by Ella Summers
Nero shook his head. “It’s too dangerous, Leda.”
He knew me well. He knew I was thinking of using the weapons of heaven and hell to go after Meda.
“The armor has protected me from unfriendly magic before.”
“But not like this. Not the power of all the world’s Magitech generators, funneled by a goddess.”
“I don’t see that we have any choice, Nero.”
He caught my hand. “Don’t go.”
“I am the only one who can go, the only one who can wield the weapons of heaven and hell,” I reminded him.
“The Pilgrim Valiant wore the armor. It protected him.”
“It protected him a bit, but it did not work as completely as it would on me.”
Stubbornness was etched into his face. “That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
He wanted to take the weapons of heaven and hell from me and go after Meda himself. I could see it in his eyes.
“But I’m not willing to take that risk. Nero, I’m going. The weapons of heaven and hell are meant to be part of me, to work with my magic. The armor and shield protect me better than anyone. The sword and gun can only deal killing blows if I wield them.”
And chances were we’d have to kill a goddess if we were going to survive this.
“She’s right,” Ronan told Nero. “The weapons of heaven and hell were made for someone with her kind of magic, someone with a perfect balance of dark and light. Like the original Immortals.”
“I have Immortal blood,” he declared.
Shock flashed in Ronan’s eyes. And he wasn’t the only one. Damiel looked pretty taken aback by the statement as well.
“You and Mother have Immortal blood as well,” Nero told his father. “It appears the Guardians had something to do with you two coming together. And with my being born.”
Damiel’s eyes drifted upward in thought, as though he were mentally rewinding his entire life, trying to figure out how and when the Guardians had interfered with it.
“So that’s why the Legion considered your father dark,” Harker said. “At least darker than expected of an angel. And why you battle that same darkness in yourself.”
“You might have Immortal blood, but it’s buried under all the Nectar, beneath all the Legion’s leveling up. You can’t use more than a fraction of it,” I said to Nero. “But I can use it all, light and dark, the whole spectrum. It has to be me who wields the artifacts and goes after Meda.”
“She’s right,” said Ronan. “Only Leda can truly tap into the power within the weapons of heaven and hell. And only with that power can we hope to stop Meda’s spell.”
The weapons of heaven and hell suddenly materialized in Ronan’s hands. He must have summoned them here from my room. I wondered if that was how he and Nyx had stolen them from Nero. But Ronan wasn’t stealing them this time. The god held them out to me, offering them freely. I moved toward him, but Nero stepped between us.
“I won’t lose you,” Nero said, his face pained, his voice dry as gravel.
“You won’t have to.” Smiling, I took his hands and gave them a squeeze. “I’ll be fine.” I pointed at the spreading web of magic. “Meda’s spell is growing. I have to get to her before it destroys this town and the whole world beyond.”
Nero set his hands on my cheeks. “Swear it. Swear you will come back to me.”
“I swear it.” I flashed him a smirk. “And you know how stubborn I am.”
He captured my lips with a slow, searing kiss. Beneath my skin’s surface, my blood rushed like a burning river, supercharging my veins with a jolt of magic. A shudder rippled down my spine.
Then he pulled away, and it was a good thing he did. The rational part of my brain had lost its way.
“I’m going to hold you to that promise, Pandora,” he whispered, his breath melting against my lips.
“I’ll make it.” My voice shook, more from lust than fear. “It’s the only way to avoid the ten thousand pushups you’d assign me as punishment if I fail.”
“Only ten thousand?” He looked offended. “You know very well that I’d never let you off that easy.”
“Twenty thousand then,” I said, grinning. “But they won’t be necessary. I’m going to knock the evil right out of Meda.”
I put on the armor. I holstered the gun, then I took up the shield with my left hand and the sword with my right. My wings unfolded from my back—dark, deep black on top, a gradual gradient to bright white at the tips. Right now, they were mirroring the unity of light and dark magic inside of me, bolstered by the weapons of heaven and hell.
I launched high into the air and flew at the web of magic. A sparkling tentacle snapped at me. When it hit my armor, it hissed like a piece of burning-hot metal plunging into a pool of cool water. The impact sent me wobbling off balance, but I managed to stay in the air. The armor’s magic had protected me from Meda’s spell. I only wished I’d figured out the art of flight a little better. Going in a straight line would have been a lot faster than zigzagging toward the goddess.
With each bolt of magic swinging at me, however, I was getting better. I was flying straighter, dodging better, and most of all, I was getting pretty damn good at putting up my shield fast enough to counter the web’s lightning whips. I guessed when it was a matter of life or death—when the fate of the Earth lay in the balance—that was a pretty effective way to learn fast.
Having navigated through the twisting, winding web, I landed on the rooftop in front of Meda. I didn’t botch my landing this time. I set down in a low attack crouch, my wings extended wide, my weapons at the ready.
“Pandora.” Meda’s red lips spread wide. “The Angel of Chaos.” Her halo sizzled like a pan of hot oil.
“That’s me.”
A hissing, magic tendril zapped out from her. I put up my shield, deflecting her attack.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” she demanded.
“You come to my world to kill every living being, and you ask what I am doing here? What the hell are you doing here?”
Meda didn’t dignify my question with a response—at least not a verbal one. Her response was decidedly less civil. She sent another magic bolt at me. I deflected that one too. When I deflected her next bolt as well, she rushed me, her spear swinging high. She moved so fast that I barely got my sword up in time. Our weapons clashed, a geyser of sparks showering us.
Damn it. Meda was holding an immortal weapon too. It wasn’t an immortal weapon like the ones I was wielding, ones that could only be wielded by someone with light and dark magic. Hers was of the more common kind, the kind any deity could use.
Under normal circumstances, my four immortal artifacts would clearly trump her one, but this was not a normal situation. Meda was feeding off the Earth’s entire Magitech grid. It was providing her with a hell of a power boost.
Even as we fought, Meda’s web continued to expand. Soon it would consume the town, killing everyone in it. From there, it would move on to the rest of the world. I had to stop this. I had to stop Meda.
I scored a hit, breaking off the clasp that held Meda’s cloak. The web, bursting with wind and lightning, sucked away the silver-white sheet of silk. With the cloak gone, Meda’s neck was left exposed but not bare. A collar pulsed on her neck.
“A control collar.” I looked at her, my eyes wide. “None of this is your doing. You’re being controlled.” My voice scraped against my throat. “Just like the beasts.”
Meda hadn’t turned against the gods. The Guardians had enslaved her mind. And if the Guardians’ collars could control a god, they could control anyone.
31
Children of the Immortal
“Release Meda’s mind immediately,” I said to Meda, knowing it would reach the Guardians pulling her strings.
“All in good time,” she laughed, her voice hard and horrible. “After the Goddess of Witchcraft has fulfilled her purpose.”
“What is…” I stopped, the Guardians’ grand plan fin
ally coming into focus. “The collars have never been about controlling the monsters. That was just the test run. This is about people—or gods, to be exact. You used Meda’s research experiments on beasts and the archangel Osiris Wardbreaker to adapt your magic formula. Then you added that potion to the control collar you bought from House Leviathan.” I stared through Meda’s eyes to the Guardians beyond. “Your plan is to use the collars to control the gods and demons.” I chewed on the thought, trying to work out why the Guardians wanted to do that. “You’re using Meda to wreak devastation on the Earth because…” Why? “Because you want to turn the people against the gods, so you can weaken them. The people’s faith boosts the gods’ power.”
“But no longer,” Meda sneered. “The gods and demons, the favored children of the Immortals, the worthy descendants, will finally serve us.”
Favored children of the Immortals? Worthy descendants? What did she mean by that?
“The gods and demons will serve us,” she prattled on, her voice lifted, victorious. “They will serve us just as we were forced to serve the Immortals for millennia. For far too long, those chosen ones, the Immortals’ beloved prized warriors, were set above us. But no longer. We’re turning the tables.”
There seemed to be a long and jaded history between the Guardians and the Immortals, gods, and demons. Arina had told me that the Guardians’ betrayal of the Immortals had led to their downfall, but I didn’t know anything more than that. The gods and demons must have risen to fill the power vacuum, and as ‘children’ of the Immortals, they’d fought over the worlds like normal children fought over toys. Somewhere in all that, the Guardians seemed to have been left on the sidelines—and they’d been plotting their revenge ever since.
“You would kill everyone in this world just to ‘turn the tables’?” I demanded.
“A select few will be saved.”
I assumed she meant people like Nero and Damiel, those with Immortal blood. Somehow, they were part of the Guardians’ plan of ascension. I just couldn’t figure out how they fit in.
“What do you want with people of Immortal blood?” I asked.
A crooked smile twisted her lips. “You can’t expect me to hand you all the answers, can you?”
Yeah, that would have been too easy. And as I’d learned early on, living as a child on the streets of Purgatory, life was very rarely easy. Or fair.
“And am I to be among the saved?”
Meda’s smile grew wider—and even more crooked. “What do you think?”
I already knew the answer. I just had to keep her talking as I tried to figure out a way to stop her from killing nearly every person on Earth.
I had no doubt that I would be among the casualties. The Guardians would never allow the Angel of Chaos, the unwanted aberration in their plans, to survive. In fact, maybe they were invoking the apocalypse, wiping out nearly everyone on Earth, just to get rid of me. I wouldn’t have been surprised. Sure, I’d like to think no one was that evil, but I wasn’t betting on it.
How could I stop Meda’s spell? There was no guarantee that knocking her unconscious would end it. And if I knocked her out, she might explode. The beasts’ collars had a self-destruct program built in; I bet Meda’s collar had the same feature. Killing her wouldn’t necessarily stop the spell either. Not to mention that killing a goddess would weaken the gods’ position, which would also play right into the Guardians’ hands. They wanted to weaken the gods so they could rise to power.
Plus, if I killed a god, the gods would certainly kill me. They wouldn’t care that I’d done it to try to save the Earth. The gods saw themselves as above entire worlds; they believed their lives were worth more than all the people on a planet, all put together. Killing Meda to save the Earth—if killing her even saved the Earth—was a surefire way to earn my own death sentence, no matter how much the gods wanted to hold onto the Earth and its people.
And if I died, the Guardians won. They wanted to be rid of this uncontrolled, wild variable. Me. Had they set up this whole battle to manipulate me into killing Meda?
Meda swung her magic-charged spear at me. I rolled out of the way, still trying to decide what to do. The Guardians wanted to be rid of me because they couldn’t control me; they couldn’t predict me either. They feared me and what I could do. If the Guardians were right about me—if I really represented a big potential monkey wrench in their plans—that meant I could find a way to save Meda, the Earth, and myself.
Meda swung her spear again, and this time I was too slow. The magic-tipped head snapped off a piece of my armor. The silver metal clunked to the ground. Meda’s magic, bolstered by the Magitech of Earth’s monster barriers, was too powerful, even for my set of immortal artifacts.
Come on, Leda, I told myself as the goddess took another swing at me. You can win this. You can find your way out of this conundrum. It’s nothing more than dirty fighting on a cosmic scale.
Meda snapped off another piece of my armor. And another. My armor was scattered across the rooftop. If I could only get to all the pieces, I could fasten them back on again. I snorted. Yeah, only. Meda was attacking like a windmill, over and over again, never stopping. I barely had time to defend myself against her strikes, let alone go collect my fallen armor.
Meda’s weapon slammed down so hard that she knocked the shield out of my hand. It dropped over the edge of the building. The impact also caused her to lose her hold on her spear, but she hardly seemed to notice. She switched to bombarding me with psychic and elemental spells. Her true weapon was not the immoral artifact, but the web of magic swirling around her, feeding off all the world’s Magitech generators.
A sparkling silver tentacle snapped out from that web and slammed into me. Without my armor to protect me, my body took the full force of the attack. It shot me backward. I hit the ground with so much force that I slid clear across the rooftop. My fingers clawed and scratched, reaching for something to catch myself on. They gripped onto a pipe just in time. Another moment and I’d have tumbled over the edge and been fried on a net of sizzling magic.
I swung my legs over my head and landed back on the rooftop. The world was spinning too. I reached out to touch my head. My fingers came back covered in blood. Meda’s spell had hit me hard.
I had to get to her. I had to kill her, even if that meant my death. It was all I could think of to do. I just had to hope that her spell would die with her. That killing her would save the Earth.
I moved toward her, struggling to walk in a straight line. Meda’s spells shot at me. I hopped aside, dodging them.
They were coming at me so fast.
I couldn’t dodge them all.
I fell, my head spinning with pain, my mind swimming with half-baked plans. How could I stop Meda?
A crazy idea popped into my head. I wasn’t sure it would even work, but if it were to have any chance of success, I had to get to my feet again. I had to get to Meda.
I tried to push off my hands, but my arms collapsed under my own weight. My face hit hard stone.
A hand gripped my arm, pulling me to my feet. How had anyone managed to get through the web of magic to make it up here? I turned around to face my ally.
It wasn’t Nero or anyone else from the Legion. It wasn’t Ronan or his soldiers either.
It was Cadence Lightbringer, Nero’s mother. And she was wearing my armor.
“What are you doing here?” I asked in surprise.
“Helping you.” She lifted up a shield to block a ribbon of fire magic that Meda had shot at us.
Wait, that was my shield. Cadence was wielding two artifacts from the weapons of heaven and hell. And she was tapping into their magic every bit as much as I could.
“But how are you here?” I asked.
“It’s a long story. After we’re done here, I’d be happy to share it.”
“All right,” I said, then stared across the rooftop at Meda.
“From the calculating gleam in your eyes, you have a plan,” said Cadence.
“I’d say that in this situation, we don’t have much of a choice.” Her eyes panned across the expanding web of magic. “What do you need me to do?”
I glanced at my armor and shield, sitting nicely on her body. “You wield them well.”
“I am a dual angel—light and dark—now,” she reminded me.
Which meant she could access the full spectrum of magic, light to dark. She’d realized the potential of her Immortal blood—with the Guardians’ help. But why did the Guardians want her to gain more magic, especially now that she was using that magic against them?
“You distract Meda,” I said, handing her my sword. I wouldn’t need it to carry out my plan. “So I can get close to her.”
Nodding, Cadence rushed toward Meda. She didn’t even ask me what I was going to do. It was just as well. She’d probably have thought I’d lost my mind.
“Is this how you repay us, Cadence Lightbringer, for all that we’ve done for you?” the Guardians spoke through Meda. “We saved you from the shackles of gods and demons. We freed you from their games. We made you powerful, and now you betray us.”
Ah, so this wasn’t part of the Guardians’ plan. They hadn’t anticipated that Cadence would come to my rescue. There it was again, that unpredictable element: me. Whenever I was involved, even the best-laid plans seemed to crumble to pieces.
“You betrayed me before I’d ever met you,” Cadence said to the Guardians. “It was not freedom you offered, but instead shackles. You used me, just as you are using Meda.”
Meda had recovered her spear. She brought it up to meet Cadence’s sword. Magic exploded between them, shaking the building. Meda had more power, but Cadence was faster. She moved like a lightning storm.
I kept to the edge of the rooftop, circling around behind Meda as Cadence drew her attention. She was keeping Meda busy, at least for now.
I snuck up behind Meda. I was only a few steps away from her when the web of magic overpowered Cadence, dropping her to the ground. Meda spun around and unloaded a fresh barrage of spells on me. She was so close that I didn’t have time to evade. Her magic hit me hard, jolting me like a shock of lightning.
