Osiris began to rise from the bed, but she caught his hand.
“I have already lingered too long, my love,” he said, his thumb massaging deep circles into her palm. “If the other gods found out I was here with you in heaven—”
“They won’t.” But Maya promptly released his hand.
“They would turn on you.” Osiris leaned down and stroked her cheek. “I am not strong enough.”
“I won’t allow any harm to come to you,” Maya promised him.
“I am not strong enough,” he repeated. “But I will be. Soon.”
The scene flickered out, the ethereal light of heaven dissolving under the weight of blood and grit.
Osiris lay on the floor in a partially destroyed city apartment building, debris strewn all around him. He flipped over, his mad, wild eyes looking up at the massive hole in the ceiling as he rose to his feet. Blood dripped from his body, splattering the ground.
Damiel Dragonsire, Nero’s father, shot through the ceiling, his wings tightly angled as he dove at Osiris. The two archangels collided in an explosion of magic, muscle, and feathers.
“Why have you risen from the dead, Dragonsire?” Osiris growled, insanity saturating his voice.
He hadn’t sounded like this when he’d spoken to Maya. Oddly enough, the goddess seemed to bring out the humanity in him.
“I was never dead,” Damiel said.
Osiris sneered. “You will be when the Legion finds out you survived.”
“You won’t be telling them. You abandoned the Legion of Angels, Osiris. Or don’t you remember?”
Osiris blinked in confusion.
Fire erupted on Damiel’s blade. “You massacred over a hundred children.”
Osiris’s roar shattered the remaining threads of his sanity. He surged forward, magic exploding out of him, slamming Damiel against the wall. Several of Damiel’s ribs were now broken, but the archangel didn’t seem to care.
“It’s too late for you, Osiris.”
Damiel lifted his sword, and this time his opponent didn’t bombard him with magic. In fact, the glowing aura had completely faded from his body. Osiris’s mindless fury had faded too. His eyes darted around the room, unfocused, confused. What had happened to him?
“Damiel,” Osiris croaked. “I don’t remember…”
Damiel shook his head. “I can’t fix this. All I can do is end it.”
His blade plunged through Osiris’s chest, pulsing blue. Then Osiris dropped to the ground. That sword had to be an immortal weapon. Nothing else could bring down an angel that quickly.
“What happened to you, Osiris?” Damiel lifted the dying archangel over his shoulder.
The final, fading taps of Damiel’s boots echoed as the building disappeared. New images shot out of the General’s dead body.
“Wardbreaker lost his mind,” Damiel said, setting Osiris to the ground at Ronan’s feet.
Osiris was still alive—barely—but he was fading fast.
Ronan’s leather vest creaked as the god folded his arms across his chest. “What was the cause?”
“I don’t know,” Damiel said. “But something about his magic isn’t right. Do you want me to investigate?”
“No,” Nyx replied. “We have something more pressing for you to do.”
Osiris choked out a final dying breath.
As the final scene dissolved like smoke, Delta tucked the opera glasses into her jacket. Her eyes quivering, she lifted up her father’s body and carried it through the magic mirror on the wall.
* * *
“I knew you two were plotting something,” Valora’s voice boomed like thunder as the Legion teams returned to the gods’ audience chamber. She glared at Nyx and Ronan—but mostly just at Nyx. “First, you hide a demigod from us, and now an archangel.”
Meda glanced at Maya. From the look in her eyes, she was just as surprised by Maya’s affair as the other gods. Maya hadn’t even told her own sister about Osiris.
“Gods sleeping with mortals. Goddesses sleeping with angels. Gods sleeping with demigods.” Valora slanted a searing look Nyx’s way. “These Earthly relations have gone too far.”
“Agreed,” said Aleris. “No good has ever come of mixing heaven and Earth.”
“Nor has any good ever come of overreacting,” Faris declared. “Let us table these discussions for a later date.”
So Faris wanted the gods to stew in their anger, hoping it would explode.
“Which brings us back to the challenges.” Faris walked away from his throne, stopping in front of Delta. “I’m afraid General Wardbreaker’s body is too impractical to carry around.” He unclasped the diamond flower necklace from the archangel’s neck, the very same one Maya had worn in the vision. “We will hold Wardbreaker’s body in storage for the duration of these challenges. This necklace will serve as its replacement.”
Delta glowered at Nero. His father had killed her father. But she couldn’t possibly be blaming him for that, could she?
Well, she wasn’t alone. At least half the people in this hall couldn’t stand each other. Yes, Faris’s plan was certainly working out nicely for him. And I still had no idea what that plan even was. Once the gods’ alliances fell, what would he do next? If Faris tried to attack, they would immediately unite again to fight off a common enemy.
Faris waved his hand, and the archangel’s body vanished. When Faris handed Maya’s necklace to Nero rather than Delta, her glower intensified. Faris wasn’t just sowing discord between the gods; he was cracking apart the Legion while he was at it too.
As the God of Heaven’s Army took his throne, I glanced hungrily at the buffet tables. Nowadays, meals and rest were few and far between, so I was going to seize the opportunity while I still could. I avoided the performance-optimizing shakes, instead opting for the cheese-and-tomato baguette slices. With a little bit of imagination, they almost tasted like pizza.
“Leda Pierce.”
I stuffed the rest of my baguette slice into my mouth and turned around to face the Everlasting telepath. “The memories were inside a body. That’s what you meant by an item that was not an item.”
“Yes.”
“So memories can be stored inside corpses.”
“Only in immortal bodies with enough magic,” Athan said.
“Like that of an archangel?”
He nodded. “Immortal bodies can store memories long after death. Have you ever wondered why immortal artifacts can store memories too? And why they are called immortal artifacts?”
Then he walked away, leaving me to decipher what the hell he meant by that. Speaking in riddles seemed to be the unifying feature of all immortals.
“We’re losing.”
I jumped at Colonel Fireswift’s sudden appearance behind me.
“For now,” I said, meeting his agitated eyes.
“You have a plan.”
“Am I allowed to have a plan?” I asked innocently. “I thought you were in charge, that I was to follow your lead and basically do everything you say. You make the plans. I’m just the tool supposed to obediently follow them.”
He ground his teeth. “This isn’t a typical situation.”
I smiled at him.
“You are going to make me say it,” he growled.
“Well, I know how much you enjoy hearing yourself speak. And how much you enjoy my undivided attention. Well, Colonel, right now you have it.”
His fists clenched up.
“Ok. I’ll just be over there by the strawberry cake when you’re ready.” I turned to leave.
He caught my wrist.
I looked back at him, arching my brows.
“Your methods are undignified and repulsive,” he told me.
“But?”
There was definitely a ‘but’ this time.
“But you are persistent against a superior enemy and without any resources at your disposal. You’re scrappy. Like a cockroach. So how do we win this?”
“A cockroach?” I repeated, my nose s
crunching up. “Did you woo your wife with those flowery words?”
“There was no wooing. The Legion found our magic to be compatible, that we had a high chance of producing children with the potential to become angels. So the Legion ordered us to marry.”
“Of course.”
My stomach flopped. Magic testing. That was what Nyx wanted to do to me. Being turned into an Interrogator or an Elite Warrior in the Vanguard bothered me—but not as much as what else that magic testing meant. It meant the Legion would look closely at my magic. Even if that did not reveal my origins, they would use my magic test results to pair me up with someone ‘compatible’.
I was with Nero. I didn’t want to be assigned a spouse just so we could produce children with the potential to become angels.
Maybe I could delay the testing, at least long enough for me to gain the magic I needed to find Zane. Then Nero and I would run away. The Legion would chase us, of course. We’d spend the rest of our lives on the run, hiding, forced to stay far away from our friends and family. I’d have to take them with us, uprooting them from their lives. What if they didn’t want to go?
And what if Nero didn’t want to go? Hell, I didn’t want to go. I had friends at the Legion. And past all the angels’ and gods’ bullshit, I actually liked what I did. I liked helping people. I liked making the world safer, and I wanted to keep doing that. It was just…the thought of the Legion pairing me and Nero off to other people made me sick to my stomach.
Colonel Fireswift was watching me closely. Smiling, I did a quick check of my mental shields. The gods were telepathic, and so were most of the angels here. I didn’t want any of them to overhear me plotting treason—least of all the head of the Interrogators, whose job it was to root out treason from within the Legion’s ranks.
“I’m not sure what the plan is,” I told Colonel Fireswift. “I’m still thinking of how we’ll win. Let’s just wing it for a while until an opportunity presents itself.”
“Wing it for a while until an opportunity presents itself?” he repeated in disgust.
“It usually does.”
“This is how you outmaneuvered so many enemies? By winging it?”
“What did you expect? Flow charts and color-coded maps?”
“I expected something. Some order. Some planning.”
“Order and planning? From me?” I snorted. “I’m flattered that you think so much of me, Colonel. Really, I am.”
Magic crackled in his eyes. “You are messing with me.”
“Yes. And no.” He was such an easy target that I couldn’t help kicking the hornet’s nest a little. “I really don’t have a plan yet. I’ll know what to do when the time comes.”
“How can you be sure?”
I shrugged. “I always do.”
“This is not how one plans a military campaign,” he protested.
“Oh, most definitely not. But your proper planning obviously isn’t getting us anywhere, is it? We don’t have any idea what our next challenge will be, nor how the gods will handicap us. Hence the need to wing it.”
“I don’t wing it.”
“Then don’t think of it as winging it. Let’s call it something else,” I suggested. “How about the Wait-and-Adjust Strategy?
“Dressing it up with a garish name doesn’t change its underlying principle. It’s a terrible plan, and I don’t like it.”
“I know you don’t, but try breaking out of your comfort zone once in a while. Embrace the exciting uncertainty of life. Breathe in the chaos.”
“You are breathing in enough chaos for the both of us.”
And he’d clearly had all he could take of that chaos for the moment. He went to the buffet table, his eyes honing in immediately on the disgusting performance-optimizing shakes. I wasn’t surprised. I was sure there was nothing as appealing to Colonel Fireswift as optimizing his performance.
I met Nero’s eyes. He was watching me from across the room. I started to walk toward him, but Colonel Silvertongue intercepted me.
The angel didn’t waste time. She cut right to the chase, opening with, “Both General Spellsmiter and Colonel Fireswift are dead-set on having you in their division. Why? What is so special about you?”
Her gaze drilled into me, her eyes swirling with magic, like a funnel dragging a boat at sea under the water. Warning bells tolled in my head, keeping me above water.
“I’m not special at all,” I told her. “I’m not sure why they want me. Perhaps you should ask them?”
“I’m asking you, Leda Pierce. Half the angels in this room can’t stand you; the other half of them adore you. Why?”
I felt an itch in my nose, like a sneeze was coming on. “I’m a very polarizing person,” I said brightly.
Colonel Silvertongue’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Your lips are moving, but you are not saying anything I want to hear.”
“I’m sorry?”
Colonel Silvertongue expelled an impatient breath, then walked away.
My nose finally stopped itching. That’s when I realized I wasn’t suffering from an impending sneeze at all.
“I believe Colonel Silvertongue just tried to compel me,” I told Nero as I grabbed a grape off the buffet table beside him.
“Yes.” He dropped his voice. “You’re making waves.”
There was a hint of reproach in his voice. And a hint of pride too.
“I’m not doing it on purpose, you know,” I told him.
“You are certainly torturing Colonel Fireswift quite thoroughly.”
There wasn’t even a hint of reproach in his voice this time.
“Ok, that I did on purpose,” I admitted. “But only because he completely deserves it.”
“Yes.”
Smirking, I said, “He asked me to come up with a plan to win, you know. I told him I was just going to wing it. I think he nearly had a heart attack on the spot.”
Gold and silver lightning flashed across Nero’s green irises. “Colonel Fireswift isn’t wrong about your skills. You would make a terrific Interrogator. You hone right in to someone’s greatest weakness—and exploit it.”
He lifted his hand to my ponytail, brushing it off my shoulder. Soft and teasing, his touch jolted my heart. My pulse jumped, revving up like a truck growling to life. My head was feverish, flushed.
“So, do you want to skip the rest of this little party?” I asked.
“More than anything.” Hot and silky, his words kissed my neck.
His magic rippled across my body like a lover’s whisper. My nipples hardened.
“But our absence would be noticed,” he laughed, low and deep.
I pouted out my lips. “You’re a terrible tease, Nero.”
“So what is your plan?” His hand stroked up my side.
“What?” I gasped, distracted.
“Your plan to win the challenges? What is it?”
“I told you already. I’m going to wing it.”
“I know what you told Colonel Fireswift,” Nero said, his hot breath caressing my neck. “I want to hear the truth.” His teeth nibbled on the thick, pulsing vein on my throat.
“I don’t have one yet,” I said breathlessly.
“Are you quite sure?” His fangs extended, their sharp tips teasing my neck.
My blood was burning, my whole body quivering with raw sexual need. “Yes, I’m sure.” My nails dug into his back, drawing him in closer, willing him to bite me. I turned my neck and presented it to him.
“Good.” He pulled away, his back slipping past my fingers.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one who knew knew how to exploit weaknesses.
“You were digging for information,” I said, my heart hammering so hard I could hardly hear myself speak.
“One must always know their enemy, inside and out,” he said with a scorching look that burned away all thoughts save one: sex.
I slid my hand over the table. It would do nicely once all the food was cleared. Or leave it on. I wasn’t sure I was patient enou
gh to clean up first. A distant voice inside of me reminded me that it wasn’t prudent to throw my panties at an angel in the presence of the gods. It was getting easier to ignore that voice with every passing second.
“You play as dirty as I do, General Windstriker,” I hissed in a low whisper.
“No, Pandora.” His hands closed around my waist. “No one plays as dirty as you do.”
“Let’s find out.” I grabbed his hands and pulled him out of the room.
We found a secluded spot in the gardens. There, surrounded by roses and peonies, I slunk up to him and kissed him softly on the cheek.
His eyes slid down the length of my body. “Leda.”
I turned his face toward mine. “Nero,” I whispered against his lips.
His hands clutched me tightly, his mouth coming down hard on mine as he dipped my head back. His tongue slipped past my lips, pillaging the inside of my mouth with savage hunger. I tore at his clothes, peeling back his jacket.
Nero’s hands locked around my wrists. “Leda.” My name was both a growl and a laugh on his lips.
He forced my clenched fist open, reclaiming the necklace I’d dug out of his jacket.
“Maya’s necklace,” he said, shaking his head. “So you did have a plan after all.”
“You can’t blame me for trying. You are hogging the artifacts.”
“Competence is not a crime, Pandora.”
“Very funny.” Biting my lip coyly, I fluttered my eyelashes at him.
“I’ve just caught you redhanded, and you’re already trying again?”
“You can’t blame me for wanting to touch you. You are hot, Nero.”
“Just how far were you going to take this little game?” he chuckled.
“Until I had your three godly possessions and we were both thoroughly satiated,” I replied solemnly.
“And if Delta had been in possession of the artifacts? Would you have tried your charms on her?”
“Hmm, I don’t know. She’s not really my type. So I’d probably have sent Colonel Fireswift to seduce her.”
A sexy grin twisted Nero’s mouth. Unable to resist, I leaned in and caught his lower lip between my teeth, giving it a nip. A drop of blood popped the surface of his lips. I licked it up, and sweet ecstasy exploded in my mouth.
Fairy’s Touch: Legion of Angels: Book 7 Page 15