by Ella Summers
He was tough but not stupid. Never stupid. He’d heard about Eva’s betrayal, and he must have known how hard it had hit me. So he’d used his influence at the Legion to get Allegra transferred with me. She was, after all, my only friend.
“You’ve been so quiet since your return from the Sienna Sea,” Allegra said. “I thought it was because of what Eva did, but that’s not all. You’re not just hurt. You’re…day-dreamy.”
I blinked. “Am I?”
“Yes. Which means something more happened. It must have been a wild adventure to get you so tangled up in your own thoughts, and yet I’ve heard almost nothing about it.”
“What do you want to know?” I asked her.
She glanced at the dagger strapped to my thigh. “Is it true that’s an immortal weapon?”
“Yes. And no.”
She frowned. “Cryptic comments must have come with the wings, Cadence, because you were far more direct before you became an angel.”
“It’s not my wings, Allegra. It’s the dagger. It’s not as simple as you think.”
“Then explain it to me.”
I sat down next to her on the bed. “I’m not sure I can explain it.”
“Try.”
“It’s just a feeling. Yes, the Diamond Tear has the immense power of an immortal artifact, but it is also something more. I can feel the hum of its magic song in my magic—and in my soul. It feels so good, so right. In just a few short days, it has become a part of me, like a dear old friend. I cannot imagine life without it.”
I looked at her to gauge her response to my words, but I couldn’t read her expression at all right now.
“Maybe I’m just imagining things,” I sighed. “Maybe after losing Eva, I’m just so sad and desperate to replace that ache in my heart that I’m filling the hole she left with an inanimate object.” A pitiful laugh escaped my mouth. “I’m trying to make friends with a dagger. I really am crazy.”
“If you can question your sanity, it’s unlikely that you’re insane.” She took my hands and gave them a gentle squeeze. “Maybe you and the dagger have a special connection. Or…” Her brows arched. “…or maybe this isn’t about the dagger at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“You and Colonel Dragonsire were in very real, very grave danger. Shared peril forges connections.”
“You think I’m transferring my feelings for him onto the dagger.”
“You tell me.”
I thought about it. “I’m not sure what Damiel is to me. Or what I am to him.”
A smirk curled her lips. “You really like him.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You are the perfect soldier, Cadence. You live and breathe procedure.”
I frowned.
“You can’t help it, honey. It’s the way your father raised you. Haven’t you ever noticed that Eva and I are the only soldiers at the Legion that you refer to by our first name?”
“That’s not true. What about Nyx?”
She chuckled. “Ok, smarty pants. The First Angel is like the gods. She doesn’t have a last name. But Colonel Dragonsire does. You called him ‘Damiel’, which means you at least see him as a friend.” Her smile spread to her whole face. She wasn’t just smiling now; she was beaming. “But I think he’s more than just a friend.”
“The Master Interrogator is…complicated.”
“No kidding.”
“Defining my relationship with him is even more complicated,” I added.
A devilish spark lit up her eyes. “You have a crush on Colonel Dragonsire.”
“Can you call it a crush if it’s not entirely one-sided?”
Damiel was drawn to me too. I could feel it. And this wasn’t just about magic. I’d felt something drawing us together, even when our magic had been muted.
“Colonel Dragonsire has a thing for you.” Allegra flashed me a grin. “The General is going to love that.”
No kidding. Dad had warned me about Damiel.
“So when are you and Colonel Dragonsire going to see each other again?” Allegra asked me.
“I have no idea. But he did promise to visit sometime and make me pancakes.”
“If he’s offered to make you breakfast, he must be planning on staying the night.” She winked at me.
I opened my mouth to respond with a witty retort—the details of which I was still working on—but a solid knock on my door cut my moment of rhetorical genius short.
“Well, that was fast,” Allegra commented.
“It’s not Colonel Dragonsire,” I told her. “It’s my father.”
Dad had a very distinctive knock.
I walked over to the door and opened it. Sure enough, my father stood on the other side. He wasted no time, striding into the room like he owned the place.
His gaze locked on Allegra. “Captain Prior, you are dismissed.”
He sounded especially gruff, even for him. Maybe he’d overheard our gossiping.
“Cadence,” he said after Allegra had left and closed the door behind her. “We need to talk about Colonel Dragonsire. You understand the dangers of piquing the Master Interrogator’s interest. You were not careful enough in your last mission.”
I struggled to keep a straight face—and to not flush bright red. Well, that proved it. My father had overheard us talking about Damiel. And as Allegra had said, he didn’t like it.
At this point, my best option was to play it cool.
“I didn’t do anything but obey orders. I haven’t been anything less than a perfect soldier.”
“Do not confide in Colonel Dragonsire. Do not trust him. He is not your ally, and he is certainly not your friend. No one is safe from him, not even the most perfect soldier. Even I have done things that would get me into trouble if the Master Interrogator investigated long enough.”
“You’re being cynical,” I said.
“I’m being realistic. You need to be realistic too if you want to survive the Master Interrogator’s investigation. He will stop at nothing to get his job done, even pretend to be your friend. He has studied you. He knows your weakness, your need to forge friendship.”
My father had raised me to be the perfect soldier. He thought he’d failed in one regard: my need for friends. The Legion believed personal connections made its soldiers weak.
“You weren’t careful in the Black Forest,” Dad said. “You showed your magic resistance, and now Colonel Dragonsire is out to expose you.”
“I did what I had to do in order to save Colonel Beastbreaker. I was trying to do the right thing.”
“You need to concentrate on doing the accepted thing, Cadence, rather than doing the moral thing.”
Yeah, I’d heard that one before. Many times, in fact. Apparently, I wasn’t capable of learning that lesson.
“Get some rest. I will see you at the ceremony in the morning,” he told me, then left my room.
I sat down on the edge of my bed, reflecting on his words. I understood where my father was coming from, but I couldn’t abandon my morality just to save my own skin. I wanted to do what was right. I wanted to see the good in people—not the bad, as Damiel’s role as Master Interrogator necessitated.
Damiel wasn’t alone. Too often, angels didn’t see the good in people. They saw only threats and monsters. And it was those suspicions that prevented them from seeing other ways, other paths to take. Their pessimism killed all optimism, that little special something that I was holding on to with all that I had.
For it was optimism which allowed me to see the world differently than others. It was what made the impossible possible.
Such were my thoughts as a gentle, balmy ripple of wind whispered through my open balcony door. Goosebumps prickled up across my skin. My gauzy curtains rustled, and Damiel Dragonsire strode into my room, his dark wings dissolving to smoke between one step and the next.
I rose from the bed and planted my hands on my hips. “My castle does have a front door, you know.”
“
This way is faster.”
The earthy aroma of rosewood flooded my senses, driving out all else. Damiel’s scent. The Master Interrogator sure knew how to make an entrance.
My father’s warnings were so fresh that they still rang in my ears. Damiel was here, as my father had predicted. And I didn’t think his visit was about pancakes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“I came to see you, of course.” His tone was easy.
A bizarre notion hit me. Maybe this visit actually was about pancakes—or about something personal, in any case. Maybe he just wanted to see me. Maybe he even wanted to get to know me better.
“If you’re here to bear witness to my Dragon ceremony, you’re about seven hours early. And in the wrong place. It will happen in the throne room.”
“No, I’m not here for that. I have seen so many ceremonies, after all.”
Of course he had. I wondered why I was so disappointed by his words. We were angels. I wanted to be friends—ok, maybe more than friends—but I knew all too well that angels didn’t have long relationships with other angels. They never worked out. Angels’ territorial instincts inevitably flared up and they fought.
I liked Damiel, but our adventure together didn’t change angel nature. I wasn’t sure anything could.
“So if this isn’t about my Dragon ceremony, then what brings you to my balcony at this late hour?”
“I caught Eva Doren’s airship and captured her pirates,” he told me. “We’ve interrogated them.”
“You didn’t come all the way here to tell me that.”
“No, I came all the way here because I need your help, Cadence. When interrogating Eva Doren, we learned something unusual about the Diamond Tear. It’s not like other immortal artifacts.”
“I know. Its magic is different. Somehow.”
“Yes,” he said. “It has a special power. According to Eva Doren, it can bring you to other worlds, much like the gods’ magic mirrors. Except the Diamond Tear is far more powerful. Because unlike the magic mirrors, whose entrances and exits are always set, always unchangeable, the dagger can bring you anywhere on any world.”
“And you trust her?”
“I trust my interrogation methods.”
His interrogation methods were exactly what my father had warned me about. Damiel didn’t always question someone directly. Could he be interrogating me right now, and I didn’t even realize it?
“There’s more,” Damiel told me. “The Diamond Tear is not alone. It is part of a set.”
“There’s another one?” I chewed on my lip. “Eva said she was after something, something that would change everything.” I snapped my fingers together. “The other dagger. That’s what she was after when she took off in her airship.”
“Yes. And now we’re going to find it.”
“Why do you need me?”
“The Diamond Tear responds well to your magic. You have already demonstrated you can wield its power. It will more likely follow your commands than mine.”
“I never used it to open a portal to another world.”
“The dagger knows how to do it. You just need to nudge it in the right direction. Tell it to seek out its partner dagger. According to Eva, they can find each other, even across worlds.”
“Those are some powerful weapons,” I commented.
“Weapons we must ensure end up in our arsenal, not the Dark Force’s,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“My Dragon ceremony is tomorrow morning, Damiel. I can’t run off on an interworld mission right now.”
“You will be back in time,” he assured me.
“It’s not prudent.”
“Stop being so prudent, so perfect.”
“This is a trick.” I frowned. “It’s another test. You’re trying to entrap me, to make me act badly. Then you’ll land me in a load of trouble because of it.”
“I will do nothing of the sort.” A slight smile curled his lips. “But it’s nice to see your suspicious angel nature is finally setting in.”
I grinned at him. “I’m only suspicious of you.”
I could tell he wasn’t lying about this. Somehow I could. Even so…
“My father told me to be wary of you.”
He snorted. “Of course he did. General Silverstar is no fool. But I’ll relieve you of your fears now.” He reached into his leather jacket and handed me the document he’d pulled out.
I glanced down at the page. Printed on it were orders from Nyx, orders commanding me to join Damiel on his intergalactic scavenger hunt.
I looked up from the page to meet Damiel’s eyes. Well, that settled that. Even the great archangel General Silverstar couldn’t argue with Nyx’s orders. I would be joining Damiel to find the second dagger. I only hoped it didn’t end as my father feared any further mission with Damiel would: with me in chains.
17
The Magic Eaters
Tapping into the Diamond Tear’s power was effortless, natural. As though the dagger had been made just for me. Ancient power coursed through my body. It was a powerful, unsettling, delightful feeling.
My hand had only just closed around the hilt when a sparkly glow slithered down the silver blade. I could feel the pull of another dagger, an immortal artifact both completely like and yet unlike the Diamond Tear. Magic shot out of the dagger in my hand, exploding into a starburst of bright white light that swallowed me and Damiel whole.
My bedroom faded away. In an instant, the temperature plummeted. My breath froze on my lips. A fresh blanket of snow covered the ground. Damiel and I stood in a large open field.
“We aren’t on Earth anymore,” I commented.
I knew that immediately when I gazed up. Two moons dominated the night sky: one moon waxing, one waning. There were only a few scattered clouds tonight, but they somehow only added to the tranquility.
“This place is so balanced, so symmetrical. So harmonious,” I said. “The whole world seems to be sitting perfectly on that pinpoint, that balance point, the perfect pinnacle. It feels so different from Earth, which is caught in the crossfire of warring magic—of monsters and humanity, of civilization and the wilds.”
Damiel watched me, his face contemplative as he listened to my comments. He must have found my notions to be so silly.
And maybe they were. I didn’t know what it was about that beautiful night sky with its two moons that made me think of harmony and peace. Maybe it was just its beauty. And maybe beneath its beauty, this world was every bit as discordant as ours.
“There’s a town nearby,” Damiel said.
I looked where he was pointing. In the distance lay a small village. It had a certain rugged charm about it, not unlike the Frontier towns on Earth that sat at the edge of civilization, at the doorway to the plains of monsters, with only a Magitech wall separating its citizens from the monsters they could see and hear from their houses.
Except on this world, there was no Magitech wall. And no monsters, at least not that I could see. It was like…like what Earth would have been if the monsters had never overrun our world.
The small village probably boasted no more than a few hundred residents. The small wood houses, none higher than two stories, were topped with snow. Smoke billowed from their brick chimneys; icicles dripped from their roofs. They must have used firewood to heat their houses, not Magitech.
“You have been to other worlds?” I asked Damiel.
Such was the rumor. I myself had never traveled beyond the Earth.
“Yes, I have been to several worlds.” He looked around. “But I do not recognize this one.”
“I wonder which deities these people worship: gods or demons.”
There were so many worlds. The battlefront of the Immortal War between gods and demons was vast, spanning hundreds of worlds. Had we traveled to another world ruled by the gods—or walked right into a demon stronghold?
“There is a building in those woods, to the side of the village,” Damiel said, pointing to an
evergreen forest. “The building is large and kept apart from the smaller houses. It might be a temple to whichever deities the people here worship. If we got a closer look at the temple, we’d have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”
So we bypassed the village and headed for the forest instead. As we got closer, I realized there were symbols carved on the temple’s stone walls.
“I don’t recognize these symbols,” I said.
“The language is not used by either gods or demons,” replied Damiel. “And yet it bears some similarity to both.” His eyes panned up the temple wall. “I think I have seen it before…” His head snapped around to me. “There.” He pointed at the Diamond Tear dagger strapped to my thigh. “Some of the symbols are on that dagger.”
“So these are Immortal symbols. But what are they doing on this temple? The Immortals have been gone for millennia.” I looked at the temple. “And this building looks so well-maintained. People still worship here.”
“The people of this world apparently never got the message that their deities are gone.”
A world not ruled by either gods or demons. I’d never heard of such a place.
“The other dagger is in that temple,” I told Damiel.
“How do you know?”
“The Diamond Tear knows. It’s telling me.”
Not in words, but in… I really wasn’t sure what it was. A feeling. I just knew the other dagger was inside the temple. It was accompanied by another feeling: the burning urge to run in after it.
“Someone’s coming,” Damiel said.
“From all the rustling and sloshing, it’s a lot of someones.”
They walked between the trees—fourteen people in fur-trimmed hoods and hats. Their coats and snow pants were thick. Their boots were high and warm, good for treading through deep snow. A few of the people wore scarves or gloves.
“Why are there only two of them this time?” one of the strangers asked another.
“They might be scouts.”
“Or spies.”