by Ella Summers
“So the message at the wedding was a trick. You sent it to lure us to you,” I said.
“I did not send that message.” Colonel Spellstorm glanced up from the Magitech devices he was tinkering with, presumably the ones that would suck up all the magic our deaths would release.
“You told someone to send it then,” I said.
Confusion crinkled his brow. “I don’t know who sent the message.”
He wasn’t lying. Not this time. He didn’t have any reason to lie to us anymore. He had us right where he wanted us.
“How ironic that you would be trapped by a device of your own invention,” Colonel Spellstorm said, his face a picture of pure delight as he watched me for my response.
I’d been the one to figure out how to use Magitech generators to create magically-reenforced prison cells.
“You did such a thorough job of designing this magic prison that not even an angel could break free of it. Or even two angels,” he added, amused by his own cleverness.
He wasn’t half as clever as he thought he was.
“Use the Sapphire Tear,” I told Damiel. “Use the dagger to break us out of this magic snare.”
“You mean these daggers?” Colonel Spellstorm laughed, holding up two daggers in his hands.
The Diamond Tear. And the Sapphire Tear.
“I’m afraid escape will be quite impossible. I helped myself to the immortal daggers while you were busy fighting the rock monsters on the streets.”
And he’d left similar imposter daggers in their places. I looked down at the dagger in my scabbard.
“What do you want with the immortal daggers?” I asked him.
“I need the Sapphire Tear to break the gods’ curse on the demons. I’ll use the dagger to funnel the magic released from your deaths. Together your magic and the Sapphire Tear will break the curse. What was once unbreakable will soon be no more, thanks to you two.”
“And then, after you break the curse, you will use the Diamond Tear to open up passages for the demons,” said Damiel. “Here, everywhere, all over the Earth.”
“You know how I think, Dragonsire. Once the demons are here, they will fight the gods over this world that they both want so much.”
For some reason, both the gods and the demons believed the Earth was the key to dominance, that whoever held this world would have the upper hand in their Immortal War.
“And you want to tip the scales in the demons’ favor,” I said. “How many soldiers do they have waiting? How big is the army they’ll send to invade the Earth?”
“I honestly have no idea. I am not working for the demons.”
Damiel’s eyes narrowed. “Then who are you working for?”
“Myself,” declared the rogue angel. “I don’t care about either gods or demons.”
Damiel looked at me. “He wants them to wipe each other out.”
“Exactly,” Colonel Spellstorm said with a sharp nod. “We’re going to rid this world of them forever.”
“The last time the gods and demons fought on Earth, most of the world was left in ruins and millions died,” I pointed out. “If they do battle here again, there won’t be anything left of the Earth.”
“The war between gods and demons will weaken both,” Colonel Spellstorm said with confidence. “And with them weakened—with the two immortal daggers under my control—I can push them all out.”
He didn’t seem at all concerned about the collateral damage to the Earth and its people, the fallout of his ingenious plan. He was no better than the deities he berated, the deities he sought to eject. He didn’t want to free the Earth. He just wanted to take the gods’ place, to rule supreme on Earth just as the gods and demons ruled so many worlds.
He would label himself the Earth’s savior, but he was the one who’d bring the war between gods and demons back to Earth.
I always tried to see the good in people. I always strove to have faith. But there was nothing good about Spellstorm’s plan, nor redeeming about his intentions. They were evil, through and through.
He wasn’t breaking the gods’ spell for the greater good. He was doing it for himself. He had aspirations to be a deity, everyone else be damned.
My disgust at his actions crashed against the optimism I tried to maintain. I’d never believed that anything was impossible if you just put your mind to it, but this situation made me question that belief. It truly did seem impossible. We were trapped in a glyph, pinned down without our magic daggers, unable to stop a mad angel from unleashing hell on Earth—literally.
“You won’t be able to use the daggers,” I told him, my mind working to find a way out of this calamity.
“Why not? Because I’m not ‘chosen’?” He made a derisive noise.
I looked at him in surprise.
“Yes, I know all about your so-called Immortal Legacy.” A smile slowly curled his lips. “You’re wondering who else at the Legion knows.” The smile widened. “No one. They are all too blinded by their devotion to the false gods to see anything.”
“And you?”
“I am not blind.” His voice rang with pride. “And I have my sources.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I could tell he wasn’t going to. Honestly, I was surprised he’d told us as much as he had. It must have been his need to gloat—and the fact that he truly believed we would not survive this.
“I am not ‘special’ like you, but I can wield the daggers well enough,” Colonel Spellstorm said. “I need only direct the spell in the right direction. Your magic will do most of the work for me.”
The magic released by our deaths. Great.
“Do not despair. Take comfort in the knowledge that your deaths will free humanity from the deities who would destroy us with their Immortal War. These daggers will free you from life. They will free this world from the clutches of gods and demons. Your deaths—that is your immortal legacy. It is your fate to die by these daggers.”
Spoken like a true narcissist.
“You mean these daggers?” Damiel mirrored Colonel Spellstorm’s earlier words.
The rogue angel looked from the two daggers in Damiel’s hands, to the daggers in his own hands. The shock was apparent on his face.
Damiel slashed out with the Sapphire Tear. Blue streaks shot across the golden curtain of magic that trapped us. The nearby Magitech generator let out a loud groan, then went silent. The barrier fizzled out.
Damiel tossed me the Diamond Tear.
We jumped off the balcony, our wings bursting from our backs. We shot toward Colonel Spellstorm, surrounding him from either side.
Colonel Spellstorm shot a firestorm at me, a comet-like cocktail of flames mixed with high winds. It stank of ashes and rust.
I drew from the water in the flooded city, using it to form a water shield that consumed the comet’s fire.
“What happened to you? Why are you doing this?” I demanded over the sizzling smoke of the drowned fire.
“The Earth has lost its way. We must put it back on track. We must expel these foreign invaders.”
He shot a psychic blast at me. I dodged. The blast smashed into the ceiling, and a storm of stone chunks rained down on me.
I couldn’t fly past them, nor could I hope to destroy every piece.
Damiel cast a magic ceiling, a protective umbrella of psychic strands, over me. The stone chunks smashed against it, but none made it through his spell.
Colonel Spellstorm blasted Damiel, disrupting his umbrella spell. The broken ceiling pieces froze in the air. The rogue angel grinned, then all the stones shot toward Damiel. Like a meteor shower, they slammed him against the wall. Damiel’s hand reached out and caught the lip of the nearest balcony. He pulled himself up.
Colonel Spellstorm flew toward him, magic firing. He tried to blast Damiel off the balcony—and, when that didn’t work, he tried to blast the balcony out from under him.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Damiel isn’t your enemy.”
“He will hunt me to the ends
of the Earth.”
Damiel glared at him, blood and sweat trickling down his face. “Yes, I will.”
Colonel Spellstorm closed in for the kill.
I launched myself at the rogue angel, grabbing him with one hand, holding him back. He struggled to free himself. He was still moving toward Damiel. My hand tightened on the Diamond Tear. I pierced his back with the dagger’s blade.
It was an immortal weapon, and I’d dealt a critical hit. A pale, deathly sheen slid over Colonel Spellstorm’s body.
“Cadence Lightbringer, you have doomed the Earth,” he said through bloodstained lips.
And then he died. His wings stopped beating, and he dropped out of the air. His body was dead before it hit the ground.
I set down on the balcony next to Damiel, my heart heavy.
Damiel met my eyes. I didn’t have to say anything. He knew.
“You had to do it,” he told me.
I looked from the dagger in my hand, to the dead angel’s body far below on the ground. Then I looked at Damiel, and for the first time, I saw the damage to his body. Half of his wing feathers were gone, completely burnt away.
I gaped at him in horror.
He threw his ruined wings a casual look. “They will regrow.”
His face did not betray any pain, yet he must have been in agony. Yes, we angels were tough, but the power of heightened senses was a double-edged sword. It meant we felt things stronger than others did. And that included pain. That was one reason we were trained so hard. We had to make ourselves tough. We had to learn to push through anything and everything, no matter how much it hurt.
“Let me heal you.” I reached toward him.
He sidestepped me. “Not this time, Princess. This is an injury only time will heal.”
“But I can speed up the healing process.”
“Don’t waste your magic. You will need your strength.”
“The battle is over, Damiel,” I pointed out.
“Is it? I’m not so sure.”
“Colonel Spellstorm is dead. I killed him.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“I know.”
“Spellstorm was going to kill us both and then unleash hell on Earth,” Damiel reminded me.
“I know.”
Saying it didn’t make me feel any better. I’d been taught that angels were holy, their lives sacred. That to kill one was to reject the gods who’d endowed them with heavenly gifts of magic. That to kill one was to weaken the Earth and place all its people into grave danger.
It was hard to move past those lessons.
“You swapped the daggers,” I said to Damiel, trying to ignore my own guilt. It was illogical, but by killing an angel, I felt like I had doomed the Earth. “You weren’t fooled by Colonel Spellstorm.”
“Of course I suspected Colonel Spellstorm. I suspect everyone. So as a precaution, I swapped the daggers with fake ones and hid the real ones.”
So when Colonel Spellstorm thought he was stealing our daggers, he was in reality stealing the fakes. And leaving other fakes in their place.
“This is it,” I said, swallowing a relieved sigh. “It’s over. The mission is over.”
“For now. But there will be other traitors.”
With that pessimistic message delivered, Damiel stepped off the balcony and dropped to the ground. His wings might have been out of order, but he was not helpless. Before Legion soldiers gained their wings, we learned to jump.
I jumped down after him. I didn’t feel like flaunting my wings in front of him, not when his beautiful feathers looked like they’d been put through a blender.
“Wait.” Damiel set his arm in front of me. “We are not alone.”
A man stepped out from behind a column. His face was young and his clothing old. The bottom of his brown traveling robes was frayed, as though he’d traveled far and long to get here. And he surely had traveled far because he was not of this world.
“Illias,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I witnessed your battle with the tainted one.” The bald Magic Eater priest glanced down at Colonel Spellstorm’s body.
“Are you working with him?”
“No.” He folded his smooth hands together. Though he’d come far to get here, his skin appeared clean, freshly-shaven, and undamaged. “I simply made use of his machinations to bring you here. We need to talk.”
“You were the voice in the smoke at the wedding,” I realized. “The one to lure us here.”
He nodded. “Yes.
“But why?”
“Because I need your help,” said Illias. “Danger looms on the horizon, a threat to both my people and yours.”
“The demons?”
“No, not the demons. Something far more dangerous. The Hive.”
The Hive was the group of people who’d figured out how to pool their magic to become insanely powerful. Just a few days ago, Damiel and I had fought them on Nightingale, the Magic Eaters’ world. We had not truly defeated the Hive; we’d merely banished them using the power of the immortal daggers.
“The Hive can’t hurt anyone,” I said. “They are now trapped on their world, unable to travel to any other.”
“Not for long,” replied Illias. “We’ve learned that they have the means to break the spell that has trapped them on their world. And once they’re free, what do you think their first stop will be?”
“Earth,” Damiel said immediately. “To take revenge on the two angels who thwarted their plans and trapped them.”
10
The Moons of Nightingale
“How will the Hive break the curse?” Damiel asked Illias.
The priest shook his head. “We cannot discuss this here.” He looked at me. “You must use the Diamond Tear to bring us to my world, where neither gods nor demons have eyes.”
“There’s an army waiting on the other side, ready to take us into custody,” Damiel told me drily.
I would have told him that he was just being paranoid, but after this recent experience, after I’d been wrong about Colonel Spellstorm, I wasn’t feeling all that confident in my gut feelings anymore. Maybe there was something to be said about not trusting everyone. Just because I wanted to see the good in everyone, that didn’t mean there actually was good in everyone.
“Take us to Nightingale,” Damiel told me.
He pressed the tip of his sword to Illias’s back. If we did pop up in the middle of a Magic Eater army, he already had a hostage. I hated that paranoia had to rule our actions, but at this point, it would have been foolish to blindly trust Illias. Especially when he and his people had celebrated our first arrival on their world by throwing us into prison.
But when I used the Diamond Tear dagger to return us to Nightingale once again, an army wasn’t waiting to take us down. That gave me some hope. I had been wrong to trust Colonel Spellstorm, but I was glad I hadn’t been wrong to have faith in Illias.
I’d brought us to the woods outside of Illias’s town.
“The sky looks different than it did last time. Everything feels different,” I told Damiel.
“It’s the moons.” Illias pointed at the two crescent moons in the sky. “They are waning now, growing smaller, unlike last time. That’s why you feel weaker.”
“Explain.” Damiel’s voice snapped like a whip.
“The moons of Nightingale determine the balance between active and passive magic. The conditions of any given world affect the magic on that world. Most worlds were made like the Earth was, where the magic is constant. But there are many worlds that were not made that way. Nightingale is among them.”
“What do you mean by ‘made’?” I asked.
“On those Earth-like worlds, even with the waning moon, you shouldn’t notice much difference in your magic,” the priest continued without expounding on the ‘made’. “But there are other kinds of worlds. Big worlds, small worlds. Worlds with more than one moon or no moon at all. Worlds with many suns. Worlds with lots of water
, or hardly any water at all. On each of these worlds, your magic acts slightly differently.” He waved his hand to indicate his world. “On Nightingale, the balance of active and passive magic is tied to our two moons. If both moons are full, active magic reigns dominant. If both are dark, passive magic rules. In other words, the brighter the moons, the stronger active magic is. The darker the moons, the stronger passive magic is.”
“When we were here last week, one moon was waxing and one waning,” Damiel said.
Illias nodded. “And so active and passive magic were in balance. Now, however, both moons are waning. One of them is nearly dark. That’s why you’re feeling weaker.”
“You brought us here at a time when we are weak.” Damiel’s eyes narrowed. His jaw clenched up.
“The effect will pass as soon as you leave this world.” Illias waved us along. “Come. We must hurry. Time is short.”
He walked out of the woods, toward the town. Damiel and I exchanged heavy looks, then followed him. I didn’t like being lured here when we were weak any more than he did.
“How did you get to Earth?” I asked Illias.
“There are many passages between the worlds in the cosmos, many magic mirrors. But my journey to you on Earth was a long one. It was crucial that I come, though. It was crucial that we discuss this in private, not in the halls of angels, not when the gods could be watching. Or the demons.”
“Discuss what?” Damiel demanded, his patience clearly wearing thin.
“Not here. Just a little further, and then we’ll talk.”
We walked past partially-demolished houses. The town was still being rebuilt from our recent battle with the Hive. Angry eyes glared at us wherever we went.
“An army might not have been waiting to take us down, but the Magic Eaters aren’t all that pleased to see us again either,” I commented to Damiel.
“The people here appreciate what you did, how you drove out the Hive,” said Illias.
“But?” I prompted him.
He glanced at the Diamond Tear dagger strapped to my leg. “But, even so, some of them don’t like that you possess an immortal dagger, even though you acquired it on your own world.” His gaze shifted to the Sapphire Tear dagger that Damiel carried. “Nor is that vocal minority pleased that you now control the Sapphire Tear, which once hung in our temple’s Reliquary.”