“Are you all right?” I asked Jace.
He drew in a deep breath, masking his pain, his anguish. It was the face of a soldier.
“That’s Delta Wardbreaker,” he said, looking at the final soldier.
I didn’t fail to note that Jace hadn’t answered my question, but I didn’t press him on it either. He needed time. He hadn’t especially liked his sister, but he had loved her. I could see that in his eyes, no matter how much he buried his feelings.
I followed his gaze to Delta, the soldier wearing an elaborate assortment of dark braids.
“Delta’s father is General Osiris Wardbreaker, the archangel who lost his mind and went rogue,” said Jace. “The Legion believes him to be dead, but no one has seen the body. Or knows how he died.”
I knew. Nero’s father Damiel, another archangel who was supposed to be dead, had found Osiris Wardbreaker in a mad, murderous rage. And Damiel had killed him.
“Delta is the oldest of us here,” Jace told me. “She’s been waiting over a century to be made an angel.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t have the right temperament,” I suggested.
“Perhaps not. Delta is a bit crazy herself. And being an angel requires a certain levelheadedness.” He slanted an assessing look my way.
I smiled. “I’m very levelheaded.”
He snorted. “Pay up. Tell me what’s in that spell-eating powder.”
“The mixture includes two petals of emerald lily, a stalk of shredded thunder root, one dragon eye, and twenty strands of silver wolf hair,” I rattled off. “It’s a little concoction my sister Bella taught me how to make.”
“And it dissolves all spells?”
“No, only psychic spells. I have different powders to dissolve the other kinds of magic.”
“And how do you make those other powders?”
“Oh, no,” I said with a smirk. “That wasn’t part of our deal. You only asked for this powder’s recipe. Next time, you might want to negotiate better.”
Jace hit me with his silent stare.
I countered with a cheerful smile.
“As always, well played, Leda,” he chuckled.
I dipped into a curtsy.
Jace’s laugh was short-lived. A dark look crossed his face.
“Nero is standing behind me, isn’t he?” I asked.
Jace nodded.
“Of course he is,” I sighed, then turned around to face Nero. He loomed like a dragon closing in on an unsuspecting village. I shot him my most disarming smile.
He folded his arms across his chest, clearly not amused. “I told you to train against your partner. This does not look like training.”
I kept on smiling. “Sorry?” I offered sheepishly.
“Time to split up this little dream team. Fireswift, partner with Spellsmiter.”
Jace hurried over to Andrin Spellsmiter.
“You’re with Wardbreaker,” Nero told me.
I met Delta’s feral grin and sighed. “Awesome.”
I jogged across the room, stopping opposite her.
“The famous Pandora, hero of the Earth. At long last, I have the chance to test my skills against such a renown opponent,” Delta sneered.
The demented gleam in her eyes was downright disturbing, like she intended to take me apart piece by piece—and then bathe in my blood.
We drew papers from the bowl. Delta got offense and Dragon’s Storm, the power of elemental magic. I got defense yet again and Fairy’s Touch. Well, this would be interesting. If I’d been a level seven soldier, I could have used my fairy magic to heal myself. But I wasn’t a level seven soldier; I didn’t have any fairy magic at all. Which left me with exactly zero magic to combat Delta Wardbreaker, the craziest soldier here.
“Fairy’s Touch,” Delta purred as my paper disintegrated. “It’s too bad you don’t possess that ability.”
She wove an air spell between her hands, then shot the sparkling silver ribbon of magic at me. Nice. Delta had hardly given me a chance to read the ability off my paper before attacking. I evaded her spell—but only just barely. I was so slow without my vampire powers.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said, keeping my smile cheerful. “I’m pretty good at improvising.”
“Improvising,” Delta said with a saccharine smile. “Yes, I’ve heard all about your dirty tricks. Like a mangy dog fighting in the streets. Maybe you think you can teach us all a thing or two?”
She didn’t even wait for me to answer. Instead, she set her sword on fire and swung it at my head. Well, that was just rude.
Jumping up, I grabbed one of the ropes hanging from the ceiling. I swung it like a whip, smacking the knotted end down hard on Delta’s hand. Swinging the rope again, I wrapped it around her, pinning her arms to her sides.
“Teach you something?” I smiled at her. “Only if you ask nicely.” I knocked the sword from her hand.
Growling, Delta set the whole rope on fire. She didn’t seem to care that she was setting herself on fire too. Well, she was kind of fireproof. Unlike the rope. The fire covered it completely now. And the flames were quickly consuming the other apparatuses, spreading across the gym.
Nero came over and calmly put out the fire with a single tap of his magic. He looked from Delta, to the charred remains of the rope, to the scorch marks on the gym floor—then finally to me.
“You are not following my instructions,” he told me, his tone as cold as an Arctic field after a winter storm. “I said to defend using the power you drew from the bowl. I don’t remember writing ‘gym equipment’ on any of those papers.”
Wait just one minute. Delta had almost burnt down the gym, and he was blaming me?
I was tempted to point out that I’d drawn a power I didn’t possess—and how unfair it was. But the Legion wasn’t about fairness. In a battle, you couldn’t suddenly stop and cry fowl and expect anyone to care. They’d just see you as a stationary target.
So I didn’t complain about the unfair exercise, or even that Nero was picking on me more than he was on anyone else here. Instead, I stared at him in stony silence.
“Shoes off,” he commanded.
I slid out of my shoes.
“The rest of you too.”
The others did as he said, doing their best to cover their confusion.
Nero tapped his finger to his phone screen. The gym floor split apart in the middle of the room, revealing a large recessed pit the size of a running track. Smoke billowed up from the newly-emerged track. It was completely covered in red-hot coals.
“How long have you been a soldier in the Legion of Angels?” Nero asked me.
I could barely take my eyes off the red glowing embers. “Fourteen months.”
The Legion brats sneered at me like I was an upstart, a troublemaker for daring to believe that I could become an angel after such a short time. I noticed they didn’t look that way at Jace, even though he’d joined the Legion at the exact same time as I had. Because he was the son of an angel, a Legion brat, the heir to a legacy.
“The Legion is a team,” Nero said, addressing the whole room now. “We are working toward a common goal: to uphold the gods’ justice and protect the Earth and its people. We cannot afford to have any weak links. Our enemies will exploit them. We share in our victories as well as in our defeats. And we all bear the burden of our mistakes and shortcomings. To that end, you will all now run fourteen miles around the track, courtesy of Leda Pierce. One mile for every month that she should have learned the importance of following orders.”
Fourteen miles on the burning hot coals track? Barefoot? Was he serious? Sure, we were all mostly fireproof now that the magic-inhibiting potions had worn off, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt to run over burning coals. Nero had lost his mind.
I was kicking myself for not answering with one year instead of fourteen months. One mile around the burning coal track was better than fourteen. Of course, Nero probably would have found a way to make one equal more than fourteen. One hundred
miles perhaps. Angel math was creative like that.
The Legion brats had abandoned all pretense of stoicism. They were now openly glaring at me. All except for Jace. He was just shaking his head, obviously lamenting the latest trouble I’d gotten him into.
“Get running, all of you,” Nero snapped. His voice tore through the hall, echoing, resounding. It seemed to come from every direction at once. “Before I add another mile. Or ten.”
The others threw me a final scornful glare, then ran onto the track. Great. Now they all hated me even more. So much for making friends.
As the hot breath of the coals kissed my feet, my mind tried to comprehend why Nero was acting this way. An unsettling possibility presented itself. Maybe the angel in the gym hall with us right now wasn’t Nero at all. The First Angel had once masqueraded as Basanti, masking herself with a shifting spell. Could someone else be pretending to be Nero? And if so, what had happened to the real Nero?
3
Boot Camp 2.0
The training facility’s exterior floodlights flashed on, lighting up the night and welcoming me back to civilization. I dragged my aching, bleeding body inside. I would have kissed the ground in relief if I’d thought I could have stood up again.
I’d just finished my disciplinary run around the island. The real problem hadn’t been the fifty-mile run after the insane day of nightmare training. No, it had been the fifty-mile run through the pitch-dark, monster-infested jungle after the insane day of nightmare training.
Fifty miles had never felt so long, not even back when I’d been mortal. It had been more like fifty miles of monster fights with a lot of running in between. The Legion of Angels Boot Camp 2.0 at Crystal Falls made my early days at the Legion seem like a distant, pleasant dream.
Only my sheer stubbornness of will had kept me going through the barefoot run over burning coals and everything that had followed—all the way up to and including my descent into the monster-infested jungle.
Back when I’d been a Legion initiate, I’d been absolutely certain that no one could be tougher than Nero Windstriker. Tough, ha! I hadn’t even known the true meaning of the word until today. The new Nero wasn’t just pushing us to the brink of exhaustion. He was pushing us to the brink of our own immortality. Truth be told, I wasn’t feeling particularly immortal right now.
As I walked down the hall, I tried to remind myself that Nero was just trying to make me stronger. Unfortunately, my aching bones were screaming louder than the voice of reason in my head.
And what if the man training us wasn’t Nero at all?
I’d had a lot of time to think during my jungle run—to analyze Nero’s words, his actions. He wasn’t really acting out of character. And yet, he was acting very oddly toward me. Cold and distant. Detached. Like the two of us weren’t a couple at all, like we didn’t share an apartment in New York. Like I wasn’t his mate.
Why would someone be pretending to be Nero?
It might be Nyx again. After all, the First Angel had once impersonated Basanti, so there was precedent. Nyx might be hoping to learn more from someone here by pretending to be Nero. But the only person here who was close to Nero was me, and this ‘Nero’ was acting like we were near strangers. Rebuffing me certainly wasn’t the best way to learn anything from me.
Perhaps it was Colonel Fireswift, off on one of his investigations. But why impersonate Nero? Colonel Fireswift had no problem torturing people in his own skin. In fact, he’d built his reputation on torture—and training that might as well have been called torture.
Maybe it was some other angel impersonating Nero, but I didn’t know many of them. So I couldn’t guess what their reasons might be for this charade.
Worse yet, the person pretending to be Nero could be a god. Or even a dark angel or a demon.
There were just too many possibilities—and no proof to support any of them. Until I figured out what this ‘Nero’ was up to, I couldn’t do more than speculate who was impersonating him. I had to watch him and see if he showed his cards.
But right now, first of all, I needed to eat. I hadn’t had dinner yet. I’d gone straight from training to my deep jungle run.
So it was tired, muddy, and ravenous that I trudged into the dining and recreation corridor. And just my luck, the canteen was closed. The doors swung shut behind Siri Silvertongue and Andrin Spellsmiter as they left the canteen. The cousins—no, the evil cousins—passed by me, no pity in their eyes, no shred of humanity in their souls.
Hungry and dirty, I returned to my room and jumped in the shower to at least solve one of my problems. Half an hour of vigorous scrubbing later, I finally couldn’t smell monster on me anymore. So I stepped out of the shower and got started on the homework Nero had given us: to read a three-hundred page book on the Legion’s history and customs.
I suspected I was the only one reading tonight. The other soldiers here were the children of angels. They knew their history and customs. They knew them forward and backward, left and right, inside and out. After all, this was their world.
I had years of catching up to do. Nero had warned us that he expected us to know everything in the book tomorrow, down to the tiniest detail. That meant he was going to quiz us on it, probably right in the middle of some physically-excruciating task. If I didn’t have all the right answers, tomorrow would be even worse than today.
I read for an hour, repeating the sentences aloud for better retention. By then, my stomach was rumbling so loudly that I could hardly even hear myself speak. I was also too hungry to fall asleep, assuming I managed to finish my homework before dawn.
One thing was clear: I needed food. It didn’t have to be a seven-course gourmet meal. I’d have settled for some fruit and crackers. But where was I going to find anything remotely edible at this hour? The canteen was closed for the day. I certainly wouldn’t earn any plus points by breaking into the kitchen and stealing a midnight snack. Maybe I should have started a fire and roasted one of the beasts I’d killed during my fifty-mile run through the jungle.
I pushed back from my desk, standing to my feet. That was exactly what I’d do. I was going back into the jungle to catch myself a snack right now. The bizarre beasts in there hadn’t looked all that appetizing, but it sure beat starving.
I grabbed a set of running clothes and shoes. Before I could put them on, however, a knock sounded on my door. What now? Were the Legion brats stopping by to play some juvenile prank on me?
I dropped my sport attire and picked up my sword. Then I opened the door.
Nero stood on the other side—or at least someone who looked like Nero. He stepped into my room without a word. The door whispered shut behind him.
He looked me up and down, his gaze darting from the sword in my hand, to the running clothes at my feet. “Where are you going at this hour?”
“For another run. Because I don’t think I repented thoroughly enough during the first one,” I added with an innocent smile.
He cocked a single eyebrow at me. “Don’t bullshit me, Pandora. We’ve been through too much.”
“Have we?” I set my sword on my desk, still close enough to grab it if the need arose. I picked up my sports clothes and tossed them onto my bed. “Because today you acted like we’ve never met before.”
An idea hit me. Nero and I were linked by magic. Which meant there was a surefire way to see if he truly was who he appeared to be, one thing no amount of magic could hide, no matter how powerful someone was. Even a deity could not fake this.
I grabbed him and bit down on his neck. As his blood filled my mouth—that delicious, fragrant, one-of-a-kind flavor—I realized it really was him. It was my Nero.
His blood called to me, mixing with my own blood and magic. Its seductive song was drawing me under, sending my self control spiraling through the shredder. I gripped his back, clutching him to me, craving him. All of him.
I let go abruptly, pushing away from him. My labored breaths shook my chest.
“That was some welcom
e.” Passion, need, hunger—that and much more burned in Nero’s emerald eyes. His gaze slid over my body, devouring me. He reached toward me, like he wanted to drink from me too.
Instead, he retracted his hand and tapped his fingers to his neck. As I watched him heal the wounds I’d left there, I swallowed my hunger—and along with it, the last few precious drops of his blood lingering in my mouth. My fangs retracted.
“I had to make sure you were you,” I told him.
“Who else should I be?”
“An imposter. You were acting so strangely today.”
“I had to act that way. I had to be detached and professional. I am in charge of this training now. I can’t show favorites.”
“Oh, but you are showing favorites,” I countered. “I am obviously your favorite—to torture. You weren’t here for five minutes before you punished me.”
“Yes.” He bit out the word. “I wasn’t here for five minutes before you forced me to punish you.” He closed in, his massive body casting a shadow over me. His finger brushed softly across my lower lip. “Before this mouth got you into trouble.”
I caught his hand in mine, holding it to my lips. I kissed his fingers softly. Sure, I was angry at him for the hell he’d put me through today, but I’d also missed him. And I was so relieved that it was really my Nero here, not an imposter.
“Your method to ascertain my identity was somewhat extreme,” he commented.
“Says the man who had us run fourteen miles over hot coals.”
“That was the angel, not the man.”
“Ok, then the angel was extreme.”
“I hope you will not make a habit of biting people as a greeting.”
I flashed him a smile. “Oh, no. I reserve that greeting just for you, honey.”
“Good.”
I chuckled.
“What would you have done if I’d not been me?” Nero asked.
“I would have promptly spat out the imposter’s blood, of course.”
Fairy’s Touch: Legion of Angels: Book 7 Page 3