by Ella Summers
I could feel the battle of light and dark magic in my blood. They were fighting, clashing, but slowly, they began to reach an equilibrium, a harmony of opposing magics.
“I saw that in the previous samples after the arena battles. Her light and dark magic worked together. She used both sides of the magic spectrum in unison,” said Sonja. “But seeing the Venom and Nectar work inside her body, at the core, as they merge, as they become part of her, is something else altogether. It’s simply amazing.”
Perhaps it was amazing on paper. In reality, as the Venom and Nectar tried to negotiate a balance inside of me, it burned like a wildfire through my body, drowning me in agony.
“After another dose of Venom, her dark magic will be up to the same level as her light magic.”
“And then?” I asked. It hurt to speak.
Sonja turned to look at me. “Then we will push you higher, alternating Venom and Nectar.” Her sparkling eyes, alight with delight, turned to the microscope again. She obviously couldn’t wait to see the results of her experiments. She really was the epitome of the mad scientist.
“Your plan won’t work,” I told her. “You can’t level up my magic with Nectar and Venom alone. It requires training.”
“We will train you if necessary,” she replied with a dismissive flick of her hand. “As I said, I am patient. We will do this for years if need be.”
I coughed, choking on the Venom’s magic.
“But I don’t think it will take so long,” she said.
The river of fire raging inside of me was splitting me apart.
“You overestimate me,” I said.
Sonja laughed. “You don’t know what you are, do you?”
I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of withholding information I so desperately wanted to know.
“The gods are too detached from reality to see anything right in front of their eyes,” Sonja continued. “Which is why they missed your friend Stash, the demigod. They don’t know Damiel Dragonsire survived his execution either. They don’t realize Cadence Lightbringer is alive, being held by the Guardians. They miss everything.”
How did Sonja know so much?
“We are not on Earth, but we are watching. Always watching,” Sonja told me. “Nyx must have figured it out. She always had an uncanny ability to cut through the bullshit.”
Soulslayer tensed at the mention of the First Angel of the Legion.
Sonja glanced at him. “Ronan won’t survive the war to come. Nyx will join us.”
They obviously didn’t know the First Angel at all. She would never roll over. She wouldn’t cooperate, and neither would I. They would just have to kill me.
“You will cooperate. You will train and embrace the magic and survive.” Sonja’s smile was savage. “Because, otherwise, your sisters will pay the price. And you will never rescue your brother.”
“He is safe,” I stated in defiance.
A shrill laugh broke past her lips. “If you truly believe that, you are even more naive than I’d thought. Your brother is in the greatest danger of you all. You will soon come to wish that either we or the gods had taken him instead of the Guardians.”
I frowned at her. “I don’t trust you.”
“Good,” Sonja said, nodding. “That’s the first truly intelligent thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth.”
My chains disappeared in a whiff of smoke, and I dropped off the wall. Soulslayer caught me by the shoulder. He dragged me across the room like I weighed nothing. I didn’t resist. My limbs were limp, my body shaking. I couldn’t have lifted a cup of water if I’d tried, let alone a sword.
My vision blurred. My sisters’ cells faded out, dripping into darkness.
“She needs some time for the Venom to settle before we can push more magic into her,” Sonja’s voice echoed in my ears.
Soft footsteps sounded her and Soulslayer’s departure. They left me alone to the firestorm of opposing magics trying to balance, to merge, inside of me. I was shaking so hard that my teeth rattled in my mouth. I clenched my jaw, just trying to stay conscious.
Time melted and twisted. I wasn’t sure how long my mind drifted in that half-conscious state between dreamland and reality.
“Leda?”
I tried to pull my head out of the magical storm raging inside of me.
“Leda?” Tessa called out to me again from the abyss.
The sound of her voice was like a tether. I held onto it and pulled myself back into consciousness.
I blinked, clearing my vision. The demon and the dark angel were gone. Tessa stood in the cell across from me, looking at me from behind the glowing magic barrier. Gin’s cell was empty.
I tried to go to Tessa, but my body didn’t cooperate. I was chained to a wall again.
“Where’s Gin?” I asked her. My voice was as broken as the rest of my body.
“Gin is gone,” Tessa said, her face gloomy. “They took her.”
They must have done that while I’d been drowning under the magic of Venom, because I hadn’t noticed it at all.
“I will get you both out of here,” I promised Tessa.
The glass doors to the dungeon slid open with a whisper. Four soldiers marched in. One of them carried Gin. As the soldiers drew closer, as I got a better look at my sister, my heart locked up. Pain paralyzed me. But as the soldiers set Gin’s lifeless body on a table in the middle of the room, the floodgates of my agony tore open, and I screamed out. My sister was dead.
27
Immortal Mortality
As the soldiers left, a soft voice cut through my agony. “Gin isn’t really dead,” Tessa said. “She will rise again.”
Hope stuttered in my chest. When I could breathe again, I asked, “How?”
“Gin is a Phoenix, an immortal with the power to be reborn,” Tessa explained. “She can’t be killed, no matter how hard she’s hit. Well, at least if there is a way to kill her, the dark angel hasn’t found it yet.”
Relief rushed through my body, even as anger pooled up deep inside of me. Soulslayer had hurt my sisters.
“He put you in the battle arena,” I said quietly.
“Yes.”
Soulslayer had told me he wouldn’t make them fight if I did, but I wasn’t surprised that he’d broken that promise. He was a sadistic beast.
“Sonja unlocked our memories to unlock our magic.” Tessa’s tone was dark. She sounded more mature, like she’d grown up a lot since the festival in Purgatory. Her chirpy girlishness was gone.
I looked away from Gin’s lifeless body. It hurt to see her like that.
“And your magic?” I asked Tessa.
“I’m a djinn.”
“Like a genie?”
“Not quite. Djinn are part of the same branch of magic as genies, our wish-granting brethren, but djinn have interdimensional jumping powers. On a smaller scale, we can teleport short distances. We can also reach into the interdimensional ether and summon creatures from other realms.”
“I’ve never come across magic like yours or Gin’s.”
“Gin and I came from other worlds, just like the gods and demons.”
So Damiel had been right.
“What are the constraints of your interdimensional magic?” I asked Tessa.
“In theory, it ignores all protection wards and barrier spells.”
The demons could use Tessa’s power to enter the Earth, to bypass the gods’ wards and bring in their armies with them. They could use it to teleport monsters beyond the wall into human cities. The results would be catastrophic, and the demons would certainly be more than willing to step in and save the Earth—at the cost of humanity’s absolute allegiance.
And Gin’s magic was just as dangerous in the wrong hands. Even gods and demons could be killed, but a phoenix was always reborn. I imagined armies of constantly reviving soldiers, ones who could jump around the battlefield and jump between realms. The perfect army.
“Can you use your magic to get us and
Gin out of here?” I asked Tessa.
“Hellfire captured me when I was very young. I never learned to make interdimensional jumps, only the small ones.”
“Can you get out of your cell?”
Tessa held up her hands, showing me the pair of matching metallic cuffs locked around her wrists. Green magic slid over the cuffs like a layer of fog, lighting up the runes engraved into the metal.
“No, Soulslayer put these on me to block my jumping magic,” she said, frowning at the beautiful cuffs. “They have settings to block different levels of jumps. The lower the setting, the further I can jump. Whenever I’m in my cell, he sets them to block all jumps, but sometimes he tones them down in the battle arena. The first time he put me and Gin in there, I realized the bracelets weren’t blocking my short-range jumps. I thought I’d gotten lucky, that the dark angel had forgotten to set them properly.”
“The angels don’t forget things. Soulslayer did it for a reason.”
“I was using my short-range jumps to evade a beast when my magic suddenly stopped working. If not for Gin, the beast would have killed me then. In the next battle, my magic was working again. Sometimes on, sometimes off, always unpredictable.”
“He was toying with you,” I said, my anger simmering beneath the surface.
“Yes.”
I formed two fists and pulled against my chains. The metal groaned.
“He killed Gin over and over again, in so many different and grotesque ways.” Tessa’s face paled. She looked liked she’d be ill. “He wanted to see if she would still come back to life.”
“How many times did Soulslayer’s arena kill Gin?”
“Fifty. Maybe more.”
Acid churned and rose in my empty stomach, but I had to keep my wits about me. So I swallowed my disgust and struggled to clear my mind.
“I tried to save her, but I wasn’t always fast enough to jump away. And the bracelets were blocking my magic half the time.” Tessa’s shoulders slumped, her words heavy with guilt.
“It’s not your fault,” I told her.
A tear slid down her cheek.
“Look at me, Tessa.”
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and met my gaze.
“You did everything you could,” I said. “This isn’t your fault. It’s Soulslayer’s.”
“When the dark angel captured you, he was so busy torturing you that he left me and Gin alone for a while. We heard your screams.” Her voice shook. “Sometimes he came here to taunt us with your pain. He enjoyed hurting you, Leda.”
“Forget about that now. The past is in the past. This ends now. We’re getting out of here.”
“How?” She sounded desperate.
“I will think of something. I promise. I’m going to get you out of here. And I’m going to make Soulslayer pay for hurting you and Gin,” I added.
“Don’t worry about us, Leda. We’ll be fine. We’ve endured much more.” Her eyes hardened with determination.
I didn’t ask Tessa about what had happened all those years ago when she and Gin had been held by the warlords—or about their months in the jungle.
“They pitted us against monsters and soldiers,” Tessa said, guessing where my mind was. “We did what we had to do to survive.”
They’d done what they had to do to survive—at such a young age. Seeing the look in Tessa’s eyes, I understood why Calli had asked Zane to wipe their memories. She must have seen that same look back then. Children deserved a chance at a normal childhood, a chance at innocence. They shouldn’t have to kill in order to survive.
On the table, Gin woke up screaming in agony as flames erupted all across her body, bathing her in fire.
Tessa looked away. “It hurts every time she is reborn in fire.”
The flames slowly died down, then they went out. Gin lay on the table, shaking. Her clothes were ashes all around her. The soldiers hadn’t bothered to chain her up. She looked so weak that she couldn’t move.
The glass doors parted, and Soulslayer glided into the room as smooth as honey. He grabbed Gin off the table, casually threw her over his shoulder, then dropped her into her cell. The magic barrier went up. Gin was still spasming, her naked body shaking on the floor. The dark angel didn’t even throw her some clothes or a blanket.
“Stop,” I growled.
He turned to look at me.
“This isn’t the end,” I said in a low snarl.
He just watched me, a bored expression on his face.
“For what you’ve done to my sisters, I will tear you apart piece by piece, watching you die in agony as your resolve crumbles and your soul shatters into a million pieces.”
He clicked his tongue. “Temper, temper.”
I heaved against my chains. The links snapped. As I worked on freeing my legs, the dark angel calmly walked over to me and hit a button on the wall. A Magitech barrier slid over my body, encasing it like a translucent cocoon. It held me so tightly that I could feel the magic singeing my eyebrows. Soulslayer considered me, his face arrogant.
I pushed out with my magic, punching it against the Magitech barrier. Cracks formed. I hit it again. The cracks multiplied, ripping the threads of magic apart. The barrier shattered.
“Sonja will be so pleased,” Soulslayer said with a dark smile.
The marble wall I was pinned to zapped me with a massive jolt of magic. The shock tore across my back, shooting down my legs, sending my body into convulsions. My chains popped open, and I dropped to the ground in a heap. The whole room was spinning. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t focus. And I couldn’t pull myself off the floor.
Get up! I mentally shouted at my battered body.
Soulslayer grabbed me by the neck and slammed me hard against the wall. New chains flew out of the holes in the marble, locking me down. The dark angel tore off the remaining sleeve of my jacket and threw the rag of tattered leather onto the floor. Then he grabbed a syringe and injected a potion into me. I tried to move and found myself unable to even twitch. He’d completely paralyzed me.
As I dangled there limply on the wall, frozen, Soulslayer pulled out his phone and began to type. I must have been really delirious because the first thought that flashed through my head was: I wonder how the phone reception is in hell.
Black spots danced before my eyes. Through those splotches of darkness, I could vaguely make out the silky stride of Sonja stepping into the dungeon. She and Soulslayer were talking, but my ears were so clogged that I couldn’t hear anything but muffled noises. Sonja lifted a syringe from the side table and moved toward me. She was going to draw yet another blood sample.
I couldn’t move a single muscle, but I collected my telekinetic magic into a point and punched out with it, flicking the syringe to the ground. Sonja picked up another one and tried again. I flicked that one away too. This time, I heard the syringe clink against the marble floor. My ears had finally cleared.
“Must I remind you that I am the Mistress of Telekinesis?”
Her magic caught the next syringe I flicked away. I countered with light magic, wrestling for control over the tool. Demons were weak against light magic, but after all these weeks or days or however long it had been, I didn’t have much strength left in me.
“Now, that’s quite enough of this nonsense,” Sonja said.
She tightened her telekinetic grip on me, wrapping it around my whole body. Her hold was so tight that I couldn’t push against the magic with my own. My magic winked out, and a moment later the needle pierced my arm. Sonja took a sample of my blood, and looked at it under her magic microscope.
“Your magic has blended beautifully,” she said. “Dark and light are complementing each other nicely. You are everything I’d hoped for. Such a perfect blend.” She looked up from the machine and asked, “You never had any magic before you joined the Legion?”
Not really. All I’d had was my weird hair that mesmerized vampires—and my hair was only growing more bizarre the more magic I gained.
&nbs
p; “Curious,” she commented.
There was no point in devoting my overspent magic into blocking my thoughts right now. Sonja already seemed to know everything I knew and then some.
The demon smiled. “True.”
“Then why don’t we stop playing games, and you just tell me what you want from me? Why do you want to grow my magic? Is this about finding my brother?”
“Your brother is certainly intriguing, but no, this isn’t about him. This is about the future of the Dark Force. That future is your magic—and making more soldiers like you.”
Tessa and Gin possessed powers that even the gods and demons did not. So of course Sonja wanted to find a way to give their magic to her soldiers. But I didn’t have any rare powers. All of my abilities were the standard Legion of Angels powers.
“You’re thinking about this all wrong,” Sonja told me. “This isn’t about your abilities, Leda. It’s about the nature of those abilities, the source of your power. It’s about your balance of dark and light magic, your ability to absorb Venom and Nectar and to access the entire magical spectrum.”
“So you’re going to bottle my magic, just like you did yours. And then you’re going to give it to your soldiers,” I guessed.
“No, I’m not going to bottle your magic. I’m going to breed it.” Her eyes were glowing like turquoises. “I’m going to breed you to create the ultimate super soldiers, soldiers with the power to use and resist spells across the entire dark and light spectrum.”
“That will take centuries.”
She shrugged. “You’re immortal, and I’m willing to wait.”
Nero’s mother Cadence was an angel, and it had taken the Guardians centuries to equalize her light and dark magic. I wasn’t willing to spend my life in a cage. And I sure as hell didn’t want to be part of a demon’s breeding program.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Sonja told me. “After all, it’s nothing different than what the Legion already does to its angels. They decide who the angels will marry.”
I glared at her, daring her to try to breed me like some race horse.