by Ella Summers
“If I say yes, will you give me that box of cookies sitting up on your shelf?”
She recovered the paper and scribbled down more notes. “Fascinating.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be looking at magic samples?” I reminded her. “Not tormenting me.”
“I’m still waiting for the test results to come back.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “In the meantime, maybe I should test your magic again to see how it’s grown.”
“Again? It hasn’t even been an hour since the last time you tested me,” I protested.
“The more data points, the better.”
I rubbed my sore arm. “Says the one who hasn’t been pricked by twenty million needles already.”
“Besides, you have eaten a lot in the last hour,” she said, brushing off my protests. “It would be interesting to see what effect that had on your magic readings.”
“If you’re going to prick me again, I’m really going to need that box of cookies,” I told her.
She grabbed the box off the shelf and tossed it to me. “You don’t have a very balanced diet, Leda.”
I offered one of the cookies to Angel and took another for myself. “I’m immortal. It won’t kill me,” I said as Angel chowed down on the chocolate mint cookie; she really did have unusual food preferences for a cat.
“I’m going to give you a prenatal vitamin.”
“I don’t need a prenatal vitamin. I’m not pregnant.”
“You should start taking them before conception.” She popped open a bottle and shook out a vitamin. “I have a special variety laced with extra sugar.”
I shot the vitamin on her open palm a stony look. “I’d rather eat cake.”
“Cake isn’t good for you.”
“Sure it is. It’s feeding my magic. You said so yourself.”
“Stop being so stubborn, Leda,” she sighed. “Vitamins are good for you.” She tried to hand me the vitamin.
“Get that away from me, or I’ll tell Nyx that you’re disrupting my magical equilibrium.”
“Take this vitamin, or I’ll tell Nyx that you’re interfering with the Legion’s procreation initiative,” she countered, smiling.
Checkmate. Frowning, I begrudgingly accepted the vitamin from her. I showed it to Angel. She sniffed it, her nose crinkling up in disgust.
“My cat, who eats raw meat and licks her fur, thinks your vitamin is disgusting,” I told Nerissa. Then I swallowed the pill, washing it down with some chocolate milk.
“Way to take one for the team, Leda,” Harker said.
I frowned at him. “Oh, shut up.”
Chuckling, he moved around several of his game pieces on the board.
“So, there was never a demon or god curse,” I commented as Nerissa drew blood from me. “All these outbursts were me the whole time.”
“The Fever has made your emotions unstable and you are projecting those emotions onto others,” she said.
“Telepathically?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t possess the power of telepathy,” I pointed out.
“It’s inside of you, just as it’s inside of all angels,” she said. “That buried power has been magnified by your peaking magic, because of the Fever. It’s quite fascinating actually. You know how you train a power before you gain it, priming it for your next dose of Nectar?” The question was clearly rhetorical; she continued speaking without waiting for a response. “But in this case, it was the Fever that primed your next power, rather than you training to increase your resistance to the power. You’ve become partially empathic—at least temporarily—and you’re projecting emotions, influencing the moods of others. It’s actually a quite common phenomenon in female angels with the Fever.”
I remembered Nerissa once telling me about the effects of a female angel having the Fever, how it affected the Legion soldiers around her. Unlike humans and normal supernaturals, Legion soldiers had taken Nectar; and so their magic was keyed to an angel’s influence. They were getting the bleed-off of my turbulent emotions.
“What’s not common is that soldiers in other offices, thousands of miles away, are affected,” Harker commented.
“That is indeed most unusual.” Nerissa looked at the sample she’d just taken from me. “But it makes sense, given these readings. Your magic is accelerating fast, Leda. There are no records of a female angel with the Fever who’s possessed this high of a magic level. However, your hormones are still on track to peak one week from now, just as I predicted.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that by the time your magic peaks, it will reach a higher potency than anything we’ve ever seen. Even an archangel doesn’t have magic that high.” She nibbled reflectively on the end of her pen. “Maybe this has to do with your magic—” Her eyes darted to Colonel Fireswift, then she snapped her mouth shut.
Ever the Interrogator, he demanded, “What about her magic?”
Nerissa shook her head. “Nothing.”
“You are hiding something.” His eyes narrowed. “I will find out what it is.”
“Then you’ll have to go through the First Angel.” Nerissa’s voice was clear and strong, but she did cringe slightly under his hard glare.
“The First Angel knows something about you,” Colonel Fireswift realized, looking at me. “And she’s concealing it.”
No one said anything.
“You all know what it is.” His scowl deepened. “This is completely unacceptable. I am the head of the Interrogators. I should know everything you do.”
“My favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip,” I told him.
His forehead crinkled in confusion.
I smiled. “Now you’re one step closer to knowing everything we do.”
His confusion melted away to annoyance.
“Actually, I didn’t know that about you already,” Harker said. “Mmm. Mint chocolate chip.”
I grinned at him. “I bet you’re glad you only tried to steal my cake, not a bowl of my mint chocolate chip ice cream. If you had, I might have used something a lot bigger than a fork to defend my property.”
He snorted.
“That is not an appropriate sound for an angel to make, Sunstorm,” Colonel Fireswift snapped.
Harker pretended to look repentant. He did a much better job of it than I could. For some reason, no one ever believed that I didn’t enjoy misbehaving.
“Leda, you became an angel two-and-a-half weeks ago.” Nerissa looked over her notes. “You had a boost of magic, which unsettled you for a time. Then your magic settled down, equalizing.”
She didn’t seem to be talking to me or anyone else, so I didn’t say anything.
“Then, once your magic had settled from your transformation, the Fever hit you,” Nerissa continued talking to herself. “Like the Fever was waiting for that moment when your magic was calm, like it needed that serenity. Your fertility seems to work differently than any other angel’s. I wonder how often this cycle will repeat.”
“Hopefully not ever,” I said. “It kind of sucks to have my magic and emotions all over the place.”
“I wonder whether we can induce the state at will by simply settling your magic.”
“No. Absolutely not,” I told her. “We are most certainly not going to do that. We’re not even going to try to do that.”
“This could be a new breakthrough in angel fertility—something as revolutionary as Nyx’s birth, which showed the gods how to make angels out of humans.”
“Let’s stay clear of anything revolutionary. The gods aren’t overly fond of revolutions.”
“Leda, your condition could show us how to make female angels fertile at will,” Nerissa pressed on, my joke not even breaking through her scientific euphoria. “This could shake the very foundation of the Legion.”
I glanced at Harker. “She keeps saying ‘you’ and ‘Leda’, but I don’t think she’s really talking to me.”
Harker laughed. “It’s your move, Ms. Re
volutionary.”
I moved a few of my pieces around the game board.
Colonel Fireswift gave the board a thorough once-over. “That move makes no sense. Why did you make it?”
I smiled demurely. “Wait and see.”
Colonel Fireswift was watching the board like it would at any moment jump up and bite him. He was likely trying to figure out what dirty stratagem was preparing to attack him from the shadows.
“Careful, there, Colonel,” I said. “You’re glaring at the game board so hard that it might just spontaneously combust.”
“Nothing inside my circle of influence is spontaneous. It’s all carefully planned.”
It sounded like a line from a self-help book, something you were supposed to repeat to remind yourself that you were the master of your own destiny. I wish I felt like I was the master of my own destiny right now, rather than just another piece on the Legion’s playing board.
“And what about the things outside your circle of influence?” I asked Colonel Fireswift.
He looked at me like there was nothing outside his circle of influence. You’d have thought our recent experience with the gods’ challenges would have reshaped his perspective, at least a little. But old habits died hard, especially for stubborn angels.
Maybe he needed a reminder. As the game cycled around to my turn again, I made my move. I swept in behind him with a magic-cloaked army twice as large as my visible force on the board. They wiped out one of Colonel Fireswift’s strongholds.
“Maybe your circle of influence doesn’t stretch as far as you think?” I suggested, cocking a single brow.
He glared at me, his eyes shooting fireballs. Not literally, thankfully.
“Just call me Ms. Revolutionary.” I stood up, stretching out my arms over my head.
“Where are you going?” Colonel Fireswift demanded as I walked toward the door.
“To stretch my legs and get some air.”
He rose immediately, motioning for Harker to do the same. “We’re going with you.”
“Of course you are,” I sighed.
Nerissa’s clock clicked, then began playing an upbeat jazz song.
I looked at it, then at her. “Is that your dinner alarm?”
She was always so engrossed in her work that she often forgot to eat. I regularly brought her a dinner plate along from the canteen, just so she wouldn’t starve.
“No, not the dinner bell,” she said. “The test results I’ve been waiting for are ready.”
She eagerly rolled her chair to the computer on the far end of her desk, the one running magic compatibility tests on me and the Legion’s male soldiers. I had to admit that since learning I had the Fever, I’d been tempted at least once a minute to blow up that computer. Of course, it was a futile wish. All her tests were run on the Legion’s servers, which she only accessed from her own computer.
But the idea of blowing things up made me feel better. It made me feel less hopeless, like I was doing something, like I was taking steps to stop this insanity. That maybe I could really become the master of my own destiny.
“And what’s the verdict, Doctor?” I asked as she typed on her keyboard.
“Weird,” she muttered.
“I’m not compatible with anyone, am I?” I said hopefully.
“No, you’re not,” she said in surprise. “At least not anyone we’ve tested against your magic. It’s not even close. There is absolutely no compatibility. Zero percent with anyone.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “And that’s weird?”
“Yes, that’s very weird.” She stared at the screen. “In each case that we tried putting your magic together with another soldier’s, your magic overpowered theirs, gobbling it right up. That’s why their magic isn’t compatible with yours. Your magic consumes theirs, absorbing it to make itself more powerful.”
My magic sounded like a parasite. Or a vampire.
“So my magic doesn’t play well with others?” I said, daring to hope.
“Apparently not.”
“How completely expected,” Colonel Fireswift said drily.
Nerissa’s timer went off again. It was an operatic tune this time, not a jazz one.
“Your toast is ready,” I told her.
“No, those are the angel group magic compatibility results. They just came in.”
“Let me guess. My magic is not compatible with any of the angels’ magic either.”
Nerissa glanced up from the screen, her wide eyes meeting mine. “Actually, Leda, according to these results, you are compatible with them all. Every single angel.”
14
Chameleon Magic
“Every angel at the Legion?” I repeated in shock. “My magic is compatible with every angel at the Legion?”
“At least every angel who’s sent in a new magic sample so far,” Nerissa said.
Magic didn’t stay fresh for long, so you needed a very recent sample to test magic compatibility.
“It’s truly remarkable. The angels’ magic must be powerful enough that yours doesn’t consume it. It blends with it in seamless harmony—well, at least to varying degrees.” Nerissa’s eyes panned across her screen. “Your magic is a blender. A chameleon. This is just…fascinating.”
“You’re doing that thing again, Nerissa,” I told her. “The thing where you talk to me but don’t really talk to me.”
“Sorry.” She turned her monitor toward me. “Look at the test results. Your magic seems to be a kind of universal blend that goes with anything powerful enough to handle it, adapting itself to complement another angel’s magic sample. I’ve never seen anything like it. I haven’t even heard of anything like it.”
That must have been my balanced light and dark magic at work. It was pretty adaptive.
“Your magic is universally compatible, but it does blend better with some samples than others,” said Nerissa. “Your compatibility with other angels seems to depend on the magical spectrum of your abilities, on which powers are strongest for you. Your siren and vampire magics are way ahead of the rest.”
Because of who my parents were.
“But look at your telepathic magic!” She pointed at the graph on her screen. “You haven’t even yet had the Nectar for that power, and see how strong it is. It’s nearly up to the level of your weaker talents, which have been activated by Nectar.”
Well, that explained how I could usually block people from reading my mind, but it didn’t tell me why my telepathic magic was so strong to begin with.
“You must have ghost blood in your lineage,” Nerissa said.
No, not ghost blood. Deity blood. My siren magic was strong because of my father Faris, God of Sirens. My vampire magic was strong because of my mother Grace, Demon of Dark Vampires.
But neither gods nor demons possessed powerful telepathic magic. It wasn’t one of their native powers. They’d acquired it later in their magical history. So why was that power strong in me? And why had it never expressed itself in me before I’d joined the Legion? My siren and vampire magic had—albeit in an odd way.”
Before my Legion days, the glow and shine of my hair had mesmerized vampires, filling them with an irresistible urge to chow down on my neck. Nowadays, it responded to my mood and magic, changing color. And so did my new wings. Chameleon hair. Chameleon wings. Chameleon magic—that was the phrase Nerissa had used. This was all connected. My hair and wings and magic. The reason they changed color, and the reason my magic was compatible with every other angel’s magic.
As for my telepathic magic…well, the only way it had expressed itself before now was my ability to mask my thoughts from telepaths. I’d thought that was sheer stubbornness—and desperation—on my part. I had a lot of secrets to hide. But what if there was more to it than that?
Nerissa’s gaze slid from the screen, to Colonel Fireswift. “You are compatible with her.”
Colonel Fireswift’s disgusted face mirrored my own.
“But your compatibility is higher,�
� Nerissa told Harker. “Ninety percent. Not bad. Do you know what this means?”
“That Nero is going to kill me,” Harker said glumly.
“It means that if we can figure out why Leda is compatible with so many angels, this will completely change the Legion of Angels.” Nerissa’s whole face was lit up with excitement. “Maybe we could learn how to make more angels compatible with other angels.”
Wow, I’d revolutionized the Legion a lot in the last few minutes.
“Do you have a magic sample from Nero?” I asked Nerissa.
“No, the First Angel has been unable to reach General Windstriker.”
My last message from Nero had been two days ago when he’d been out on the plains of monsters, about to close in on a monster breeder, a profession I hadn’t even known existed. Since then, there had only been silence from his end. Phone reception was notoriously bad out there. He might not even know what was going on at the Legion—and with me—right now.
Nyx entered the room. “Interesting results, Doctor?”
She said it like she already knew the answer. She’d probably been listening.
“Leda seems to be universally compatible with other angels,” Nerissa reported. “These unprecedented results are very exciting.”
I could forgive my friend’s enthusiasm—she was a scientist who’d discovered something new and novel—but that didn’t mean I would go through with this. Whatever ‘this’ ended up being. I had to find Nero. I had to contact him and get out of here before…well, just before. We would run away together as we’d promised each other.
“Walk with me,” Nyx said to me.
I followed her out of the room. As we walked down the hallway, we passed other soldiers, but no one appeared to be fighting or going otherwise berserk. They were all acting with the dignity and reserve expected of a soldier in the Legion of Angels.
“They all seem fine,” I commented.
I’d thought the incidents had been caused by a demon curse, but these troubles had been my fault all along. I couldn’t help but feel guilty about that. Some of the affected people were my friends, and I’d hurt them. The fact that I’d done it unknowingly did little to assuage my guilt.