Archangel's War

55

We have to rethink our plans,” he told his senior people only minutes later, all of them gathered around Dmitri’s strategy table in the war room. On that table was a full three-dimensional reconstruction of the battle zone.

Joining Aodhan, Illium, Dmitri, Venom, Jason, and Elena were Vivek Kapur, the members of Elena’s Guard, as well as Sara Haziz. While not a part of the Tower, Sara represented all the hunters on the ground and needed the knowledge to be discussed here.

Her husband, Deacon, was a brutally qualified hunter but he was an even better weapons-maker. He was working nonstop in a workshop lower down in the Tower, alongside a team he’d hand-selected. Their task was to repair broken weapons as they came in, discard what couldn’t be fixed, and make new ones.

The last person at the table was Suyin, here to offer any insight she could on her aunt.

“The size of her army changes everything,” Aodhan agreed, the glittering filaments of his wings streaked with rust red and his hair sweat damp. “I’ve never seen or heard of the like.”

“I missed it.” Jason rarely showed his emotions, but today, his shoulders were bunched, his spine rigid. “I can’t understand how. I personally confirmed the numbers I gave you. Those were the only fighters she had at her various strongholds.”

“I might have an answer,” Vivek Kapur said. “It’s weird as shit.” He lifted up the tablet he had on his lap. “I’ve been watching the battle from every angle I can, trying to feed the computers enough data that we can begin to predict their moves.”

Raphael had battle-honed generals for that—and he had Dmitri. His second’s brain was a steel trap when it came to battle strategy. But he wasn’t about to disparage a man this intelligent. “What did you discover?”

“A lot—and I mean, a lot—of the fighters don’t look like trained combatants,” he said. “Angels are pretty much all in shape, but these ones don’t have the look of honed warriors.” He brought up a set of images on his tablet.

“Put it up here,” Dmitri directed, touching something on the side of the table.

A large screen opened out from the ceiling, directly above the table.

“Give me one sec.” Vivek’s fingers moved over his tablet. “There.”

Raphael saw what the young vampire had meant the instant he set eyes on the images.

“I know him.” Jason pointed to an angel with his sword raised and teeth bared, the whites of his eyes showing. “Junior librarian in a minor court. No combat skills.” He pointed to another angel, went motionless. “She’s combat trained but belongs to Titus.”

All of them went silent for long moments.

“It appears we may find ourselves fighting friends,” Raphael said at last. “Warn your squadrons—and remember, it is unlikely they are acting of their free will.” Titus’s people were notoriously devoted to their archangel. “Do to them what we would expect them to do for us were our positions reversed and we were the ones being controlled.”

“I’m not sure they’re even actually alive,” Vivek ventured, his face pale under his brown skin. “I know they look it, but . . . Here.” He threw up another image.

It showed an angel with wings of speckled light brown sinking his teeth into Andreja’s arm—who was in the process of smashing the spiked ball of her morning star club into his head. A flail swung from her other hand, that spiked ball on its way to crushing the biter’s ribs.

“Talk about psycho eyes.” Arms folded across her chest and booted feet set apart, Elena stared at the biter’s visage. “There’s nothing there.”

She was right. The fighter looked dead, the lack of expression eerie.

“His eyes are black.” Illium came to stand beside Elena, their wings overlapping slightly—but no energy jumped from Elena’s wings to Bluebell’s. “Hardly anyone in the world, mortal or immortal, has eyes of pure black, but I came up against a number of other fighters with the same eyes. You can’t distinguish pupil from iris.”

Raphael recalled his own sense of unease about two of the enemy angels. It had been the eyes, he realized—too black, too flat.

Vivek threw up image after image of blank-eyed warriors, their gazes black. Jason identified half of them as belonging to archangels other than Lijuan. It was a small mercy they hadn’t yet come face-to-face with one of their own.

“Vivek,” Elena murmured, “can you find more images of the junior librarian Jason pointed out? I want to see him in battle.”

“Should be doable. This facial rec software is great, but it needs . . .” His words mumbled off as he worked.

Jason stirred again, his wings rustling as he stepped closer to the screen. “I don’t understand how she is even here.” He pointed to a female angel whose full breasts bulged from the sides of her improperly fitted armor. “She gave birth to a child two months early—and that was a mere week before China went dark. She was meant to rest and recover, then fly to the Refuge with the babe in the company of a healer.”

Sara Haziz spoke for the first time, her tone shards of flint. “Her breasts are engorged with milk.”

“A premature angelic infant needs near-constant contact with their mother to have any chance of survival.” Raphael had stood watch in the nursery as a youth, watched worried mothers cradle their early-born babes to their bare skin hour after hour.

“Got it.” Vivek replaced the photographs on the screen with a recording.

The librarian angel with no combat training sliced and cut through his opponents without pause. His movements were fluid, his reaction time that of a well-trained warrior. His expression, however, never changed. Whether he struck a blow or took one, the dead blankness of his eyes was a constant.

Raphael stared at the images, then he thought of the angels he’d seen in the infirmary and what his consort had said in the aftermath. “I think the reborn are already among us.”

“That’s impossible.” Illium shook his head. “She made reborn with mortals. These are angels.”

“Charisemnon was able to impact immortals,” Dmitri argued. “It’s possible.”

“Except for the meeting in India,” Jason murmured, “Charisemnon has stayed closeted in his palace for months. My spies glimpsed him now and then, but he never appeared outside, even within his own grounds.”

Raphael remembered that report, but as Michaela had so cleverly used to her advantage, immortals oftentimes decided to withdraw from the world. Charisemnon had been available to the Cadre and in being so, had fulfilled his obligations. His sociability or lack of it had been no concern of his fellow archangels.

“They did it together.” It was a certainty in Raphael’s blood. “Whatever created this abomination of death and life, it involves both Charisemnon and Lijuan.”

The Archangel of Disease and the Archangel of Death.

“His ‘gift’ turned on him last time,” Elena said. “You think he’d have risked it?”

“He recovered. If it happens again, he no doubt believes he’ll recover.”

“That might’ve been a miscalculation,” Ashwini said, a throwing star held absently in one hand. “Might be his ability kills him this time—not directly, but by weakening his body in ways that aren’t visible on the surface. If I were Cadre, I wouldn’t want to battle Titus at less than full strength.”

“That just your hope, cher,” Janvier drawled, “or will our dreams come true and Charisemnon will rot from within?”

Secreting away the throwing star, Ashwini made a face. “I can’t tell.”

Izak stood silent and awed next to them.

“Even if Charisemnon dies,” Raphael said, “the damage is done. He and Lijuan have created a plague upon immortals.”

Elena’s head snapped up and he knew she’d made the connection to the story the Legion told of the Cascade of Terror. An archangel had created a plague back then as well. As a result, a poisoned angelkind had chosen to Sleep in the hope they could wait out the poison—and woken to find a new people had been born in their absence. A people who held their salvation.

The toxin created back then still lived in the cells of each and every angel and archangel. Only by purging it into humankind at certain intervals could they stop from turning into bloodborn monsters. Vampires were the accidental byproduct of that purging.

“Sire.” Jason’s quiet but potent tone. “I’ve just watched a small part of the battle on Vivek’s device.” He passed the tablet back to the vampire. “It appears that each squadron of reborn fighters is led by a living fighter.”

“What happens if you kill that leader?” Illium muttered. “Are they connected to him somehow? Is he—or she—the source of their martial skills?”

“Possible.” As possible was the fact they might’ve all been imprinted from the same source—Xi was a skilled warrior and he’d have no compunction in opening himself up to his goddess. “Regardless, brief all squadrons to try and take out the leader.” If nothing else, it’d confuse the group. “Warn your people to avoid being bitten by the other side at all costs, on the ground or in the sky. If that means a broken leg or a gunshot wound, take it.”

Everyone nodded.

“I’ll warn the healers to use biohazard protocols on any bite victims.” Vivek slipped away to make the call.

“We’ve got ordinary reborn on the ground.” This from Dmitri, who’d stepped away for a moment, one finger pressed to his ear. “One of my reconnaissance team’s sighted them shuffling around a surviving container.”

“City firelines are ready,” Janvier said. “Ashwini and I took our teams out, checked them one last time before all hell broke loose. Give the word and the flames go up at the same time the ground opens up.”

To destroy his own city was a decision no archangel took lightly, but Raphael had authorized this destruction to save the rest of his territory. They’d lose two skyscrapers, badly damage part of the port area, but the destruction would make it near impossible for the reborn on the ground to get through to their side.

Lijuan’s troops would no doubt retaliate by flying the reborn across, but it’d be a far slower invasion than hordes of infected flowing into the streets of Manhattan. “If I’m in battle, Dmitri makes the call.”

Dmitri gave a curt nod, but he still had a finger to his ear, his concentration intense. “Lijuan’s troops are dumping their wounded in a big pile,” he said before breaking off.

Three seconds later: “V, pull up the feeds from quadrant eight.”

Having completed his call to the healers, Vivek reacted at once.

Sixteen different live cameras filled the screen. “Full screen on camera seven.” Dmitri pointed to the feed on the far left.

Piles of squirming and screaming bodies, one on top of the other.

Angels with their wings half burned, or hacked off.

The broken but live bodies of ground fighters who’d survived the container Izak had sent plummeting to the ground.

The mass of burned and healthy flesh, the squirming, the destroyed wings, it made a dark, angry heat crawl over Raphael’s skin. He’d seen many terrible things in battle, but never this kind of callousness from a leader toward their own troops.

“All of them are damaged.” Aodhan’s quiet voice held nothing but calm, but Illium shifted to stand with his wing brushing the other angel’s. “There is no one whole on that pile. No one who will heal quickly.”

Dmitri asked a question into the mike on his lapel, received an answer. “Aodhan’s right—they’re taking the wounded with functional wings and limbs to another area.”

Another angel was dropped onto the pile from above, his bloody body sliding down the flesh pile to end at the bottom with his remaining wing smeared dark red . . . and black. Some of those in the pile weren’t alive, not as everyone but Lijuan understood life. They were reborn.

A choked-off sound drew his attention to Suyin, so silent till this instant that he’d nearly forgotten her though she stood beside Elena. Her hands clutched the edge of the table, the ice white of her hair a liquid waterfall as she leaned forward.

“Our family line was one of honor.” Her voice shook. “Warriors and scholars and an archangel who was the cause of much pride. We are not this. She is not us.” Agony contorted her features. “My memories of the moments after I woke this time are blurred, but I have a vague recollection of a conversation between Xi and my aunt while they stood over me.”

A furrow between her eyebrows, those brows black in contrast to the white of her hair. “She said words that made no sense to me: ‘Your troops will not die, Xi. Be content, for they will become of me, their goddess.’”

Oh, fuck, Archangel.

Come stand with me, Elena. His rage was a cauldron in his gut, cold and deadly. I need to remember why I cannot simply fly out right now and attempt to stop this atrocity.

His hunter slipped to him, coming to stand so that part of her back brushed his chest, wings of stormfire defiant with life against him. We’ll get her. Steel and wildfire in his mind. She doesn’t get to do this and win.

A stirring on one side of the camera feed before Lijuan flowed into view, as graceful and regal as ever.

“Her wing’s dragging.” Suyin’s voice steadied, a grim joy in it. “You hurt her.”

“Not enough if she’s able to walk.” He’d expended far more wildfire than he had in the last battle, but done far less damage.

Dressed in a gown of fog gray that darkened to black at the edges and followed the shape of her body until it flared out in waves from the waist, she was an empress in her bearing and in the elegance of her features. No skeletal mask showed through her pearlescent skin, no nightmares danced in her haunting pale eyes. Even her wings, dove gray and soft, were so lovely that the damage to the left one appeared an abomination.

A hush fell on the world.