by Ella Summers
He kissed my neck softly. “I know.” He looked up, meeting my eyes.
I shivered. “You haven’t given up on everyone. I know you haven’t. That man at the wedding, Jiro Goodman. The one with the golden eyes. You trust him. I can see it in your eyes when you spoke to him.”
Damiel stopped caressing my neck. He stepped back from me. “You are entirely too observant.”
“I know,” I replied with a smile.
Damiel grunted and started walking down the road again. “Jiro and I joined the Legion at the same time. We’ve been through a lot together.”
“So you do still have friends.”
“One friend.”
“And you’re not in fact so jaded that you’ve completely given up on people,” I pressed on, ignoring his qualifier.
“You must never tell anyone that I’m not a cold-hearted bastard,” he told me.
“Don’t worry.” I winked at him. “I won’t tell anyone about your secret friend.”
“You’re a troublemaker.”
“Why do you think that?” I smiled. “Everyone else says I’m a perfect angel.”
He chuckled, the charming devil.
“Damiel, I’m glad we’re on this mission together, just the two of us,” I told him. “It’s giving me a chance to really get to know you.”
“You might not like what you find,” he warned me.
“I doubt that.”
“Ever the optimist.”
“One perk of immortality, coupled with an abundance of magic, is you can do anything you set your mind to.”
“I’m glad we’re on this mission together too,” he said seriously. “And that I’m getting to know you better.”
He opened his mouth again—and then he snapped it shut. Surprise flashed in his eyes.
We’d reached the top of a hill. From here, we could finally see the Hive’s fortress. Sparkling purple tendrils swirled around the stone tower, flowing up, up, up. Bright beams of magic shot out of the tower.
And that tower wasn’t alone.
Past it, far in the distance, other fortresses stood all across the flat expanse. I counted six, but something told me there were more. A lot more. I was strangely certain there were towers like these all across this world, each one shooting magic up into the sky.
Had the Hive already set their plan into motion to escape their world? Were Damiel and I already too late?
13
The Magical City of No Magic
I looked up at the magic swirling in the sky. “We need to figure out how the Hive plans to break the spell on them.” I pointed at the beam of light shooting out of the nearest fortress. “And we need to figure out what that is. I think that calls for some reconnaissance.”
“Stealth reconnaissance,” replied Damiel. “We need to be discreet. Here, we are outnumbered, and we’re strangers as well. People are suspicious of strangers. That’s a universal fact.”
“Don’t be so cynical.”
“It’s not cynicism. It’s experience.” He almost sounded tired saying it, as though these universal flaws weighed on him. “We must be cautious. No one will trust us, and I expect there are Hive patrols everywhere. The squad we saw earlier is surely not the only one.”
I swept my hand toward the road. “After you.”
Damiel led the way into town—no, city. Skyscrapers rose high at the other side of the city, but where we now walked was decidedly more modest. None of the neat brick buildings reached more than a few stories high. They consisted mainly of apartment houses—in addition to a few grocery stores, clothing shops, restaurants, and bars.
“This isn’t what I’d expected to find on the Hive’s world,” I commented.
“No, it is not.” Damiel’s eyes swept the storefronts. “There are no armories. No guns on the building towers. No signs of any weapons at all.”
“And no signs of magic either.” I looked up at the street lamps. “The lights aren’t run by Magitech. I think they’re run by electricity, mundane energy, not magical.”
Damiel scanned the people walking along the street. “The people all appear human as well. No one in this city of millions seems to be using magic. Nor is any magic being sold or advertised.”
After seeing the Hive soldiers in action during the battle on Nightingale last week, I’d expected us to find magic absolutely everywhere here. And powerful magic at that.
But this place was, as far as I could see, completely devoid of magic. Well, except for the fortress outside the city.
“A sky lit up with magic over a city with no magic,” I said as we walked through the magical city of no magic. “The oddity of magic and no magic side-by-side. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Damiel. “But I now know that magic has been shooting out of those fortresses into the sky for a long time.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because no one is even looking at the magic swirling overhead They don’t gawk at it. It’s apparently normal to them. It’s become so commonplace that they don’t spare it a second glance.”
“Or maybe they can’t see it?” I wondered.
“Let’s find out.”
Damiel headed toward a bar across the street. Nothing about the bland brick building front indicated it was a bar—except for the business name over the door. It read: Club Catatonic.
“These people have an odd sense of humor,” I commented to Damiel as we entered the bar.
Inside, the floors were wood, and the bar and tables too. Behind a cluster of round tables, there was a target board, something vaguely resembling a pool table, and a few other games. Nothing was run by magic here, neither lights nor the heavy jukebox in the corner.
There was more than one way to interrogate someone. Damiel had been right to come here for information. Bars were where people drank alcohol and loosened up. When people loosened up, it became easier to get information out of them. And if they were drunk, they noticed it less when you started asking them weird questions.
“Those people.” I glanced at a pair of likely candidates, two women who were drinking colorful liquor shots as they played a game that involved tossing small balls into holes in the wall.
Damiel nodded. “Good choice. They are slowly becoming inebriated, but they can still manage the game’s hand-eye coordination. That means they aren’t too drunk yet. If people are too drunk, they don’t make sense. If they aren’t drunk enough, they’re less likely to answer strangers’ questions.”
“The perfect balance.” I grinned at him. “Just as my father taught me.”
Damiel gave me a curious look. “I told you about my past. You have not reciprocated.”
“You rub my back, and I rub yours?” I said, brows raised.
“I had no idea that back-rubbing would be part of this, but yes, that would be agreeable.”
“How can you make anything sound inappropriate?”
“Rubbing is often inappropriate, except when it’s very, very appropriate.” He winked at me.
“You’re doing it again.”
“It?”
“Making everything sound dirty. How do you do it?”
“Maybe it’s the way I lift my brows like this.”
He arched his bows.
“Or drop my gaze like this.”
His eyes panned down my body like a river of molten honey—hot, smooth, and sinfully delicious.
“Or smile like this.”
His lips curled up into a dark, devious grin.
“Stop it,” I laughed.
“As you wish.” In an instant, like flipping a switch, his face went cool and professional.
“No, wait, don’t stop.”
“Stop, don’t stop—which is it?”
“Don’t stop. You make me laugh.”
“Pleased to oblige, Princess.” He took my hand and kissed the top.
I giggled.
“I’m sure General Silverstar taught you that ‘angels do not make such an unseemly, undignifie
d noise’.” Damiel spoke the last few words in a pretty convincing imitation of my father.
I snorted.
“Or that noise,” he said sternly.
I linked my arm with his. I was laughing so hard that I doubled over and my body shook against his arm.
“Bless you.”
“I didn’t sneeze,” I told him.
“You could have fooled me.”
I laughed some more. “It’s a good thing no one from the Legion is here. Could you imagine Nyx’s face if she saw us carrying on like this, laughing like a pair of fools? She doesn’t understand that sometimes it feels good to just be silly.”
“Even when the fate of our world hangs in the balance?”
“Especially when the fate of our world hangs in the balance,” I told him. “Without laughter, without happiness, it’s harder to stay optimistic. But when you laugh, the worries weighing you down just bounce off your shoulders and you know everything is going to be ok. Try it, Damiel. You’ll feel so much better.”
He drew in a deep breath, then stopped. He looked at me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m afraid that if I let my worries bounce off my shoulders, they’ll hit you in the head.”
I chuckled. “I wish you could always be this way, Damiel.”
His smile faded, his face now serious. “I can’t be, you know.”
I sighed. “I suppose laughter clashes with the Interrogator demeanor.”
“Horribly.”
“Unless it’s maniacal laughter.”
A slow, wicked grin curled his lips. “I save the maniacal laughter for only special occasions.”
“Like when you’re wearing your favorite uniform.”
“Exactly,” he said. “But if you behave, I might treat you to some maniacal laughter later.”
“And if I don’t behave?”
His eyes met mine, deep and serious. Neither of us said anything. We just stared at each other, the air crackling with supercharged tension. He closed the distance between us.
“Hi.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Behind us stood a woman with dark eyes and short pigtails dyed a bright shade of blue. She held a tray of full shot glasses in her hands.
“Could I squeeze by you?” she asked us.
Her voice was soft, her demeanor altogether likable. The smile on her face told me that a joke was always ready to bounce off the tip of her tongue.
“Actually, we were hoping to join in,” I said to her as I made space for her to pass. “Do you have room in your game for two more?”
“What do you say, girls?” she called out to the pair of women Damiel had chosen to interrogate. “Do we have room for two more?”
The ladies cheered in the affirmative.
Blue waved at us. “Come on over.” She set down the drink tray on the table closest to the balls-in-the-wall game.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” her pink-pigtailed friend asked us.
“Where do you come from?” asked the woman with the bright banana-yellow pigtails.
No one else in the bar had such vibrant shades of hair as these three, but there was nothing magical about them. They must have just enjoyed standing out in a crowd.
“We are visiting from another world,” Damiel told our new friends, to my surprise.
But no one attacked us.
“Cool,” said Pink, and she picked up a small silver ball, hardly larger than the palm of her hand. She tossed it at a hole in the wall but missed.
Yellow stopped the rolling ball with her foot. “Are you here for a little vacation?”
“For our honeymoon,” said Damiel.
“So you’re newlyweds. Cute.” Yellow threw the ball—and missed. It bounced off the wall.
Blue caught the ball before it hit her in the face. “This game is harder than it looks.”
“May I?” Damiel held out his hand.
“Sure.” Blue handed him the ball. “Are you here to see the sacred springs?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I understand they are just outside the city.”
Earlier, I’d seen a photo of these ‘sacred springs’ taped to a tourist office window. Obviously, Damiel hadn’t missed it either.
“They’re past the west end of town,” Blue confirmed. “But if you go there, be careful. Tourists have gone missing out there.”
“Oh?” Damiel threw the ball at a hole in the hall—and it went in.
“Wow, you’re good,” Yellow said, her eyes wide. “Have you played this game before?”
“Something similar.”
That ‘similar’ meant shooting the whiskers off a wild boar from a hundred yards away on the plains of monsters, while dodging enemy fire from an enraged dragon and evading the behemoth stomping feet from a dinosaur with a bad temper. That was the kind of thing an angel would call a decent workout.
I grabbed one of the balls from the bucket on the ground and tossed it into a hole smaller than Damiel’s. Then I turned to him, arching my brows in open challenge. His hand flashed out and grabbed a ball. He looked upon me, his lips curling with unspoken promises.
“Where did you say you’re from?” Blue asked us as Damiel landed another ball in a hole in the wall.
“Far from here,” he said, his gaze never leaving mine. He didn’t even look at the holes he was throwing balls into. “You were warning us about the sacred falls.”
“Right. Some tourists who visit the falls have gone missing.”
Yellow nodded. “It’s the rebels—”
“Shhh,” Pink cut in.
“The rebels?” I asked.
Pink frowned. “We don’t speak of them.”
Blue nodded vigorously. “The Magic Collective has labeled them heretics.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
“The Magic Collective?” I asked.
“The Chosen Ones,” Pink said.
“Anyone who possesses magic is chosen.”
“They’re taken to learn and live and serve in the grand castles throughout the world.”
So the Hive’s fortresses really did cover this whole world.
“It is a great honor to be chosen.”
“But no one ever sees the Chosen Ones again,” Yellow said in a whisper. “They are kept separate from the rest of us, apart from anyone without magic.”
“Is there magic in the castles?” Damiel asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Blue. “All the magic is there.”
“There’s no magic outside the Magic Collective’s castles?”
“Of course not,” Pink laughed. “We don’t have any magic, so why would we need anything to be run by magic?”
It sounded like the Hive had everyone perfectly in control—and all the cards stacked in their favor. But on the other hand, a rebellion was brewing against the so-called Chosen Ones. That must have been a recent development. The three women hardly dared speak of these rebels, even under the influence of alcohol. And when one of them had spoken of the rebellion, her friends had quickly silenced her. That told me people deeply feared the Hive.
“We haven’t had a visitor from another world in several days,” Yellow said. “I wonder why they stopped coming. There used to be so many.”
So normal humans weren’t kept in the loop of the Hive’s plans. That was unfortunate. It would have been easier to get all our answers from these people.
“The rebels might have chased away the tourists,” Damiel suggested.
“The rebels only attack tourists to bring attention to themselves,” said Yellow. “To be heard. To gain a voice.”
“It doesn’t matter why the rebels do it,” Blue snapped. “Their actions are hurting all of us.”
Pink nodded. “The rebels are the reason why there’s a curfew now in the city.”
So there must have been rebels nearby.
“Do the rebels ever do anything bolder?” I asked.
Blue frowned. “Like what?”
“Like attack the Ma
gic Collective’s castles.”
“No, even they are not that foolish,” said Pink. “Entry into the castles is forbidden to all but the Chosen Ones, and there are magical defenses to keep out the unworthy.”
We’d thrown our final balls into the wall holes, and the game was over.
“You throw those balls better than anyone I’ve ever met,” Blue said.
I was willing to bet she’d never met an angel—or anyone with supernatural hand-eye coordination, for that matter. Not if the humans here were kept completely separate from anyone with magic.
“Don’t you worry. Those dirty rebels won’t be able to get the jump on someone with your reflexes.” Pink flashed us a warm smile.
“Where are you staying while you’re here?” Blue asked us.
“We were thinking of camping out in the woods,” replied Damiel.
“On your honeymoon?” Shock flashed across Blue’s face. “You mustn’t.”
Pink nodded. “Especially with the rebels stalking about. “There’s a nice hotel near the sacred springs. It’s called the Sunshine Palace.”
“The matron is lovely.”
“And she makes the loveliest fruit pies.”
Damiel looked at me. “It is late. And we haven’t slept in a long time.”
“True,” I agreed.
So we bade farewell to our bar buddies and headed out. Along the way to the hotel, we got a quick look at the Hive’s fortress. From the buzz of magic in the air, it was obviously heavily warded, just as the three women had told us.
There had to be a way in, but right now, I didn’t see it.
As soon as the Sunshine Palace’s matron heard Damiel and I were newlyweds—and Damiel compelled the hell out of her—she handed us the key to the honeymoon suite and shooed us upstairs.
“I’m surprised you told the ladies in the bar that we’re from another world,” I said as we walked toward our room.
“The humans here are out of the loop. They know nothing of the Hive’s plans, but they do know about this world and its political structure. They would find it strange that we wanted to know about their world—needed to know about it—if we were from around here. The risk of telling them seemed minimal.”
