by Nalini Singh
Aodhan had already passed the wounded angel to another fighter, was turning to fire back at the enemy. Elena dropped out of the battle zone. Sparkle needed to fight, not worry about protecting her. She landed behind a row of shooters on a rooftop.
Glancing back toward the Tower, she said, Sorry, Archangel. Terror would’ve gripped him when he realized what she’d done, where she was. I’m fine, no damage.
The sea crashed into her mind, the salt spray of it a familiar kiss. I’m certain you just saved Aodhan’s life—bone-chilling fear is a price I’ll pay with no complaints. That bolt came from Philomena, one of the few of Lijuan’s generals who doesn’t depend on her mistress’s power. She’s strong enough to have ended him with that hard a hit.
Her hands shook as she brushed back her hair. That they could’ve lost Aodhan so quickly . . . Since I’m here anyway, she said, forcing calm because anything else could be deadly in battle, I’ll give someone a break.
Scanning the shooters, she noticed one who was moving a little slower than the others and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hiraz. You want a break?”
“Yes, Consort.” Sweat dripping down his temples, he turned away and let her take his position. He was wearing a camo green T-shirt and cargo pants in black. It was the first time she’d seen the senior vampire in anything but a button-down shirt and suit pants. The T-shirt had gone dark, was stuck to his skin.
The two things that hadn’t changed were the wedding ring on his right hand and the expert cut of his hair—currently black with streaks of bronze. She’d woken from the chrysalis to the news that his lover, Jenessa, had proposed.
He’d accepted on the condition they wait to marry until ten years after her transition to vampirism. In the interim, he’d wear the wedding ring she’d chosen on his right ring finger instead of his left. Elena didn’t think Jenessa would change her mind, but she liked Hiraz for thinking first of the woman he’d saved from a life on the streets, and not just his own need.
After catching his breath, he said, “My relief was badly wounded soon after taking her position.”
So he’d effectively done a double shift. It put the continued speed and accuracy of his shooting in a whole different light. “Get some rest,” she said to him. “I can spot you for a while.”
“I’ll be back soon. I just need a blood boost.” Shifting into a low crouch, he headed out of the live fire area.
Elena had already begun to pick off enemy fighters with precision shots of the surface-to-air weapon that could fire both single shots and a burst. It wasn’t her favorite, but she’d trained on it because she knew it’d be used during battle. She’d made sure to update that training the instant she recovered enough after the chrysalis.
Given that she was a—limited—backup power source for Raphael, Dmitri had fought hard to have her stay safe in the Tower and out of the fighting. Elena had pushed back as hard. That was not who she was—and having the consort and “hunter angel” MIA from the field of battle would demoralize their people.
Raphael had agreed with her.
Her archangel understood what drove her, she thought as she targeted an enemy angel aiming his crossbow at the wings of their fighters. He’d already badly wounded one; the angel was only alive because Aodhan had managed another air rescue. Before today, she hadn’t known how fast Sparkle could fly—his speed tended to be eclipsed by Bluebell’s.
“Fuck you, you asshole.” She fired. Her shot hit the enemy angel in the eye, exactly as she’d planned. Screaming, he spun in the air as red bled down his face. She struck him twice more, shredding his own wings.
He fell.
Part of her would always mourn an angel’s fall, but she couldn’t be sorry. Not when he’d come to this city as part of an attacking force—and not when his eyes had been an ordinary blue instead of the ugly black that marked Lijuan’s puppets. It wasn’t like Raphael had gone to China and picked a fight. Lijuan had come here and all these clear-eyed fighters had followed out of choice.
A massive shattering sound, shards of concrete flying up into the air. Something struck Elena’s cheek hard enough that blood dripped down her skin. She glanced back to see a smoking hole in the center of the roof. “What the fuck was that?”
“Look out!
Her head jerked up at the warning . . . to see a bolt of shining copper power heading directly for her. She rolled up to her feet . . . and found herself on the Tower roof, her breath gasps and her heart thundering from the speed of her flight. Raphael was already above her previous position, his wings white fire.
I’m safe! she yelled to him mind-to-mind, as angry frustration gnawed at her. She wasn’t the kind of woman who abandoned her fellow soldiers and ran from danger. She stayed and she fought! Fuck this ability that wouldn’t let her choose!
Elena. A single word that held Raphael’s heart.
Philomena directed her blows toward Raphael, but Raphael was an archangel, Philomena a mere angel even if she was experienced and old. The piercing blue of his angelfire hit Lijuan’s general on one side of her body and that was it.
She disintegrated from the inside out.
Angelfire was designed to kill archangels; ordinary angels stood no chance.
Raphael then blasted angelfire across a heavy line of enemy squadrons coming at theirs and the sky glowed for a long moment before things quieted down. Lijuan’s forces didn’t withdraw but they became warier, more careful.
Come back, Archangel. You’re our only hope when Lijuan rises. You can’t afford to get injured. If the enemy managed to shoot off part of his wing while it was in its physical form, he’d be grounded until it grew back. It might grow back faster than before the Cascade filled him with power, but it wouldn’t be immediate.
There are so many of them, he replied. Our people are exhausted.
I know. But if you fall, we all fall.
A silver-green power cracked the sky at that moment, and Elena stiffened . . . until she realized it was coming from their side. I forgot about Elijah. Her grin was surely manic.
Raphael didn’t reply until he landed beside her on the Tower roof. “Eli is of the same opinion as you.” He folded back his wings, his skin glimmering with perspiration. “He will help our forces while I hoard my energy to take on Lijuan.”
He stared out at the battle zone. “He is a good man. Not many generals, far less archangels, would put themselves in the position of being the assistant.”
“Yeah, he is.” Leaning her head against his biceps, she let her wing overlap his, the energy that danced between them a familiar caress by now. “I have to be more careful where I put myself if they’ve begun to target me.”
It had happened in the last battle, too, but this time around Lijuan had appeared so obsessed with Raphael that the entire army had forgotten Elena. Too bad the memory lapse hadn’t lasted. “I don’t want to put our troops in danger. I could—”
A door banged behind them, Dmitri running out. “Titus is wounded,” he said, a phone held to his ear.
Elena’s entire body tensed.
“How bad?” Raphael asked at the same time.
A pause while Dmitri listened to the person on the other end of the line. “He’s not incapacitated but he’s down for at least a day.” Another pause. “Charisemnon is also down. Titus wounded him at the same time he was wounded.”
Exhaling on a shudder, Elena leaned forward with her hands on her knees.
“Good,” Dmitri said curtly, putting away the phone. “Tzadiq says Titus caused massive quakes through Charisemnon’s territory, including one that collapsed land under a significant percentage of Charisemnon’s ground troops. Injured as he is, Charisemnon won’t be able to make much headway while Titus is down.”
Tzadiq, Elena remembered as she rose back to her full height, was Titus’s second—and Galen’s father.
Dmitri’s T-shirt pulled agai
nst his pectorals as he put his hands on his hips. “I finally managed to get an update on Astaad and Aegaeon. Charisemnon got his insects into Astaad’s territory. He’s evacuating those who haven’t been bitten to clean islands, putting the infected on a single quarantine island, and burning the rest down to soil and rock. Aegaeon is assisting.”
Elena had seen pictures of Astaad’s lands, many of them lush and tropical. How it must hurt the archangel to deliberately destroy all that beauty, all that life. As it must’ve hurt Elijah to give the order to scorch his lands. “What about Australia?” It was the biggest swath of Astaad’s territory.
“Infected.” Dmitri’s jaw worked. “But it’s also where he bases a good percentage of his army—they’re burning out the areas closest to the ports and shepherding the uninfected inward. Infected are being quarantined in various small towns.”
“The enemy has poisoned our world to win this war,” Raphael said and in his voice was the cold of the Cascade. “If we do not stop them here and now, their plague of death will cover the planet.”
60
The smoke over the city finally began to dissipate after sunset—when Lijuan’s reborn stopped attempting to cross the border. A few of the macabre walking corpses apparently had a semblance of primitive brainpower, because they caught a clue and began to hunker down on the other side of the line of blackened remains that marked where their brethren had burned up.
Lijuan’s squadrons drew back at the same time.
Now, the moon a spotlight in the sky, Elena sat on the edge of the balcony with her legs hanging over the side, Illium beside her. Raphael was up in the sky with Elijah, giving the other archangel the lay of the land.
“Naasir’s behind enemy lines,” she told Illium. “No one saw him enter the city but Raphael’s spoken to him.”
“I figured as much when I saw Galen in the sky.”
“Did you know Galen brought in a freaking catapult in pieces? It’s being set up on a rooftop, ready to pelt Lijuan’s people.”
“Makes sense,” Illium said. “Lijuan’s got a ton of old vampires and angels in her forces. Catapults are intimidating and something they fear.” He took a drink from the bottle of vodka in his hand, then passed across the bottle. Elena took a hit, the warmth of it spreading like fire through her system. “We fought together in the last major battle of the day.”
“How long do you think this pause will last?”
“I’m more worried about why they’ve pulled back.” He took the bottle back from her but didn’t drink, the aged gold of his eyes focused on the distance, where Lijuan’s troops were doing something they couldn’t quite figure out.
The enemy had finally begun to stomp on Vivek’s bugs. Most of the drones were also down. Lijuan’s people hadn’t found the cameras hidden in the facades of buildings, atop roofs or on streetlights, but many of those buildings—and cameras—had been damaged during battles. As a result, there were blind spots.
“Elijah hurt them pretty bad,” she pointed out. “He was throwing angelfire around like it was candy.”
“It’s a question of resources,” Illium murmured. “Lijuan has an overwhelming number of fighters who will follow her commands without hesitation. She—or her generals—could’ve simply kept sending through wave after wave of people. And Philomena wasn’t her only naturally powerful fighter.
“Even Elijah and Raphael couldn’t hold off that entire mass of fighters, not if they swarmed. No one but Lijuan could kill either of them, but the army could do damage and take over the city, lay siege to the Tower.”
“Yeah, I see your point.” The moon’s silver light shimmered on the ocean in the distance. “Have we kept an eye on the other waterways around New York? She isn’t sending people into the water so they can sneak up on us?”
“We’ve got dive teams double-checking on the sensors. Nothing. They’re not in the water. And they’re not in the sky—not unless . . .”
Horror curdled Elena’s stomach. “Oh, shit.”
Illium jumped to his feet, hauling her up at the same time. Vodka abandoned, they raced into the war room.
“Vivek!” Illium said. “How much has she fed?”
Vivek’s head snapped up from his focus on a computer screen. “Two mountains of flesh,” he said, “and they’re building another one it looks like. I don’t know how many bodies. Lot of wings in the last lot.” A frown. “But she was still limping badly afterward.”
“Bring up the images.”
A woman in a lovely gown made up of myriad shades of gray . . . the skirts of which shaped against her legs in a passing breeze. Two complete legs. And she wasn’t dragging either leg, the limp only a thing of motion.
Elena ran out of the room, her mind reaching for Raphael’s. Raphael! We think there’s a chance Lijuan’s fed enough to go noncorporeal with a bunch of her troops!
The sea crashed into her mind, the taste of salt sharp against her tongue. Elena, if you are in the sky, drop! ALL FIGHTERS, DROP!
She heard the troop-wide command just as she burst out onto the nearest balcony. The sky above her head crackled an incandescent white-gold shot with scorching blue. Precious wildfire going into the void to try to unmask Lijuan. If they were wrong . . .
Illium, Andreas, Nimra, Nazarach move your squadrons to the East River! Lijuan is halfway to the Tower! Elijah has activated his resting squadrons and they’ll join you! Galen, Aodhan—take the port! Ground teams on break—return to your positions. Venom, get ready for a renewed reborn assault.
The sky filled with wings on the heels of Raphael’s orders.
Elena rose into the air just enough that she could see what was going on. The battle was close, far closer than on the first front. Lijuan—legs definitely fully regrown and fuck it was freaky how quickly she’d done it—was spraying the sky with shards of starlight obsidian that were ruthless in their beauty.
Raphael was blocking the spray with wildfire, while Elijah attempted to hit her with angelfire. Around them, their troops were badly outnumbered; most had not been anywhere near the site when the order came. Even the vast majority of the Legion wouldn’t make it in time. Which meant Raphael and Elijah were under attack from not only Lijuan but a massive chunk of her army.
It was shaping up as a massacre.
Meanwhile the troops that had gone quiet near the port had risen again with bloody fury. At the front were three generals whose power was Lijuan’s obsidian. Galen and a tired Aodhan were in the air, but the numbers coming at them were catastrophic. They needed Raphael or Elijah, but neither archangel could break off from the fight against Lijuan.
Elena flew up to the Tower roof. Lifting open a specific weapons locker, she picked up a grenade launcher. The shot wouldn’t go far, but she didn’t need it to go far. Not if she could make this fucking work.
Hauling the thing up to her shoulder, she rose back into the air.
Focusing on Raphael and the lethal threat of Lijuan, she let her rage and her worry rise to fill her throat, her need to be next to him a pulse in her mouth.
Nothing happened.
Raphael barely dodged being skewered by Lijuan’s poisonous energy. She was releasing huge sprays of bolts rather than one at a time—because the Archangel of China didn’t have to conserve her energy. She could waste as much as she wanted.
And Elena was still too far away to help.
Think Elena! Why had it worked with Aodhan but not Raphael?
Because he is an archangel, child. The voice was old and tired and heavy with Sleep. You cannot interfere in the wars of archangels.
That’s bullshit, Elena said, not having the time or the inclination to be startled by Cassandra’s reappearance. If I’d been a fucking battery, I’d have interfered wouldn’t I? But thanks for the tip.
Willing to believe that the Cascade could be so arbitrary, she focused on Illium instead. Fast as he was,
he’d outpaced his squadron and was about to fly directly into the line of fire, had nearly a hundred percent chance of being badly wounded before the rest of the warriors caught up with him.
Not my Bluebell, she thought, letting all her fear and anger coalesce into a hard knot in her gut.
Her breath came in pants when she appeared beside him.
“Ellie!”
“Cover me!” She dove in front of him while he shattered the sky around her with his power, driving off would-be assailants. It wasn’t as good as if she’d come out next to Raphael, but it was good enough.
Ignoring the death bolts the fucking Queen of the Dead was throwing her way, she fired the grenade launcher. Lijuan ignored it. Of course she did. She didn’t pay attention to mortal things. Or a baby angel.
Elena dropped at the same moment, screaming at Bluebell to do the same.
Lijuan’s poisonous spray flew over them to smash into the buildings at their backs. And the grenade went straight into Lijuan’s chest . . . or it would have if she hadn’t smashed her hand across it at the last moment. But all was not lost. Because the thing blew up as her hand connected with it. It took her hand and a section of her ribs with it, while peeling back part of her face to reveal the skeletal understructure.
Elena fired again while the bitch was distracted, and this time, she aimed for the lower half of Lijuan’s body. The grenade punched out the side of her hip and amputated her thigh. Raphael slammed Lijuan with wildfire at the same time, aiming for an open wound.
The Archangel of China went noncorporeal.
Elena had a moment of hope, thinking she’d turned tail and run. But the sky erupted with shards of starlight obsidian a moment later . . . right on top of the incoming squadrons. Angel after angel went down, even as Raphael and Elijah attacked a rematerialized Lijuan. She was bleeding and listing badly to one side, and her face was straight out of a horror film, but she had enough power to make a return volley before she flew toward her troops.
