by Nalini Singh
Half wrapped protectively around her as an escort, while the other half continued to fight. But with Illium, Andreas, Nimra, and Nazarach all here with their highly trained squadrons, along with two archangels, the advantage was now on their side.
Archangel, Galen and Aodhan need backup!
Eli is going to them. I need to clear up the mess on the ground. Venom’s ground teams are already overwhelmed on the port side and Jason is taking care of a skirmish to the west.
That was when Elena saw the scuttling movements below. Landing on the nearest roof, she flipped open weapons lockers until she found a flamethrower. Raphael beat her down and used his power to burn the things up before they could scramble any deeper into Manhattan, but there were a fucking lot of them.
While he took care of larger groups as battle raged overhead in a clash of swords, she flew in and out through gaps and alleys, burning up the loners sneaking through. She saw fallen angels as she flew, sent their coordinates to Dmitri to organize rescue—while she crisped the reborn trying to get to those angels.
“Hurry!” she yelled into the mike on her collar. “There’re too many wounded angels. The reborn are heading straight for them!” To Elena it seemed they were acting with resolve and planning.
They’re being guided. Raphael’s voice in her mind. Look for a vampire at the head of each group.
Elena switched focus. There. She flew right over the bastard and turned him to flame. She took no pleasure in his scream, but he had to die. As he did, she saw things crawling out of him and scuttling quickly away. Her blood ran cold. Raphael, they’re bringing in the insects!
A breath of cold in her mind she could almost feel. This part of the city is now infected. A moment while I take care of the aerial assault—there is no point in accumulating power to fight Lijuan if she takes the city by stealth.
Elena had to turn away from the furious blaze of his power as he raked angelfire across Lijuan’s troops. Ash fell like rain from the sky. She tried not to think about what she was breathing in—but Raphael’s deadly assault achieved its intended outcome. Lijuan’s people retreated en masse.
Elijah had achieved the same outcome by the port.
Raphael’s next order to the ground and aerial troops was to evacuate their wounded and create a fireline that would encompass a large chunk of the city. As soon as that was done, the area clear of their people, Raphael began to rain down hell on the infected area. Standing watch on top of a skyscraper just behind the blaze of the fireline, Elena watched and felt tears burn her throat, her eyes.
New York was going up in flame and that bitch Lijuan was responsible. Her and her disease-ridden friend. The only mercy was that the entire city had been evacuated of noncombatants. “We’ll rise again,” she promised herself and all their people.
Another woman stood not far from her, her moonlight hair dancing in the hot winds and her armor glowing in the firelight. “It is a horrible truth to accept that the person I most hate in this world, the person who is my worst nightmare, is so far beyond me in power that I can never do her harm.”
“But you’ll try anyway, won’t you?” Sometimes, you had to fight the monsters even if you knew you’d fail—as a frightened and traumatized ten-year-old Elena had fought Slater Patalis while Ari and Belle’s blood was an iron-rich scent that clogged her throat.
“Yes.” Suyin’s murmur was a soft vow, the weight of her presence a portentous heaviness. “To the death.”
It took pathetically little time to erase so much of Elena’s beloved city. The angelfire not only razed buildings, leaving a smoking red ruin of earth, it ate up the reborn and any insects they’d brought with them. Do we have to worry about the side Venom’s ground team is handling? she asked her archangel as she swallowed her tears for her city.
No. He landed next to her, his wings aglow and his eyes chips of Antarctic glaciers. There have been no reports of insects there—I don’t think they can be controlled. Even Lijuan wouldn’t risk releasing them so close to her own people.
Below them, the lost part of their city smoldered.
61
Once the casualties from the engagement were tallied up, Raphael discovered that, together, he and Elijah had lost an entire squadron of strong, powerful warriors. Rage burned in him, but it was a cold hard thing. He couldn’t afford to be hot, to give in to the sorrow that bit at his throat. To lose warriors in battle was a thing that could not be fought. But he had never lost so many so rapidly.
Elijah’s face showed the same strain and anger.
The sheet-wrapped bodies of their dead lay in the cold embrace of a morgue set up in a warehouse. It was a necessity Nisia had quietly taken care of when battle first began. Each and every fighter here, Raphael promised himself, as he carried in one of the fallen himself, would have a burial with full honors. They would go home to the Refuge.
The meeting he next held, with all his senior people and Elijah’s who weren’t out on watch or fighting in small skirmishes, was brutal in its grimness. Now that they knew Lijuan could turn part of her army noncorporeal again if she had enough fuel, they had to be ready for an attack from any quarter.
“My entire city is seeded with machines that watch.” Raphael waved Vivek Kapur forward. “But we can’t watch for what we can’t see. And even if we could, the feeds would be far too many for even a team to monitor constantly.”
The angels and vampires gathered around Dmitri’s battle strategy table parted for Vivek’s wheelchair. A few of Elijah’s warriors gave him a curious look, but that was to be expected. It was rare that a vampire was Made when he had such terrible injuries.
“Tell us of your machines,” Raphael said.
The vampire—ridiculously young in immortal terms—did not flinch at being the focus of so much powerful attention. “The surveillance grid covers nearly the entire city—the only gaps are where Archangel Lijuan’s forces have destroyed cameras, drones, or bugs.”
Taking a small “bug” from his pocket, he put it on the table for reference. “I’ve been able to set the sky-focused system to sound a warning for any movement big enough to be an angel but I still need bodies to look at every alert and verify if it’s a friendly or an enemy.”
“The wounded,” one of Elijah’s female warriors suggested. “They are distraught at falling at the dawn of battle—to watch for the enemy, it will give them life.”
Elijah, new lines carved around his mouth, glanced at Vivek. “Can wounded warriors do this task?”
“As long as they have their sight,” Vivek said. “I also have another job that only needs hearing, no sight—I was able to reprogram our electronic spies to listen for dialects you’d usually only hear among older residents of Archangel Lijuan’s territory. I don’t know if noise escapes that invisible thing she does, but it can’t hurt to listen—and I figured since a lot of her generals and commanders aren’t exactly young . . .”
The looks shot Vivek’s way by Eli’s people were not curious this time—they were assessing.
I see why you Made this man, Raphael, Elijah said. He is an asset.
You cannot steal him yet, Eli. He is under Contract.
“I also thought of trying to program a system to alert us of areas of dead air without birds,” Vivek continued, unaware of the judgments being made around him, “but with all the fighting, the only birds still in the city are yours, Archangel Elijah.”
Even Elena’s owls had disappeared, perhaps because their lady was stirring.
Discussion ensued, but no matter how they looked at it, they had no way to moderate Lijuan’s one major advantage. “The only reason we managed to hold her off in the latest attack,” Raphael said, “was that we were both close enough to respond quickly.”
“And because your consort can do something I have never seen anyone do.” Elijah smiled at Elena, who stood silently beside her onetime nemesis, Galen.
Shifting their discussion to what they could control, they used the battle layout on Dmitri’s table to plan troop movements, but the harsh fact was that they did not have enough people—not when faced with the size of Lijuan’s army.
“How is she feeding them?”
Everyone turned to Vivek. He flushed under the deep brown of his skin, realizing he’d interrupted two archangels and their most senior people, but to his credit, he held his ground. “Archangel Lijuan has far too many people for there to have been enough food on the submarines. So how is she feeding them?”
“Angels do not need to eat as much as mortals,” Raphael said, but he was frowning. “Wounded angels, however, do need food to have enough energy to recover.”
“Well, that explains it,” his consort muttered. “She just eats her wounded.”
Everyone stared at Elena this time.
“What?” She threw up her hands. “It’s the truth.”
“It is indeed,” Elijah said. “That leaves blood for the unwounded vampires. So she must have a store of mortals who’ve been kept away from the fighting.”
“One second.” Dmitri grabbed Vivek’s ever-present tablet and brought up something. “This came in just before all hell broke loose—one of the snipers reported seeing a small group of ‘scared mortals’ being ushered into a building. They were dressed like farmers. Healthy, but only about fifty in number.”
Cristiano, a powerful vampire in Elijah’s team, shook his head. “That’s nowhere near enough for the number of vampires she has in her ground forces. Also, she still has to feed the mortals and Venom tells me you left no food behind when you evacuated that area.”
“Her plan was to take this city in a violent surge—plenty of food and blood then.” The courage of Raphael’s people had stopped her advance, but they were exhausted and they had lost too many of their own.
He locked eyes with those of liquid silver, his hunter with whom he had no shields. If we do not stop her, hbeebti, Lijuan will feed on our own.
* * *
• • •
The fighting over the next two days was brutal. Lijuan was still down, possibly as a result of having been badly injured twice in quick succession, but her generals and commanders were determined not to let that stop them. Even more of them were now shooting Lijuan’s obsidian power from their hands.
When Elijah got hit in the chest with a bolt, they all panicked—but it became clear in a matter of seconds that while the energy was deadly to an ordinary angel, it did not incapacitate an archangel. Neither were their strikes infectious. Elijah was soon able to shake off the effects.
The law that only an archangel could kill another archangel remained an immutable one. However, that so many of Lijuan’s senior people could now end members of New York’s troops in a single strike meant both Elijah and Raphael had to be out there—being worn down by constant battle while Lijuan rested.
Elijah’s birds of prey were vicious fighters who’d torn holes in angelic wings and gouged out eyes, but neither they nor the Legion could even the odds when Lijuan was feeding near-archangel level power to the top echelon of her army. Take Raphael and Elijah out of the field of battle and it’d be a bloodbath.
“I will not sacrifice people,” Raphael said to Elena in the short lull between one battle and the next. “I will not allow them to be mowed down like dispensable pieces on a chessboard.”
“You know I’m on your side.” If he won the war by walking on the bodies of his people, he would lose the greater battle—to remain Raphael.
She was bone-tired, too, but she stayed on the front line beside their people, sometimes with the ground teams fighting the reborn, others with those on rooftops. With her wings retracted and her hair hidden under a knit cap, the enemy couldn’t find her. Permanent dye would’ve been better, but they’d discovered it didn’t stick. The energy that arced through her wings occasionally zapped her hair, too, and poof, no more dye.
Yesterday, she’d been back-to-back with Venom as they cut down a swarm of reborn. Today, she was firing a ground-to-air gun. When three of Lijuan’s squadrons managed to overwhelm them with sheer numbers, swarming the rooftop, she fired the weapon at point-blank range until it ran out of projectiles, then threw it aside and went for her knives.
Blades were close combat weapons, no room for squeamishness.
Blood sprayed her face, but she continued on with relentless focus, images of Zoe and Maggie held close to her heart. If the city fell, the little girls would become prey for Lijuan and her forces. A momentary gap between two sets of wings and she saw that Hiraz was trapped behind the enemy soldiers, his sword moving with blurring speed. But even a skilled swordsman couldn’t hold off that many of the enemy.
If he didn’t get some backup soon, he was dead.
She stabbed one of her assailants in the eye, threw a blade that slammed home in the eyeball of the second attacker. One thing she’d learned during all of this—didn’t matter if it was a vampire or an angel, they hated to get a blade in the eye. Both of the two that she’d attacked had the dead black eyes, but even they screamed and pulled out the knives, putrid greenish-black fluid leaking down their cheeks.
Elena had seen enough of these reborn angels now that she didn’t flinch. As the loss of an eye led to a loss of coordination, she was able to slice open the throat of one, while an archer who’d been fighting beside her used a small scythe to slice off the head of the other.
Archers were elite specialists. But turned out that when you had hundreds of years to become a specialist, you picked up a few other skills along the way.
Dropping and rolling as an enemy combatant swung for her own throat, she slid her blades across the back of his ankles, severing the Achilles tendon on each foot. He dropped to the ground with a scream, but she was already moving, confident the archer would finish him off. Hiraz was fighting three angels at once now, and he was losing. Blood dripped from his arm and his cheek had been sliced open.
Elena wrenched a knife through the wing of the nearest angel while kicking out the knee of another, giving Hiraz enough room to thrust his sword into the stomach of the third angel and twist. But the one whose wing she’d injured wasn’t down; he spun around with blank-eyed determination . . . and she faltered. “Gadriel.”
The haunting gray-green eyes were gone, his pink-tinged skin holding a greenish cast, but it was the solid senior angel she and Raphael had last seen in China. Her entire being rebelled against seeing him turned into this abomination.
Teeth bared, he swung his sword toward her neck.
Instinct took over. Ducking, she slammed a blade into his gut, then ran straight through to slam into Hiraz, taking them both off the roof.
It had been a purposeful action and she managed to slow their descent, though the vampire’s weight was more than she could handle. When they made a bruising but survivable landing on the balcony a couple of stories down, Hiraz ran back inside the building without a word. She knew what he was planning—to go up a set of internal fire escape stairs and come up behind the attackers.
Elena had the same idea. Rising up into the air, she went to rejoin the fight, coming at Lijuan’s troops from the back—but it was too late. Another swarm of troops was heading their way. Fuck! She didn’t have the mental ability to tell their people to withdraw and they had to withdraw. They couldn’t win this one, not with so many fighters coming at them. It would be a slaughter.
Raphael was involved in heavy combat against multiple squadrons and at least five of Lijuan’s generals. Elijah was down with a wounded wing that would take a couple of hours minimum to heal.
Wiping the sweat and blood off her face with her forearm, she looked desperately around—and spotted Galen. Raphael’s weapons-master was on the leading edge of the fighters on the roof. He moved
like lightning, his red hair sweat damp and two swords dancing in his hands as if they weighed nothing when she knew they were heavy as hell.
Dropping down beside him, she took on an assailant and yelled, “Massive incoming force! We have to retreat!”
Galen was a warrior, and the light of battle glinted in his pale—almost translucent—green eyes, but he was also a highly intelligent angel. Slicing off the heads of the two angels he’d been fighting, then finishing off the one she’d taken on, he followed her gaze to where the new squadrons were heading their way.
Opening his mouth, he issued a command in a voice that carried across the entire rooftop—she’d known he could do that, had heard him do the same in the Refuge. Then, he’d been yelling at a group of recalcitrant children to fall in line. Though the kids had obeyed at once, they hadn’t looked the least scared; most had been grinning while trying hard to maintain correct wing posture.
The sight had gone a long way toward making Elena understand how kind, soft-hearted Jessamy could’ve fallen in love with this barbarian angel.
“Fall back!” he ordered. “Begin defensive maneuver alpha!”
Elena continued to fight beside Galen as the rest of their people fell back behind them; she swapped out her knife blades for a long blade another retreating fighter slapped into her hand. Her own had been lost in another skirmish earlier that day.
Everyone had their assigned tasks in this maneuver and hers was to hold the line and buy their people time. The vampires and two other guild hunters on the roof would be flown to the next nearest safe position by the angels who were strong enough, but before the guild hunters went, they’d lay a little trap for Lijuan’s troops.
Gadriel, wing damaged and stomach bleeding, was suddenly in front of her again. Her eyes burned as she swung the deadly sharp blade of her weapon across his neck, separating head from body. Gadriel had died in China. This was nothing but Lijuan abusing an honorable warrior’s corpse. She would remember him as he’d once been, not as this monstrosity.