by Nalini Singh
He threw wildfire at her in a relentless volley until she dropped back into her protection. Sweat dripped down his back. It might appear as if he was winning, but he wasn’t. He’d used up so much wildfire that, Cascade power or not, his body was having trouble generating enough to keep up.
Much longer and he’d be forced to use ordinary angelfire—which didn’t have much of an impact on Lijuan. As he’d feared after his failure to heal Antonicus, even his wildfire wasn’t working as it had in the last battle.
Then, he’d truly hurt her.
Just now, when she’d risen, he’d seen signs that her body had already stopped the progression of the wildfire on her wing, the same for the damage to her leg. If Lijuan decided to wait him out, she’d win by default. He had, at least, given his people a little breathing room by crashing that carrier. Lijuan’s troops were being more cautious, and those with the carriers had dropped back behind the fighters and changed direction to head back to the port.
Aodhan, Illium, Jason, can you get to a carrier? They were the only three angels on his team with enough strength to take out the massive metal constructs.
The answer from all three was negative. Jason was fighting an advance on their left flank, Aodhan on their right, while Illium was at the frontline. Any withdrawal and Lijuan’s squadrons would fall on the archers and shooters in a bloody massacre.
Izzy is close to the one at your eleven o’clock. It was Elena in his head.
Raphael had included his consort in the communications as a matter of course.
He demolished a swathe of enemy warriors, something about two of them striking him as odd, but he didn’t have time to stop and think about it before he obliterated them from existence. I know he is your favorite, hbeebti, he said in the aftermath, but Izzy is a baby angel without the ability to light a candle with his power, much less that to throw bolts of energy.
That’s why he has a missile launcher, his hunter replied patiently. Ash taught him to shoot one last month and insisted he carry it into battle.
54
Raphael located Izzy in the chaos of battle. No wonder the young angel was flying slightly crooked. That weapon had to be heavy, even worn across his chest. Izak, launch your missile at the carrier directly ahead of you. Jurgen and Imani, protect Izak.
The two senior angels, their leathers already bloody from combat quickly flanked the younger one. Who, to his credit, reacted with smooth precision. Lifting the launcher into the correct position on his shoulder while maintaining a slightly wobbly hover, he ignored the screaming enemy warriors coming at him and launched.
Those flyers smashed into Jurgen’s dual swords and Imani’s war hammer. A head went flying, a face was smashed in . . . and the carrier was torn out of angelic hands by the power of the blow from the missile. Izak went flying backward from the momentum, was halted by two of the Legion who body-slammed him to a stop.
Archers scrambled out of the way of the carrier as it careened down toward a building, only for one of his people operating a massive crane to whack it out into open air using a huge iron ball hanging on a muscular chain.
Said ball then swung angrily through a heavy knot of enemy fighters. Raphael’s portside fighters had clearly already received the order to withdraw when the crane came into operation. Lijuan’s people were chasing them, thinking it a true retreat. The crane took them down like bowling pins.
Crushed bones, pulverized faces, red pulp raining from the sky.
Using the cranes across the city as stealth weapons had been Galen’s idea. No one really saw cranes. They were a part of the landscape. The surprise would only work once, but it had worked very, very well. Multiple cranes had come online at the same time, and they’d managed to catch Lijuan’s forces unprepared, smashing down hundreds in a matter of minutes.
Lijuan’s generals rose up high into the air, above the reach of the cranes, their hands ringed with obsidian.
Eject! Raphael ordered the crane operators.
The men and women literally dived out of the control boxes, all of the operators winged for this very reason. Obsidian power hit the cranes on the heels of their dives. Raphael couldn’t tell if any of the operators had made it.
Raphael, we’re starting to lose people. Dmitri’s voice, as steady as he always was in battle. There’re just too fucking many of them.
I know. His forces had done a massive amount of damage, but no one city could take on an enemy army of this size. It was incomprehensible. Have you heard from Eli’s second?
They’re on their way.
But they wouldn’t arrive for at least another day. Elijah would probably come ahead, but even then, it’d take him hours. Raphael’s city was going to be dead by then. He had to find a way to delay Lijuan, stop this full-frontal assault. He and his people needed time to reassess their plans. Not even in their worst-case scenario simulations had they imagined an army of this magnitude.
There was no point hoarding power when New York was on the brink of a catastrophic defeat.
Decision made, he ordered all his fighters nearby to collapse their wings and drop. Not all of them could get disentangled fast enough, but enough did that he had an opening. Exhaling, he released all the wildfire in his body and shaped it like a spear, then threw it with tactical calculation at the squadron locked around Lijuan.
The husk of a once-living angel dropped from the core at that very instant . . . right as the wildfire cut through the protective guard like butter.
It punched to the center. And found its target.
Lijuan’s scream was a serrated saw in his head. Gritting his teeth as she reappeared at last, burning in wildfire, he lifted his hands as if to throw more at her. She ran, heading to the port area while her fighters collected around her in suicidal loyalty. He followed, smashing them down with archangelic fury, but had to turn back when a large enemy squadron broke through the front line to close in on a rooftop full of archers.
He blew the squadron out of the sky, but Lijuan was out of reach by then, her fighters falling on his people in chaotic hordes to keep him from following her.
I will accept your offer of a cease-fire to gather our wounded. Lijuan’s nightmare of a voice, awash with the thready screams and begging cries of the dead.
Both sides will retreat, Raphael replied. One squadron from each side comes forward to collect the bodies. His people were lying broken all over the city, too. And he was out of wildfire. Nothing else could really touch Lijuan.
It is agreed. Rage in every word, but he’d done enough damage to her that she was slinking off to lick her wounds.
He waited for her to order her troops to retreat before he gave his own the same order. As expected, Lijuan’s army retreated to the neighborhood by the port area. Raphael’s people had booby-trapped entire neighborhoods long before and would set off those traps once Lijuan’s ground troops began to crawl forward—because his forces hadn’t managed to destroy all the carriers.
At least five had landed.
He could hope that the reborn had been in the ones he and Izak had destroyed, knew they wouldn’t be that lucky. The Cascade wanted destruction and destruction it would get. But Lijuan wouldn’t find any safe harbor in his city. For her, all of New York had teeth.
His archers and shooters stayed in position as the rest of his people withdrew.
Raphael, too, waited until Lijuan’s army was far enough away that they couldn’t mount a stealth attack while his back was turned. When Elena flew up to join him on his return flight to the Tower, he saw a splash of sticky red on her side. Not her blood. Someone else’s.
Enemy angel, she said, having caught sight of his glance. Someone cut off his head in the sky and he bled all over me as he fell. Her voice was grim as she continued. We lost two archers on the roof I was on. Two more are badly wounded.
Four. It wasn’t a huge number . . . unless you consider
ed how long this war would likely rage, and how few people his side had in comparison to Lijuan’s. With that in mind, he shifted the oncoming strategy meeting to the infirmary. He might be able to heal enough warriors that his forces could hold the line until Elijah’s army arrived.
Ahead of them, the Primary landed on the Legion building. Raphael had seen the gray-winged fighters in the thick of battle. If one fell, another rose in his place. They were Raphael’s greatest advantage. Seven hundred and seventy-seven warriors who couldn’t be killed. Except . . .
“Something is wrong, Guild Hunter.” He dropped into a rapid descent.
The Primary was crouched over one of his people who lay on his back on the ground, one hand clutching at his chest as he coughed black liquid out of his mouth.
“What is this?” As far as Raphael knew, the Legion were invulnerable to disease.
“Death,” the Primary said in a voice that held a chorus of hundreds. He slipped out his sword and, looking into the eyes of the other fighter, sliced the cutting edge straight through the other’s neck, severing the head from the body.
The body didn’t dissolve into dust as the Legion always did when they fell in battle. It began to liquefy into a noxious sludge that had the Primary looking to Raphael. “You must end this, sire,” he said as Elena landed beside Raphael.
Raphael torched the dead Legion fighter with angelfire . . . but parts of the corpse yet moved in the aftermath.
“Hell.” Elena touched his arm . . . and a lick of wildfire jolted into him even as she gasped. The wildfire tasted of her. Of defiant life.
He used a droplet of what she’d given him to eliminate the last pieces of the corpse before glancing at the Primary. “Do you feel him regenerating?”
The Primary shook his head. “His body was consumed. We are now seven hundred and seventy-six in flesh.”
“I’m sorry.” Elena placed her hand on the Primary’s shoulder, her expression scored with pain. “I know you’ve been together eons.”
Cocking his head to look up at her, the Primary said, “He is not lost. He is part of us. Only his body has been destroyed.”
Raphael had never quite understood the level to which the Legion were enmeshed, but he was glad to hear they hadn’t permanently lost one of their own. “Was he hit by Lijuan’s power?”
“No. He was bitten by one of her angelic fighters.”
“Bitten?” Elena shoved a flyaway strand of hair impatiently behind her ear. “Like a vampire?”
“The angel sank his teeth into the arm.” The Primary indicated his biceps area. “Others have also been bitten but none of mine.”
Raphael took off without warning at the same instant that Elena said, “Raphael! Go!” His flight buffeted Elena and the Primary into flattened positions on the roof, his wings white fire.
He landed on the infirmary balcony in a matter of split seconds, ran inside.
“Sire!” Nisia looked to him with desperate eyes from her position kneeling on a bed. It held brown-haired and blue-eyed Andreja, her wings a slightly darker shade of brown than the rich mahogany of her hair. The tall and muscled angel was twisting and fighting the hands that sought to hold her down for Nisia’s attempts at healing.
Her bare leg was bloody from an injury, but that wasn’t what caught Raphael’s attention. An ugly blackness coughed from Andreja’s mouth, stark against the cream of her skin.
Placing his hand on the angel’s breastbone, Raphael punched in the tiniest possible droplet of the wildfire Elena had given him.
Wildfire hurt Lijuan, was not meant for even old angels.
The tough canvas of Andreja’s fighting tunic disintegrated in a scorched burst where he’d touched her. She screamed, high and agonized, before collapsing. The visible bite mark on the decaying flesh of her arm crackled with wildfire.
That didn’t stop Nisia from putting her hands on the angel. “She’s alive. Laric, finish stitching up your patient, then attend to Andreja’s leg.”
The younger healer nodded, his head bare today. Though he continued to wear a cape over his damaged wings, his hood had fallen off in the chaos of having to deal with so many badly injured patients. It was the first time Raphael had seen the thick, deep auburn of his hair touched by light.
“Watch for the infection and tell me if it returns,” Raphael said, catching a glimpse of stormfire wings in his peripheral vision. “Where are the others who came in with bites?”
There were five in all and he was able to drive the black poison from all of them—at a speed that gave him hope that the wildfire could cause Lijuan significant damage. Andreja was already conscious and sitting upright by the time he reached the last of the bitten.
“Sire,” she rasped after he was done, her voice holding the cadence and rhythm of her long-ago homeland in what was now the far edge of Michaela’s territory. “Inside, the blackness, it eats at the soul. It wants to devour and dominate.”
Laric moved quietly to assist Andreja, kneeling down in front of her so he could begin to work on the open wound on her leg. She looked down at the top of his head, then moved her hand to put her fingers below his chin, tilt up his head.
Wait, hbeebti, he said when he felt Elena stiffen beside him. Andreja is not a cruel angel.
Today, she took in the dark pink scars that ridged the white of Laric’s face. They went from just below his hairline all the way through to his throat and farther. Of his face, only a single section around his left eye and cheekbone was smooth and unmarked. His shoulders had gone rigid at Andreja’s actions, his hands motionless on her flesh.
“Hvala, small one,” the female angel said with a slow smile that held not pity but something that had color crawling under Laric’s skin before he ducked his head and began to work on her leg again. “You have gentle hands.”
Ooooooh. With that, Elena tugged Raphael away and out of the infirmary. “Did she just hit on Laric?” she asked outside, a grin curving her features.
“He could do far worse.” Of an age that she saw below the skin, Andreja would have a care for the wounded angel’s body—and heart. “From what I have seen, she does not mind being the one who initiates a courtship, but she will not coerce or force if Laric indicates he doesn’t welcome her attentions.”
“I hope she gets a chance to find out.” Elena’s smile faded, the small moment of happiness dying under the weight of war. “What she said about the effect of the bite . . . Death’s not the aim, is it? If it happens, it’s as part of a process to a kind of reborn state.”
“I fear you are right.” He brushed the back of his hand over her cheek. “Elena, my wildfire isn’t regenerating fast enough to repel Lijuan should she strike again today.”
A tightening at the corners of her eyes.
He kissed her before she could speak. I have no regrets. Without his Elena by his side, he wouldn’t have wanted to fight for the world, wouldn’t have wanted to save it. I would rather fall as Raphael than win as a puppet of the Cascade.
Her lips trembled as they parted. “I would still rather die as Elena than live as a shadow.”
“So, we are agreed.” Pressing his forehead to hers, he wrapped her up in his wings.
An instant of love stolen from the crawling dark whispering at their door.
55
We have to rethink our plans,” he told his senior people only minutes later, all of them gathered around Dmitri’s strategy table in the war room. On that table was a full three-dimensional reconstruction of the battle zone.
Joining Aodhan, Illium, Dmitri, Venom, Jason, and Elena were Vivek Kapur, the members of Elena’s Guard, as well as Sara Haziz. While not a part of the Tower, Sara represented all the hunters on the ground and needed the knowledge to be discussed here.
Her husband, Deacon, was a brutally qualified hunter but he was an even better weapons-maker. He was working nonstop in a workshop l
ower down in the Tower, alongside a team he’d hand-selected. Their task was to repair broken weapons as they came in, discard what couldn’t be fixed, and make new ones.
The last person at the table was Suyin, here to offer any insight she could on her aunt.
“The size of her army changes everything,” Aodhan agreed, the glittering filaments of his wings streaked with rust red and his hair sweat damp. “I’ve never seen or heard of the like.”
“I missed it.” Jason rarely showed his emotions, but today, his shoulders were bunched, his spine rigid. “I can’t understand how. I personally confirmed the numbers I gave you. Those were the only fighters she had at her various strongholds.”
“I might have an answer,” Vivek Kapur said. “It’s weird as shit.” He lifted up the tablet he had on his lap. “I’ve been watching the battle from every angle I can, trying to feed the computers enough data that we can begin to predict their moves.”
Raphael had battle-honed generals for that—and he had Dmitri. His second’s brain was a steel trap when it came to battle strategy. But he wasn’t about to disparage a man this intelligent. “What did you discover?”
“A lot—and I mean, a lot—of the fighters don’t look like trained combatants,” he said. “Angels are pretty much all in shape, but these ones don’t have the look of honed warriors.” He brought up a set of images on his tablet.
“Put it up here,” Dmitri directed, touching something on the side of the table.
A large screen opened out from the ceiling, directly above the table.
“Give me one sec.” Vivek’s fingers moved over his tablet. “There.”
Raphael saw what the young vampire had meant the instant he set eyes on the images.
“I know him.” Jason pointed to an angel with his sword raised and teeth bared, the whites of his eyes showing. “Junior librarian in a minor court. No combat skills.” He pointed to another angel, went motionless. “She’s combat trained but belongs to Titus.”