I grabbed for the wall to catch my fall, but my hand broke right through the bricks, crumbling them. I stumbled, barely maintaining my balance. I gaped at the sizable hole I’d put in the wall. I opened my hand, and stone crumbs spilled through my fingers, sprinkling to the ground. Athan stood beside me, his arm folded over his sister.
“What the hell did you do to me?” I demanded of him.
The gods weren’t paying me any mind. They were all focused on criticizing Aleris for what he’d done.
“Your magic wasn’t powerful enough to find her,” Athan whispered to me.
“What did you do to me?” I repeated, my voice cracking with anger and fear.
Your magic wasn’t powerful enough to find her, he said again, in my mind this time. So I leveled it up. I gave you a double dose of Nectar and Venom. I made you an angel, Leda.
That was the last thing I heard before I collapsed to the ground and passed out.
32
The Angel
I opened my eyes and saw Nero.
“What happened?” I asked groggily, sitting up in bed.
“What happened is you are an angel.” His voice was soft, even gentle. He was looking at me like I might explode—or shatter before his eyes.
“I’m fine,” I assured him, taking a deep breath.
Athan had told me he’d made me an angel, but Nero’s words made it more real.
Nero was tracking every twitch of my body, every flicker of my eyes. “We are still trying to figure out how that happened.”
“Athan happened,” I told him. “He said he needed me to wield Aleris’s glasses, to read the memories imprinted there…to find his sister.”
It all clicked. Athan’s sister was a descendent of the original Immortals. That meant her magic was both light and dark too. And so the memories her magic imprinted were mixed light and dark magic. All the other imprinted memories we’d seen during the challenges had come from people with only light magic. Legion soldiers with potent light magic had used the glasses to expose those memories off the immortal artifacts.
Athan had needed me to expose the memories his sister’s light-dark magic had imprinted on the artifact. No one else had the right magic to do it.
“Leda,” Nero said after I’d shared my revelation. “Aleris’s glasses, an immortal artifact, exposed the memories from other immortal artifacts. That is the glasses’ power. And it’s one of your powers too. You didn’t use an immortal artifact to expose the memories from the glasses. You only used your own magic.”
He was right.
“Just like I saw memories imprinted on the weapons of heaven and hell back in the Lost City last year,” I said. “Athan must have known what happened there. He knew I had this power. That’s why he needed my magic to find his sister. But I couldn’t fully read his sister’s memories off the glasses. They came to me as only dreams, fragmented sounds and images. I couldn’t find exactly where she was.”
“You needed more magic to fully expose the memories. More light magic and more dark magic,” Nero said. “So Athan leveled up both. He gave you a double dose of Nectar and Venom to make you an angel.”
“It’s all so unreal,” I said, hugging my knees. “A few days ago, I couldn’t level up at all. And now I’m an angel.” I looked around the bedroom. It was our bedroom. “We’re back in New York.”
“I thought a familiar place would help you,” he said.
As I rose to my feet, my pulse quickened. “Help me do what?”
“Help you stay calm and recover.”
“I’m fine,” I assured him, even as fear suddenly and inexplicably sparked inside of me. The lamp on the nightstand exploded, and I cringed.
“Don’t worry about it.” Nero took my hand, leading me out of the bedroom, away from the lamp I’d blown up.
Unfortunately, there were even more things to blow up in the living room, including some pretty expensive antiques Nero had collected over the centuries. Thinking about that only made me more nervous. I was a rollercoaster of emotions. One of the paintings wobbled on the wall. I slammed my eyelids shut and tried to concentrate on not freaking out.
“That’s your new magic at work,” Nero told me. “It’s one of the less fun side effects of gaining angel magic. Becoming an angel has boosted all your magic across the board, but it’s also put your emotions into high gear.”
Something tickled my back, perhaps my boosted senses picking up a particle of dust. But when I glanced behind me, I didn’t find dust. I found wings. My wings.
I brushed my fingers along the soft feathers, fear melting away to wonder. My wings were almost entirely white, except for the last few inches, which dripped vibrant color. Before my eyes, the bright red-orange tips turned pink.
“Just like my hair,” I commented.
My hair changed color with my mood too. Sometimes, it even changed depending on what kind of magic I was using at the moment. I wondered if my wings were the same.
I cast a cloud of snowflakes overhead, and my wings indeed changed from white-and-pink to bright azure blue.
“They are beautiful.” Nero’s gaze slid across my wings. “As I knew they would be when you became an angel.” His expression was guarded.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Faris is coming here.”
“When?”
Magic flashed, and then the God of Heaven’s Army was standing in the apartment, directly in front of me.
“Now.” Faris stepped toward me. “Hello, daughter.”
My pulse jumped, my throat tightened. All hope that Faris wasn’t my father died. Having him say it made it all so real. I was his daughter. Shit.
“Well?” Faris’s voice grew impatient. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
Nero was gone. I glanced around, but I couldn’t find him.
“What did you do with Nero?” I demanded.
Faris scowled at me. “This isn’t the welcome I’d had in mind.”
I planted my hands on my hips. “So I shouldn’t have cancelled the parade in your honor?”
“Irreverent as always. Your new wings haven’t cured you of that.” His irritated magic popped and snapped at me.
My magic snapped back.
“Your precious archangel is fine.” He shot me a hard glare laden with threat. “Now control your magic. It’s most unruly.”
I ignored him. “Why did you send Nero away?”
Nero tethered me. He would always look out for me, stand by me. When he was here, I was never alone. Faris had uprooted that tether.
“I wanted to have a private chat with my daughter.” He set his hand over mine.
I was alone with him. Vulnerable. I jumped back, the burning need to find a weapon—and preferably stab Faris with it—flooding me. But I had no weapons on my body. I was wearing only a tank top and shorts, no pouches or belts or holsters.
Then I remembered my magic. That was my weapon.
A psychic blast punched out from my body, pushing Faris away.
He was back beside me all too fast. “Good.” He nodded. “Very good. Your magic has blossomed nicely.” He said it like he was talking about a weapon that was assembling well.
“Stay away from me,” I growled at him.
Faris kept coming. He was too close.
I ran to the opposite side of the room. I was there in a flash. I’d never moved so fast in my life. My new angel magic really had super-charged all of my abilities.
My heart was pounding. I was so afraid—no, make that terrified. The magic boosts were cool, but the emotional turbulence of being an angel so wasn’t worth it. Not that I had a choice. It was already too late for me.
Proving what a stellar father he was, Faris told me without delay or pity, “The emotional turbulence will be even worse when you become a deity.”
“You read my mind.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Your wild emotions have dissolved your mental defenses,” he said. �
��With sufficient training, by properly honing your magic, your moods should settle down in a few days. I can help you with that.” He reached out.
I sneered at his hand. “You’ve done quite enough already,” I snapped.
“I had nothing to do with Athan’s ploy to use your magic to find his sister. Unfortunately,” he laughed. “It was a marvelous plan. Aleris was quite beside himself when you ripped the bandage off the scarred remains of his morality.”
“I wasn’t referring to Athan’s ploy.”
“I know what you mean, daughter.” Faris said ‘daughter’ like he said ‘gun’ or ‘sword’.
I swallowed hard. “I have questions.”
“Of course you do,” Faris replied smugly.
“Will you expose me?”
“What do you think?”
“Before Aleris revealed your secret, exposing me would have meant exposing yourself too,” I said. “But now the gods know about your affair with a demon, so you might throw me under the bus to save yourself, using me, your ‘weapon’, as a bargaining chip.”
“Now, that’s a thought.”
“But I don’t think you will,” I continued. “Not because you care about me, of course. It’s because you plan to use me against the demons and probably against the other gods as well.”
“No one can wield the immortal artifacts like you can. So fully. So completely,” he said. I could practically see the birth of a million machinations sparkling in his eyes like stars.
“You intended to create a balanced person with light and dark magic. That’s why you had an affair with Grace. This was your plan all along, to forge a living weapon out of light and dark magic. Just like Meda is doing.”
“Meda is trying to add dark magic to a person with light magic, using the Guardians’ faulty methods,” Faris said. “Even if she succeeds, those soldiers will never be the same as you. They’ll never be truly balanced, never as perfectly powerful as the original Immortals. Meda’s work is a graft, a hack if you will. You are something else entirely, Leda. You are special.”
When he used the word ‘special’, he didn’t mean I was a special person to him, or he cared for me at all. No, he said it like I was a one-of-a-kind weapon he couldn’t wait to unleash on an unsuspecting enemy.
“I was your endgame,” I realized.
His brows peaked.
“You planned to turn all the gods against one another, and then, while they were fighting amongst themselves, use my magic to wipe them out,” I told him.
“A fascinating idea.”
“How much does Grace know of your plans?” I asked him.
I could not imagine the demon entering a relationship with Faris on an emotional whim. She had to have her own reasons.
“What does it matter?” he said.
“It matters to me. I want to know.”
He scowled at me in disapproval. “That is a child’s answer.”
“If you don’t want to deal with children, don’t father them.”
“Don’t be impudent with me. I am your father and your god.”
“I grew up without a father,” I barked back. “And you aren’t the only god in town.”
“I am the only god who matters as far as you’re concerned. You will do as I command.”
“Or what?” I threw the words in his face. “I’m grounded?”
“Or I will capture the people you love most and torture them, starting with your foster sisters.”
Nope, Faris certainly wouldn’t be winning any father-of-the-year awards.
“Thankfully, I have far greater aspirations than trivial vanity awards,” he said.
“Stop. Reading. My. Mind,” I ground out.
“Block your thoughts better.”
Easier said than done. My emotions were completely out of control. It was like puberty all over again, times about a thousand. If I’d known that was what becoming an angel meant, I might not have pushed myself so hard to get here.
“You really must control your thoughts,” Faris told me. “It simply won’t do for any god, demon, or angel in your vicinity to pluck my plans from your mind.”
“I’m trying,” I growled. “I don’t like people reading my mind, you know.”
“Try harder. Anger is no substitute for discipline.”
His words only made me angrier. In response, my wings, which had finally disappeared, burst out of my back again. Magic crackled across the now-red feathers. My wings absorbed my bleeding emotions, my anger evaporating as the feathers turned white, lightly dusted with gold and silver. My mind calmed.
“Good,” Faris said, nodding. “Better to show your wings than to show your thoughts.”
“Of all the gods, you had to be my father,” I growled in frustration.
“In time, you will come to realize how lucky you are.”
Wow. Now, I’d known the gods were arrogant, but Faris took that arrogance to whole new heights.
“So I’m supposed to thank you for creating me as a weapon?” I demanded. “A weapon you plan to use against your enemies—enemies who would destroy me for what I can do, or use me for what I can do.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” he said coolly. “When I’m through with you, no one will be able to kill you. For centuries, I have trained gods to be soldiers. There is no one better suited to train you, to ensure your survival.”
Faris only cared about my survival because I wasn’t any good to him dead. If I was dead, he couldn’t use me as a weapon.
“We are all weapons,” he told me.
Damn it. My mental defenses couldn’t hold together for more than two seconds. I wasn’t hiding my thoughts at all right now.
“Indeed you’re not,” said Faris. “We’ll have to keep you isolated for a while, until you regain control of your thoughts.”
I feared that isolation equaled a prison cell.
“Stop panicking. It’s very distracting,” Faris chided me. “I’m not locking you up. I can’t train you very well if you are trapped inside a prison cell.”
“What if I don’t want you to train me?”
“Would you prefer Valora or Aleris?” His mouth cut a hard smile. “Or perhaps Sonja?”
I cringed.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“Who knows that I’m an angel now?” I asked him.
“At least everyone who was standing outside the prison cell when you collapsed in a magnificent explosion of light and sound, your magic and wings bursting from you like a giant lotus blossom.”
Great. I always did put on too much of a show—even when unconscious, it seemed.
“I’ve told the other gods that Athan put Nectar into your glass, using you to expose Aleris’s secret in the glasses, the memory of his sister being captured,” Faris told me.
“That memory required light and dark angel magic to expose,” I replied. “My magic.”
“They believe you saw Aleris’s memories, memories imprinted on the glasses with light magic. Athan hasn’t corrected their misconceptions. It seems the Everlasting feels some sense of loyalty to you.” Faris gave his hand a dismissive wave, like he didn’t understand why Athan would want to protect me. “There have been so many secrets exposed over the last week. In time, Aleris’s secret will bleed into the rest. No one will investigate you if you stick to the story: Athan, trusting in your incorrigible habit of feeling compassion, slipped you Nectar. He knew that when the visions hit you, you’d not stop until you found his sister. Even fear of Aleris wouldn’t stop you as it would stop others. This is the story the gods heard. And it is the story you will confirm the next time you see them.”
“What makes you think I’ll play along?”
“Because the other gods would kill you if they knew the truth. As much as you like to play the rebel, you like to live even more,” Faris told me. “And you want your loved ones to live, don’t you? Nero Windstriker, for instance.”
Anger flared inside my heart—and on my hands. “You will not hu
rt him.”
“So protective,” Faris laughed. “Especially considering the circumstances.”
Circumstances? What circumstances? No, I wasn’t playing along.
“You’re trying to bait me,” I said.
“Am I?” Faris walked to the window, looking out on the city. “You think you can trust Nero Windstriker?” He glanced back at me. “Then ask him why he interviewed you the day you came to this office to join the Legion of Angels. Ask him why he oversaw your training. Or did you think it’s common for an angel, the head of a Legion office and a large territory, to concern himself with a lowly initiate?”
I opened my mouth to rebuff his words, but that protest died on my lips. Honestly, it was strange that Nero had overseen my initiation training. I’d been too enamored with him to see it back then, but now that Faris pointed it out, I couldn’t deny that he had a point.
“There is much more going on here than you know, child,” Faris told me. “And Nero Windstriker is entrenched neck deep in it all.”
Author’s Note
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The eighth book of Legion of Angels will be coming soon.
Books by Ella Summers
Legion of Angels
Vampire’s Kiss
Witch’s Cauldron
Siren’s Song
Dragon’s Storm
Shifter’s Shadow
Psychic’s Spell
Fairy’s Touch
Book 8 [2019]
Dragon Born Serafina
Mercenary Magic
Magic Games
Magic Nights
Rival Magic
Dragon Born Shadow World
(Magic Eclipse, Midnight Magic, Magic Storm)
Fairy’s Touch: Legion of Angels: Book 7 Page 29