by Ella Summers
Of course, Nyx might not give me an official position at all. She and her lover Ronan, the God of Earth’s Army and Lord of the Legion, wanted to use me to wield the weapons of heaven and hell. My balanced light and dark magic made me uniquely qualified for that task, but I wasn’t any more interested in being a living weapon than I was in being an Interrogator or Vanguard warrior. The only reason Nyx and Ronan hadn’t yet put their plans for me into motion was the two of them weren’t speaking to each other at the moment.
And then there was Faris. I hadn’t heard from Daddy Dearest since he’d visited my apartment in New York last week. Like Nyx and Ronan, he planned to use me and my magic as a weapon, but right now he was busy overseeing the punishment of his brother Zarion, God of the Faith, and Stash, Zarion’s demigod son. Their sentence was one month of hard training in the gods’ army. Faris’s army. I didn’t expect to hear from Faris until the month was over.
“I wonder what Soren is doing way out here,” Ivy said.
Her words brought me out of my own circle of worries—and back to my immediate problem.
Last night, Captain Soren Diaz, a loyal Legion soldier, had suddenly gone missing from the New York office. We’d tracked his movements here to the Black Plains. No one knew what had led him here, but our mission was perfectly clear: to bring Soren back with us.
And I was assigned to lead it. Nyx had told me that the best way to master my new magic was to channel it into my work. The Legion took a very throw-you-off-the-deep-end approach to things. After all, every time we went through a promotion ceremony, we either leveled up our magic or died.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Ivy commented, looking across the feral terrain. Her body shuddered.
I couldn’t remember the last time Ivy had been in the field. Her position as a Legion counselor didn’t generally throw her into the heat of battle. She excelled at talking to people, at calming them down. I had a sinking suspicion Nyx had sent her here to babysit my volatile new-angel emotions.
But right now, she was the one who needed comforting. “It will be all right.” I set my hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find Soren and bring him back. And no monsters will eat us.”
Ivy shuddered again. “You call that a pep talk?”
I countered her frown with a smile. “Of course. Now, chin up. All this gloom and doom clashes with your outfit.”
She laughed.
A chorus of beasts howled in the distance, as though in response to her laughter.
Drake’s eyes scanned the plains, looking for the noisy monsters. “Soren sure picked a great spot to make new friends. What was he thinking?”
The plains of monsters were dangerous areas, consumed by the beasts when they’d overrun the Earth centuries ago. Only Magitech walls separated civilization from these wildernesses. Hunted criminals fleeing from the gods’ justice sometimes hid out here in desperation, when no place in civilization was safe for them. They rarely lasted long. What had made Soren, a respected Legion soldier, come all the way out here?
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” I muttered.
I pointed out a figure leaning against a boulder. Soren. Blood stained the rock face and his clothes. It was his blood. He wasn’t in good shape.
“Careful,” I said as we made our way toward him. He was still so far away. “There are monsters nearby.” I couldn’t see them, but we could all hear them. And I could feel their minds buzzing in the background.
For a week now, ever since I’d woken up to find I was an angel, I’d been setting off on one short mission after the other. And when I was not out on a mission, I trained.
Nero had left a week ago to go on Nyx’s mission. He was still away—I got a message from him every day or so, depending on whether he was close enough to civilization for his phone to have reception—so Harker had been training me.
The first few days had been the worst, but with a lot of training and even more self-discipline—gods, I hated self-discipline—I was managing my explosive magic. Managing, not excelling at it. Yet. But things had to get better, right?
I still couldn’t fly. Well, at least not in a straight line and not without crashing into things. Lots of collateral damage was pretty much where my flying was at right now. Flying was a lot harder than angels made it look.
On the plus side, the other gods had been mostly quiet lately. They were undoubtably still licking their wounds following the Crystal Falls training—and plotting their next moves. That meant they hadn’t yet questioned me about becoming an angel without their blessing. I was not looking forward to that interrogation.
Lightning flashed across the sky, trailed by the rumbling roar of thunder. It was followed a few moments later by the hard patter of hail hitting the ground. The hail stones were as large as tennis balls.
“I knew I should have brought a shield,” I commented.
A different sort of roar echoed across the plains now: a chorus of angry beasts. A hundred feet up the hill, a forest of spiky yellow trees shook and shuddered. A herd of razor-backed bulls burst out of the trees, their nostrils puffing noxious green fumes, the tips of their tails streaming trails of purple fire.
They beelined straight for us, dozens and dozens of beasts. Lightning flashed every second, in sync with every stomp of their heavy metal hooves. The monster tsunami stampeded around us, swirling closer with every loop they made around us.
3
The Great Monster Flood
I extended both my hands. Fire flared up in each open palm. Flames surrounded me in a fiery aura. It pulsed over my skin, along my hair, across my wings, down to the very tips.
A ribbon of fire shot out of me like a shockwave, torching every monster it touched. There was a loud, resounding pop, like a drum in an echo chamber—and then the fiery ribbon was gone.
“Cool,” Alec sighed as burning monsters fell to the ground all around us.
“Now we know why the plains are black,” Drake said.
Alec nodded with glee. “Because Leda scorched them with her magic.”
“No time for jokes, you comedians,” I told them. “More beasts are coming.”
It seemed every monster on the Black Plains had responded to the razor-backed bulls’ howling call to battle. The land was flooded with beasts, and not just bulls. There were wolves and birds and dinosaurs—and even a huge, hulking marine creature on legs that looked like a cross between a whale and a frog. The great monster flood rushed toward us, growing and growling.
Ivy glanced at me hopefully. “Any chance you can do that fire ribbon trick again?”
“Sorry, no.”
It was a cool spell, one that I finally had enough magic to pull off, now that I was an angel.
“At this point, it’s a once-per-battle trick,” I said.
That was the downside of the spell, the once-per-battle problem. Maybe in time, I’d grow powerful enough to pull it off more frequently.
“Performing the spell completely blew out my elemental magic,” I said.
“But you have other powers,” replied Ivy.
“Yes.” I grinned. “Yes, I do.”
My team was fighting hard, giving the monsters a run for their money, but it wouldn’t be enough, not without some angel magic to even the odds. There were just too many monsters.
I targeted the whale-frog with my shifting magic.
“You made that thing even bigger?” Drake gasped, his eyes wide as he stared up at the enormous beast that towered over us like a skyscraper in a village of cottages. “What is that good for? It will just step on us.”
I cast a psychic wave. It exploded out of me, throwing back everything in sight—including the whale-frog. The gigantic beast flopped onto its back like a toppled turtle. I gave it another nudge with my psychic magic, and it began to roll uncontrollably, crushing every beast in its path.
Then, its momentum finally spent, its destructive capacity fulfilled, it flopped to a stop and shifted back to normal size.
Alec t
ook out the monster with a sharp slash of his sword. “You are the most badass angel ever, Leda,” he said, his eyes alight with excitement. “I’ve never seen an angel fight so deliciously dirty.”
Basanti was shaking her head slowly. I wondered if she was shaking her head at my dirty tricks or at Alec’s appreciation of them. Probably both. If Basanti could have afforded the time to take her eyes off the battle, she certainly would have squeezed in a little face-palming for good measure. As it was, the storm of monsters was not subsiding. In fact, it seemed like the more beasts we killed, the more new ones rushed in to take their place.
I watched the monsters’ advance, trying to decide what to do about them. Having blown the fuse of my elemental magic, my psychic magic, and then my shifting magic, my options were becoming more and more limited.
“Have any more magic tricks up your sleeves, Leda?” Ivy asked, panic streaking her words.
“I could curse them,” I said. Curses and healing were the magical domain of fairies. “If I can remember the spell.”
“If you can remember the spell?” Ivy repeated in disbelief as her arrow took down a purple wildebeest.
“Hey, give me a break. Curses are tricky business.” I’d read through a few curses printed in old fairy spell books, but they were all complicated. “And there are so many of them to keep straight. You wouldn’t want me to mess up and curse one of you, would you?”
“That depends,” Ivy said, a small smile touching her lips. “Can you curse Alec with a sensitive personality?”
“I heard that, Ivy,” Alec growled over the whistle of his swinging blade.
Ivy ignored him, her eyes trained on the new wave of beasts crashing toward us. “Any day now, Leda. I don’t think we can hold them off much longer.”
“Curses are always overly long and complex,” I said, mentally searching through my paltry library of curses. I hadn’t possessed fairy powers for very long, so I was horribly ill-equipped in that branch of magic.
“This is why I have a desk job,” Ivy muttered, continuing to shoot arrows at the beasts.
“A desk job that involves counseling elite soldiers, who have been powered up by the gods and possess major personality defects,” Drake said, fighting beside her. “Legion soldiers are far more dangerous than monsters.”
“There is one curse in particular that might work well here,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else.
I wove the curse together, creating a spell that rolled over the monsters, knocking them all unconscious. Then the sparkling blue cloud puffed out. Fairy curses were generally very pretty.
“It is not an exciting spell. In fact, it’s so dull that it put the monsters to sleep.” I smirked at my team.
They all stared back at me blankly, clearly not amused by my joke. And they weren’t alone. The next wave of monsters was storming toward us. They hadn’t even paused to smell the humor in the air.
Performing that fairy curse on hundreds of monsters had overloaded my fairy magic. That was four fields of magic gone now. I was burning out my magic powers at an alarming rate. See, that was the problem with having the extra power boost that came with being an angel: if I accessed all the power I had, it overloaded my magic.
Basanti watched the approaching monsters. “It’s almost like they’re drawn here.”
“Don’t look at me,” I said, holding up my hands. “I didn’t invite them.”
Basanti snorted softly and charged at the monsters, swinging her sword. I ran beside her. With four of my magic powers out of commission, I turned to witchcraft, tossing potion bottles at the beasts. And when I ran out of those, I turned to my vampire magic, using that strength and speed to power every strike of my sword.
Behind the curtain of reptilian beasts and hairy spiders closing around me, a flock of giant feathered monsters slashed at a barely-standing Soren. We’d found him! But would he last long enough for us to get to him? He wasn’t in any condition to defend himself. The beasts barreled him right over.
Basanti sheathed her sword and caught my arm, pulling me back as I tried to run toward Soren. “There are too many of them. They’re everywhere. We need to leave while we still can.”
“Soren is still alive.” I could see him twitching beneath the stampeding hooves and clawed paws. “I’m not leaving him behind.”
“This is about more than losing one soldier. If we stay, we will all die.” She gave me a pointed look. “Including an angel.”
“The rest of you will take the truck,” I said. “But I am staying. I will clear a path through the monsters for you to get away safely. And then I’ll get Soren out of here.”
“You don’t fly all that well,” Basanti pointed out. “There’s no way you’ll be able to fly a few hundred miles while carrying another soldier.”
“Hey, don’t you know me by now? I’ve been getting myself into trouble since I could walk, and I always find a way out of it.” I shot her a crooked smile. “I never needed wings before. I can get along without them now.”
Basanti drew her fighting staff and faced me down.
Smirking, I glanced from her weapon to her hard face. “Are you going to try to stop me?”
Basanti tapped her staff against her open palm. “If I have to. For your own safety.”
“This is insubordination.”
The corners of her mouth drew up. “Ironic words, coming from you.”
I shrugged. “The attitude came with the wings.”
“The wings you apparently don’t need,” she snipped.
“Well, I don’t exactly need three double chocolate sundaes either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them.”
Basanti snorted. “Being on a mission with you is never dull.” Her lips might have been smiling, but her eyes were as hard as granite. She wasn’t backing down—and now the rest of my team was falling into line around her, facing me down.
“I was wrong,” I said, frowning. “This isn’t merely insubordination. It’s a full-out mutiny.”
“Harker told us to knock you over the head with a pole if we got in a hopeless situation and you predictably and stubbornly refused to leave,” Basanti told me.
“Damn you, Harker,” I muttered, then raising my voice, declared, “Harker and I have the same rank. He isn’t in command of me.”
“Maybe not, but he is in command of us,” Basanti replied. “And if he orders us to save you from your own stupidity, we must comply.”
I tracked their movements closely as they closed in. “I’m sure there must be a Legion rule against calling an angel stupid.”
“Those were Harker’s words, not mine. Take it up with him.”
“Oh, I will,” I promised darkly.
More monsters poured over the horizon. Soren wouldn’t survive if we didn’t leave now. The monsters would devour him.
No, I refused to allow that to happen. I was going to save him. We were all getting out of here alive. I didn’t know what had possessed Soren to run off and leave New York, but he was my friend. So was his girlfriend Nerissa. She would be heartbroken if he died. I couldn’t allow that to happen either.
Desperate to save Soren and protect my team—yes, damn it, I wanted my cake and to eat it too—I wrapped my siren magic around the beasts, capturing their minds, their will, their magic. For a moment, all the monsters just stopped, frozen in place. Then they turned tail and retreated back across the plains as fast as their legs or wings could carry them.
“What just happened?” Alec asked in confusion, watching the beasts flee.
“The monsters all ran off.” Drake looked at me. “She made them leave. She compelled them to go.”
“Come on, guys. Monsters cannot be compelled,” I laughed. “They were simply afraid of us.”
Ivy’s sculpted red brows arched. “Right before they were going to eat us?”
“See? I told you no monsters were going to eat us.” I grinned. “They saw my wings and got scared.”
“Your wings.” Drake’s gaze p
anned across my wings. They were currently a bright mix of red and orange, reacting to my emotions, which were running hot from battle. “Each angel has special powers, abilities unique to that angel. Is one of yours the power to compel monsters?”
No, it wasn’t. I’d been able to control beasts long before I’d become an angel. But I didn’t want to get into that now—or ever, for that matter. It would only lead to blowing open all my other secrets.
“We need to help Soren.” I turned and walked toward him.
Soren rose slowly to his feet. He looked at me, blinking rapidly. “What happened?” His voice was scratchy, his eyes bloodshot. If he’d been human, he’d be dead after that monster stampede over his body.
“Monsters attacked us,” I told him. “Thousands of them.”
His eyes panned across the dead monsters lying all around us.
“There were more. They’re gone now,” I said.
Basanti closed in behind me and gave me a pair of handcuffs.
I glanced down at the silver cuffs in my hands. “I like Soren.”
“I like him too,” she said. “But we both know that wishful thinking isn’t one of the cornerstones of the Legion.”
She was right.
“No,” I sighed. “It’s not.”
And I’d seen far too much to not exercise caution.
I slapped the cuffs over Soren’s wrists. “It’s nothing personal, Diaz. I have to do it. Procedure and all. You did desert the Legion.”
“Desert,” he muttered, as though he were chewing on the word—and didn’t like the taste of it on his tongue.
“What happened?” I asked him. “Why did you run out of the New York office yesterday?”
“I…”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember everything,” he gasped. “In perfect detail. The need to flee, to get out of there. Like my life depended on it.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
