by Ella Summers
“How—”
A contraction cut off my sentence, but Bella knew what I’d meant to ask.
“How do I know?” she said. “Arina told me.”
“Where—”
“Arina has brought some toys to the fight, technological wonders I’ve never seen before,” Bella answered my broken question. “Arina’s toys are doing a good job of knocking the other side’s soldiers unconscious. But our soldiers must do the same. They must stop killing these people. It’s only helping the Guardians.” She was looking at Faris and Grace.
Grace nodded briskly. “Agreed.”
She cut her long fingernail across the inside of her arm. That must have been the way she communicated with her forces—through blood.
Faris frowned. “Agreed.” He signaled to Devlin, who passed the message along to the rest of Heaven’s Army.
Faris looked particularly furious at the Guardians for trying such a trick, for trying to use him to serve their needs.
“The Guardians are still hiding within the safety of the Sanctuary. But they will flee when the Sanctuary is ripped open. We will be ready,” the God of Heaven’s Army said with vicious delight. His hand snapped around to Nerissa. “Can’t you do anything to speed this thing up?” he demanded.
“This labor is already going very fast,” Nerissa told him.
“Unacceptable.” Faris stood there like a mountain, unmoving, uncompromising.
“Don’t mind Faris,” Grace said to Nerissa. “He never had to give birth to a child. And patience isn’t his virtue.”
“You’re one to speak of virtue, demon,” Faris snapped.
“If you two…” Contraction. “…are going to….” Contraction. “…start flirting again…” Contraction. Damn it! “Take it someplace else.”
The next minute or so was sort of hazy. I vaguely noticed Faris and Grace fighting. I definitely noticed a lot of pain. Someone was holding my hand. Bella. My cat rubbed against my leg. Then there was an explosion of magic from inside of me. And from all around me. I was just lucid enough to remember to gather all the pieces of our magic, channel it through my cat, and shoot it at the Sanctuary cloaked just beyond this realm.
And then Nerissa was setting a baby, wrapped in a towel, into my arms. My daughter’s eyes were big and beautiful. They were Nero’s eyes. Her hair was warm and soft and a sort of light brownish red. Tiny silver wings peeked out of the top of her towel.
“She has wings,” I said in awe, lightly touching her feathers.
Sierra cooed in delight. Yes, Sierra. The name was perfect. I suddenly knew it had also been the name of the pale-haired angel from the past, the first bearer of the weapons of heaven and hell. That name was my daughter’s destiny.
“Deities and demi-deities are born with wings,” Nyx said beside me.
I noticed she held her baby too. He was a boy with white wings and a full head of black hair. Those black locks were swirling around him as though he were underwater. It seemed he’d inherited his mother’s trademark hair.
Past Nyx, the others all had their newborns in their arms. Leila and Basanti were huddled close together with their two baby boys.
“Did it work?” I asked groggily.
“See for yourself.” Bella pointed.
I looked beyond our closed little circle. Buildings had appeared on the battlefield.
“The Sanctuary,” I said quietly, my heart feeling lighter, like a heavy weight had been lifted from it.
“It’s in our realm now,” Stash told me.
Before one of the buildings, Nero and Damiel had locked swords with Giselle and Taron.
A pulse of psychic energy shot out of Giselle, knocking Nero back a step. She followed it up by summoning a fireball and using her sword to bat it at Nero. He slashed out, his blade splitting it in two. The fire dissolved into smoke. Nero flicked his wrist, and the smoke turned green. He’d cursed it. The cursed cloud swallowed Giselle but not her screams.
When Nero gave his wrist a second flick, the smoke faded away to reveal someone hardly recognizable. Giselle was now completely bald. Her skin was deathly pale, and as she tried to rise to her feet, handfuls of feathers fell from her wings like a tree shedding its leaves.
“Surrender,” Nero told her.
Giselle’s dry lips formed into a defiant sneer. “I will never be your prisoner.”
“You would have led these people to their deaths.”
Giselle started to laugh. It was a cruel, sickening laugh. “This isn’t the end.”
“It is for you,” Nero said coldly.
Silver flashed. He’d slashed out with his sword so fast that I hadn’t seen him move. Neither, it seemed, had Giselle. Her head fell to the ground, that sick smile still frozen on her face.
Nero glanced toward Damiel, but his father didn’t need any help. Taron lay dead at his feet. I tried not to look too closely at the state of the corpse, but I saw enough to know that Damiel had let his emotions get the better of him today. The fury slowly faded from his eyes, fury that these two angels had taken Cadence from him. And fury for what they’d done here today.
“They’re not stopping.” Bella watched with wide, trembling disbelief as the Guardians’ sacrificial lambs rushed at our army. “Their angels are dead, and the Guardians have fled. So why do they still fight? They must realize that their Guardians have abandoned them.”
“I think they don’t want to believe,” I said.
“Look,” Alice said in pure wonder.
So I looked. Wild monsters had gathered nearby in the hopes of feasting on the losers of this great battle. A sparkle of magic started at the center of the Sanctuary, spreading out from there in a wave of rainbow light. It passed through the storm clouds overhead, quieting them. When it touched the barren earth, wildflowers popped up all around us. And when it met the monsters, the feral fire in their eyes died out.
Arina strolled up to us, an arm wrapped around each of her twins. “I understand it now. The Guardians’ Sanctuaries on Earth were created by the clash of gods and demons. And when that happened, when the Sanctuaries fractured this realm, the beasts went wild. The weather of Earth turned wild too.”
I was happy to see Arina had come out of the Sanctuary with her two adorable children. They all looked so happy together. A family reunited at last. A tear slid down my cheek.
“But this act of balance, of breaking the Guardians’ Sanctuary, has accomplished something else as well,” Arina said. “It has balanced the Earth’s magic once more. The storms are gone. The monsters are once more tame.”
“Just as Cadence and I balanced the magic on another world, Interchange, in another great act of magic.” Damiel wrapped his arm around Cadence and their daughter, whose black-and-white wings were perfectly divine.
“In another great act of magic, like we performed here,” Cadence said. “An act of unity and perfect balance.”
Nero knelt beside me. He set his hand on our daughter’s forehead. “Everything all right, Pandora?”
I lowered my head to his shoulder. “Yes. Everything is perfect.”
“Not everything.” Ronan had one eye on his newborn child—and one eye on the Guardians’ army, which was still fighting us.
“Try not to kill them,” I pleaded with the Lord of the Legion. “They’re confused. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Now that the Guardians were gone, now that they were too far away to use the supernaturals’ deaths to gain magic, I was worried that the gods and demons would decide there was no reason to spare those supernaturals’ lives.
Ronan looked at me with an expression I’d never before seen on a god’s face: sympathy. Of course, he only felt sorry for me because he thought I was really naive.
But rather than scorn or pity, the god gave me kindness. “We will try to save as many of them as we can. They are powerful supernaturals, not people we like to waste.” He looked at Faris. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Ronan, don’t think I don’t see tha
t scheming look in your eyes.” The God of Heaven’s Army drew his sword. “And I will not allow you to claim those supernaturals for yourself.”
Faris followed Ronan across the battlefield. I was pretty sure the Lord of the Legion had just done me a very big favor. He’d directed Faris’s attention to the supernaturals—and away from my daughter.
“Did we capture any Guardians?” I asked Nero.
He frowned. “No. But we did find a female Guardian dead in one of the buildings.”
“I bet it was the same one who had Meda try to kill me last month,” I said. “In doing so, she acted against the others’ wishes. The Guardians don’t strike me as the kind of people who tolerate dissension in their ranks.”
“Right now less than ever,” Nero agreed. “Now that their Sanctuary is gone, they will only survive if they all act together as one. When packing up to leave, they’d have left behind anyone who didn’t follow the Guardians’ hard line.”
“How did the Guardians escape?” I asked.
“They had an escape route already planned out,” Damiel told me. “They went through a special one-time-use magic mirror. Their trail dissipated quickly. It didn’t even leave a trace, or I would have followed them.”
Now that he possessed all the active and passive magic abilities, Damiel could teleport. It was kind of annoying when he just popped up out of nowhere. Annoying but cool. I wished I could do it too.
“Wherever the Guardians are, our efforts here have weakened them,” Nero said. “And they’re on the run. But they’re not done.”
“No, they’re not done,” I agreed as I watched the Guardians’ abandoned supernaturals continue to fight our forces.
I simply did not understand their fierce loyalty to the Guardians, though the wicked light in Faris’s eyes as he spotted those he wanted to add to his Orchestra certainly wasn’t helping to make us look trustworthy.
Ronan was trying to woo the supernaturals with the truth, but they outright refused to believe the Guardians had taken them in only to sacrifice them.
“That’s the problem with blind faith,” I said.
Grace, the Demon of the Faith, winked at me. “I will try not to take offense at those words.”
The demon’s forces closed in behind her. I had a lot of people on my side, people I knew would all fight to their last breath to protect me, but Grace’s horde was even larger. And they were all powerful demons.
“So,” I said, facing her.
The air between me and my demon mother was heavy with the ghosts of our past.
“So.” Grace waved her hand at her soldiers.
Beside me, Nero’s leather armor creaked. He’d grown very tense. I held our daughter close to my chest.
But Grace’s soldiers didn’t attack us. They merely spread their wings, and flew into the sky, a few at a time.
She nodded at me. “Until next time, Leda.”
I held very still. “You mean, when my daughter and I don’t have an army at our backs.”
Grace stepped toward me. She stopped when Nero moved between us. “Calm down, Windstriker,” she said impatiently. “I am not going to take your child away from you.”
“But that was always the plan,” I told her. “Your plan.”
Grace sighed. “Plans change.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not the plans of deities.”
“Well, I suppose I’m not a very good deity, no more than you are a very good angel.” Grace winked at me again. “Where do you think you got your spirit, Leda? Certainly not from Faris?!”
Stash moved to my side. His eyes didn’t waver from Grace. “Inside, she is a lot like you, sweetness. You just have to be able to see past all the demonic window dressings.”
Which Stash could. He had the power to see through to someone’s soul, to who they truly were deep down, their core essence.
“Ava was right,” I said quietly, not blinking, just looking into Grace’s eyes.
She gave me a curious look.
“I found out some things about Ava,” I told her. “By the way, she was the one to tell Sonja where you were hiding with me.”
Grace’s expression went from curious to angry.
“She thought the real reason you didn’t want to drop me off on Earth was that you’d grown attached to me, that you’d come to care for me. She was right, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.” Her word dropped like a stone between us. “Ava was right.”
Ava suddenly appeared in front of her sister. “I always am.”
Eight identical women were with her. I hadn’t met all of the octuplets yet, but of the ones that I had met, I thought I could pick out which one was which. Gertrude was so stately. Indira was shining with so much energy. Rosette’s stance was nimble, like she was ready for anything. And River was quiet and reserved. The others I didn’t have a clear read on yet.
I handed Nero our daughter, then I stepped up to Ava. “I thought you’d show up, Auntie, once all the smoke had cleared.”
Ava’s eyes darted to Sierra.
My cat hissed at my demon aunt.
“You won’t be taking her,” I told her. “She isn’t your weapon. And she’s my daughter.”
Flames burst up all across my halo. Even my wings were on fire. But the fire didn’t hurt. It felt just right.
Ava simpered at me. “You are a very foolish child.”
I glared back at her. “Then teach me a lesson, if you can.”
Ava moved so fast that I could barely see her, but I was ready. I grabbed her wrist, and swung around, tossing her a good ten feet.
She rose from the ground, fury in her eyes. Her halo was burning now too. But the flames weren’t red or orange. They were black. The scent of burnt cookies flooded my nose. No doubt about it—Ava was pissed.
“Go,” I told her, my voice frozen over. “Your schemes are not welcome here.”
Ava waved the octuplets forward. “Take Leda Pandora’s child,” she commanded them. “Kill anyone who gets in your way.”
But the octuplets didn’t move.
Ava spun around. “What are you waiting for?” she demanded.
The octuplets were a chorus of chuckles.
Ava snapped back around to glare at me. “This is your doing, Angel of Chaos. What have you done?”
“Oops.” I lifted up my hand, lightly shaking the bracelet dangling between my fingers. The eight tiny charms clinked together.
Ava hurriedly glanced at her wrist, where her bracelet had once been. “That is impossible.”
“Not impossible,” I told her. “It just took years of practice to perfect my pickpocketing skills.”
“Pickpocketing,” Ava repeated in disbelief.
“I learned it on the streets of Purgatory. I can teach you how to do it if you want.” I flashed her a grin.
Ava opened her mouth, but no words came out. Apparently, I’d rendered the demon speechless.
Her sister Grace, however, was laughing her ass off. “You pickpocketed Ava.”
Yes, she found that very, very funny.
“I guess that’s an attack the demons of Hell’s Army haven’t learned to defend against, it being rather scrappy and all.” I arched my brows. “It’s not a particularly divine skill.”
“No, it is not,” Grace laughed.
“I demand that you return my bracelet immediately!”
So Ava had gotten her voice back.
“No. I don’t think so. And, besides, these don’t belong to you.” I tapped one of the eight immortal artifacts attached to the bracelet chain. “I know what happened, what you were trying to hide from me. And I know what you were trying to hide from Grace. I’ve already told Grace that it was you who told Sonja where she was hiding with me, so Sonja’s agent could steal me from her.”
Ava glanced at her sister, who scowled at her.
“But Sonja’s agent wasn’t really loyal to Sonja at all,” I continued. “Aradia blamed Sonja for what happened to her friend Thea. So Aradia didn’t return m
e to Sonja. She raised me on Earth—until the day Sonja’s soldiers found and killed her.”
“I was following our plan,” Ava said to Grace.
“Plans sometimes change, Ava. And I trusted you.” Grace shook her head. “Well, no longer. You’re even worse than Sonja.”
I walked up to the octuplets and handed them the charms off the bracelet, one by one. Each of the eight sisters hooked her own immortal artifact onto her necklace.
“Thank you, Leda Pandora,” all eight said in unison.
Then they turned their eyes on Ava. That’s when the Demon of Hell’s Army made a speedy retreat from the battlefield.
Grace watched her sister fly off. “Serves her right for underestimating you,” she laughed. “Leda, you’re the chaos that throws a monkey wrench into the best-laid plans of gods and demons.”
My mother bowed her head to me and then to Sierra, then she also took flight.
“You know, I might have been wrong about Grace,” I said to Nero. “I’m more than just a weapon to her.”
“You might be more than a weapon to her, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t also a weapon to her,” Nero warned me. “Be careful.”
“Oh, I know, Nero. Things are never simple with gods and demons.”
36
The Love Child of Order and Chaos
I’d just gotten Sierra settled into her crib in the garden library—now a nursery of another kind—when Cadence’s Aunt Eva and Eva’s husband Jiro popped up. There were cribs with babies in them all over the garden library, but the two Immortals went straight for Cadence’s daughter.
Eva smiled down on the child. “She’s beautiful.” Her gaze shifted to Cadence. “What is her name?”
“Eira,” Cadence told her.
“Perfect,” Eva said, brushing aside a tear.
Eira had been the name of Cadence’s mother, Eva’s sister.
Jiro patted Damiel on the back. “May your daughter grow in power and grace.”
Damiel drew his old friend Jiro into a hug.
“She is very tiny,” Eva said. “But very strong.”
