by Ella Summers
“Funny.”
“I think so.”
“Too funny,” he added. “I’m sure there’s a Legion regulation against angels having a sense of humor.”
“Actually, I’d be surprised if there is only one regulation against angels having a sense of humor.” I swayed my hips for his benefit. “Say, you know what would be really funny? I should totally get Faris a t-shirt that reads ‘Daddy Dearest’.”
“I doubt he’d be amused by the gesture. He doesn’t share your appreciation of irony.”
“You’re probably right.” I turned in a tight circle in front of the mirror, looking at myself from all angles. “Is it obvious that I’m not wearing a bra?”
His eyes dipped unapologetically to my chest. “Yes.” His gaze panned lower. “As is the fact that you’re not wearing any underwear.”
I shrugged. “I’ve survived worse.”
Nero took my hand, and we left the bedroom and descended the stairs to the level below. Baskets of fruit, muffins, and other tasty treats waited for us on the dining table—and Faris waited for us in front of a glass wall with a view onto Purgatory.
I chose the more enticing encounter and went to the breakfast table. Nero made the same choice. It hurt to walk. I limped a little. Coincidentally, Nero seemed to be suffering from the same ailment.
“You haven’t been training enough,” I teased him.
His eyes twinkled at me. “Neither have you.” He pulled out his phone and hastily typed away on it. “To remedy this problem, I’ve ordered your team to set up an obstacle course beyond the wall.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
Proving how very serious he was, he showed me the impossible obstacle course he’d brought up on his phone screen.
“You are serious,” I sighed.
“About training. Always.”
I took a blueberry muffin for comfort. “I was planning on just taking it easy today.”
“Which is why I started out with the easiest course I’ve designed.”
“How many courses are there?” I asked, fearing the answer.
“There are over two hundred distinct variations.”
I sighed. That served me right for teasing Nero about training. Training for Nero was a serious affair.
Faris watched us in calculating silence.
“What?” I asked him.
“All this banter isn’t particularly efficient. It’s so off target.”
“So was officiating our wedding.” I smirked at him. “Did the prospect of your daughter’s wedding make you feel unusually sentimental, Faris?”
“Hardly,” he said coolly. “Your wedding served a very important purpose.”
“An opportunity to eat lots of cake?”
“No.”
“No? Are you sure? Because there was an awful lot of cake. And a lot of people eating cake. That served a very important purpose: once and for all proving to the gods that you can indeed have your cake and eat it too.”
Faris’s mouth tightened into a hard line. “It’s puzzling that you haven’t gotten lost in your own meandering tangents yet.”
“What do you want, Faris? Or did you just come for the muffins?” I grabbed a second muffin, this one chocolate with chocolate chips.
“No, I am not here to eat muffins.” He turned up his nose at my muffin. “I am here to outline your duties.”
“Well, you already covered my duties pretty thoroughly on my wedding night. I’m to be the face of the Legion, the symbol that encourages Earth’s citizens to join up, so we can clear the plains of monsters, bring harmony to the world, and all that jazz.”
“There is more.”
“Oh?” I sat down at the breakfast table. I didn’t like the sound of this ‘more’. I was definitely going to need another muffin—no, make that several muffins.
“You are obviously wondering why it was I who spoke for the gods at the ceremony.”
“You mean, besides your burning need to say a few words at your daughter’s wedding?”
He gave me a flat look. I smiled back.
“Ronan wanted to speak for the Legion in his role as Lord of the Legion. Just as Zarion spoke for the Pilgrims in his capacity as God of the Faith,” Faris said. “But the council has decided that we need to take a more active role in the affairs of Earth.”
Alarm bells were going off in my head. Nothing good ever came of the gods taking an active role in the affairs of Earth.
“We decided to have the council speak, not just the Lord of the Legion, to show that all the gods were united.”
“And mitigate the damage done by Meda’s very public damnation of the Earth and all its inhabitants,” I said.
“Unfortunately, that will take time. But we are confident that you can do it.”
“I?” I gasped. “I am supposed to fix your mess?”
“It is the Guardians’ mess.”
“Right, and you didn’t contribute to it at all.” I rolled my eyes.
“The Guardians set themselves on this path long ago, Leda. What you discovered about their crimes is shocking. We’d always known that the Guardians had betrayed the Immortals, but we didn’t know how they’d done it. We had no idea that they’d killed them all and channeled all their magic into immortal artifacts.”
“How did you find out about that anyway?”
“Meda told us. She told us a lot of things.” He gave me a pointed look.
I slouched in my seat. “The gods know about me. They know what I am.”
“Yes,” Faris confirmed, his face impassive. “They know.”
“What are they going to do?” I hardly dared to ask.
“There was a debate.”
My hands were sticky and sweaty. “They want to kill me.”
“There were calls for your immediate execution.”
Of course there were. A god-demon hybrid didn’t fit into the gods’ vision of how the universe should be.
“But Meda spoke in your favor,” Faris told me. “As did Ronan.”
“And you?”
“Your death would hinder our efforts, especially now that the Guardians have shown their cards. You possess unusual skills: the ability to access light and dark magic, the power to control monsters. The other gods recognize the essential role you will play in the days to come.”
“So they’re not going to kill me?”
“No,” said Faris. “The Guardians have been plotting their ascension for millennia, and we had no idea. My colleagues on the council have come to recognize the necessity of your continued survival. Your chaos is the best weapon against the Guardians’ perfectly-laid plans.”
“So I’m the monkey wrench you’re throwing at the Guardians’ machinations?”
“You have an important role to play, Leda.” He looked at Nero. “You both do, archangel of Immortal blood.”
So the gods knew about Nero’s origin as well.
“Wait a moment here.” My forehead furrowed with suspicion. “Just a few weeks ago, you tried to sell me on the story that Nero is the enemy, that he was using me, that he was engaged in some underhanded scheme. You manipulated me. You tried to put a wedge between me and Nero, in the hopes that I’d then lean on you for support. And now you’ve proclaimed him a champion of the gods.”
“I was misinformed.”
I laughed. “You’re actually admitting that you were wrong?”
“Not wrong. Misinformed.” His marble facade did not crack. “I knew that Nero Windstriker had taken an interest in you from the moment you joined the Legion. The only logical conclusion was that he knew of your origin and wanted to use you.”
“That wasn’t the only logical conclusion, and if you weren’t so jaded, you’d have realized that. Nero had a dream about me before we met, of me and him, together as angels. That is why he took an interest in me.”
“No, I did not predict an angel’s humanity,” Faris said, his words dripping with disapproval. “The Legion’s training regimen was supposed
to wash the humanity out of its soldiers by the time they became angels. Ronan has been far too lax, far too easy on the Legion’s soldiers. He is too attached to humans and his Legion soldiers. But Ronan is not solely at fault. As head of the council, Valora should have managed him better.”
“Which is why the gods replaced her,” Nero said.
Gold sparked in Faris’s bright blue eyes, a hint of emotion peeking through his mask. “Indeed so.”
“Replaced her?” I asked. In gods’ speak, that meant kill. “But Valora was at the wedding. She’s not dead.”
“She is still the Goddess of Shifters. She is just no longer the Queen Goddess. The council judged her unfit to lead us, so she was replaced.”
“By whom?”
“By Faris,” Nero told me.
I looked at Faris. A hard, victorious smile was etched into his face, like a sculptor had chiseled it from a block of stone. It was the smile of someone confident in his own supremacy.
“You?” I blinked. “The other gods made you King of the Gods?”
“We now face a crisis far worse than our war with the demons. The Guardians have been plotting our demise for millennia. Even without magic, they destroyed the Immortals. They are the greatest threat we have ever faced. The other gods recognized that I, the God of Heaven’s Army, am the one best suited to lead them now in this time of war.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe it. I am king, and you two are crucial to my plan.”
That was what I was worried about.
“We might already be too late,” I said. “All your planning could be for nothing.”
“Explain.” Faris’s voice rang with the note of command.
“Someone wanted me and Nero to meet,” I told him. “Someone sent him those dreams of me. I can’t imagine it was the Guardians. They want to keep me and Nero apart. After all, I am the wild variable that’s messing up all their equations. It wouldn’t do to mix that chaos with their plans for Nero and the Immortals’ other descendants, whatever those plans might be. But someone else did send Nero those dreams. There’s another player at work here.”
“Someone with powerful telepathic magic,” Faris said, his voice…bored?
“You know who this other player is,” I realized. “You know who sent Nero the dreams of me.”
“I am reasonably certain, given the available facts.”
“Just as you were reasonably certain a few weeks ago that Nero was manipulating me?”
Faris brushed off my quip. “Recently, my telepaths have had visions to back up my theory.”
Faris’s chorus of telepaths was the reason he always knew more about what was going on than anyone. It was probably a contributing factor as to why the other gods had put him in charge as well. The Guardians had a chorus of telepaths too. Knowledge truly was power.
“So who is it?” I asked Faris. “Who sent Nero dreams of me?”
“We both know they weren’t merely dreams, Leda,” he said, smooth as silk. “They were visions of the future. A future with you, Nero, and your angelic daughter.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. I hadn’t told anyone about our daughter’s presence in Nero’s dream, but somehow Faris knew. That must be the vision his telepaths had seen. They’d seen the same thing Nero had, and now Faris knew it too. He recognized what our daughter meant, what she represented.
Somehow, Faris would find a way to use my child who did not yet exist, a child with the power of gods and demons and Immortals. That would be his perfect, ultimate weapon. I was just a temporary stand-in until he could replace me with my daughter.
I’d felt divided about my decision to take Nerissa’s contraceptive potion. But now, knowing what Faris would do to my child, that he’d steal her from me to make her his weapon, I was no longer conflicted. I knew that I’d made the right choice. I had to protect her, even if she didn’t exist yet.
“Who sent this dream to General Windstriker, you ask?” Faris wore the confident, unfading face of a king. “My Orchestra has not seen this, but when magic fails, you need only apply logic to the problem. It takes a powerful telepath to catch a fleeting fragment of the future, to make it solid and concrete, real and true, and then pass on that vision to someone else in the form of a dream.”
“The dream could be a fake, a forgery,” I pointed out.
“No, only a true vision of the future has the potency to provoke such a deep, emotional response in a trained angel like Nero Windstriker. Only a real vision could ring so true, could take such a powerful hold over him that he’d set aside his other duties to train you. Only a real vision could compel him to want to know you before he even saw you, could press him to figure out why you were in his dreams and how you were his future.”
“That was almost poetic,” I said. “If I didn’t know better, Faris, I’d say you were having a fatherly moment.”
“But you do know better.”
“Yes, I do. So, tell us, who is this powerful telepath?”
“Gods and demons did not always possess the power of telepathy. Do you know how we acquired it?”
“You bred it into your magic by mating with powerful telepaths.”
“Native telepaths are one of the many branches of supernaturals descended from Immortals. They are not natural, direct descendants like you.” He glanced at Nero. “But rather bloodlines created by the Immortals in their many experiments on the nature of magic.”
“What kinds of experiments?” I asked.
“The Immortals were experimenting on isolating specific magical abilities from the rest. The ghosts—or telepaths—came into existence as a result of one of those experiments. Shortly before our war with the demons began, the ghosts went into hiding.”
“You hunted them down so you could breed with them?” I demanded, my voice shaking.
The whole idea of hunting down these poor telepaths to breed their powers into the gods’ magic made me sick.
“Finding telepaths was easy. Finding a pure, undiluted telepath proved nearly impossible,” Faris said, unmoved by my anger. “But eventually the gods managed. Unfortunately, so did the demons.”
“You’re saying a god or a demon sent me those images of Leda?” Nero asked him.
“Despite our best efforts to gain the power of telepathy, it is not as strong in us as our other magic abilities,” Faris admitted, looking annoyed. Hunting down people to breed them hadn’t bothered him, but this failure to fully acquire their magic clearly did. “Furthermore, future-gazing is a difficult art that requires much magic and training to perfect. Most deities do not possess enough telepathic magic to capture and redirect future visions. In fact, of all the gods and demons alive today, there is only one who wields that power.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Grace.”
My mother. Demon of the Faith and Queen of Dark Vampires.
“Grace channels the future-gazing ability through prayer and meditation,” said Faris. “She uses her followers’ faith to boost her telepathic powers.”
I frowned at him. “You knew that she had this ability when you used her to create me.”
Faris laughed. “Grace allowed herself to be ‘used’. You can bet she has her own plans for you, Leda. She was undoubtedly furthering that agenda when she sent Nero dreams about you. She brought you together, and you can be sure her motivation wasn’t motherly compassion. Grace isn’t looking out for your best interests.”
“Neither are you,” I told him.
There wasn’t a shred of regret on Faris’s face.
“So what is Grace plotting?” I asked him.
“Ask her yourself when you see her.”
“I wasn’t planning on paying her a visit.”
“Your plans have changed,” Faris told me. “The gods have decided to broker an alliance with the demons, at least until the Guardians are dealt with. And you, Leda, child of god and demon blood, are our emissary to hell. You’ll leave at once.”
Author’
s Note
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The ninth book in the Legion of Angels series will be coming soon.
Books by Ella Summers
Legion of Angels
Vampire’s Kiss
Witch’s Cauldron
Siren’s Song
Dragon’s Storm
Shifter’s Shadow
Psychic’s Spell
Fairy’s Touch
Angel’s Flight
Book 9 [2019]
Dragon Born Serafina
Mercenary Magic
Magic Games
Magic Nights
Rival Magic
Dragon Born Shadow World
(Magic Eclipse, Midnight Magic, Magic Storm)
The Complete Trilogy
Dragon Born Alexandria
Magic Edge
Blood Magic
Magic Kingdom
Shadow Magic [2019]
Dragon Born Awakening
Fairy Magic
Spirit Magic
Magic Immortal
Sorcery & Science
Sorcery & Science (Prequel)
Vampires & Vigilantes
Book 2 [2019]
And more books coming soon…
About the Author
Ella Summers has been writing stories for as long as she could read; she's been coming up with tall tales even longer than that. One of her early year masterpieces was a story about a pigtailed princess and her dragon sidekick. Nowadays, she still writes fantasy. She likes books with lots of action, adventure, and romance. When she is not busy writing or spending time with her two young children, she makes the world safe by fighting robots.
Ella is the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and International Bestselling Author of the paranormal and fantasy series Legion of Angels, Dragon Born, and Sorcery & Science.
