by Ella Summers
“My Interrogators have questioned them.”
Harker’s team had been more successful than Nero and I. They’d brought back the suspicious hooded people. All I’d brought back were broken pieces of metal.
“The hooded miscreants were nothing but decoys,” Colonel Fireswift continued. “They know nothing. They were merely hired to run off, to divert your attention.”
“Divert our attention? From what?”
“I do not know.”
“Surely, your prisoners must know something,” I insisted.
“I assure you, my people were quite thorough.”
I cringed to think what the Interrogators had done to those who’d been hired to don hoods and stalk through the shadows.
“But I might be willing to allow you to speak to them,” Colonel Fireswift said. “You have proven how persuasive you can be. You are quite adept at revealing secrets.”
I’d revealed a lot of secrets during the gods’ recent challenges. It would seem, unfortunately, that I really was my father’s daughter.
“And you would allow me to speak to the prisoners because…”
“It seems your delusions about the goodness of all people isn’t as deeply rooted as I’d feared.” Did he sound pleased?
“I assure you, Colonel, when it comes to you, I harbor no delusions.” I flashed him a grin. “I know you for exactly what you are.”
“Good.” He nodded. “Very good.”
Gods, his approval felt worse than his scorn ever could.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“I have a price, of course.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m fresh out of empty yogurt containers. So if your greatest wish in life is an encore of my ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ performance played on yogurt containers, then I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you.”
Colonel Fireswift’s nostrils flared up. I was surprised fire didn’t shoot out of them.
I smiled demurely at him.
“If you want to speak to the prisoners,” he began, his voice hard and unyielding. “You may do so as one of my Interrogators. Under my supervision.”
That nonsense again?
“I thought you’d given up on the idea of breaking me and putting me back together in the form of one of your Interrogators.”
“I do not give up,” he said. “To do so—”
“Would be unbecoming of an angel.” I sighed. Yeah, I should have known.
“So, what do you have to say to my offer?”
“I say that there’s no way Nyx will put two angels in the same territory, let alone the same division. It’s just not how things are done at the Legion.”
“Things change. The Legion evolves.”
I laughed. “So let me get this straight. If I try to change even the teeniest, tiniest thing at the Legion, you brand me a troublemaker. But you are allowed to change a fundamental element of the Legion’s structure?”
“It’s different. I am different than you.”
“How?” I questioned him. “Why?”
His response was immediate, and packed with all due arrogance. “Because you lack the wisdom and experience I’ve spent centuries cultivating.”
“Just because you’ve been doing something a long time, that doesn’t mean you’re good at it. You’ve had two centuries to learn compassion, and look how well you’re doing on that front.”
“Enough of this,” he snapped. “If you tell Nyx you want to be in my division, she will consider it.”
“No thanks. If I wanted to speak to the prisoners that badly, I’d just sneak in and talk to them when you weren’t watching.”
“I am always watching.”
“Perhaps,” I allowed. “But are you seeing?”
He frowned at my statement, probably wondering how I could be so philosophical. The answer was less meaningful than he thought. I’d said it because it sounded like the sort of deep statement an angel would make, and I enjoyed confounding him.
Nero stepped through the door to Nerissa’s office and headed right for me. I rose to greet him.
Colonel Fireswift moved between us. “Come no closer.” He was taking Nyx’s orders to keep Nero away from me until the wedding very seriously.
Nero ignored him completely. He didn’t even pay enough attention to him to offer him a scowl. Nero kept his eyes on me the whole time, even as he lowered to one knee in front of me.
I looked at the box he’d set in my hands. “What is this?”
“Your engagement gift.”
“You already gave me one.”
“That was yesterday,” he said. “This is today.”
“A man courting an angel with the Fever presents her with a gift each day leading up to their wedding,” Nerissa told me.
I nodded, a smile stretching my mouth. “Not a bad tradition, at least as far as Legion ones go. It sure beats the tradition of punching a metal wall with my bare fists, like you made me do when I was an initiate, Nero.”
“I have many more exercises for you.”
I grimaced. “Do I have a choice in the matter?”
A savage smile curled his lips. For some reason, it made me think of sex. Probably because I had the Fever, and pretty much everything made me think of sex.
I lifted the lid and pulled Nero’s second present out of the box. “Shooting Star.” The gun that belonged to the immortal weapons of heaven and hell lay cold and dormant in my hand.
And I was glad for it. The last time Shooting Star and I had crossed paths, I’d been on the receiving end of its fiery bullets. It had left me with the scar on my abdomen.
“Do you have them all?” I asked Nero. “All the weapons of heaven and hell? The whole collection?”
“You’ll need to wait and find out.”
“But I’m impatient.” I smiled coyly. “I don’t like waiting.”
His voice dipped lower. “Nor do I.”
Magic crackled between us, a pleasant, impatient buzz against my skin. My lips moved toward his…
Colonel Fireswift was suddenly between us. He shoved us apart. He didn’t say a word, but the look of total disapproval on his face spoke droves. Apparently, he had a big problem with the idea of losing yourself in the passion of the moment.
Angel fell off her perch atop Nerissa’s oven and tumbled to the floor.
“Hey, silly,” I chuckled. “Getting high off the catnip a bit early today, aren’t you?”
But as I came around the table to look at her, the laughter died on my lips. Angel was convulsing on the floor. I lifted her tiny body into my arms and prodded her gently with my magic, trying to figure out what was wrong with her.
“She’s been poisoned,” Nerissa told me.
She began compiling ingredients from various jars on her shelves. It was taking too long. She wouldn’t be able to make an antidote in time. I wrapped my magic around Angel. A golden glow pulsed across her white fur. The healing spell enveloped her from head to tail—then it flickered out. My kitten looked up at me, expelling a pitiful whimper. She was alive! Still weak, but alive just the same.
I hugged her body to me. “What happened, Angel? Did you eat something or…” My eyes fell on the toy mouse resting atop the oven. Angel had been nibbling on it just before she fell. “The woman at the market. She gave me the toy. She tried to kill my cat!” My anger ignited my magic, setting the toy on fire.
Nero caught my arm, stopping me as I rushed toward the door, determined to find the person responsible for poisoning my cat. “Not your cat. You, Leda,” he said darkly. “They were trying to poison you.”
“Me?” Surprise froze me. I stopped struggling against him. “Well, I guess I’ve made a few enemies.”
“This isn’t about you,” Colonel Fireswift said. “It’s about your magic. You are a fertile female angel compatible with another angel. That’s why they targeted you. Someone wants to hurt the Legion. This was an attempt to cripple the Legion, to weaken us.”
“The demons,” said Nero,
his voice something between a growl and a hiss.
“If the Legion figured out how to make more angels compatible with each other, the demons wouldn’t stand a chance,” Colonel Fireswift said to him. “It would be a new generation of soldiers—soldiers more powerful than ever before, their destiny to become angels all but assured.”
Nero and Colonel Fireswift were on to something. The demons might not have been behind the Legion soldiers’ emotional outbursts, but this latest poisoning attempt absolutely reeked of them.
Someone had poisoned my cat just to get to me. Anger churned through my veins, thick and volatile. My poor Angel. They’d nearly killed her. My anger exploded from me in a shockwave that shook the building. All at once, Nerissa and her assistants began fighting one another. Beyond the room, I could hear soldiers in the corridor slamming, shouting, and punching. Blades clashed.
“Control yourself,” Colonel Fireswift snapped at me.
Nero glanced at his phone. “Harker says the whole office has suddenly gone mad.”
“You are causing this,” Colonel Fireswift snapped at me. His voice cut like a whip. “You need to stop it.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Pitiful excuses from a pitiful girl given too much power to control. Power she does not deserve,” Colonel Fireswift growled. “If you don’t put an end to this, I will.” He edged forward, magic hissing off of him.
Nero intercepted, his eyes cold with fury, his sword hot and fiery. The two of them looked ready to tear each other apart.
Nyx ran through the door. “Pull yourselves together!” she told them sharply. “We must concentrate on the actual crisis. My ward has shattered. The office is imploding in on itself, buried beneath the weight of Leda’s emotional tempest.”
Nyx’s hands were a blur. She wove a spell around me, trying to contain my telepathic bursts of emotion. At the same time, I struggled to reel in my emotions. Neither of us made any headway. Nyx’s ward split as soon as she cast it.
There was a flash of light, and then Ronan stood before us. Without a word, he added his own magic to Nyx’s, and together they fashioned a tightly-knit spell around me. As they tied it shut, the magic silver threads flashed once, then faded from sight. Though it was invisible, I could still feel the weight of the ward around me, a telepathic barrier between me and everyone else.
Nerissa and her staff stopped fighting. The battle noises coming from the corridor ceased.
“The ward won’t last long,” Ronan told Nyx. “Leda’s magic is spiking too fast. If she gets upset like that again, even our combined ward will not hold.”
Nero held my hands, stroking deep, soothing circles into my palms. This time, no one complained that we were touching. They must have realized his touch was keeping me grounded.
“I’m fine,” I said.
It was a lie. No, I was mostly certainly not fine. Not at all. They’d already nearly killed my cat. Who else would get hurt before this was over?
The demons! They’d try again. They’d go after my loved ones. My friends. My family. Nero. I had to stop them!
Anger with a side order of panic bubbled inside of me.
Nero squeezed my hands. Right now, only his presence was keeping me from blowing up again.
The demons might not have caused the disruptions in the Legion—that was my Fever—but they were definitely taking advantage of the situation. They’d poisoned my cat. They were trying to make me lose control of myself, so I’d make everyone else lose control too. But were they connected to the monster trade?
I had to find out. The determination to thwart the demons’ plans, to get to the bottom of this, settled my mind. I was stronger than the Fever. Sure, the Fever might be the primal force beyond the future of the Legion, but I was Pandora, the Angel of Chaos. It was no match for me.
“I was going to wait on this, but it seems now is the time,” Nyx said.
“The time for what?” I asked her.
“For your new Legion post.”
I held my breath, hoping I was right, hoping that Nyx wouldn’t assign an angel to another angel’s division. I didn’t want to be an Interrogator. Or a member of General Spellsmiter’s Vanguard.
“Every angel needs a territory,” said Nyx. “And I have just the one for you.”
“A territory?” I said, confused. “But there aren’t any territories available on Earth.”
“That’s not entirely true,” she replied. “There is one available, in fact. One which you are ideally suited to command.”
I couldn’t think of a single place I was suited to command.
“Leda, I’m giving you the plains of monsters,” the First Angel told me.
I laughed. “You’re joking.”
But there wasn’t a hint of humor on her face. “You have demonstrated a unique ability to control the monsters. Your mission as the Angel of the Plains of Monsters is as follows: to regain the lost lands overrun by monsters centuries ago. And you will start with the Black Plains. To that end, the newest Legion office—your office—will be located in Purgatory, at the edge of the Black Plains.”
Home. I was going home.
21
The Angel of Purgatory
Gold banisters and red carpets greeted me as I stepped through the front door of the Legion’s newest office. My office, the first and only on the Frontier. Purgatory was my town now. The Black Plains were mine. Nyx had given them to me. Now I just had to figure out what to do with them.
The Purgatory office was housed inside the largest of the former district lords’ ‘castles’. The Legion had converted the building for our use, but its original flavor—the air of an opulent country estate—remained.
The other district lords’ former residences were still being renovated. When the work was done, one of them would hold our training halls. Another would become a garage for the vehicles we drove out onto the Black Plains. A fourth would serve as our armory. It was a good thing there were underground tunnels that connected all the buildings because they were situated throughout Purgatory.
The spread-out design of this office was different than any other on Earth, but Purgatory wasn’t a typical place. It wasn’t a city located at the heart of civilization. And I wasn’t a typical angel.
I followed Nyx through the arched doorway of my new apartment. A private suite that filled an entire wing of the castle, it was the former sleeping quarters of the district lord who’d owned this building.
“What do you think?” Nyx asked me.
I rubbed the lush cream-and-gold curtains between my fingers. “I thought it would be bigger.”
Nyx’s blue eyes pulsed.
“I’m kidding,” I told her. “The room is so enormous I might need a map to keep me from getting lost.”
“I trust you won’t be so flippant when you address your soldiers at your introduction ceremony in half an hour.”
“Introduction? They all already know me.”
“That is beside the point.”
“What is the point?” I asked.
“Traditions must be upheld.”
“So, you want me to enter the room, declare I’m taking control over this territory, and then walk out?”
“Flying would be preferable to walking. It makes a statement.”
I snorted. “Yes, it will certainly make a statement when I crash into the wall and get tangled in the curtains.”
Impatience flashed in her eyes. “How is it you still have not learned to fly?”
“I can fly just fine,” I told her. “I just can’t land. Or navigate if there’s anything within ten feet of me.”
In my defense, my flying had improved a lot. If if hadn’t been for the Fever messing with my equilibrium—and the monster-trading conspiracy keeping me otherwise occupied—I might have mastered flight by now. Or at least mastered not crashing into things.
Nyx sighed. “Ok, you will stride into the room, wings out and spread wide. Make yourself as big as possible. You must own the room. Th
e ceremony is being filmed live. The entire Legion will be watching. You need to show everyone that you own this town, territory, and everything in it. That’s the only way the other angels will respect you.”
I smiled at her. “I had no idea you cared so much about whether the other angels respected me.”
“I care a lot. If they don’t respect you, they will undermine everything that you do. I don’t have time to play angel referee. I need all my angels working together if we’re to have any chance of protecting the Earth from the demons’ forces—and from the monsters that threaten our borders.”
She handed me a package.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A present for my newest angel.”
I opened the package and pulled out a plaque plated in gold.
“An angel plaque. It’s for your office room,” Nyx said. “Every angel has one.”
“Leda Pandora, Angel of Purgatory,” I read. It sounded too cool to be true. “Pandora?”
Nyx nodded. “It’s about time we made it official.”
“My angel name is Pandora?” I grinned. “Like for real?”
“It seemed fitting. Besides, you already had all your uniforms embroidered with that name.”
That wouldn’t have been reason enough for Nyx. Not at all.
“No angel has a name like mine,” I realized.
“Yes, and no angel has a territory like yours. “At last, you have an angel name and an angel territory, Leda. Now it’s up to you to hold on to them.”
And with that said, she turned and walked out of my room. Two soldiers remained in the corridor just beyond my door. My chaperones.
I stepped up to the window and pushed the curtains aside to look outside. My suite had a singular view of the wall and the Black Plains, but right now, the action was closer. Beyond the cast iron gates that surrounded the estate, the people of Purgatory had gathered en masse.
None of them had seen me or the other soldiers arrive in town. The Legion had closed off the train station for our arrival, and from there, we’d been ushered into trucks and driven straight here.
