by Nalini Singh
Illium, back with them, swore under his breath, next to a quietly stoic Jason.
Elena’s expression was a study in fury, and it made him want to smile even in this moment, for she was a woman any man would be proud to have by his side on the eve of the greatest battle of his life. “Warn our people,” he said to Dmitri, “and tell them that if there comes a time when there is no hope of victory, they do not dishonor me by choosing to retreat or surrender. With Lijuan gone from the world, they will not have to serve under evil.”
Dmitri’s eyes held his. I’ll make it known, but I’ll never serve anyone except you.
I know, old friend. Were it my choice, I would leave my city and my territory to no other angel, but to my second.
Fly strong, Raphael.
Fight well, Dmitri.
Wings snapping out, he swept off the Tower with Elena, Illium, and Jason, the four of them winging their way directly to the heart of Lijuan’s operation, hoping to take her unawares. Crossbow bolts filled the air as soon as they came within range. Jason and Illium were fast enough to avoid them; Elena wasn’t, but she was very good at shooting her own bolts in flight, slamming two home between the eyes. The shooters quickly grew wary of giving her a target.
They’d just crossed the border that divided their perimeter line from the enemy’s attacking front, the mark pulsing hot and urgent under his skin, when Raphael saw the wave of dark gray on the lightening horizon, the line shifting to encircle the entire stage of battle.
Watch out!
Twisting sideways at Illium’s warning, he barely avoided the hail of blades that was Lijuan’s power, as Elena, Illium, and Jason engaged the enemy fighters that sought to disable Raphael’s wings. Having materialized above him, the Archangel of China was attempting to shred him with her poisonous fire.
Coaxing the last of the wildfire inside him to the surface and drawing on the fire that lived in Elena, too, he blocked Lijuan’s next barrage with ordinary angelfire and, ignoring the crossbow bolt that thudded into his shoulder, flew up, his aim to make physical contact.
Except she dematerialized without warning, her strength renewed. And when she rematerialized to the left, she managed to score him with a whip of black poison. Vicious pain stabbed through his flesh as the wildfire inside him sought to cauterize the wound and he blocked the healing—he couldn’t afford to lose the last of it, of the only thing that could hurt Lijuan.
Dropping down beside him with a gloating smile, eyes virulent red, Lijuan said, “I give you one final chance to surrender, Raphael,” her face a skeletal mask. “I do not intend to kill you, not any longer.” She made certain not to come within touching distance. “You will be much, much more useful to me in other ways.”
Raphael thought of the desiccated corpses found in her territory, of the fighter Naasir had seen go to his death, and knew Lijuan sought to feed on an archangel. “A very generous offer,” he said aloud, while his mind reached for Dmitri’s. You must make sure the remainder of the Cadre knows Lijuan seeks to feed off not only angels, but archangels.
I’ll ensure the message gets through, came the immediate reply. Sire, the new assault force has arrived and will swarm the Tower in minutes if we don’t do something to stop them. I’ve authorized the use of any and all weapons at our disposal.
Raphael heard gunfire and rocket booms on the heels of that statement and knew his exhausted and wounded vampires, and the hunters, were shooting at the enemy, while his angels, some with broken limbs, all with injuries, filled the sky. But there were too few of them, and too many of the strange gray-winged angels who powered Lijuan’s new assault. “What have you become?” he said to her, unable to imagine how she could’ve created this new army, silent and lethal, without anyone in the Cadre knowing the truth.
A terrible smile. “The epitome of our evolution.”
That level of power could not be held in the hands of a nightmare.
He blasted her with angelfire without warning, wanting her to believe his intent was another ordinary battle. Deflecting the blows with a rain of black razors that he held back through sheer will, she smiled again. “I will chain you in my court, feed on you for years. You’ll be the example that brings the others in the Cadre to their knees.” His shield broke, the razors shredding his face.
Raphael!
He reached for Elena not only with his mind but his hand, Jason and Illium clearing a path for her so she could get to his side. This will hurt, hbeebti, he said, as the mad archangel raised her hands again.
Nothing hurts when I’m with you.
Squeezing her hand, he sent an order to all his troops in the vicinity to get out of the blast zone. If Lijuan’s forces thought them cowards in retreat and turned their attention to him, Elena, Illium, and Jason, all the better. He’d take as many of them with him as he could.
He met Lijuan’s gaze before she would’ve struck again, and said, “Feed.”
She froze, her surprise unhidden.
“I won’t fight if you give me your word you’ll call off your troops till the sun sets on this day.” All he needed was a single point of contact and he could ignite the tiny amount of combined angelfire and wildfire left inside him, hopefully sending Lijuan to the hell where she belonged.
See you on the other side, Archangel.
Total calm descending on him with Elena’s words, he said, “My consort also remains,” knowing that was a lure Lijuan could not resist. She coveted Elena’s wings for the macabre collection of angels pinned to the walls of the refrigerated space that was her museum of death. “Look down.”
Lijuan’s teeth gleamed in a satisfied smile as she realized whose hand he held in his own. “I will agree,” she said, with a gleam in her eye, “if you give me your consort first. I wish to snap her neck, make her a beautiful corpse.”
His rage violent, he felt Elena’s wing just brush his as she flew up. Contact, Raphael. That’s all you need, right? Use me as a conduit.
No! he wanted to scream as Lijuan’s hand clamped over Elena’s wrist at the same time that his own closed around her ankle. Forgive me, Elena.
I’ll be waiting for you.
Refusing to let Elena die at Lijuan’s hand, he reached for the flickers of flame within himself and his consort, ready to ignite them both, when something dark gray slammed into Elena hard enough to break Lijuan’s hold.
At the same instant, a thousand crossbow bolts thudded into Lijuan’s body.
His wings tangled with Elena’s as she tumbled into him, it took Raphael several seconds to slow their momentum, and when he looked up, it was to see a badly bleeding Lijuan take bolt after bolt from the gray-winged angels, as others of the gray ones took on the enemy one-on-one.
Raphael didn’t waste time wondering which unexpected ally had sent this strange force. Attack! he ordered his own fighters, and made the decision to use a minute amount of wildfire to neutralize the poison Lijuan had thrown at him, for he was now of more use to his people alive. No mercy!
A wild grin on her face, Elena lifted the crossbow she’d never dropped, one wrist ringed with bloody bruises from Lijuan’s grip. We need to fucking deify whoever the hell sent those gray guys.
The sight of her hurt made the cold rage in him flare to icy brightness. First, he said, powering to Lijuan, I need to take out the garbage.
An archangel couldn’t be killed by crossbows, but with the bolts thudding into Lijuan’s body as fast as she pulled them out, she was distracted, her energies funneled toward healing herself. Her facial bones appeared and disappeared as her skin faded in and out, but when she didn’t shift into her noncorporeal form, he realized that whatever power she gained from draining the lives of others, it wasn’t enough to allow her to transition under this type of bloody attack.
Wrapping one hand around her ankle while she was distracted, he sent all his remaining power, power kissed with the life that was Elena, directly through his arm and into her bones. Her shriek splintered the sky, her lower body exploding
in a blinding flash of light, her torso crumbling.
Is the wicked witch dead?
I’m not certain. He almost thought he’d seen her transition into her other form at the absolute last instant. But even if she survived the blast, it’ll have been with extreme injuries. Her body is gone. It would take her months to regrow it, and while Lijuan had tried to make them believe she didn’t need the flesh, this battle had shown she very much did.
Even if she could feed on others to speed up her healing, the way she’d opened her mouth when tugging Elena closer told Raphael she needed her physical form to feed. And he’d seen her head burst like a pumpkin as bolt after bolt thudded into it in that split second while she screamed. The gray ones were merciless fighters, but right now they were on New York’s side.
And it was time for him and his own to reclaim their city.
His body’s ability to store power depleted to the point of nonexistence, he grabbed the sword Illium threw at him and entered the fray, his battle cry echoed by every one of his men and women.
He didn’t know how long they fought, but he was always aware of Elena and those of his Seven who fought with him. Dmitri, having held off a new attempt to storm the Tower, his view far better than those in the thick of battle, sent through continuous strategic updates that Raphael used to direct his men and women so they acted as a smooth unit. He didn’t realize how far they’d pushed Lijuan’s forces until they hit the Atlantic, the fighting having moved from Manhattan and over wider New York as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky.
Ten seconds later, the instant after he sliced off the head of an enemy general in a fountaining spray of red that sent the body into the water from where his people would no doubt retrieve him, for he was too old to die by beheading, he felt Jason’s mind touch his. Sire, they’re lifting the flag of surrender.
Rising immediately above the rest of his force, Raphael confirmed Jason’s sighting, then raised his sword above his head in a vertical line. The message took half a minute to get through the furious fighting, but one by one his people held their blows, allowing the enemy to retreat.
“We just let them go?” Elena asked, having come up beside him. “Seriously?”
Raphael didn’t blame her for her angry disbelief, his own fury colder but no less deadly. “It is part of the rules of engagement.”
“But they would’ve killed us.” It was almost a growl, her blood-streaked and battered body taut with the need to hunt down those who had hurt the people who were her own.
“If my forces had surrendered, the enemy fighters wouldn’t have touched them so long as they didn’t raise arms against Lijuan.” Whether Lijuan herself would then have used his people for her feeds was another question, but he wasn’t Lijuan, to make such an ugly breach of the rules of his people.
Contacting Dmitri and Naasir, he said, Herd her surviving vampire troops to the pier and find them a ship. Make sure they have enough blood to survive the journey out of my waters. After that, they became the responsibility of their own commanders, and while Raphael didn’t think Lijuan had much honor any longer, he thought perhaps her older commanders had enough not to abandon their own.
“I still think it sucks.” Elena pushed a strand of hair off her sweat-stained face, the brown color so wrong, Raphael knew he’d have her wash it out at the first opportunity. “I don’t think that sick thing calling herself an archangel would’ve obeyed the rules.”
“She is beyond honor and madness, a creature of true evil.”
A sigh, his furious consort nonetheless lowering her crossbow. “And you’re not.” Scowling, she continued to watch the enemy. “Fine, fine, we’ll be civilized and let them retreat, but damn it, I don’t like it. They’ll be back as soon as Lijuan has recovered, because it would be just too much good luck if the Queen of the Zombies was truly dead.”
Of that, Raphael had no doubt. “The rules of engagement were put in place long ago, after archangelic wars no one remembers,” he said to Elena, and it was also a reminder to himself of why such rules were needed. “Wars, after all, are between the archangels—yet it is the angels and vampires below us who die total deaths.”
As he’d expected, the general he’d beheaded had been retrieved, while countless vampires and ordinary angelic fighters floated on the water or lay broken and bloodied across the city, their lives ended. “In those wars, it’s said we decimated over eighty percent of our population. Only the archangels and the noncombatants survived and not one person ever forgot the blood that stained the hands of the Cadre at the time.”
“Okay,” Elena whispered, horror in her expression. “Okay, I get it now.”
“Jason’s squadron will escort them out of our territorial waters,” he said, brushing his wing over hers. “Now we must deal with this other strange force, find out their price for this day’s help.”
They turned as a unit to face the city.
45
Having landed on roofs as far as the eye could see, the gray ones sat crouched like living gargoyles, their wings arched, fundamentally changing the landscape. Birds sat on the shoulders and bodies of many of them, silent and watchful.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Elena asked Raphael, trying to make some sense of what she was seeing, and failing.
From what she’d witnessed in the battle as the gray angels fought around her, there was no color to them—gray eyes, pale smooth skin, hair of gray, gray wings. Yet they were humanoid, had faces with the clean lines and strong bones of the immortals. Their wings, however, had no feathers, instead formed of a leathery texture that reminded her of the wings of bats. The shape of those wings, too, was similar to the nocturnal creatures.
“No,” Raphael said after a long moment, as heavy clouds passed across the sky to drop a curtain of snow on the city, the sun blotted out to cloak the world in darkness.
It created the perfect muted background for the strange angels who crouched all over New York.
“These gray ones are an enigma.” Eyes of violent blue took in the eerie scene, everyone so silent it seemed impossible this was a city of countless souls. “Come.”
The gray angels didn’t stop them as they flew back through the snow to the Tower, Illium by their side. Coming to a stop on the Tower balcony, Elena took her place beside Raphael, their eyes on Manhattan. Dmitri flanked him in silence, while Illium acted as a winged sentry. Naasir, she realized, had to be handling the enemy vampires still in the city.
Take one step forward with me, Elena.
Guessing it to be some kind of angelic protocol, she did so without argument . . . and one of the gray ones flew toward them from a nearby building. Tall, with broad shoulders, his wings silent in the snow and his hair brushing his nape, Elena couldn’t have picked him out from any of the others. It was as if they’d been minted from the same press, one after the other.
Landing right in front of them, he placed his sword horizontally in front of his body and went down on one knee, head bent.
Elena bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle her gasp. The mark on his nape, she said, eyes on the primal black lines of it as the male’s dusty gray hair slipped to either side, it’s a mirror image of yours.
“Sire,” the unknown fighter said at the same instant, “we come as called.”
Raphael’s answer was accompanied by a freezing wind that swept through the deathly silent city. “None who fought so bravely should kneel.”
The gray angel rose to his feet on Raphael’s words. This close, Elena saw his irises weren’t truly gray; they were so pale as to be barely distinguishable from the whites, but for the black pinpricks of his pupils. It should’ve reminded her of Lijuan, but it didn’t, because where Lijuan carried death and a putrid evil in her eyes, the being that looked through those colorless eyes was near to a blank slate. As if he hadn’t yet decided who he would be.
“You call me Sire.” Raphael’s wing was heavy against her own as they stood side by side, their bodies aligned u
nder the falling snow that was a cold, welcome kiss on the wounds that scored her flesh. “Tell me why.”
“We heard your voice in our Sleep.” It was a flat, toneless statement. “We hear only the voice of the Sire or his consort.” His eyes locked with Elena’s.
“Elena,” she said through a dry throat, forcing herself to remember this deadly creature was a friend, not foe. “You can call me Elena.”
He looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. “You are the consort.”
Okay, Archangel, I think this is more your speed than mine.
I’m uncertain these gray ones are anyone’s speed. “What do you call yourselves?”
“We”—an absolute hush, the wind frozen—“are the Legion.”
Elena felt her stomach drop, as if she’d learned something terrible.
• • •
The Legion.
Raphael had heard those words before, a long, long time ago. They are, he said to Elena, the threat used to scare badly behaving angelic children.
Have a nap or the Legion will come get you? Like the bogeyman?
Precisely. Except it appears our bogeyman is real. “You have been gone from the world an eon.”
“Yes.”
Raphael, look at his eyes. They’re starting to gain color. And his hair . . .
Doing as Elena bid, Raphael saw the gray one was indeed no longer so gray. His hair was darkening into black and his irises now boasted a fine rim of blue—the same blue as Raphael’s eyes. “You are now my Legion.” Not a question, the mark on his face a quiet thrum that told him the truth, told him, too, that the Legion waited for his command. “Your first task is to assist my troops in securing the city and fixing the damage to the Tower.”
A quiet nod, his wings folded with military tightness. “Sire.”
“You are their leader. I need a name for you.”
