by Nalini Singh
“Run! You will all run in the end!” yelled one of Lijuan’s squadron leaders as he landed on the roof, his face bloody and his eyes hot with battle fury—he had normal hazel eyes, which meant he’d chosen this, chosen to walk with Lijuan. “We will own you!”
Elena lodged a knife in the back of his throat the next time he opened his big mouth. She and Galen were falling off the edge of the roof even as he gurgled and struggled to remove the weapon. The two of them made a hasty retreat, following the rest of their people. A number of Lijuan’s warriors flew after them, but Jason dropped out of the sky to score black lightning across the space, cutting them in half and driving back others who would’ve followed.
As with all of Raphael’s Seven, he was tired and worn, but he would fight to the very end.
The boom came seconds later, the explosives planted on the roof by Rose, one of the Guild’s demolition experts, going off with such violence that the resulting collapse sucked in a number of angels who’d been attempting to fly off. Dust and stone flew into the air, tiny pieces of shrapnel hitting the back of Elena’s neck and getting caught in the energy of her wings before being spit out.
She made a hard landing, the vibration going through her entire body. The first thing she did was look around to see if Hiraz had made it out from inside the building. There. The vampire sat slumped against a wall, his eyes on the collapsing building across from them. His expression was bleak, the look shared by many of the others around him.
Elena understood why. They were losing.
This wasn’t the first of their buildings that had fallen to Lijuan’s people. Elijah was wounded. Raphael was exhausted. The Seven were reaching the edge of their endurance. Dmitri had taken to the battlefield with his sword a deadly menace in an effort to give the others a break, but the enemy was just too big in number.
And Lijuan was yet to rise again.
Another enemy squadron rose into the air behind the dust of the collapse, heading right for them, and the battle was on again.
62
Raphael felt the explosive force ripple through the air, and knew his people had detonated another building. They weren’t destroying every building as they retreated. Some had been left whole but stuffed with explosives—in the hope that Lijuan’s people would settle in and the delayed detonation would take out hundreds of them at once.
But with every boom of sound, every call to retreat, Lijuan’s grip around the city tightened. All his people were fighting to their limit—he could ask nothing more from them. Elijah’s predatory cats were stalking the enemy throughout the city and his birds of prey fought in unnatural squadrons formed by Eli’s knowledge of tactics.
Deacon and his repair team had left their workshop to wipe out a surge of reborn in an unexpected corner of the city. Janvier and Ashwini had flooded an enemy weapons cache with seawater and made it appear an accident, while Holly had managed to taunt and lead a couple of reborn right into an uninfected section of Lijuan’s army. Demarco and the other snipers had stealthily blown off the heads of more than one senior member of Lijuan’s forces, timing their assassinations to get lost in the mass of battle injuries.
Dmitri had mowed down an entire squadron that’d had the misfortune to land on the rooftop where he was fighting, his weapons a blur. Naasir was deep in enemy territory and had successfully fouled the enemy’s main water supply by rerouting sewerage into it. Venom had beheaded reborn after reborn, his clothing stained with blood. Galen hadn’t stopped fighting since his arrival. Aodhan, Jason, and Illium had forgotten sleep.
His Legion had fallen again and again only to rise back and fight with unflinching courage, but even they couldn’t make up for the massive disparity in numbers.
Lijuan’s forces had begun to pincer the city in their grip, the battle now being fought on two major fronts.
He deflected a hail of obsidian from one of her generals, struck back with angelfire. The general collapsed his wings and dropped out from under the electric blue ball. It smashed into two other fighters beyond him; they died without having a chance to scream.
Another bolt arrowed toward him, but Raphael didn’t duck. If he did, that bolt would hit a mass of his own people. Instead, he went to deflect the power with angelfire . . . when something about the energy coming toward him had him responding with wildfire instead. His instincts had understood what his mind took a moment to process: this obsidian had a piercingly lovely starlight shimmer.
The two powers collided in a crash of light and sound that echoed through his head. Lijuan is awake! Drop drop drop!
He sent out a pulse of wildfire in a three hundred and sixty degree circle only seconds later. Enemy fighters died in a single breath, and the air rippled bare meters from him. He pulsed more wildfire in that direction. Lijuan shimmered and came into focus, and despite the amount of wildfire he’d expended, she didn’t appear wounded.
The hail of return fire she sent toward him was vicious.
Elijah had rejoined the battle only minutes earlier, was fresher than Raphael, but the other archangel stayed back. Raphael knew the action went against every bone in Elijah’s body, but they had agreed to this. Raphael and his city couldn’t afford to lose their only archangelic backup. Elijah had to keep his distance from Lijuan—as with Antonicus, he had no defenses against her particular brand of death.
Elijah’s voice in his mind. I will take care of her generals.
Silver-green fire erupted around Raphael.
Your city is falling. The cold words held a taste he could only describe as death, the screams of the lost Lijuan’s terrible symphony. Surrender now and I will cause you only a modicum of pain when I absorb you.
Raphael took no pleasure in being proven right in his supposition that Lijuan didn’t intend to kill him and Elijah outright. As powerful as she was now, how much more powerful would she become once she fed on two archangels?
He warned Eli of her intent even as he directed a pinpoint strike of wildfire to her heart.
Deflecting it with a wave of her hand that shot the shards of starlight obsidian in every direction, she smiled. So, you choose pain. So be it.
One of the shards hit him on the shoulder and spun him around. Using the motion instead of fighting it, he shot back a wide arc of wildlfire. Lijuan couldn’t avoid it, as he hadn’t been able to avoid her strike. The wildfire hit her around the solar plexus, causing her body to bow inward and her skin to glow from within.
But she held her ground, as he held his.
He could feel her poison working its way through the bones of his shoulder, but the wildfire in his body was fighting against the virulence. That wouldn’t last much longer, not if they kept battling at this level. If he ran out of wildfire, that was it.
Crossbow bolts thumped into Lijuan’s shoulder. She turned and swiped out a hand. “Know your place!” Suyin flew back to slam into the side of a building, her wings crumpling and red streaking the moonlight of her hair, but she’d bought Raphael precious time.
He sent out two more arcs, one horizontal, one vertical. Lijuan moved just in time that the cross point of the arcs didn’t hit her face. Instead, she took the vertical line on one side of the body and the horizontal one on the heart. Raphael didn’t see what happened next because he was drowning in a rain of starlight obsidian.
He threw up a shield of wildfire. It began to buckle nearly at once.
His body, worn out from the constant fight against her proxies over the past two days, struggled to produce more wildfire and failed. Lijuan rammed herself toward him at the same instant, her hands spread out even as his wildfire crackled under her skin in an effort to take hold. If she touched him with those hands, she’d punch her poison into him at point-blank range.
Sweeping sharply to the left, he released the shield and that wildfire returned to him. Lijuan twisted to a halt, then turned to come after him again. Gathering the last o
f the wildfire in his hand, he held it up in a glowing ball. Come close by all means, he said. We will meet and see who survives.
A slight hesitation, her wings braking. Then she smiled and lifted her hands and he knew he’d soon be buried under a rain of death. He threw the wildfire, manipulating the energy so it would spread and encase her. It was the thinnest of barriers, but it blocked her energy for a moment or two.
He drew both his swords. There remained a limited amount of wildfire in his system, but he had to husband that on the off-chance he could get close enough to Lijuan to do what he’d done once before—send the energy directly into the bloodstream.
Tearing herself out of the thin skin of wildfire, she looked at him with irises so pale she appeared blind, her face hauntingly lovely and the ice white of her hair a silken fall. You will come to me, she said in that voice filled with ghosts. In the end, they all come to me.
Starlight obsidian rimmed her hands, her malevolent energy powerful beyond comprehension. Raphael’s left arm was already going numb, his body losing the battle with the poison she’d managed to get inside him. But he faced her with no fear—he would fight to the end to save his people. His Elena.
Archangel.
His consort in his peripheral vision, the stormfire of her hidden in the shadow of the nearest building. Then she flew forward and into the light.
Across from him, Lijuan smiled. How lovely of your consort to present herself. I will take care of her after you. A pity I will not be able to pin her up in my wing museum.
She was toying with him now. Taking her time before the kill. But she’d given something away—she didn’t realize Elena stored power for him. He and his consort had pulled off a similar action in the last battle, but Lijuan must’ve assumed all the power came from him.
To her, his consort was a former mortal and baby angel. No threat at all.
Wildfire licked across her eyeballs, danced in her hair. She shuddered and seemed to set her jaw. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth. His power was having an impact, but not fast enough.
Already, she was lifting her hands, in readiness for a strike.
A sudden smile before she lowered her hands. You are no threat, she said in a laughing tone. I will absorb you in the way most pleasurable to me, then I will feed on your consort. She dove toward him, as if diving into a lover’s arms.
Archangel, here I come.
He thrust out his swords at the same instant that Lijuan stopped on the other end and laughed. What can sword wounds do to me now? Holding his gaze, her smile taunting in a face covered with moonlight skin, she pushed herself deliberately onto the blades, allowing them to sink into her flesh. I am a goddess. I will rise and rise and rise into my reign of death.
His consort touched her hand to his ankle. And the wildfire that had grown inside her over the past two days jolted into him in a direct line. It wanted to go toward the poison in his shoulder, but he shoved it all down the swords and into Lijuan.
His blades danced with white-gold and blue edged with an opalescence of midnight and dawn that shifted into an unexpected wild green, then back again.
Lijuan’s scream threatened to pierce his eardrums, a million deaths hidden within it. In her face, he saw the ghosts of the countless people she’d killed, her flesh morphing too fast to hold in the mind. Her facial bones turned skeletal right then, the flesh receding, before she was the lovely Archangel of China once more.
A woman he had once respected and looked to for advice.
But that wise archangel was gone, lost in the Cascade madness that had created this monster. One day, Raphael might mourn her, the Lijuan she had once been, but it would not be today. Today, he fought for the life of not just his and Elijah’s people, but for the survival of the world.
Lijuan’s hands turned into blood as she tried to wrench herself off the swords. He kept on pushing them into her even as she tried to pull away, until at last she shot a river of starlight obsidian down the swords, using them as a conduit as he had.
He broke contact with the hilts, and she wrenched.
He got out a warning to the angels directly in the path of the falling swords and the blades hit the street below without harming any of his people. In front of him, Lijuan was coming apart at the seams, the wildfire literally pulling her to pieces, the edge of defiant green causing searing burns along the ruptures. But even as he felt a flicker of hope, her obsidian starlight wrapped around her, as if sealing the cracks.
When Elena threw him another blade, he moved to cut Lijuan’s throat. The more they could hurt her, the more time they’d gain for the wildfire to regenerate. That deadly living green wasn’t his or Elena’s but formed of an amalgamation. If their combined wildfire could do so much damage now when he’d only had dregs to contribute to the strike, what might they be able to do if they combined their wildfire at full strength?
He sliced out . . . but Lijuan was no longer there. Once again, she’d gone noncorporeal to escape a killing blow, must’ve had a store of power in reserve for just such a possibility. Throwing back his head, Raphael roared out his rage.
She would be back.
And they had nothing left, no more aces up their sleeve.
63
Exhaustion hung over the Tower’s as well as Elijah’s forces. Elena could see both groups of troops as she walked through a snowy Central Park at Hannah’s side. Some members of their combined forces were sitting and resting with tired but open eyes, while others had their heads tilted back and their eyes closed. Another lull had fallen, except for brief skirmishes here and there.
The cause of the lull seemed to be a similar exhaustion on Lijuan’s side. Unexpected given their numbers, but Xi had sent all their forces into battle as one, instead of resting groups and sending them one after the other. Losing Lijuan this time had fizzled out the proxies, too. Even Xi was no longer shooting the obsidian bolts.
Elijah and Raphael had considered pushing forward, forcing Lijuan’s tired army to engage, but the numbers worked against them. Their forces were even more exhausted than Lijuan’s, and both Raphael and Elijah were on the edge of endurance.
Elijah had actually had to pull power from the city’s electrical grid, shorting out connections all over the city. It had been a desperate reach for power as he attempted to keep Lijuan’s most dangerous surviving generals at bay. Having barely recovered from his injury, he’d taken on at least ten of them while Raphael fought Lijuan.
As a result of Elijah’s stand, they still had at least five squadrons of fighters who would’ve otherwise fallen under the assault. But even if Raphael and Eli stripped the city’s entire grid, they didn’t have enough remaining power between them to demolish Lijuan’s forces. They’d do severe damage . . . but they’d flatline afterward.
Manhattan would then be helpless prey for a rejuvenated Lijuan.
Better for everyone to recover in readiness for her return—this time, they had a better idea of her vulnerabilities. Especially when it came to the bright new-leaf green that resulted from the amalgamation of Raphael and Elena’s wildfire. That stuff had hurt Lijuan.
Now, in this tenuous instant where they could catch a breath, Hannah was doing the rounds. Her people expected this from her, and their faces lit up when they saw her. They seemed to gain a fresh energy when she touched her hand to theirs or spoke to them for a moment or two.
Elena didn’t have the same relationship with her and Raphael’s people, but she had a relationship of her own, warrior to warrior. They told her about their injuries and asked her questions about the overall losses of the war. She didn’t lie to them—she and Raphael had agreed they’d tell their troops the truth.
Their courage deserved nothing less.
The only thing they wouldn’t share was Raphael’s depleted state. Angels, vampires, mortals, everyone needed to believe that their archangel was a power. Raphael had neve
r before been so worn out. Even when he’d fallen with Elena in his arms that first time, he’d done so as a being of power who’d taken out a murderous enemy.
“We are holding up against impossible odds,” one of the senior soldiers said after her update. “No one could’ve expected Lijuan to bring her entire country into battle with her.”
It was about to get even worse, though they’d wait to share the news until after they were certain. Raphael’s forces had been able to neutralize the planes that had taken off from Charisemnon’s territory what felt like a lifetime ago, but their surveillance system had now picked up signs of ships heading toward New York. Those “trade” ships bore Charisemnon’s mark, and had been prowling in international waters prior to the war.
Lijuan was either about to get even more reinforcements, or the ships were filled with insects who’d become a plague. Raphael was currently holed up in the Tower with Dmitri and Galen, as well as Elijah and his top people, in an effort to come up with a way to take those ships out of the equation. Because if they landed . . .
Her phone buzzed. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said after a quick glance. “It’s my sister, Eve.”
A vampire so old that his face was ethereal in its beauty, said, “The little warrior? She is a brave one.”
“Yes, she is.” Stepping away, she took the call. “You’re okay.” She’d lost track of Eve in the chaos of battle, had had a fist clenched around her heart since her attempt to touch base with her sister got kicked to voicemail.
“I’ve been helping out in the Guild infirmary.” A slight tremor in the words.
“Tough gig,” Elena said softly, because underneath the bravery, Eve remained a child in the midst of the worst war the world had ever seen. “Your friends all right?” She couldn’t ask about her own, wasn’t ready to handle it if the news was bad. Ransom, Demarco, Rose, Kenji, and so many more of her Guild friends were on the battlefield. No one would’ve begrudged Ransom for going to safety with his wife and newborn baby, but he’d said, “I’m fighting for our kid’s future. Nyree understands.”