Archangel's War

46

Raphael glanced in that direction, was just able to see the bottom of the violent rotation of wind and dirt and pieces of plane wreckage. It’s going to get loud, he warned everyone on the plane as he sent even more power into the energy shield he’d created around the plane.

Light began to spear out above him and at first he thought he’d lost control. But no, the shell he’d erected was holding its pattern. Elena?

Yeah, I’m glowing big-time. Happened while we were landing, too. Partial battery kicking in?

I haven’t reached for your energy. He’d needed the massive amount held by the Legion. Do you feel ill or hurt?

No. I’m just a glowstick. A kiss he felt. We’ll figure it out later. Concentrate on keeping yourself alive so I don’t have to kick your ass.

Again, she worried about him when, of all of them, he was the one most likely to survive. Even if a twister picked him up and smashed him to the earth at terminal velocity, it would not be terminal for him. His body would knit itself back together sooner or later.

Illium would survive, too. His recovery would be far longer, but he was old and strong enough now to make it. Aodhan was the same. Dougal and his copilot, however, would not endure. Their heads would likely be torn from their bodies by the impact and, as vampires, that was it for them.

As for Elena . . . She was far less breakable than she’d been before the Cascade tried to steal her soul, but she remained a young angel. Her body would not last being battered into pieces.

So he’d ensure it didn’t come to that.

Staring down at the tarmac, he anchored himself. The tarmac cracked around him as his energy shoved into the earth and clawed itself into stone so far below it was part of the planet’s mantle. In concert with the shield, it kept the plane from moving as the twister hit.

Pieces of plane wreckage whacked hard against the sides of the craft, but nothing got through the shell of lightning fire. A bit of debris hit him in the leg, and it was only then that he realized he’d forgotten to create a shield around himself.

It took but a thought.

A roar of noise and dust and nothingness. Then . . . an abrupt silence. Andreja. Status.

I’m scanning the skies and the landscape. I don’t see any more twisters. All is calm.

Raphael sucked the energy that protected the plane into himself, pouring a vast amount of it back into the Legion, some of whom had fallen where they stood when he grabbed for their power. He had no desire or need to carry that much power in his own body—not when the Cascade lightning was already so violent. I thank you.

We are yours, whispered seven hundred and seventy-seven voices. This power is yours.

Inside him, the Cascade energy settled back in with a familiar coldness leavened only with a tendril of wildfire and steel. Deplane, he said to those inside.

Already out from under the plane, he rose into the air just as the clouds opened up. Pounding rain began to slice in from his right, hitting his skin in hundreds of sharp, cold shards.

The Legion mark on his temple flared.

The door of the plane opened at last, and Elena raced out. He was hovering right outside, hauled her off the top of the stairs and into his arms. She clung to him with a laugh, the lightning storm of her wings brilliant against the gray heaviness of the rain-wet world. A second later, she thrust her hands into his hair, pulled his head down to her own, and kissed him stupid.

Later, they stood with Dmitri and watched the footage from the airport cameras and from a plane spotter who’d been parked at a “secret” location the enthusiasts shared only among themselves. The Tower let them be because they never tried to breach the airport boundaries and policed themselves into good behavior. This spotter had been recording the jet coming in, complete with commentary.

“Tower 1 is about to land,” he said cheerfully. “Like, that’s not the actual call sign because the Tower doesn’t advertise which of its planes are in the sky, but I can tell this is number 1 from that slight mark on the tail. Means one of the senior people must be onboard. Can’t wait—Fuck!”

The footage wobbled as he focused in on a tornado that had appeared out of nowhere. He whipped the camera back and forth as another appeared, then another.

“Oh cripes! How’s the pilot going to avoid those?” Fear rippled through his words. “That plane is going to go right into that twister. Oh man, oh man . . .” His words mumbled off into a chill terror they could almost feel, until his voice squeaked again. “Raphael! Fuck me! No one is going to believe this!”

He’d caught the instant Raphael’s energy crawled all over the plane and turned it into a glowing beacon in the heavy gray darkness. The plane was soon obscured by the twisters and the dirt and debris in the air, only to reappear in patches as Raphael brought it in to land.

Through it all was an awed silence that ended with, “That’s the fucking Archangel of fucking New York! Suck on that all you cretins who try to attack our city, especially you Zhou Lijuan!”

Elena snorted out a laugh. “I like this guy.” She had to laugh or her heart might explode—she couldn’t believe Raphael had done that. Seeing the visuals and the size of the jet above his head, viewing the sheer power involved in the landing . . . Her pulse was thunder.

“You would,” Dmitri muttered, but his words didn’t hold their usual mocking bite. He was too focused on the second recording that had begun to play—this one from the surveillance cameras at the airport. Vivek had stitched together the footage to provide a continuous narrative.

The tornados had sprung up without warning, huge swirls of wind and dirt and flying debris that had become shrapnel. Raphael’s wounds had already healed, but Elena was going to be seeing his blood smeared on his skin for a while to come. Andreja at the air traffic control tower had narrowly avoided having her head sliced off when part of a broken-off wing smashed through the glass of her enclosure.

Turned out that had occurred close to the start of things; she’d then continued to calmly communicate with Raphael.

“Why is Andreja in that control room?” Elena said to Dmitri. “I’d figure a woman that unflappable would be in the Tower.”

“You don’t know Andreja.” Dmitri folded his arms. “She’s seven thousand years old and has decided she’s on vacation this century. And she likes planes.”

Elena thought it over and realized that when you’d lived so long, taking a century off to relax was no biggie. “Lucky for us she decided to vacation as an air traffic controller.”

“Regardless, inform her that all vacation time is cancelled until the Cascade is past.” Raphael’s eyes were on the screen. “There is no sense to the twisters. It appears to be chance your plane was coming in to land when they appeared.”

“Seems to line up with reports coming in from other territories,” Dmitri said. “Devastating weather events all over the place. Flash flooding in Chile. Major landslide in Turkey. Whirlpool in a lake in Switzerland—casualties are going to be significant there. Thing swallowed up multiple pleasure craft.”

Elena rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “The pace of chaos, it’s speeding up.” Like a concerto rising to an inevitable crescendo: war.

When she and Raphael made it up to their suite at last, it was to find the Primary waiting for them on the night-draped balcony. A patient gargoyle crouched on the very edge, his hair dripping. Sliding open the doorway and spilling light onto the balcony, Elena said, “You know you’re welcome to wait inside.”

The Primary rose from his crouch.

Elena went motionless when he stepped into the light. “Your second becoming,” she whispered, recalling words the Primary had spoken to her what felt like a lifetime ago.

The Primary’s eyes remained that pale, pale color with a ring of vivid blue around the irises that echoed the color of Raphael’s eyes, but his skin had gained a hue that wasn’t gray or pale. It was very much alive. And his hair, it was a vivid black, the shade of midnight skies. The shade of Raphael’s hair.

“It happened today.” The Primary lifted up his hand to stare at the back of it. “I have not been in full color for . . .” A tilt of his head. “For endless eons. Since the last aeclari.”

“Are your brethren the same?” If her archangel was disturbed by the strange echo of his coloring, he didn’t show it.

The Primary took time to answer. “They are themselves. Only the Primary is of the aeclari.” His dark pupils suddenly bled outward in waves of silver. Until the silver met the blue and the two merged, with the blue flowing into the silver at the edges. The pupils re-emerged from the silver-blue sea.

Elena put her hands on her hips. Eerie but pretty.

Look at his wings.

Elena hadn’t paid much attention to the Primary’s bat-like wings—the wings of the Legion never seemed to change. Apparently, that rule was now over and done with, because the Primary’s formerly gray wings boasted a rim of white-gold that brushed inward into a vivid purple before fading into gray.

“You have pieces of both of us,” Raphael said.

“We glimpsed the mirror and the mirror changed us.” The Primary went down on one knee. “I come to offer the sire the power that is his. Today, you took only a percentage and returned the overflow to us.”

“You told us once that if Raphael took the power, you’d have the choice to stay in the world as separate beings, or return to the deep,” Elena said. “Is that still true?”

A small hesitation. “Things have altered. We feel the dark energies rising and rising. We wish to give you not just the power we hold for you, but the power that makes us.”

Elena’s heart iced.

Raphael’s wings brushed hers as he spread them out, her lightning dancing over his feathers before returning to her. “What will that mean for you?”

“We do not know. We may die,” the Primary said with no indication of fear or anguish. “We may return to the deep to begin again.”

The idea of a city without the Legion’s crouching presence, their green home abandoned and empty, was anathema to Elena. Her heart rebelled so hard against the idea of it that she couldn’t speak.

“At this moment, I do not need any of the power,” Raphael said. “I would rather have my Legion present and at full strength. A battle is brewing and I will need as many experienced fighters as I can gather.”

The Primary rose to his feet. “The last aeclari were not like you.” He seemed to be struggling to untangle memories so old they were beyond time. “You are . . . new. You . . . break patterns.”

“Good. It’s probably why I’m not a chrysalis battery and Raphael hasn’t turned into a cold-hearted villain.” She was fucking proud of her archangel for making the choice he’d just made—especially when she felt the chill of the Cascade power continue to roil in his blood. He’d gained considerable control over it, but it took a fierce will not to listen to its sinister promises.

Lijuan had listened. And now Lijuan was a monstrous power that might rule all the world. Being good, being honorable, didn’t seem to come with any prizes in this immortal fight to the death.

Arms folded, Elena glared out at the sky. “I don’t know what the fuck the Cascade wants.”

“To rebalance the world,” the Primary said, as if that was self-evident.

When they both stared at him, he stared back for a long moment as whispered voices built in the back of Elena’s head. The Legion, talking among themselves.

“We have remembered,” the Primary said. “We do not know from when. We do not know from who.”

That was a reasonable enough statement given their age and how many memories they carried in their minds.

“Tell us,” Raphael ordered.

The Primary took his time to speak, a being so ancient that he had been present at the first end and the second beginning of angelkind. “Power grows. Archangels grow. A balancing is needed to keep the world from breaking.”

Elena scowled. “Hold up. This whole power surge thing is part of the Cascade. I don’t know about you, but looks to me like it’s the Cascade doing the breaking.”

Cassandra’s owls flew past the balcony on snowy wings, their silent beauty catching all their attention for a moment before they flew out of sight. “It is a paradox,” the Primary admitted, then seemed to struggle to find words. “Too many Sleepers. Too much stored power. The earth groans. It must be released.”

A susurration of sound, Raphael settling his wings . . . a sound her own wings would never again make. The stab of sadness was unexpected and visceral. Swallowing hard against it, Elena reminded herself that she had fucking retractable wings like a comic book superhero. Not only that, her wings were afire with lightning.

Her archangel spoke into the small silence. “The Cascade is triggered when the gathered power of the Sleepers in the world reaches a certain threshold?”

Voices in the back of Elena’s head again, the Legion engaging in a furious discussion before the Primary nodded. “Wind, rain, tremors, ice, it is a release.”

“Like a volcano letting off a bit of steam.” Elena tapped her boot on the ground. “Of course, then the top blows off and everyone dies.”

“Yes,” the Primary said. “This time, the top will blow. Balance will be found again.”

Elena and Raphael asked him more questions, but that was all he had to give them. “Unbelievably, that all made sense,” she said to Raphael as they got ready for bed. “I mean, in a race of immortals where some of you continue to grow in power, things are going to get out of control without an inbuilt safety switch.”

“Especially when those of us with the most power are all but impossible to kill.” Bare chested and barefoot, Raphael walked to stand by the open balcony door, staring out at the night. “Leave us to continue on that trajectory unchecked and we will eventually become world-destroying powers who will annihilate each other.”

Admiring him as she walked closer, Elena kissed his spine, right between where his wings grew out of his back. “I don’t like where this is going.”

“But I think we must confront it. The only way for power to be released back into the system, and for things to come back in balance, is for some of us to die.” That was what Raphael hadn’t realized for so long—as Elena had said, a race of immortals couldn’t keep going forever without consequences. “And the only way for an archangel to die . . .”

“. . . is at the hands of another archangel.” Elena shifted to face him, her back against the night. “Fucking Cascade’s setting up an immortal fight club?” Fury vibrated in her voice. “But what does it get if Lijuan wins and all the rest of you are dead?”

“Think of how much power the deaths of the Cadre and the Ancients will release back into the system.” Wave after wave after shocking wave. “It explains why we do not have legends of more archangelic Sleepers. For a race of immortals, we appear to have lost countless prior Cadre without a trace.”

“Wait. Wait.” Elena rubbed her forehead. “What happens to all the Cascade ‘gifts’ afterward? Your wildfire, Titus’s earthquakes, everything else. Your mother lived through a Cascade and she’s not mega-powerful.” She paused, squeezed her eyes shut for a second as she fought to get her thoughts in order. “Well, she is because she took an entire city with her into Sleep and now protects Amanat with a shield, but she doesn’t have a crazy-violent offensive power. Same with Alexander.”

“Hers was a ‘normal’ Cascade.” He cupped the side of her neck, stroking his thumb over the delicate skin there. “Yet the question remains. Perhaps the Legion know.”

But the Legion had no more answers for them. We Slept after the Cascade of Terror. Such a deep Sleep that when we woke, none of the old archangels walked the world.

Elena ran her hands over his chest. “Guess we’ll find the answer after we kick Lijuan’s butt.” But in her eyes was the same dark knowledge that haunted him—that the wildfire hadn’t been enough to save Antonicus.

Their only weapon against Lijuan’s poison had failed.