by Nalini Singh
Raphael didn’t waste time wondering which unexpected ally had sent this strange force. Attack! he ordered his own fighters, and made the decision to use a minute amount of wildfire to neutralize the poison Lijuan had thrown at him, for he was now of more use to his people alive. No mercy!
A wild grin on her face, Elena lifted the crossbow she’d never dropped, one wrist ringed with bloody bruises from Lijuan’s grip. We need to fucking deify whoever the hell sent those gray guys.
The sight of her hurt made the cold rage in him flare to icy brightness. First, he said, powering to Lijuan, I need to take out the garbage.
An archangel couldn’t be killed by crossbows, but with the bolts thudding into Lijuan’s body as fast as she pulled them out, she was distracted, her energies funneled toward healing herself. Her facial bones appeared and disappeared as her skin faded in and out, but when she didn’t shift into her noncorporeal form, he realized that whatever power she gained from draining the lives of others, it wasn’t enough to allow her to transition under this type of bloody attack.
Wrapping one hand around her ankle while she was distracted, he sent all his remaining power, power kissed with the life that was Elena, directly through his arm and into her bones. Her shriek splintered the sky, her lower body exploding in a blinding flash of light, her torso crumbling.
Is the wicked witch dead?
I’m not certain. He almost thought he’d seen her transition into her other form at the absolute last instant. But even if she survived the blast, it’ll have been with extreme injuries. Her body is gone. It would take her months to regrow it, and while Lijuan had tried to make them believe she didn’t need the flesh, this battle had shown she very much did.
Even if she could feed on others to speed up her healing, the way she’d opened her mouth when tugging Elena closer told Raphael she needed her physical form to feed. And he’d seen her head burst like a pumpkin as bolt after bolt thudded into it in that split second while she screamed. The gray ones were merciless fighters, but right now they were on New York’s side.
And it was time for him and his own to reclaim their city.
His body’s ability to store power depleted to the point of nonexistence, he grabbed the sword Illium threw at him and entered the fray, his battle cry echoed by every one of his men and women.
He didn’t know how long they fought, but he was always aware of Elena and those of his Seven who fought with him. Dmitri, having held off a new attempt to storm the Tower, his view far better than those in the thick of battle, sent through continuous strategic updates that Raphael used to direct his men and women so they acted as a smooth unit. He didn’t realize how far they’d pushed Lijuan’s forces until they hit the Atlantic, the fighting having moved from Manhattan and over wider New York as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky.
Ten seconds later, the instant after he sliced off the head of an enemy general in a fountaining spray of red that sent the body into the water from where his people would no doubt retrieve him, for he was too old to die by beheading, he felt Jason’s mind touch his. Sire, they’re lifting the flag of surrender.
Rising immediately above the rest of his force, Raphael confirmed Jason’s sighting, then raised his sword above his head in a vertical line. The message took half a minute to get through the furious fighting, but one by one his people held their blows, allowing the enemy to retreat.
“We just let them go?” Elena asked, having come up beside him. “Seriously?”
Raphael didn’t blame her for her angry disbelief, his own fury colder but no less deadly. “It is part of the rules of engagement.”
“But they would’ve killed us.” It was almost a growl, her blood-streaked and battered body taut with the need to hunt down those who had hurt the people who were her own.
“If my forces had surrendered, the enemy fighters wouldn’t have touched them so long as they didn’t raise arms against Lijuan.” Whether Lijuan herself would then have used his people for her feeds was another question, but he wasn’t Lijuan, to make such an ugly breach of the rules of his people.
Contacting Dmitri and Naasir, he said, Herd her surviving vampire troops to the pier and find them a ship. Make sure they have enough blood to survive the journey out of my waters. After that, they became the responsibility of their own commanders, and while Raphael didn’t think Lijuan had much honor any longer, he thought perhaps her older commanders had enough not to abandon their own.
“I still think it sucks.” Elena pushed a strand of hair off her sweat-stained face, the brown color so wrong, Raphael knew he’d have her wash it out at the first opportunity. “I don’t think that sick thing calling herself an archangel would’ve obeyed the rules.”
“She is beyond honor and madness, a creature of true evil.”
A sigh, his furious consort nonetheless lowering her crossbow. “And you’re not.” Scowling, she continued to watch the enemy. “Fine, fine, we’ll be civilized and let them retreat, but damn it, I don’t like it. They’ll be back as soon as Lijuan has recovered, because it would be just too much good luck if the Queen of the Zombies was truly dead.”
Of that, Raphael had no doubt. “The rules of engagement were put in place long ago, after archangelic wars no one remembers,” he said to Elena, and it was also a reminder to himself of why such rules were needed. “Wars, after all, are between the archangels—yet it is the angels and vampires below us who die total deaths.”
As he’d expected, the general he’d beheaded had been retrieved, while countless vampires and ordinary angelic fighters floated on the water or lay broken and bloodied across the city, their lives ended. “In those wars, it’s said we decimated over eighty percent of our population. Only the archangels and the noncombatants survived and not one person ever forgot the blood that stained the hands of the Cadre at the time.”
“Okay,” Elena whispered, horror in her expression. “Okay, I get it now.”
“Jason’s squadron will escort them out of our territorial waters,” he said, brushing his wing over hers. “Now we must deal with this other strange force, find out their price for this day’s help.”
They turned as a unit to face the city.
45
Having landed on roofs as far as the eye could see, the gray ones sat crouched like living gargoyles, their wings arched, fundamentally changing the landscape. Birds sat on the shoulders and bodies of many of them, silent and watchful.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Elena asked Raphael, trying to make some sense of what she was seeing, and failing.
From what she’d witnessed in the battle as the gray angels fought around her, there was no color to them—gray eyes, pale smooth skin, hair of gray, gray wings. Yet they were humanoid, had faces with the clean lines and strong bones of the immortals. Their wings, however, had no feathers, instead formed of a leathery texture that reminded her of the wings of bats. The shape of those wings, too, was similar to the nocturnal creatures.
“No,” Raphael said after a long moment, as heavy clouds passed across the sky to drop a curtain of snow on the city, the sun blotted out to cloak the world in darkness.
It created the perfect muted background for the strange angels who crouched all over New York.
“These gray ones are an enigma.” Eyes of violent blue took in the eerie scene, everyone so silent it seemed impossible this was a city of countless souls. “Come.”
The gray angels didn’t stop them as they flew back through the snow to the Tower, Illium by their side. Coming to a stop on the Tower balcony, Elena took her place beside Raphael, their eyes on Manhattan. Dmitri flanked him in silence, while Illium acted as a winged sentry. Naasir, she realized, had to be handling the enemy vampires still in the city.
Take one step forward with me, Elena.
Guessing it to be some kind of angelic protocol, she did so without argument . . . and one of the gray ones flew toward them from a nearby building. Tall, with broad shoulders, his wings silent
in the snow and his hair brushing his nape, Elena couldn’t have picked him out from any of the others. It was as if they’d been minted from the same press, one after the other.
Landing right in front of them, he placed his sword horizontally in front of his body and went down on one knee, head bent.
Elena bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle her gasp. The mark on his nape, she said, eyes on the primal black lines of it as the male’s dusty gray hair slipped to either side, it’s a mirror image of yours.
“Sire,” the unknown fighter said at the same instant, “we come as called.”
Raphael’s answer was accompanied by a freezing wind that swept through the deathly silent city. “None who fought so bravely should kneel.”
The gray angel rose to his feet on Raphael’s words. This close, Elena saw his irises weren’t truly gray; they were so pale as to be barely distinguishable from the whites, but for the black pinpricks of his pupils. It should’ve reminded her of Lijuan, but it didn’t, because where Lijuan carried death and a putrid evil in her eyes, the being that looked through those colorless eyes was near to a blank slate. As if he hadn’t yet decided who he would be.
“You call me Sire.” Raphael’s wing was heavy against her own as they stood side by side, their bodies aligned under the falling snow that was a cold, welcome kiss on the wounds that scored her flesh. “Tell me why.”
“We heard your voice in our Sleep.” It was a flat, toneless statement. “We hear only the voice of the Sire or his consort.” His eyes locked with Elena’s.
“Elena,” she said through a dry throat, forcing herself to remember this deadly creature was a friend, not foe. “You can call me Elena.”
He looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. “You are the consort.”
Okay, Archangel, I think this is more your speed than mine.
I’m uncertain these gray ones are anyone’s speed. “What do you call yourselves?”
“We”—an absolute hush, the wind frozen—“are the Legion.”
Elena felt her stomach drop, as if she’d learned something terrible.
* * *
T he Legion.
Raphael had heard those words before, a long, long time ago. They are, he said to Elena, the threat used to scare badly behaving angelic children.
Have a nap or the Legion will come get you? Like the bogeyman?
Precisely. Except it appears our bogeyman is real. “You have been gone from the world an eon.”
“Yes.”
Raphael, look at his eyes. They’re starting to gain color. And his hair . . .
Doing as Elena bid, Raphael saw the gray one was indeed no longer so gray. His hair was darkening into black and his irises now boasted a fine rim of blue—the same blue as Raphael’s eyes. “You are now my Legion.” Not a question, the mark on his face a quiet thrum that told him the truth, told him, too, that the Legion waited for his command. “Your first task is to assist my troops in securing the city and fixing the damage to the Tower.”
A quiet nod, his wings folded with military tightness. “Sire.”
“You are their leader. I need a name for you.”
A pause. “I am not the first primary,” he said at last, “but that is what I am. The Primary.”
“All right,” Raphael said, accepting what appeared to be a rank rather than a name. It was becoming clear the Legion was not in any way an ordinary angelic—if they were even angels—squadron. “Tell the Legion they are to obey the orders of Dmitri and Illium as if they were mine or my consort’s.” He pointed out the two men. “I will make the others of my Seven known to you when they return from their tasks.”
“The Legion has heard and understands.”
“I estimate five hundred in your squadron. Is that correct?”
“Five hundred woke to the Sire’s call in urgency. Two hundred and seventy-seven need more time. They will arrive when their hearts begin to beat fast enough for flight.”
Seven hundred and seventy-seven fighters who functioned as a single cohesive and apparently tireless unit, their skills lethal and their healing abilities unparalleled. He’d seen a Legion fighter beheaded, only to rise again within minutes, his head growing a new body while the old disintegrated into dust.
It was an army no other archangel would easily wish to face.
“We’ll need quarters for the Legion,” Raphael said to Dmitri.
“Sire.” It was a quiet interruption from the Primary, and when Raphael nodded at him to speak, the male said, “We do not sleep except when it is time for us to leave the world.”
“Do you eat?” Dmitri asked. “Need water?”
Another pause, akin to those of older angels who sought to mine their memories for a lost answer. “Yes”—a faint sense of surprise in his tone—“when we are awake, we do need fuel, but we can fight for many days without sustenance or rest.”
I’ll work out the logistics, Dmitri said mind to mind. “Though you may not need a place to sleep,” he said aloud, his words directed at the Primary, “you should have a place where you can be with your men and women—” A frown. “I see no women.”
“We are the Legion,” came the incomprehensible answer.
Eyebrow raised, Dmitri continued. “You’ll need a place where your men can gather at least.”
“Yes,” the Primary said after another pause, his mind seemingly not yet having shaken off the shackles of his long Sleep. “We do not . . . do well if cut off from the group so soon after waking.”
“There are two warehouses next to each other not too far from the Tower,” Dmitri said. “We normally use them for storage, but they can be cleared for temporary accommodation if”—a glance at the Primary—“that wouldn’t be too basic an environment? They’re nothing but large spaces with four walls and a roof.”
“No, such will do well.”
Raphael knew the warehouses could only be a short-term solution. Even with the members of the Legion rotating in and out, the combined space wasn’t designed for over seven hundred winged beings. “Now that you’re awake,” he said to the Primary, “how long do you plan to stay this way?”
“Until it is time to Sleep again.”
Okay, he takes the win for most cryptic statements.
Biting back a smile at Elena’s dry assertion, Raphael said, “We’ll build you a living space suited to your requirements after the repairs to the city and the Tower.” Raphael owned a massive chunk of Manhattan, far more than most people realized, and it made sense to have this force around the Tower. “In the interim, you are welcome at the Tower. You are my people now.”
Epilogue
Sadness had been the pulse of the city for five days following the war, as they watched flower-covered bier after bier leave for the Refuge and buried hunters and vampires who’d fallen. Elena hated funerals—not hard to figure out why—but she’d attended every single one, as had every other fighter who’d survived and wasn’t confined to a sickbed. It had hurt.
The finest honor we can do the fallen is to bring our city back to life, until children play in the parks and lovers walk in the streets while angels soar among the skyscrapers and the blood kin share the kiss of life without fear. We must not forget what they died to protect.
Words a still badly hurt Aodhan had spoken, at the funeral of a vampire commander he’d considered a friend, and words they’d all taken to heart. In the past forty-eight hours, the rebuild of the city had kicked into high gear, and that was going a long way toward healing the wounds, though Elena knew it would take time for the emotional—and physical—injuries to heal.
She’d been lucky, so damn lucky that all her close friends had made it out alive, here and in the Refuge—the fighting there having ended the instant word filtered back of Lijuan’s defeat. Of the injured, Ransom and Ashwini were the worst off, but they’d both be okay. Ransom had taken a crossbow bolt in the leg in the final battle, his femur snapping, while Ashwini had been slashed pretty badly with a sword acro
ss her chest. The other woman now held the Guild record for most stitches in a single sitting and was trying to avoid answering the one question to which every hunter wanted to know the answer.
If she and Janvier weren’t together, then what was he doing playing (wow-mama-sexay) nurse at her apartment, hmm?
The silliness of wondering about Ash and Janvier’s relationship gave the tough, often stoic men and women of the Guild a much-needed emotional outlet, and if the jokes segued into more solemn conversations, that was good, too. Day by day, hour by hour, they were all finding a way to deal. For Elena part of that had meant a visit with Eve and Beth both, as well as a long squeeze-cuddle of a snuggly Zoe, a video call with Sam, and a visit to a hospital earlier that morning to fulfill her promise to a little boy who wanted to fly.
Today, she stood on a building across from the Tower with her archangel, the two of them having met there to get an overview of how the repairs were going—they’d both been working with their people until now. “Oftentimes,” Raphael had said, “an archangel must stand above those he rules, but there are times when he must stand beside them.”
Now, he turned to her, his leathers dusty from the work. “Astaad contacted me earlier. Once we are in a position to welcome guests, he has indicated a willingness to visit.”
Elena had no arguments with that, the other archangel having done the entire world a giant favor. It had been approximately fifteen minutes after they’d returned to the Tower after the retreat of Lijuan’s troops that Raphael had received a very polite call from the Archangel of the Pacific Isles. “Raphael,” he’d said, “I wished to let you know I destroyed the cargo planes heading in your direction. I cannot believe Lijuan would attempt to fly such unclean creatures over my territory.”