured you.”
“Of course she tortured me!” Eva snapped at me. “The gods don’t arm us with immortal weapons, Cadence. They wouldn’t want to give us anything that could be used against them, oh no. So they leave us defenseless against the demons. If I hadn’t pretended to break, if Sonja hadn’t bought the whole act, I might still be in her dungeon right now. Or dead.” She shuddered.
“There are so few immortal weapons,” I said. “Of course they don’t just hand them out to everyone in the Legion.”
“Your naive desire to always see the best in everyone is going to get you killed. We are not all like you, Cadence. We can’t all just snap our fingers and get everything we ask for. We’re not all so…perfect.”
Damiel had spoken those words to me in admiration. Eva did not. Her words seethed with jealousy.
“How long have you hated me?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.
“As long as I’ve loved you. You’re my best friend, Cadence. And my worst enemy.”
And she was like a sister to me. Like family. That made her betrayal sting that much more.
Magic flashed. I lifted my hand to my face, shielding my eyes. When the blinding light faded, Eva was standing across the hangar. She’d used the immortal dagger to break free of Damiel’s spell.
“You don’t understand,” Eva said as Damiel and I closed in on her. She slashed out, blue flames hissing off her blade.
Damiel evaded the stream of angelfire. Moving like a whip—in and out, so quick that the blue flames couldn’t touch him—he struck at her with the knife he’d pulled from a fallen guard. Blood dripped from Eva’s arms, but she didn’t seem to notice her wounds. She thrust up with her dagger, meeting his strike. The blue flames hopped from her blade to his, drowning the knife in angelfire. Damiel’s hand sprang open. A warped piece of metal hit the ground with a hollow clang, all that remained of Damiel’s knife.
The falling walls buzzed against our telekinetic shield, a reminder that our magic was all that held this building together, all that kept it from collapsing on top of us.
Bodies stirred on the ground, the survivors of the Nectar.
“Get to the airship,” Eva called out to them. “And get it ready to go.”
The pirates moved to obey her commands.
“You wanted them to survive,” I realized.
“Darkstorm was not a popular boss,” said Eva. “He did not share power. When his pirates realized things could be different, they helped me make sure Darkstorm always got his love potion.”
Love potions had to be regularly administered as the effects waned, burnt off by the body. An angel, in particular, had a very fast metabolism. Darkstorm probably had to be drugged every few hours to keep him complacent. It was no wonder his men were all so anxious about the ‘package’. If the love potion wore off, Darkstorm would realize what had happened—including their role in drugging him. And then he’d have killed them all.
