by Ella Summers
“No, they’d do something far worse.”
That was all she said, leaving me to wonder. Athan had said Arina was the most powerful smith in all the worlds, her skill unparalleled. Based on what she’d told me about these corporate magic houses, if they found out where she was, they’d find some way to force her to work for them. And so would the gods and demons if they found out about her abilities, I reminded myself. I had no intention of letting any of that happen.
“There has to be some way to figure out who bought your original collar from House Leviathan,” I said. “If only it were an immortal artifact, then we could lift the memories from it.”
“You seem to know a lot about immortal artifacts.”
“I’ve had a lot of recent experience with them.”
“Well, you’re right. Unlike my original collar, none of these copycat collars are immortal artifacts, so none of them possess the power to store memories. And even if they had, the magic binding each collar together is shattered. There would be no memories left to lift from any of them.” She indicated a metallic point protruding from one of the pieces. “This looks like part of an injection needle.”
“You can insert a potion pack into each collar,” I told her. “The collar injects the potion into the monster as needed, supposedly assisting in maintaining control over the beast.”
“There’s a residue here on the needle fragment.” Arina set the magnifying glass in front of the piece. “Dragon root. Fire lily. A few other herbs.” She looked up at me. “And Life.”
“Life, as in the light and dark magic potion?”
“Yes.”
“Meda’s experiments.”
She gave me a curious look.
“The Goddess of Witchcraft has been experimenting on controlling monsters,” I explained. “She gave them a potion, and Life was one of the ingredients. She got the Life potion…from the Guardians.” It hit me like a sheet of hard granite to the face. “The Guardians are behind these monster control collars. They stole Meda’s research. They bought your collar from House Leviathan. And they are using the collars on monsters to control them.”
The question was why. What were the Guardians trying to accomplish?”
27
Immortal Blood
Arina held up the collar she’d reconstructed from fragments in mere minutes. “The Guardians made this collar all right. Look at the lines, the design. It might as well have their signature all over it.”
I didn’t know anything about the Guardians’ designs, but I trusted that a master magic smith like Arina did. While her words were further confirmation that the Guardians had indeed made these collars, I was not any closer to understanding why they’d done it.
The door to the outside opened. Nero stood in the doorway, his caramel hair rustling dramatically in the wind, his leather-bound form lit up in an angelic halo.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“Well, here I am,” I replied, smiling.
“How did you slip past your chaperones?”
“Athan distracted them by projecting the images of phantom spirits into their minds.”
“Nyx will not be pleased by their lack of discipline.”
I shrugged. “That’s not my problem. Or yours. They are Jace’s soldiers.”
“I am obliged to report this to Nyx.”
I couldn’t fight the smirk tugging on my mouth. “Are you going to report me too?”
He stepped inside, and the door slammed shut behind him. “Eventually.”
I stepped toward him. “Eventually?” I looped my arms over his shoulders.
He shot me a look that curled my toes.
“Unfortunately, we currently have an audience,” I sighed.
Cassian peeked out of the waiting room. “You’re an angel?” he asked Nero.
“Yes.”
“Prove it.”
Magic flashed, and Nero’s dark wings unfolded from his back, stretching out behind him, larger than life.
“Wicked.” The boy’s eyes grew wider as they panned over Nero’s wings, following the patterns of black, blue, and green feathers. “What would happen if I set your wings on fire, like if I shot a fireball at them? Would the feathers burn?”
His sister had joined him in the open doorway to the lounge. “Set them on fire?” She sounded horrified. “Why would you do such a thing? Why would you want to ruin such pretty wings?”
“There is little danger of that,” Nero told the girl. “I am pretty much fireproof.”
“Doubly wicked,” said Cassian.
“Do not hurl fireballs indoors,” Arina warned her son.
He frowned. “You never let me do anything fun.”
“It is not fun to electrocute my goldfish,” Kalani chimed in, her voice wobbling. The incident she was referring to obviously still stung.
“Sure it is. The fish had a great time.” He shrugged. “Once they woke up.”
Kalani’s eyes trembled, as though she were reliving the experience. “They were traumatized.”
“No, they weren’t.”
“You don’t even know what traumatized means.”
He stood up taller. “I do so.”
“Then tell us.” She smiled. “We’re all listening.”
“It means…” Cassian frowned. “Well, it means something really bad!”
Kalani giggled.
“You’re just so…perfect,” he said with obvious disgust. “All the time. And you’re doing it on purpose, just to make me look bad.”
“You don’t need my help to look bad.”
He growled, his fists clenching up. Fire burst up on his hands.
“Mommy! Cassian is trying to set me on fire!”
“Don’t set your sister on fire,” Arina said calmly. She didn’t even look up from the collar she was examining.
“Why not?”
“Because if you waste all your magic hurting your family, you won’t have any left when an actual enemy comes along.”
Gods, the woman was positively brilliant.
“I have more than enough magic,” Cassian declared.
The fire went out on his hands, but it continued to burn in his eyes as he glared at his sister. Kalani lowered into splits on the cushion pile again, the other leg in front this time. As she took up her coloring once more, Nero coaxed Cassian to return to his homework. The fact that the spirited boy complied wasn’t half as surprising as my realization that Nero was really good with kids. All of a sudden, I recalled his words months ago back at the Party at the Wall, Purgatory’s annual festival. He’d confessed that he wanted children someday.
I brushed off the memory. Honestly, given my current feverish situation, it kind of scared me shitless.
“Can you tell me more about how the collars work?” I asked Arina.
She hesitated.
“What is it?”
“I don’t want to get involved in this,” she said. “I can’t afford to go up against the Guardians. They ‘rescue’ people with rare and unusual magic.” She glanced at her kids. “I won’t draw their attention to Cassian and Kalani. My kids don’t need their kind of rescue.”
“What kind of magic do your children have?” I asked her. Cassian obviously had some fire magic, but there had to be more to it. Elemental magic wasn’t all that uncommon.
“The rare and unusual kind.” That was all she said, and I could tell she had no intention of clarifying further.
“Why do the Guardians rescue people?” I asked her.
“I don’t know what they’re planning, but it’s nothing good,” Arina replied. “Their sordid past is littered with the skeletons of their betrayals.”
“Betrayals? What betrayals?”
She watched me closely. “You don’t know anything about the Guardians, do you?”
“No. That’s why I’m asking you. Because you seem to know all about them.”
“I know enough to steer clear of them,” she said. “In the days of the ancient Immortals, the
Guardians were the keepers of the Immortals’ potions and caretakers of their armory of weapons. Hence the name Guardians. But they betrayed their masters, and it was that betrayal that led to the Immortals’ demise.”
“How? What did they do?”
Arina shook her head. “I don’t know. I only know that they are bad news.”
So I’d been right to be worried for my brother Zane, currently one of their ‘guests’. Something about the Guardians had never sat right with me.
Nero closed in by my side. “You can’t stay out of it,” Nero told Arina. “None of us can. What’s going on here between gods, demons, and the Guardians affects everyone on Earth, and on all the other worlds too.”
“It’s certainly affected you.” Arina looked at him, her eyes narrowing.
I recognized the gleam in her eyes. It was the same way she’d looked at me before she’d declared me to be the daughter of a god and a demon. She was reading his magic as she had mine.
“In fact, what’s going on between gods, demons, and the Guardians has shaped your entire existence,” she told Nero. “It’s the reason you were born.”
Nero must have been bursting with questions, but he hid his curiosity well. I wasn’t nearly as practiced as he was.
“What do you mean?” I asked Arina.
“From our recent conversation, I trust you know of the power of the Spymaster’s Opera Glasses.”
Of course I did. Those glasses had played a major part in the Legion trials recently, in revealing the gods’ secrets.
“The glasses are an immortal artifact,” I said. “They possess the power to lift memories off immortal artifacts, deities, and angels.”
“Like future visions, echoes from the past also ripple across the fabric of magic. Since they have already happened, the past visions are clear, solid, and unchangeable. All the memories—your past, everything that happened to make you who and what you are—are a part of you. Those past events are woven into your magic.
“The Spymaster’s Opera Glasses were crafted with lenses that can lift those memories from the past, to uncover what happened to the person who experienced them. But with a few minor tweaks, the glasses could be modified to see more. They could read memories that go back even further. Your parents’ memories, the memories of their parents…all the way back to the beginning of your bloodline. Because those memories are a part of your magic, of your soul. And if they are potent enough, integral enough to the history of your existence, they can be read off your magic.
“There are such memories in your magic,” Arina told Nero. “Memories crucial to understanding the true nature of this immortal war.”
“So if we brought you the Spymaster’s Opera Glasses, you could make the modifications required to read these memories?” Nero asked.
“I could, but it’s unnecessary.” The corner of her mouth curled up. “I can read magic. That means that, like the glasses, I can also see the memories that form a person’s existence.”
“And what do you see when you read my magic?”
“The Guardians watched your parents throughout their Legion careers. They arranged for them to meet. They set the scene so your parents would fall in love—and so that you would be born.”
I chewed that over. “Wait, so the Guardians are responsible for Nero being born? But why? What do they want with him?”
“Unclear.” Arina frowned. “But it has something to do with his magic. Have you ever wondered why Cadence Lightbringer and Damiel Dragonsire are the only two angels to have ever had a child together? The answer is in their blood. Their Immortal blood.”
She said Immortal with a capital I, as in the original Immortals.
“Your parents have Immortal blood,” she told Nero. “And, therefore, so do you.”
“That’s how two angels could be compatible. That’s how they could have a child. It’s the balancing effect of Immortal blood, of light and dark magic,” I realized.
The next realization hit me harder. I looked at Nero. “This was what Faris meant by you being neck-deep in this all.”
“Faris knows,” Nero said darkly. “He knows I was born because of the Guardians’ machinations. He knows that I have Immortal blood.”
“For your information, the effect Nero’s Immortal blood has on you is the same as Nectar and Venom, Leda. That’s the reason you get drunk on his blood. That priest you drank from had Immortal blood too, albeit far more diluted than Nero’s.”
“Priest?” Nero asked me, his expression distinctly blank.
Damn it. When Arina had said she could read our past in our magic, she hadn’t been kidding.
“It was part of the gods’ challenges. Colonel Fireswift and I had to drink from one of Zarion’s priests to gain entry into the temple. I assure you, he didn’t taste even half as good as you, honey.”
You could have bounced bullets off his hard face.
“He didn’t taste even a hundredth—no, a millionth—as good as you,” I amended quickly.
He folded his arms over his chest, looking somewhat appeased. “I take it my origin is the reason Leda and I are compatible?” he asked Arina.
“Yes, both light and dark reside in your blood as well as in hers.” She looked at me. “Nectar and Venom have activated your light and dark magic.” She turned back to Nero. “But your body is drowning in Nectar, a power so blinding that it’s masking out the dark. To gain access to your dark magic, to realize your Immortal heritage, you will need the Immortal Life potion. It contains a balancing magic present in neither Nectar nor Venom.”
“Life, the potion the Guardians use on the people it ‘rescues’?” I wondered.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Like everything else they now possess, the Life potion was stolen from the Immortals.”
“And if I take this potion, my dark magic will grow to match my light magic?” Nero asked her.
“Indeed, but getting it is an impossible challenge. Nowadays, only the Guardians know how to make the Immortal Life potion, and their Sanctuary is hidden away by ancient spells even the two of you can’t break.”
I smiled. “We live to defy impossible challenges.”
“You’re going to try to get to the Sanctuary, aren’t you?” Arina looked incredulous. “Are you mad? Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? The Guardians brought about the end of the ancient Immortals, the originators of magic as we know it. If you go up against them, that will be the end of you too.”
“Be positive, Arina.” I turned away from her expression of utter disbelief. “Nero, in my dreams of your mother, the Guardians were giving her the Life potion, trying to build up her dark powers to put her magic in balance. And now they’re building control collars based on designs stolen from Arina. They combined those collars with Meda’s research on monsters.”
“Controlling the monsters of Earth is clearly only the first step in the Guardians’ plan,” said Nero.
“But what is their plan? What are they trying to do? What do they want?” I tried to work it out. “Well, we know one thing they want. They want me dead. They tried to poison me. But why?”
“Because they cannot control you,” Nero replied. “Whatever they’re planning, they’ve obviously been planning it for a very long time. You are the wild variable they didn’t plan for, the chaotic element they didn’t predict in their equations.”
But what was the Guardians’ equation? What were they plotting? The answers weren’t forthcoming, so I turned to a question that Arina might be able to answer.
“How do we stop the collars’ influence?” I asked her.
“Use your magic to overpower the collars, to put the beasts under your spell.”
“I tried that already. The result was the beasts blew up.”
“You only need to be stronger than the collars, to overpower them completely and all at once so they don’t overload and blow up. That’s how you avoid the collars’ self-destruct failsafe.”
“Oh, is that all?” I laughed, my v
oice cracking with sarcasm.
“Your magic is up to the task,” she replied. “When your mind is ready too, that is the moment you will succeed.”
Nero and I left the museum, parting ways with Arina and Athan.
“Nyx is afraid of losing her Legion soldiers to the demons, especially me,” I told him as we walked back toward the Legion office.
“Nyx admitted this to you?”
“Well, not exactly. I kind of overheard her talking to Ronan about it.”
His brows arched. “Eavesdropping, Pandora?”
“Not intentionally. I couldn’t sleep, so I was getting some air. I didn’t know the discussion would get all deep and vulnerable.”
“You’d best hope Nyx doesn’t ever find out that you eavesdropped on her admitting weakness.”
“There was more.”
“Oh?”
“I kind of caught the start of her and Ronan getting busy in her office. I ran off real fast when that started, but let’s just say they didn’t waste any time getting down to business.”
It had all happened in a split second. One moment, they were just talking. And the next, tabletop ornaments were crashing and fabric splitting.
Nero was laughing.
“It’s not funny.” I frowned at him. “It’s not my fault they suddenly went from arguing to having sex.”
“Actually, it is entirely your fault,” he said, amused. “As your magic peaks, your emotions do as well—enough, apparently, to overwhelm the formidable First Angel and the God of Earth’s Army.”
I opened my mouth to argue, to deny that it was my fault, but I popped it shut again immediately. Nero was right. I could feel my magic pulsing out, my emotions pounding. As I approached my Peak, my emotions weren’t so much dominated by anger or fear or rage; they were settling decidedly in the lust category.
Nero brushed his hand down my face. “The urges pulsing out from you are very distracting.”
I smiled coyly, trembling as his hands settled on my hips. I set my hand over his chest. My pulse seemed to beat in time to his heart. His mouth dipped lower, tracing the throbbing vein down my neck.
