by Nalini Singh
Her boots pounded over crushed and bloodied feathers as she shot her way past the startled angels still standing, the air full of bullets she couldn’t totally avoid. One caught her a glancing blow on her arm, the other dug a fiery groove across her cheek, but she reached her target without any real injury, going over the opposite side of the building from where she’d been herded. The enemy turned to follow her en masse, which hopefully meant the others on the roof would be all right.
“This is my city, you bastards.” Managing to get her guns strapped down in midair as a result of hours of practice doing the same, she swept down a wide avenue, the wind whipping off the blood trickling down her cheek. “Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
As the battle raged overhead and buildings shuddered after being hit by stray bolts of power, the city as a whole began to go progressively darker. She’d seen this before, during the fight with Uram, and knew it was because Raphael and Lijuan were both sucking power from the electricity grid, batteries, anything that could supply them with the energy they used to supercharge their strikes.
The darkness was her friend. Teeth bared, she led the enemy angels in and out of streets, through buildings she knew had accessways wide enough for flight, under the High Line and between certain widely spaced trees in Central Park. They were fast, the ones on her trail, but they didn’t know Manhattan.
Of course, she couldn’t keep this up forever. Naasir, you fucking smart predator, she thought as her wings began to tire, it’s showtime. She’d managed to make a short cell phone call halfway through her darting flight, and, as instructed, now led her pursuers into a narrow gap between two high-rises.
It dead-ended at the back of another building.
Reaching the end, she spun around, wings spread. The leader of the pack, his left eye a pulpy mess where a bullet had hit him, grinned . . . and ran right into the steel net that snapped into place in front of the speeding squadron. The ones at the back tried to fly up to avoid the net, but it fell from above, too—courtesy of a certain blue-winged angel—before a net sprung up behind them.
Trapped, the enemy fighters tried to land, but their wings were too fouled up in the net and with each other. Falling hard to the asphalt, they dragged the nets down with them—nets that, she saw with a wince, had cut lines into their flesh and wings, the edges razored. “I love you right now, Naasir, but you have a scary, scary mind.”
She flew up and out before the enemy figured out how to escape the trap. “I need to get to the Tower!” she yelled to Illium—since it was obvious Lijuan had put a target on her back, she was now a liability to the shooting teams.
“I’ll take you in!”
“What about Lijuan’s generals?” If he’d broken off that engagement to help her, he had to get back to it—those generals had serious firepower.
Illium’s grin was satisfied. “I and my brothers in arms earned our power! Lijuan trusts no one with real power! Her generals are puppets—and right now, the Sire is holding all her attention!”
“As long as Lijuan lives, Xi will continue to gain power. Without her, his body wouldn’t be able to hold what it does.”
Illium had told her that at the Refuge, in reference to one of Lijuan’s generals, but she hadn’t realized the male was this closely linked to his archangel. But there was no more time to think about that—the two of them had reached the battle zone.
They had to go in shooting, Illium faster with a crossbow than she’d realized, given his preference for using a sword. Halfway through, Tasha appeared out of the mass of wings to flank her other side as Lijuan’s men and women deliberately blocked Elena’s path to the Tower. Much as Elena would’ve liked to nurture her dislike for Tasha, the other woman had fought with brilliant fury in the battles, as she did now.
Grabbing her guns, Elena took aim at the enemy. “Get the fuck out of my way!”
Their wings shredded, Lijuan’s fighters crashed to the streets and buildings. Illium and Tasha rejoined the fight as soon as Elena landed safely on the Tower roof. Frustrated at having been grounded, she ran inside and to the Tower “aerie,” a small nest directly above the war room and connected to it by an internal staircase. It had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view, as well as windows that could be shoved up.
Dmitri stood in the center of the aerie, running everything from his supreme vantage point.
Elena didn’t bother to exchange pleasantries with the vampire. Having grabbed ammunition from the stash just outside, she slammed herself into place in front of one of the windows, pushed it up, and started pulverizing any enemy fighter who came too close. There weren’t too many, the defenders managing to hold them from the Tower, while Raphael kept Lijuan occupied above.
As Elena watched, Raphael’s wildfire just scraped the side of Lijuan’s face, ripping off a chunk of her cheek. Screaming that awful scream that made Elena grit her teeth, the older archangel retaliated with a fury of jagged black that Raphael couldn’t completely avoid. Horrified, Elena watched as he took a bad hit on one wing, the ugliness of Lijuan’s power an oily black that began to crawl over the white-gold as it had done during the battle in Amanat, the blackness infiltrating his very cells.
It shouldn’t have affected him that badly—not with the wildfire awake inside him, its ferocity an antidote to Lijuan’s ugliness. But he was tired, had just fought nonstop with Lijuan for God knew how long after the trip to destroy the weapons carriers, and he’d been using the wildfire against the other archangel since the fighting began. In Amanat, he’d only been able to create it for a tiny period of time, the power new. It might have developed in the interim, but it was still new.
Skin chilling, she realized he had no more in him.
42
Already moving, Elena didn’t stop to question the instinct that drove her to put down her gun, leave the aerie, and run to take off from a nearby balcony as Raphael spiraled down from above, his wing mutilated by the black.
Archangel!
Get inside, Elena!
Hell, no. Having instinctively calculated the speed of his descent, she slammed into him, wrapping her arms around his torso. “Use it!” she said, her left arm beginning to pulse with stabbing pains, though nothing touched her skin. “Use me!”
One of Raphael’s arms clamped around her, the other shooting a bolt of angelfire toward Lijuan. That arm, his left, she saw, was scored with wounds.
“You need to get back in the Tower!” It was a furious order as they began to fall faster and faster, his “infected” wing pitch-black and useless. “I can’t protect you and fight at the same time.”
“You’re not listening to me! Don’t you sense it, the connection?” Her own wing felt as if it were being eaten alive by the black, the pain excruciating. “Us, Raphael! Us!”
The dream word hung between them as a laughing Lijuan created a rain of lethal black needles. “Fitting you should die with your mortal!”
Slamming up a hand, Raphael deflected the black with his own power, but the shield began to buckle almost at once, his injuries having apparently depleted his ability to draw power from outside sources.
Elena grabbed his jaw, slamming a kiss on his lips. “Batshit Lijuan will get us anyway so forget about protecting me and reach!”
A hard glance out of eyes of wild blue yet free from the oily black, and then she felt a wrenching inside her that made her scream . . . as Raphael’s shield turned electric with wildfire. Yes! Throat raw and chest aching, she looked at his wing to see the black eaten away to leave only luminous white-gold in its wake.
Another chilling scream, Raphael having deflected Lijuan’s needles right back at her. Stay close.
Snapping out her wings when he released her, she grabbed the handguns at her hips, mourning her custom-built crossbow, as well as the absence of the machine guns. As it turned out, she only had to shoot a couple of enemy fighters. Clipped by one of Raphael’s bolts, which destroyed the bottom half of her right wing, Lijuan called a retreat, and her entire force fel
l back behind the defensive perimeter.
Elena didn’t fly to the Tower but to her shooting team, dreading what she’d find. But somehow, the entire group had made it through, injured but alive. Walking over to her, a bloodied but whole Ransom said, “You owe me a big, wet kiss,” the wound on his thigh bleeding through the field bandage.
When she scowled and told him to get himself to a medic, he rolled his eyes and withdrew his hand from behind his back. “Your crossbow, Consort.”
She did kiss him then, to the wolf whistles of the rest of the team.
That, however, was the sole point of light in the darkness. As night turned to dawn, the city drained of power, the Tower running on massive generators stored below ground and turned on only when Raphael and Lijuan weren’t in the air, they cataloged their losses while watching for any movement from the opposing camp. The news was bad.
“Half of the injured,” Dmitri said, after sharing the pitiless numbers, “will be able to fight again in a few hours, but the rest are either dead”—a grim look—“or so badly injured they’ll be out for days at least.” Black T-shirt wrinkled and bloodied from where he’d fought a squadron that had landed on a Tower balcony, he shoved a hand through his hair. “Jason, did you manage to get any reliable numbers on Lijuan’s casualties?”
The spymaster nodded. “Double ours.”
Everyone in the room understood that even with the impressive abilities of the Seven in the mix, that still left Lijuan at a huge advantage, and the remainder of the time was spent discussing what they could do to lessen the near-impossible odds. It was grueling, because there weren’t many more rabbits they could pull out of hats. Especially given the fact that while Lijuan hadn’t begun any hostilities in the Refuge, Galen reported that her stronghold was bristling with aggression.
“The instant they see any sign that we may head your way,” Raphael’s weapons-master had said, “there’s no question they’ll attack.” A tic in his jaw, he’d shaken his head. “If Lijuan survives this war, she’ll do so with more enemies than she knows. Every man, woman, and child in the Refuge understands the threat originates from her.”
An hour after Galen’s message, Jason received another report—more cargo planes were being stocked with weapons in Lijuan’s territory, and this time, instead of vampires, there would be reborn in the holds.
“It appears,” Raphael said, rage a cold burn in his blood, “the goddess has decided there is no dishonor in using her ‘servants’ to win this war.”
“You know,” Illium said with a smile that held no humor, “it’s a compliment. She’s starting to worry you might actually hurt her and win.”
Too bad the compliment could well lead to hell on earth.
• • •
Having forced herself to grab a couple of hours of down-time while she could, Elena was still grappling with the horrific possibility of a New York overrun with reborn when she walked into the refueling station to grab a cup of coffee just before dawn. “Sara.”
Face drawn, her best friend shared a photo her parents had sent of Zoe peacefully sleeping somewhere in a commune in Nebraska. “We’ll beat Lijuan, Ellie, whatever it takes.” An unyielding vow. “I will not have my baby growing up in a world ruled by a monster.”
Deacon came in just as they finished their coffee, and Elena left to give them a few minutes’ privacy, Deacon’s wide shoulders blocking Sara from view as he drew her into his arms. Elena couldn’t imagine how hard it must be for the two of them to be so far from Zoe. As far as she knew, their little girl had never before gone to bed without a kiss from Mommy or Daddy.
She hoped with everything in her heart that Sara’s words would prove prophetic, that they’d win this terrible fight so Zoe could play in the snow again, safe and happy and with wonder in her heart at the shadow of an angel’s wings. Picking up a feather of dappled black and gray that looked like it came from a squadron commander she knew well, she put it carefully into a pocket to save for Zoe.
Her aim was to find Raphael, maybe steal a few seconds in his arms, but when she reached the war room, she saw that he was in intense discussion with Jason. Not wanting to interrupt and needing some fresh air, she went to the balcony doors. She’d pushed the door to one side when she looked up and froze, her eye caught by the unexpected tableau outside.
Aodhan and Illium stood near the edge, weapons in hand, both bearing wounds that said they’d been in one of the ongoing light skirmishes along the perimeter. Aodhan had a cut on his cheek and what looked like a couple of shallow slices on his upper arms, while Illium’s right wing was notched as if by a blade. Not a disabling injury, Elena judged, and one that was healing before her eyes.
That, however, wasn’t what held her attention. It was the fact that they stood side by side, their wings overlapping the slightest fraction. Aodhan never made the mistake of putting himself in a situation where he could be touched, which meant this wasn’t a mistake. Fingers clenching on the doorjamb, her heart full at this sign of healing amid the hurt and the horror, she was about to turn away, leave them in peace, when Illium turned toward Aodhan.
The two angels were both tall, but Aodhan was perhaps an inch taller, and now his eyes locked with Illium’s for a long, quiet moment before he lowered his head very slightly. Illium raised his hand, the movement slow, hesitant . . . and then his fingers brushed Aodhan’s cheek just below the cut that had almost sealed. The first ray of dawn kissed the tear that rolled down Illium’s face, caressed the painful wonder on Aodhan’s as he lifted his hand to clasp the wrist of his friend’s hand.
That instant of contact, the power of it, stole her breath.
Then Illium smiled, said something that made Aodhan’s lips curve—Elena thought it might’ve been “Welcome back, Sparkle”—and they were separating to sweep off the Tower in a symphony of wild silver blue and heartbreaking light.
“Raphael,” she whispered, having felt him come up behind her. “Did you see?”
“Yes.” His hand on her nape, his thumb brushing over her pulse. “Of course it would be Illium who reached him,” he murmured. “They’ve been friends since Illium first talked Aodhan into flying to the bottom of the gorge—he was younger than Sam is now, Aodhan even younger.”
Elena hadn’t realized Illium was older, Aodhan was always so solemn. “Did they get in trouble?” she asked, turning sideways to his body.
“Yes. It’s a forbidden flight for such young babes—the gorge floor is far from the city and, though coasting down is not so hard, young angels don’t have the wing strength to get back up.
“When they were found,” he added, tucking her against him, “everyone knew it was Illium who must’ve been the instigator, and he took the blame without pretending otherwise.” A laugh. “He has never lied, your Bluebell, even as a child, and that’s why no one could ever be angry with him. ‘I did it’ is apt to be the most frequent thing he said as a child.”
Elena could just imagine. “And Aodhan? What was he like?”
“Always quiet, shy, gentle of heart. But that day, he was intractable, insisting Illium alone wasn’t to blame, that they’d come up with the plan together. He wouldn’t listen when Illium told him to shush, and the next thing the Refuge knew, they were close as two birds of the same nest, each as often at the other’s home as his own.”
Pressing his lips to her hair, he said, “Two hundred years, Elena, that is how long we have waited for our Aodhan to return.”
The solemn words made her eyes burn. Wrapping her arms around him, she stood in silence with her consort, their eyes on the squadrons that patrolled the uneasy border. Each time she glimpsed wings of silver blue, she looked for those of broken light.
• • •
Heavy fighting began again with true sunrise.
The Tower forces, Elijah’s two elite squadrons included, did considerable damage, but it wasn’t enough, not with Lijuan’s generals recharged by their mistress. Having learned from their previous skirmishes, they ganged up on
the Tower’s most powerful fighters while an overwhelming number of ordinary fighters engaged anyone who might come to assist. Their tactic worked, bringing down five of Raphael’s experienced commanders one after the other.
Of the Seven, it was Aodhan who took the worst damage.
The angel, with his unearthly beauty, was almost decapitated when he left his flank unprotected in order to save the life of an injured commander. Aside from the gruesome neck wound, one of his wings had been hacked half off, his left arm gone. Crash-landing on a roof, he broke a number of bones and it was only the relentless fire of the shooters around him that kept the enemy angels from landing to finish the job.
Yet even close to death, he eschewed anyone’s touch but Illium’s.
Racing to the infirmary as soon as he forced Lijuan to retreat once more, Raphael saw that the other angel was conscious. “I must touch you, Aodhan.”
Throat destroyed, Aodhan spoke mind to mind. I will heal. Help the others.
Shaking his head, Raphael placed his hand very gently across the neck wound, and when Aodhan went white and stiff, knew he was throwing the angel back into the hell from where Raphael had carried him in his arms. I’m sorry, he said, adding yet another reason to the list of why he needed to kill Lijuan. I cannot lose one of my Seven.
He wasn’t certain Aodhan breathed until he lifted his hand, the neck wound sealed, though the other injuries would take weeks of painful healing. “I would not have done this unless I needed you.”
It is all right, Sire. Aodhan’s splintered eyes held forgiveness for the unutterable pain caused. Get me in front of a window. I can use my offensive abilities as long as I have a line of sight.
After personally moving Aodhan’s bed to a windowed area and smashing out the glass so the other man wouldn’t do it himself the first time he used his abilities, Raphael returned to the field of battle. Every time he rose, Lijuan did, too, meaning he couldn’t help his own forces, and sometime after midnight, she scored a hit almost directly to his heart.
