Phoenix’s Refrain (Legion of Angels Book 10)

by Ella Summers

  Phoenix’s Refrain

  Legion of Angels: Book 10

  Ella Summers

  PHOENIX’S REFRAIN

  Legion of Angels

  Book 10

  Copyright © 2021

  Version: 2021.07.27

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  Contents

  Story Summary

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Author’s Note

  Books by Ella Summers

  About the Author

  Story Summary

  There are forces greater than gods or demons at work here.

  Leda Pandora, the Angel of Chaos, isn’t like other angels. She fights dirty, in ways totally unbecoming of a soldier in the Legion of Angels. She cracks jokes at the other angels, even when she should really keep her mouth shut. And she stubbornly insists on doing the right thing, even if it’s totally against the rules.

  Leda’s chaotic ways have helped her win many battles, but she’s going to need more than a healthy dose of chaos this time. Powerful forces have their eyes trained on her unborn child, a magical miracle who might just become the most powerful weapon ever conceived.

  To secure her daughter’s future, Leda will need to unravel schemes and unlock secrets buried deep in the past. Because ignorance is not bliss when deities play the game.

  Phoenix’s Refrain is the tenth book in the Legion of Angels series.

  1

  Return to the Lost City

  I walked across the broken highway, which cut right to the middle of the Lost City. There, at the epicenter of desolation, the highway ended abruptly in a massive crater. I passed the rotting husks of buildings, relics of an ancient era. The city was a forgotten piece of the past, a throwback to a lost world that we’d never return to again, a world ravaged by the immortal war the gods and demons had brought to Earth.

  The Lost City had lain mostly dormant for over two centuries. Treasure hunters sometimes braved the ruins in search of great fortune, but that very rarely happened. There might have been treasures hidden within the decaying buildings, but there were monsters hidden there too.

  Sounds rang in my ears. The clash of swords. The rapid beat of gunfire. Magic, ancient and unyielding. Powerful and arrogant. So beautiful. And so terrible that it had consumed the city.

  The Lost City lay on the Black Plains, the wide, beast-infested expanses on Earth that humans shunned and where monsters reigned supreme. I sure wasn’t here for the fun times. I’d come back here because this was where it had all begun…where the visions had first appeared to me.

  The first time I’d seen the visions—these memories of the past—had been on a mission just a few months after joining the Legion of Angels, the gods’ Earthly army. I’d had a few more flashes here and there in the two years since, but lately these visions flowed like the floodgates of the past had opened up and unloaded everything it had onto me.

  That might have had something to do with my newly-gained telepathic powers. Or maybe the visions were another ‘present’ my demon mother Grace had left with me. Whatever the case, there was something about these visions from the past, something I was sure held the key to the future. I just had to figure out what they were trying to tell me.

  And so I’d traveled to the Lost City against orders…hell, without even telling the First Angel where I was at all. But now, being here, I knew I’d made the right decision. The visions were strong here, in the Lost City, just as I’d known they would be. I could hear those memories all again in perfect clarity.

  I saw Sierra, the angel with the red hair and the silver wings. She walked down the highway of the Lost City, the very same highway I was now standing on. And yet not the same. The highway of Sierra’s era was intact. Mine had fallen into ruin. The tall buildings on either side of her shone brightly, the light of a pleasant sun bouncing off the pristine windows.

  Nowadays, the buildings on either side of me could hardly be called buildings at all. Their windows were shattered, their insides gobbled up by enemy fire and the slow, inevitable passage of time.

  Sierra’s city was not the Lost City. Back then, it had been called the Golden City. I’d seen that in the visions. I saw—no, I felt the ground beneath Sierra’s feet shake. The Golden City was under siege. I recognized these visions. They were of the city’s final golden moments.

  The heavens roared. An angel landed beside Sierra.

  “Sierra,” he said, dropping to one knee.

  “Why do you bow before me, Calin?” she asked him.

  “Because you are the Keeper,” he said. “You are our savior.”

  I knew Sierra didn’t feel like a savior. She felt so…so lost. So trapped by her destiny, a destiny which had been forced upon her without her ever having any say in the matter. She felt like she’d been thrown into this whole war, a war she didn’t understand, a war that had been raging since long before she’d been born.

  “Sierra, we must hurry.” Calin took her arm and led her to the gateway of the Treasury. “They are coming. You need to don the armor and wield the weapons of heaven and hell. You need to save us all.”

  The weapons of heaven and hell. I had encountered them before. Worn them before. I guessed I was Sierra’s successor, a version of her in the present era.

  The weapons of heaven and hell were immortal artifacts of great power, the power to kill a deity. They were unique among the immortal artifacts in that they could only be worn by someone with balanced light and dark magic. Whereas most immortal artifacts could be used by anyone with enough magical might to control them.

  The memory faded away. Back in my time, I’d reached the end of the broken highway. I looked down into the crater. Beside me, my sister Gin released a deep, uneasy breath.

  “Leda, are you sure we have to go down there?” she asked, gaping into the crater. “I can’t even see the bottom.”

  My sister Tessa giggled. “What’s the matter, Gin? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I left it back in my bed. Where I wish I had remained instead of setting out on Leda’s crazy quest,” said Gin.

  Gin’s words didn’t fool me. She might have been a little scared right now, but she was even more excited. She was an avid reader of adventure books and had always dreamed of being part of a great adventure of her own.

  “You love it, and you know it,” Tessa told Gin. She wasn’t fooled either.

  Gin and Tessa weren’t my sisters by blood, but they were my sisters in all the ways it truly mattered. We had grown up together under the guidance of our amazing foster mother Calli. It had been a good home, full of love and understanding and guidance. All those
things that I didn’t get from my blood parents: Faris, the God of Heaven’s Army, and Grace, the Demon of the Faith.

  I looked all around. Most of the Lost City had been consumed by the final battle for Earth and had deteriorated even further in the time that had passed since then. The streets had split open, and the buildings were slowly crumbling to pieces. Some of the underground structures were still intact, though.

  “Don’t worry,” I told Gin. “I won’t let you fall.”

  I wrapped one arm around her and the other around Tessa. Then I spread my angel wings, beating them gently as I slowly lowered us into the crater, all the way down to the ground. Angel, my feline companion, hopped in after us.

  We landed in what seemed to be an ancient airport. This was a time capsule of how things had used to be, a taste of the Earth before the gods and demons, before magic and monsters.

  “This way,” I told my sisters, Angel strutting by my side.

  We walked down the long airport corridor.

  A flash from the past hit me, and I saw Sierra walking down this very same corridor. She was wearing the weapons of heaven and hell, marching into battle. Her armor was silver, just like her wings. In her hand, she held a burning sword. Blue flames licked the blade.

  Magic fire rained down from above. Sierra jumped aside to avoid the blast.

  I sidestepped several holes in the otherwise-smooth ground. Time was a funny thing, though. The holes weren’t where they were supposed to be, not where the magic had impacted the ground in Sierra’s time. Who knew what had happened in the centuries since then.

  Yeah, memories were weird, especially visions from the past. I’d once spoken to Nero about the memories that kept coming to me.

  “I’d guess someone buried them there,” he had told me. “It’s no coincidence that they are coming out now. I believe they were triggered by the Nectar and maybe by the Venom, by your growing abilities, your growing magic. If I’m right, as your power grows, more memories will surface.”

  And he’d turned out to be right. I’d certainly had more memories since gaining Ghost’s Whisper, the power of telepathy.

  “In my dream,” I’d told Nero. “Sierra spoke of inheriting someone else’s destiny, and the gateway only opens to someone who embodies light and darkness. Sierra wasn’t the first keeper of the weapons of heaven and hell. I wonder how many keepers there have been? And where they all are now?”

  “I believe I’m looking at one right now,” he’d told me.

  “I don’t know, Nero. Sierra was so…powerful. I’m just some watered-down version. You probably have a better chance of opening that gateway than I do.”

  “I have darkness and light in me, Leda, but they’re not in balance. They’re in conflict.”

  “And that makes a difference?”

  “More than how much magic you have, I believe. You survived Venom mixed with Nectar. If that isn’t proof of your light-dark balance, then I don’t know what is.”

  Yeah, I was balanced—or at least my magic was. That’s what I got for being the offspring of a god and a demon.

  Or maybe that’s why I was unbalanced, torn between two worlds, destined never to fit in either.

  I reached out and traced my finger along the edge of the very large hole in the wall in front of me. Something had blown that hole in the wall. I wondered what spell had done it.

  I led the way through the hole, up the many, many stairs that ended in another hole, this time in the ceiling. I climbed out, then reached down to help Gin and Tessa up. Angel crouched down, wiggled her butt a few times, then leapt through the hole. She landed soundlessly beside me.

  “Good kitty.” I scratched her under her chin, then rose from my knees.

  We were standing on what had once served as an airport runway. The asphalt surface had cracked and fractured since those days. There were holes larger than my foot in it.

  We walked a few minutes, then the broken runway ended abruptly with the skeletal corpse of a plane. We climbed through the plane, its shell eaten away by the winds of time.

  Nero’s words and mine hummed in my ears.

  “Do you remember the visions I had last year in the Lost City?” I’d asked him.

  “Visions of the past,” he’d said. “Your proximity to the weapons of heaven and hell triggered them.”

  “I saw memories stored in those immortal artifacts, just like the gods’ memories stored inside their immortal artifacts. I think it takes a very strong emotion to imprint a memory on an immortal artifact. The glasses exposed the gods’ memories stored in those artifacts. But I didn’t have the glasses last year when I saw those memories in the Lost City. And why am I seeing this woman’s memories now when the rest of you are not?”

  That was a good question. Why was I seeing Sierra’s memories? What was so special about her? Were we somehow linked through time because she had once worn the weapons of heaven and hell, just as I had?

  My sisters and I jumped out of the corpse of the plane. We followed the old train line. Angel led the way, balancing effortlessly atop the slim profile of the broken tracks.

  It was this way. I knew it. I could feel it. The visions were drawing me in closer. Something important lay at the end of the line.

  The visions were coming from there. But what were the visions? Nero’s father Damiel had once said that he’d unlocked these memories in my mind, but Damiel was famous for never telling the whole story.

  “The spell doesn’t lie,” Damiel had said. “It showed us the one the Guardians entrusted these memories to.”

  “What spell?” I’d asked.

  “The one I cast the first time you came to the Lost City, the one that unlocked the treasure trove of memories inside that precious little head of yours.”

  So Damiel had helped me come to these memories, memories he claimed the Guardians had put there. But why would the Guardians want me to have these memories?

  Or was Damiel wrong? Yeah, he’d really hate to hear that. Maybe it hadn’t been the Guardians at all. Maybe the memories had come from my demon mother Grace. She certainly had the power; she’d once given Nero future visions of me and our daughter. If Grace could show Nero visions of the future, maybe she could show me visions from the past.

  It would certainly be in line with Grace’s character. She’d schemed so that I would absorb Faith’s telepathic powers into my unborn child.

  Or was Damiel right, and it had been the Guardians to give me these memories? But to what end? Did they think they could use me in some way, just as Faris and Grace hoped to use me? I didn’t think so. The Guardians had tried to kill me. They wouldn’t kill someone they needed. Right?

  A broken train blocked the tracks. I had to jump inside and crawl through it.

  Another flash. The train rattled. Another piece of the past hit me. Sierra, the red-haired angel, jumped across the train car’s roof. Her blade met a monster’s body. There were more monsters below on the ground, lured there by the sounds of battle. A beast’s jaws snapped at her. She cut across its body, severing it, splitting it in two.

  But that was not the true enemy. Sierra pressed on. The real enemy had invaded her city. They were coming for her.

  Sierra’s memories weren’t the only ones that lived on in this city. I saw a pale-haired angel too, wearing the weapons of heaven and hell, fighting unseen enemies in the city. She ran at them. She was outnumbered. There was no hope of victory or even survival, even with all her magic and the aid of these powerful artifacts. But she did not shy away from her duty. She charged into battle, nonetheless, to defend her city and meet her end. If she was going to die here, she would take as many of them with her as she could.

  Sierra and the unnamed pale-haired warrior: they were two different angels. The pale-haired angel had lived long before Sierra. I just knew it. Centuries before. Maybe one of the angels had fought in the Final Battle for Earth all those years ago, but then what of the other angel? I knew of no other battles in the Lost City. I would need to
ask Bella. She always knew everything about history, and if she didn’t know, she knew just which book to consult for answers.

  I brushed my hand across the graffiti painted on the inside walls of the train car. Rough depictions of two angels: one with pale hair and one with red hair. What did it mean?

  The front of the train car ended in a building, like the train had crashed full-speed into the train station. We hopped out of the missing door on the side. There, on the walls of the station, painted all over, were lots of funny symbols. I recognized those alien symbols. I’d seen them before, way back.

  I remembered how Nero’s eyes had panned across those symbols in confusion.

  “I’ve seen these markings before,” he’d said. “They belong to one of the ancient languages, one not of this world. I can’t read them. Can you?”

  “I think so,” I’d replied.

  “How?”

  “I don’t really know. I guess the same way I have weird visions of things that happened long ago.”

  “Can you translate them?”

  “I can try.”

  Where had I gotten this knowledge of the past? Of old languages? I’d once drawn some of those symbols for Bella. My sister had said they were one of the demons’ old languages. Maybe I’d gotten this knowledge of the symbols from the same place I’d gotten the memories of the long-gone past.

  The symbols were from a demon language. The signs seemed to point to Grace, that she’d been the one to give me these visions.