20
The Gods' Justice
All discussions and arguments in the gods’ hall promptly died a swift death. Every eye in the room tracked Damiel and Stash as Faris’s soldiers brought them before the gods’ thrones.
“Enter the traitors and rebels,” Valora declared, her voice as clear as a bell. “The insurgents. The evaders of the gods’ justice.”
She certainly was laying on the drama thick.
“And one of them is sitting on her father’s throne,” a voice pierced the hall.
Valora’s eyes darted around, trying to figure out who had spoken against her. They fell on Meda.
Zarion glowered at Meda. “Says she who betrayed us to the Guardians.”
“Be silent, Zarion. This mess is all your fault,” Meda snapped at him. “You and your lust.”
“Lust comes in many forms, Meda. Including your lust for power. For control. That is the root of your abominable experiments on monsters.” Zarion’s eyes flickered to Maya. “And on angels. You tortured your poor sister’s lover.”
“Shut up, Zarion,” Maya snapped. “I don’t need your help. Or your sympathy.”
“Nor do you have either,” he growled. “Your weak heart and your sister’s thirst for power lost us an angel. Wardbreaker would have been better off if you’d killed him the moment you realized you had feelings for him.”
“I am not you,” Maya growled between clenched teeth. She drew her sword.
Flames flared to life on Zarion’s hands. Meda aimed a gun at his head. Maya drew a second sword and pointed it at her sister. A coil of hissing blue magic formed in Valora’s hands. Aleris had summoned a flock of wild red bats out of thin air. They spiraled around him like a spinning cyclone. Ronan watched them all, his arms folded across his chest, psychic magic pulsing out from him like a drum’s heavy war beat.
“Do you still think this is just a minor skirmish between the gods, soon to be resolved?” I asked Colonel Fireswift as Zarion shot a fireball at Meda’s head.
Colonel Fireswift’s eyes darted between the gods, his jaw clenching up. He looked like his world, everything he knew to be proper and dignified and orderly, was crumbling to pieces before his eyes.
“The gods’ justice will prevail,” he said stubbornly.
“Enough,” Faris’s voice boomed over the bickering gods.
The walls shook—and everyone just stopped. I could feel his siren magic rippling over me and everyone else in this room. It hadn’t compelled the gods, but it had made them stop and listen.
“That’s better.” Faris waved Damiel and Stash toward him. “Come forward, prisoners.”
Faris’s godly soldiers nudged Damiel and Stash forward with their weapons. The silver-tipped spears shone like immortal weapons. Damiel and Stash sure moved away from the spears like the weapons had the power to hurt—or even kill—an immortal.
“General Damiel Dragonsire,” Faris began. “You stand accused—”
“The Legion of Angels is my domain, Faris,” Ronan cut in, stepping forward. “I will determine how it is run. And I will decide how traitors are dealt with,” he added, his words etched in ice.
“Yes, we all see how you dealt with this traitor,” Faris laughed. “By hiding him away from us.” He turned to face the other gods.
They were nodding in agreement, their eyes narrowing in annoyance when they looked upon Ronan. The gods were arrogant by nature. They didn’t enjoy being fooled. It was a hit to their self-proclaimed omnipotence.
And yet they were always keeping secrets from the other gods, big ones at that. As this training continued to demonstrate.
“General Dragonsire was convicted in a different era,” said Ronan. “Back then, we were overly zealous, seeing threats that were not there. We’d just lost several angels to the demons, who’d corrupted their minds and magic, turning them against us.”
“And you saw that same corruption in General Dragonsire’s magic,” Faris said. “You saw that his magic was going dark.”
Nyx stepped forward, joining Ronan. “An angel doesn’t slowly go dark, Faris. That’s not how magic works. We all have a little light and a little dark magic in us.”
“Perhaps that is true of you, Nyx. But not of us.” Faris glanced haughtily at the other gods, who looked offended by the notion that their magic was not pure light magic.
“Angels are not gods, as you’ve never let me forget,” replied Nyx, anger cracking her cool facade.
Nyx had been raised with the gods. She’d trained alongside them under Faris’s rule. He must have made every day of her life miserable.
“When the Dark Force turns an angel into a dark angel, they flip their magic entirely. They transfuse it, replacing light magic with dark. We didn’t understand that well enough back then,” Nyx said, steadying her voice. “A dark angel no longer has his light magic powers. General Dragonsire’s magic was not turned dark. His powers are still light magic, powers given to him by the gods.”
“You have tested this?” Meda asked.
“Yes,” replied Nyx. “The results clearly show that while his native magic contains more dark than we typically see in soldiers who survive the gods’ gifts to become an angel, his powers are powered by light magic. The source of his magic is the Nectar we gave him. He is not a dark angel.”
“You are simplifying things, Nyx. Apparently, an angel can be infused with dark magic while keeping his light magic, as my sweet sister has recently shown,” Maya said, her words dripping with venom, her eyes full of scorn for her sister.
“If you’d seen the state of General Wardbreaker in person, you wouldn’t attest that an angel can be infused with dark magic while keeping his light magic,” Damiel said. “He had retained precious little of anything. And he had completely lost his mind. His magic was fragmented, broken. It shifted with his unstable moods, going from insanely powerful to completely mortal in the blink of an eye as his light and dark magics fought each other. Meda’s procedure didn’t work.”
“It is a work in progress,” Meda said.
“A work that stops now,” Maya told her angrily. “Grafting dark magic onto light magic—it’s obscene.”
“The demons are growing stronger,” said Meda. “We need something to counter them. We need soldiers who can resist dark magic. It is too easy to kill an angel with a Venom bullet. As we saw last month.”
Isabelle Battleborn cringed at the reminder of her dead father.
“It’s even easier to kill an angel with a poison syringe in the name of science,” Maya retorted.
“He volunteered,” Meda said. “He was doing his duty.”
Maya spun around to face Ronan. “Doing his duty? You knew about this?”
“No,” Ronan said coolly.
“So you didn’t know about Meda’s experiments. You just knew that the traitor Damiel Dragonsire had killed Osiris.” Maya hurled the words in his face. “And you didn’t just protect Dragonsire; you allied with him. You worked with someone whose magic is as black as his soul.”
“As I said, General Dragonsire’s magic isn’t dark. And this proves it.” Nyx snapped her fingers, and a slim yellow folder appeared in each of the seven gods’ hands. I hadn’t known she could make objects appear out of thin air like the gods could.
“This is all irrelevant,” Zarion said as the gods looked through their folders. “We are not discussing General Dragonsire’s magic. We are discussing his treachery and deceit. Wardbreaker is not the only angel he killed. He killed another angel, Colonel Cadence Lightbringer. Then he faked his own death and left the Legion of Angels he had sworn to serve.”
Damiel hadn’t killed Cadence. He and Cadence had staged the whole thing to make it look as though they’d both died battling each other. I didn’t volunteer that information. Telling the gods that Nero’s mother was still alive would just blow open yet another secret, one I didn’t think Faris knew yet. And I intended to keep it that way.
“Damiel left because the Legion’s Interrogators we
re chasing him,” I said, stepping forward. “They were trying to kill him.”
“You will be silent,” Zarion snapped at me. “No one cares about your opinion.”
Gods, I really hoped Zarion wasn’t my father. I could just imagine family dinner night. He’d probably cut out my tongue for daring to ask him to pass the potatoes.
“Don’t throw stones in the hall of gods, brother,” Faris told Zarion. “We will soon get to your own transgressions.” Faris’s gaze flickered to Stash.
Not that Faris was a better candidate for a father figure. Last year, he’d tried to use me to expose Zarion’s secret, and he hadn’t given up when that had failed. He’d found another opportunity in these challenges. And this time, he’d upped his game to include exposing the other gods’ secrets as well while he was at it. He was still using me, under the guise of being my patron god. He was even using Aleris to strike at the other gods.
“We are dealing with General Dragonsire’s treachery for the moment,” Valora said. “And Ronan’s.”
“Treachery seems to be contagious, doesn’t it?” Ronan said coolly. “Even our esteemed king, your father, fell victim to it.”
Valora’s lips pursed together. She didn’t look happy that he was throwing her secret in her face. “It’s never so simple.”
“And neither is General Dragonsire’s situation,” Nyx said.
Valora didn’t even look at her. “Very well, Ronan. General Dragonsire is your angel. He is yours to punish as you see fit.”
“Ronan has already shown himself to be biased in this matter,” Aleris protested. “He has been sheltering General Dragonsire.”
“Enough.” The word popped off her lips like a bomb. “We are moving on.”
Aleris’s scowl deepened. He looked pretty upset about her glossing over Damiel’s betrayal. He really was obsessed with maintaining the perfect order and punishing transgressions, just as Nero had said. Colonel Fireswift should have thrown his lot in with Aleris, not Faris. Aleris was more his style.
“We now move on to the case of the demigod Stash.” Valora’s voice dipped to a blistering hiss, even as she shot Zarion a withering look. “And Zarion’s indiscretion.”
The air crackled with Zarion’s irritation. He was always so righteous. It must have been a big blow to his ego to be caught as the perpetrator of this scandal.
“Romantic entanglements with mortals are prohibited, Zarion,” Valora said. “You knew that.”
“So did your father.”
Valora’s lips hardened into a thin line. “Your behavior was obscene. This act demands a response.”
“Will that response be swift and decisive, Valora? Or will you scheme for years, waiting for the right moment to stab me in the back?”
Like you did to your father.
Zarion didn’t say those words, but they were implied. Everyone here knew it.
Valora’s eyes pulsed with pure loathing as her gaze fell upon Stash. She looked at him like she looked at Nyx, like he represented all that went wrong when the gods were seduced by mortals and led off their holy, heavenly path.
“What to do with him…”
Valora paused. She looked like she was cooking up a juicy punishment, one that involved every terrible thing she wished she could do to Nyx. Her father had protected Nyx all those years, and now Ronan did. So Valora was redirecting her anger on Stash, who didn’t have a god to watch his back.
Well, I wasn’t going to have it. Zarion had tried to kill Stash when he’d still been inside his mother’s womb, so the god wouldn’t stick out his neck for his son now. Zarion clearly didn’t care what happened to Stash. He was a problem, an embarrassment, a threat to his holiness. Something to be annihilated, not protected.
Ronan stood by Nyx because he loved her, but he and Nyx were training Stash because he possessed powerful magic that they could use. They weren’t his friends. They didn’t care about him as a person.
But I did. Stash was my friend, and I was not going to allow him to be tortured and executed because Zarion couldn’t keep his libido in check. I moved to stand beside Stash.
“What are you doing, child?” Valora demanded.
“I’m protecting Stash.”
Faris looked mildly amused, like I was nothing more than an ant standing up to the dragon that would crush it. “From whom?”
“From anyone who would do him harm,” I said. “Stash didn’t do anything wrong, and he doesn’t deserve to be punished.”
“A weed doesn’t do anything wrong in isolation,” Aleris told me serenely. “It is living its life, growing where it has always grown. But then, pop, you kill it. Why do you think that is?”
I frowned. “Because you decided to put a flower garden there, and the weed is in your way.”
“You need to look at the big picture,” said Aleris. “The weed is wild, out of control. If you allow a weed to exist, it will continue to spread. It will outgrow all the roses and carnations, all the lilies and peonies. It will wrap its spiky, ugly vines around the pretty flowers and choke the life out of them. It will block out the sun and destroy all that is right and orderly and beautiful in the world. The weed is, at its very core, chaotic.”
That was the gods’ worldview to a T: preserve their own order and stomp everything else into oblivion.
“Why would you protect the weed and allow the roses to die?” Aleris asked me.
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess you could say I have a certain affinity for weeds. They are nature’s underdogs.”
Nero stared at me, silently willing me not to pour any more gas on the fire. Damiel, on the other hand, snickered.
“It’s not too late to punish you, Dragonsire,” Ronan warned him.
Aleris’s eyes considered Stash with dispassionate appraisal. “Now we just need to decide what to do with this weed.” His gaze shifted to Zarion. “And the one who planted it.”
“Stash has god’s blood. Powerful magic,” Ronan said. “And right now, we need all the magic we can get to fight the demons. That’s why we were training him.”
“In secret,” Valora noted.
“Because we knew exactly how you would all react to the news of his existence,” Nyx told her.
Valora’s nose crinkled up, as though Nyx’s words stank like rotting cabbage.
“What would you have us do, Nyx?” Meda asked her. “We cannot allow indiscretions to go unpunished.”
Nyx’s dark brows arched. “If anyone who has erred is going on the chopping block, you all have a lot to answer for.”
Anger flared in Valora’s eyes. “How dare you speak to us like that, you—”
“Choose your next words wisely, Valora,” Ronan said, stepping in front of Nyx.
“Indeed,” Aleris agreed. “Handing out punishments is all well and good, but there’s no reason to lower ourselves and allow savage emotions to get in the way of reason.”
The problem with Aleris was that he was merciless in his reasoning. He wouldn’t laugh at you, insult you, or snarl at you—but he would kill you just the same if he found you in violation of his perfect garden of order.
“Zarion should choose Stash’s fate,” Faris suggested. “After all, this mess is his. Just as General Dragonsire is Ronan’s mess.”
“Agreed,” said Valora.
But Faris wasn’t done yet. “Choose your son’s fate, brother,” he told Zarion. “For you will share in it.”
Oh, clever. If Zarion was too harsh on Stash, then he suffered. If he went too easy on him, the other gods would determine he was just saving his own skin. And then they would punish Zarion in ways I didn’t even want to imagine.
Zarion turned to the other gods for support, but they now looked even more enthusiastic about him choosing his son’s punishment. They were lapping up his anxiety. The gods didn’t just play games with mortals and supernaturals. They played games with the other gods. If this training had taught me anything, that was it. It had given me a rare look into the ways of gods, beyond all their g
lamor and magic.
“The demigod Stash will submit to hard training in Heaven’s Army for a period of one month, to commence at the conclusion of this Legion training,” Zarion finally said after a long pause.
A delighted smile curled Faris’s lips. “You realize what this means, don’t you, brother?”
“That I share in his fate. Yes, I am well aware.”
“You will train with young gods. Like a child.” Faris was practically snickering.
“Maybe I’ll teach you a thing or two.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’ll break you.”
“You can certainly try,” Zarion said, fire in his eyes.
“Oh, I will,” Faris replied, smirking. “I will.”
Zarion looked at Valora, the unspoken question in his eyes. He was waiting for her to approve.
“The punishment is acceptable,” she decided.
“If Stash performs adequately, he will join Heaven’s Army,” Faris said.
The gods nodded in agreement, much to the apparent dismay of Ronan and Nyx. In fact, they looked even unhappier than Zarion, who was sharing in Stash’s punishment. Zarion simply looked resigned—and a tad defiant.
Faris would be recruiting Stash into his army. I was sure of it, just as I was sure he’d planned all along to steal him from Nyx and Ronan. Faris had been winning a lot lately. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I did wonder why, out of all the possible punishments, Zarion had chosen this one. During that month of training, Faris wouldn’t pass up any chance to humiliate his brother. One month might have been the blink of an eye to an immortal, but Faris would find ways to make it feel like an eternity. I knew that he would. He and his brother didn’t just simply not get along; they despised each other.
Jace walked up beside me. “Intense,” he commented as Faris’s soldiers escorted Damiel and Stash out of the hall.
“Not as intense as the last challenge.” I smirked at him. “In particular, I enjoyed watching your face during our last game of Legion as I leveled up Colonel Fireswift’s soldier into an angel.”
Fairy’s Touch: Legion of Angels: Book 7 Page 19