Archangel's War

49

A one-minute shower to hide evidence of their quickie from the smartasses in the Tower, a change into proper sparring clothes, then they went down to the large windowless training ring on a lower floor. “Vivek set up a recording system here for if we want to play back certain moves, figure out weaknesses.” She made her way to the control box and started the system. “I want proof.”

The two of them began as usual, but every so often, Raphael would rush her at full archangelic speed. Her body reacted to get her out of the way the first five times. The sixth time, he’d have smashed her into a wall if he hadn’t pulled himself up.

No matter how many times they tried after that, it didn’t work.

“Seven times,” Elena said, her hands on her knees and her exercise tank plastered to her body—though the stormfire of her wings never faded. “I can do it seven times in a row before it fails.”

“The problem is that you can’t control when it happens.”

“Yep, I don’t feel anything. I just go poof.” She put her hands on her hips. “Let’s invite the others to watch the footage with us.” Their senior people needed to know how she might react if startled in battle. The idea of just disappearing and dropping a fellow fighter in the shit made her grind her teeth, but at this point, all she could do was warn them it might happen.

“First, you need more sleep,” Raphael said. “This can wait a few hours.”

Illium, Dmitri, Janvier, Ashwini, and Honor proved to be in the Tower when she woke. Raphael met her in the training room and they viewed the footage again before asking the others to join them.

Elena was the one who located Honor—the other woman wasn’t far, had just finished up a session with Suyin in a smaller training area. As always when Elena ran into the architect, she felt a visceral punch. The shining hair of ice white, the sharp cheekbones, the striking upward tilt of her eyes, Suyin could’ve been Lijuan in another life.

Except that Suyin’s gaze held a bruised pain Lijuan would never comprehend. “Ellie,” she said with a soft smile that didn’t banish the sadness that shadowed her.

Elena fought the urge to hug her. Suyin was an intensely private angel, her grief and pain contained and held tight. “You’re a lot better than the last time I saw you.” The woman responsible for some of the greatest architecture in angelkind had the type of instinctive understanding of movement that made for gifted athletes and dancers.

“You are kind.” Suyin’s age pressed against Elena’s skin with a power that was uncommon; it always made Elena wonder if Lijuan had tortured and imprisoned her niece not only because Suyin knew the secrets of Lijuan’s stronghold, but because she’d seen Suyin as a possible rival.

“I know I have a long way to go.” Suyin’s voice was a haunting melody, her accent that of an old being speaking a new tongue. “As part of that, I must now do flight drills with Jurgen’s squadron.”

“She’s learned to fight and she’s good at it,” Honor murmured as she followed Elena down the hallway after Suyin had left. “But she’ll never be a warrior. It’s not in her nature.”

Elena thought of Astaad. The Archangel of the Pacific Isles preferred literature over swords, would rather debate a point than start a war, but pushed to the wall, he’d push back as hard.

“For Suyin,” Honor continued, “it’s about never being helpless again when evil rises.”

Then they were at the large training ring, and everyone was soon watching the footage. No one spoke at the first viewing. Illium slowed down the playback for the second viewing and one thing became clear. “You’re not disappearing and reappearing, Ellie. Your wings are morphing to white fire and you’re moving at a speed invisible to the naked eye.”

Thanks for the chunk of your heart, Archangel.

You are most welcome, hbeebti.

“I know you flew at impossible speed once.” Dmitri, arms folded, looked to Raphael. “That day Elena collapsed. That wasn’t just the white fire wings. It was more.”

“I did it another time—again, when Elena was at risk.” Raphael frowned, as lightning cracked his arms. “That level of speed, it appears, is also triggered unconsciously.”

“So Elena’s not doing anything new,” Dmitri pointed out. “She’s doing exactly what you do, but in microbursts. Seven microbursts to be precise.”

Elena didn’t like where this was going. “I seem to have stolen a little of your Cascade-given abilities.” And he’d need everything he had when Lijuan picked a fight. Because the Queen of the Dead would, of that Elena had zero doubts.

“I am yours, Guild Hunter.” No hesitation, nothing but a sense of love so deep it was her bedrock. “I would give you every drop of blood in my body did you have a need.”

“It’s all right,” Ashwini said breezily while looking down at her phone, her hair up in a long ponytail and her lipstick a dark fuchsia “You’re mirrors anyway.”

Everyone stared at her, but she was involved in tapping out a message.

An amused Janvier gently flicked one of her dangling earrings. “Cher.”

“Hmm?” She slid away her phone and seemed to notice all the eyes on her for the first time. “Sorry, that was Sara about a hunt. She wanted to know if I could take it—I said I could, since we’re pretty much done here?”

“Ash,” Elena said very deliberately, “what do you mean about mirrors?”

“Huh?” The other hunter frowned. “Oh, that.” A shrug. “No idea. Sometimes words just fall out of my mouth.”

Elena knew there was no point pushing her. The last time words had fallen out of Ashwini’s mouth, they’d had a geothermal event in upstate New York. “Can you keep your senses trained for any other hints on the whole mirror thing?”

Ashwini nodded, but Elena knew that there would be no quick answers. And they needed those quick answers—because the situation in China was getting worse. That night, they received a dispatch from Neha that said the fog had drawn farther back to reveal even more death—and more signs of missing children.

After that, the report that Cassandra’s lava sinkhole had opened up again was almost good news. There’d been no earthquake, no bird murmurations. A passing squadron had stumbled upon the glowing hole in the snow on their way home, the orange-red of the lava a jewel in a bed of white.

“There will be a war,” Raphael said to her as they stood inside the fence, beside the heat of the sinkhole, while the snow drifted down in delicate flakes. “This cannot end any other way—Lijuan is not gorging herself for pleasure. Even if we disregard her, there are too many archangels awake and now Cassandra stirs.”

His eyes glowed with the reflected heat of the lava. “Our energies will begin to collide. It is a law of nature, cannot be stopped.”

“Do you think Lijuan will come here?” The Archangel of China was obsessed with eliminating Raphael. He was the only one who’d ever hurt her, and appeared to remain the only one who had a weapon even slightly effective against her.

“If she does, the Cadre is agreed that all will come here to help defend the city.” He looked up at the moonless sky. “They know that if I fall, so do they and Lijuan’s dark night will spread across the entire world.”

Elena crouched down to stare at the lava moving languorously below. “Same deal if she targets another territory?”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter who she attacks, she is a threat to us all.”

A golden-eyed owl swept over the lava . . . and in Elena’s mind stirred an old presence heavy and tired. Child of mortals, Cassandra murmured. Watch the Sea of Atlas. Death comes.

Cassandra?

But the Ancient was gone.

A stone on her chest, she rose to her feet and told Raphael what the Ancient had said. “I don’t know what Sea of Atlas means.”

His already grim expression grew lethal. “It is an old name for the Atlantic. I have squadrons patrolling that and every other border and we now have eyes in the sky.”

“What if she’s figured out a way to make her entire army noncorporeal?” Elena’s mouth dried up. “All those dead, all that power she’s sucked up . . . What if it’s about hiding her assault force?”

“If she can do that, then she has won the war before it begins.”

The next day dawned with no sign of a threat on the horizon, but Raphael took Cassandra’s warning seriously: he ordered extra watches in the east, on water and in the sky. He’d just finished reviewing their overall border strategy with Dmitri when Neha called another meeting of the Cadre.

Things had changed in China.

“We have begun to see live people beneath the retreating fog,” reported the Archangel of India before she switched to the feed from a drone.

Thin people with shocked faces stumbled around the mummified remains that littered the streets. Horror scarred the expressions of many, while others were blank-eyed and lost.

It was Elijah who pointed out that all the survivors were young and—aside from their low weights—healthy. “The women are of childbearing age, the men young enough to help raise those children.”

“She has left enough survivors to repopulate her country,” Caliane murmured. “If this is madness, it is a cunning one.”

And still, they didn’t know what had happened to the children.

The fog over China disappeared the next day. Gone without a trace in a matter of seconds. Drone flights over the core of the country discovered several still-living cities . . . but with much smaller populations.

There was just one problem—the warriors, the fighters, were dangerously limited in number. Nothing with which an archangel could hope to defend her territory.

“She knows no one will dare enter,” Alexander bit out. “Not with the death she left on the borders and what happened to Favashi and Antonicus—the threat of a contagion is too great.”

“Your borders?” Astaad asked the impacted archangels. “Your people are safe?”

Neha was the one who replied. “Yes. If it was airborne, it was confined inside the fog.” Her jaw worked. “I have been unable to contact any of mine who were helping to caretake the country.”

“I have also lost people.” Raphael’s anger was a cold, hard thing. “Have any of you managed to initiate communication with your own inside Lijuan’s territory?”

Silence.

So many strong angels gone. It was a catastrophic loss if you considered the angelic birth rate and how many of those warriors had been highly experienced.

“She has begun the war then.” Alexander, his voice razored. “To kill so many of our own when they were placed in China by the Cadre and would’ve stepped down at her return, it is a declaration of war.”

Raphael’s hand fisted as he thought of Gadriel. The angel had taught four-hundred-year-old Raphael how to use a battle axe, his calm, unflappable patience undaunted in the face of the anger Raphael carried within. All that maturity, all that life just gone, destroyed so totally that his parents wouldn’t even have a body to bury. “I am in agreement with Alexander. This is war.”

No one in angelkind would argue against the Cadre’s decision—the terrible loss of mortal and vampiric lives had already begun to make an impact. Immortals weren’t without soul, couldn’t just shrug off mortal deaths on such a scale. But the angelic lives lost? It would hammer home the final terrible blow.

“We will not get to pick the field of battle.” Caliane, her eyes blue fire. “She has poisoned her land to ensure we cannot invade it. Her next act will be to choose where she makes her stand. Prepare for war.”