by Ella Summers
“You told the guards there would be Nectar,” I said, working it out. “They helped you set it up. They made sure it was in everyone’s cup. You are creating your own Legion from the remnants of Darkstorm’s army.”
Eva shrugged. “You always were so clever, Cadence.”
“Where did you get the Nectar?” I asked her.
Nectar wasn’t just passed around to anyone who wanted it. The gods kept it locked away.
“The time for questions is over,” Eva declared, cutting a line through the air with her dagger.
A wall of blue flames burst to life. Behind the flames, Eva’s new soldiers hurried into the ship. The windows in the ceiling opened to reveal a lovely midnight-blue sky sparkling with stars.
Damiel and I danced around the blue flames, trying to get to Eva. She slashed out with her weapon, shooting cords of angelfire at us. One of those cords kissed Damiel’s arm. His steps slowed, but he didn’t stop moving toward her.
Eva released another volley. I tackled Damiel to the ground, and the deadly blue flames shot over our heads.
I jumped back to my feet. Damiel tried to do the same—and fell back down.
“Go,” he said. “Get her.”
“That was the fire of an immortal weapon, Damiel. I have to heal you.”
“Later. Right now, you have to stop her. You cannot allow her to get away with an immortal weapon.”
“Damiel, I…”
“I’m fine.” He didn’t scream out, but I could see the pain burning in his eyes.
“I thought you didn’t believe in little white lies.”
He snorted. “I’m not lying. I just have a higher pain tolerance than you do.”
“When I get back, I’m going to heal you. Then I’m going to test your ‘higher pain tolerance’ boast by kicking your ass,” I promised him.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
I jumped up, running toward the airship, launching myself over the dying bonfires of blue flames to land in front of Eva. The airship was at my back. I’d cut off Eva’s escape path.
A heavy sigh shook her chest. “I don’t want to fight you, Cadence. But I have to go. I’m on a mission, a mission to find something that will change everything.”
“What mission? What is this something?”
She shook her head. “I can’t trust you with it. After I’ve found it…” Her voice trailed off. “Just stand aside. Let me go.”
“I can’t let you go. You know that. You stole Nectar, the deadliest poison on Earth, which you are using to raise an army. And you stole an immortal weapon.”
“I stole that weapon from a rogue dark angel. The Legion never had the Diamond Tear dagger to begin with,” she argued. “You’re my friend, Cadence. Let me go. Let me be free.”
“Free to kill?” I demanded. “Like the way you killed Colonel Starfire?”
“That was an accident!” she protested. “He wasn’t supposed to be in the tower when I fled the castle.”
“You betrayed the Legion. You betrayed everything we swore to uphold. Everything that ever mattered to us.”
“I only fight people who stand in the way of my freedom.”
“Stop and listen to yourself, Eva. That’s the same tired excuse used by basically every criminal mastermind we ever took down.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Come back to the Legion. We can fix this.”
“Come back to the Legion?” Eva scoffed. “Why? So the Master Interrogator and his lackeys can throw me into an interrogation chamber?” She shot Damiel a look of pure loathing. “No, thank you.”
She slashed out with the dagger, but this time I was faster. I hurled a ball of concentrated wind magic at her, knocking the weapon from her hand. As she watched the dagger slide all the way across the hangar, rage flared up in her eyes.
Eva lifted her hands over her head, summoning a tidal wave. It shot straight up in the air behind her. Then she blasted that wave at me. I hastily drew an intricate series of fire symbols in the air around me. I finished not a moment too soon. Eva’s wave crashed down. As water met fire, my spell flared to life, swallowing the tsunami. Smoke hissed, the thick fog of the dissolving elements filling the hangar.
The airship was already taking off, but Eva didn’t try to get on it. Through the fog, I saw a white and silver streak shoot out of the hangar. Eva was making a run for the fallen dagger.
I gathered the magic in the smoke, morphing the swirling energy into something else. The air sizzled and crackled. I wrapped my will around the magic storm. Lightning flashed. When the smoke cleared, Eva lay unconscious on the ground.
I bound her feet so she couldn’t run—and her hands so she couldn’t attack me when she woke up. Then I picked the dagger off the ground. The hilt was warm. As soon as my fingers closed around it, a harsh, heated melody began looping inside my head. The dagger was singing to me. And it was angry.
I shook the ridiculous notion from my head. How could a weapon possibly possess feelings? I listened to its song, stroking its hilt as I whispered calming words to it. Slowly, its anger subsided. Its fear departed shortly thereafter.
It was then that I realized that anger and that fear belonged to Eva. She’d transferred those emotions to the dagger, infecting it. Now that she didn’t hold it anymore, the weapon was slowly calming down. As I tucked the dagger into the holder at my thigh, a swell of contentment pulsed between it and me.
I went back into the hangar and lifted Damiel off the floor. His body was already healing the black burn marks on his right arm. It was the gash in his stomach that worried me.
“Why didn’t you tell me she cut you with the dagger?” I demanded as I set him down on the ground outside the hangar. I peeled back the ruined edges of his shirt.
His eyes fluttered open. A soft noise broke his lips.
“Could you repeat that?” I said, leaning in closer.
His hands curling around the back of my neck, he pulled me hard against his chest. He captured my lips with his mouth, swallowing my surprised cry. His kiss started out slow—a paper-thin sliver of decorum wrapped around a core of savage sensuality—but that didn’t last long. His tongue teased mine, stroking, feeding the dark, dizzying desire growing inside of me. My fingernails dug into his back, clutching him roughly to me. He groaned against my lips.
I pulled back suddenly, releasing him. “What the hell is wrong with you?!” I punched him in his shoulder, where he wasn’t wounded. “You are injured! And you’re hurting yourself just to get a chance to kiss me?”
He sat up, his eyes pulsing with magic. “If you think that was a groan of pain, then you’re even more innocent than I thought.”
My whole body buzzed in anticipation, like I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, even as clarity returned to my mind. Damiel was wounded. Just because the crazy angel’s priorities were all screwed up—just because seducing me was more important to him than getting healed—that didn’t mean I would let him bleed to death on the ground.
“I’m going to heal your wound now,” I said, reminding myself that getting involved with Damiel Dragonsire, the Master Interrogator, was a terrible idea.
“No, it’s a fantastic idea,” he countered. “Give me five minutes to convince you, and I promise you’ll agree.”
He didn’t need five minutes. I doubted I’d last five seconds. And Damiel could read my thoughts again. Shit.
A sly smile twisted his lips. I avoided his eyes. And his mouth. And pretty much his whole face. His body wasn’t much safer to look at either. I focused my attention on the bloody gash in his stomach.
“What were you trying to say to me before, when you were lying there?” I asked as I managed to get the bleeding under control.
“Your magic is sexy.”
I shot him a hard look. The man was incorrigible.
“You asked what I said, and that’s it,” he told me. “But mostly I was just muttering to lure you in, so I could kiss you.”
“You wer
e feigning pain and suffering so you could kiss me?”
“Basically. Except for the feigning part. My pain and suffering are both very real.”
“Oh, really?” I said warily. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad are your pain and suffering?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what answer is most likely to convince you to sleep with me.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help it. The angel was devilishly charming.
“You’re good to go, Colonel,” I told him. “I healed the wound in your stomach. But it was made with the blade of an immortal weapon. It will scar.”
He looked down at the slender white sliver that spanned the left side of his abdomen. “I’m surprised you managed to heal it as well as you did.”
“The blade barely touched you.”
“It touched me enough,” he replied. “It’s your magic that made all the difference.” He watched me, his gaze unblinking.
“Flattery won’t work out any better than feigning pain and suffering,” I told him.
“I don’t know about that. The pain and suffering worked out pretty well for me. I kissed you. And you kissed me back.” If he’d looked any more smug, his head would have collapsed under the weight of his own ego.
“I’d say it’s high time we got out of here,” I declared, standing.
Damiel rose with me. His eyes scanned the rocky terrain, pausing on Eva’s unconscious body. “You have secured Major Doren.”
I swung Eva over my shoulder. “Yes, but the ship got away.” I looked up at the sky. The airship was only a tiny dot in the distance. “I failed.”
“A rogue dark angel is dead. A traitor has been captured. And you recovered an immortal weapon. The airship full of pirates is just a battle for another day.”
“That’s very glass-half-full of you, Colonel.”
He chuckled. “What can I say? I’m an eternal optimist.”
The complete collapse of the airship hangar behind us muted my laughter. Red dust billowed up from the impact point, and the wild winds of these wild lands carried it long and far away.
15
A Debt to Pay
“That’s quite a story,” Nyx said.
Damiel and I had just recounted our misadventures on the Sienna Sea.
“And quite a weapon,” the First Angel added, eyeing my new dagger.
Would the First Angel force me to give it up? I really didn’t want to do that. Strange as it sounded, I felt a connection to the dagger. An affinity with it. Even so, it was a rare weapon, forged using an ancient art. We didn’t even know how to make immortal weapons anymore. Nyx surely wasn’t going to let me keep it.
But the First Angel simply said, “The dagger has chosen you to be its master.”
“I didn’t know a weapon could choose a master.”
“Not an ordinary weapon, of course. But the immortal weapons are far from ordinary. The dagger will serve you well in your next assignment.”
This time, my curiosity got the better of me. “Which is?”
I was hoping to go out and capture Eva’s pirates. I didn’t like to leave things open and unfinished.
“Colonel Dragonsire will take care of the pirates,” Nyx told me.
She was reading my mind. You’d think I would have gotten used to it after two days with Damiel, but you really never got used to something like that. I only hoped Damiel was right, that once my magic settled down from my angelic transformation, I would regain the ability to shield my thoughts from telepaths.
“With Colonel Starfire’s death and Major Doren’s betrayal, we’ve been left with a very sizable power vacuum at Storm Castle,” Nyx continued. “I have already found our new Fire Dragon, but I need an angel to command the facility and take on the role of the fourth Dragon. Colonel Dragonsire tells me your magical mastery of the elements is unparalleled, particularly water.”
I looked at Damiel, but his face was inscrutable. He might have given me a few glimpses at the man behind the angel mask, but now that we were back in civilization, here in the presence of the First Angel, he was as cold as ever.
“You will leave at once for Storm Castle, where you will become the Sea Dragon and command the Elemental Expanse.”
It was a prestigious assignment. The angel who commanded Storm Castle was entrusted with the task of keeping all the Earth’s elements in balance, to push back the wild weather of the monster plains, to keep that tainted magic from infecting our cities.
Nyx turned to leave. “Now I must have a heart-to-heart with our newest traitor.” The icy way she said it shot a trail of goosebumps down my neck.
Moving with a liquid grace unique to the First Angel, Nyx walked out of the room, leaving me alone with Damiel.
“There was a dark glimmer in the First Angel’s eyes, like she’s seen too many traitors,” I commented to him.
“Yes.” He paused. “Leon’s betrayal hit us both hard.”
Leon Ironfist was the first angel who’d defected from the Legion, who’d left the gods’ army to join the forces of hell. Nowadays, he was known as Leon Hellfire, the first dark angel of hell—and the dark angel I’d fought just a few days ago.
“He’s the one who betrayed you,” I realized.
The sting of betrayal still burned in Damiel’s eyes. I didn’t want to see him like this. I didn’t want to see him in pain.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said quickly.
“A promise is a promise,” he replied. “Leon was my friend. My mentor. I didn’t just trust him; I looked up to him. He made me the angel I am today. And then he betrayed us.”
I took Damiel’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. He didn’t say anything more, and I could tell he wasn’t going to—at least not today. I had to lighten the mood.
“You still owe me pancakes,” I teased him.
“I haven’t forgotten. I have a debt to pay to you.” His voice was serious, like he was discussing something far more important than pancakes. “I’ll make them for you the next time I’m at Storm Castle.”
My new position, the angel Dragon of Storm Castle, was one of great importance and trust. And I’d gotten it at least partially because of Damiel.
“You put in a good word for me with Nyx,” I said.
“I simply related a fact.”
“Even though you wanted to have me work with you.”
“Yes, well, I knew Nyx would never allow it,” he admitted. “The last time she assigned two angels to the same territory, the arrangement didn’t last a month before they were at each other’s throats, vying for dominance. It’s simply part of our nature, Cadence. But before you think me totally unselfish, Storm Castle sits in a territory that touches my own.”
So he wanted to keep me close. Honestly, the idea no longer frightened me.
“Thank you,” I told him.
“Cadence.” Humor flashed in his eyes. Now that Nyx was gone, he’d let down his mask for me—if only a little. “If you want to thank me, I can think of a few ways.”
I snorted. “I’m sure you can.”
He winked at me, a remarkably boyish gesture from the serious Master Interrogator. But was he really so serious? He certainly seemed more relaxed now that our mission was over. Or maybe he’d always been that way—and I’d just been too scared to see it.
I stood at the window, looking out across the city, savoring these last few moments before I had to dive into work again.
“I’ll see you soon, Cadence.”
Damiel spoke the words like he knew something I didn’t, but when I turned to ask him about it, he was already gone. I could still feel the weight of his presence lingering in the air, the potent punch of his distinctive magic cocktail mixed with his warm, earthy scent.
Two days ago, if someone had told me I’d actually be looking forward to my next meeting with the Master Interrogator, I’d have thought they were insane. But now—well, now I just couldn’t wait to see him again.
16
Frozen in Time
I stared out the window of my new bedroom. The sky was quiet, but not cloudless. The dark clouds were unusually still, like they were frozen in time. In fact, the Elemental Expanse that surrounded Storm Castle was eerily calm as well, as though all the elements were holding their breath, just waiting for something to happen.
I was holding my breath too.
Tomorrow morning, as the sun rose on a new day, I would take part in the ceremony that would make me a Dragon of Storm Castle. I’d heard it was a powerful experience, to be magically linked to one of the Earth’s four elements. To become one with its deep and ancient power.
“Are you nervous?”
I turned away from the window to look at Allegra. She sat on my bed, browsing through an angel tabloid magazine.
“I am a bit nervous,” I replied honestly.
Becoming the Sea Dragon was a job that involved a great deal more meditation and quiet reflection than any of the more active roles I’d taken in the past. It required me to be at peace—in complete harmony—not only with my element, but also with the other three Dragons, who were each linked to one of the other elements.
“No need to fret, darling. I’m here to take care of you.” She winked at me.
I laughed, which was exactly what I needed right now. Allegra’s magic wasn’t as powerful as mine, but she did take care of me. She always had my back—no matter what.
“I’m glad my father made sure you were transferred here with me,” I told her.
“General Silverstar is a tough angel, but he really does care about you.”
“I know.”
Even though I often forgot it. My father had trained me to be independent, to fight alone and to depend only on myself. Still, I’d always felt a deep need for personal connections. To have friends.
Dad considered this need a weakness. It was one of his regular lecture points, but he humored my weaknesses in a way he would not do with others. It was a sign that under the ruthless archangel exterior, he really did love me.