“This is my city, you bastards.” Managing to get her guns strapped down in midair as a result of hours of practice doing the same, she swept down a wide avenue, the wind whipping off the blood trickling down her cheek. “Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
As the battle raged overhead and buildings shuddered after being hit by stray bolts of power, the city as a whole began to go progressively darker. She’d seen this before, during the fight with Uram, and knew it was because Raphael and Lijuan were both sucking power from the electricity grid, batteries, anything that could supply them with the energy they used to supercharge their strikes.
The darkness was her friend. Teeth bared, she led the enemy angels in and out of streets, through buildings she knew had accessways wide enough for flight, under the High Line and between certain widely spaced trees in Central Park. They were fast, the ones on her trail, but they didn’t know Manhattan.
Of course, she couldn’t keep this up forever. Naasir, you fucking smart predator, she thought as her wings began to tire, it’s showtime. She’d managed to make a short cell phone call halfway through her darting flight, and, as instructed, now led her pursuers into a narrow gap between two high-rises.
It dead-ended at the back of another building.
Reaching the end, she spun around, wings spread. The leader of the pack, his left eye a pulpy mess where a bullet had hit him, grinned . . . and ran right into the steel net that snapped into place in front of the speeding squadron. The ones at the back tried to fly up to avoid the net, but it fell from above, too—courtesy of a certain blue-winged angel—before a net sprung up behind them.
Trapped, the enemy fighters tried to land, but their wings were too fouled up in the net and with each other. Falling hard to the asphalt, they dragged the nets down with them—nets that, she saw with a wince, had cut lines into their flesh and wings, the edges razored. “I love you right now, Naasir, but you have a scary, scary mind.”
She flew up and out before the enemy figured out how to escape the trap. “I need to get to the Tower!” she yelled to Illium—since it was obvious Lijuan had put a target on her back, she was now a liability to the shooting teams.
“I’ll take you in!”
“What about Lijuan’s generals?” If he’d broken off that engagement to help her, he had to get back to it—those generals had serious firepower.
Illium’s grin was satisfied. “I and my brothers in arms earned our power! Lijuan trusts no one with real power! Her generals are puppets—and right now, the Sire is holding all her attention!”
“As long as Lijuan lives, Xi will continue to gain power. Without her, his body wouldn’t be able to hold what it does.”
Illium had told her that at the Refuge, in reference to one of Lijuan’s generals, but she hadn’t realized the male was this closely linked to his archangel. But there was no more time to think about that—the two of them had reached the battle zone.
They had to go in shooting, Illium faster with a crossbow than she’d realized, given his preference for using a sword. Halfway through, Tasha appeared out of the mass of wings to flank her other side as Lijuan’s men and women deliberately blocked Elena’s path to the Tower. Much as Elena would’ve liked to nurture her dislike for Tasha, the other woman had fought with brilliant fury in the battles, as she did now.
Grabbing her guns, Elena took aim at the enemy. “Get the fuck out of my way!”
Their wings shredded, Lijuan’s fighters crashed to the streets and buildings. Illium and Tasha rejoined the fight as soon as Elena landed safely on the Tower roof. Frustrated at having been grounded, she ran inside and to the Tower “aerie,” a small nest directly above the war room and connected to it by an internal staircase. It had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view, as well as windows that could be shoved up.
Dmitri stood in the center of the aerie, running everything from his supreme vantage point.
Elena didn’t bother to exchange pleasantries with the vampire. Having grabbed ammunition from the stash just outside, she slammed herself into place in front of one of the windows, pushed it up, and started pulverizing any enemy fighter who came too close. There weren’t too many, the defenders managing to hold them from the Tower, while Raphael kept Lijuan occupied above.
As Elena watched, Raphael’s wildfire just scraped the side of Lijuan’s face, ripping off a chunk of her cheek. Screaming that awful scream that made Elena grit her teeth, the older archangel retaliated with a fury of jagged black that Raphael couldn’t completely avoid. Horrified, Elena watched as he took a bad hit on one wing, the ugliness of Lijuan’s power an oily black that began to crawl over the white-gold as it had done during the battle in Amanat, the blackness infiltrating his very cells.
It shouldn’t have affected him that badly—not with the wildfire awake inside him, its ferocity an antidote to Lijuan’s ugliness. But he was tired, had just fought nonstop with Lijuan for God knew how long after the trip to destroy the weapons carriers, and he’d been using the wildfire against the other archangel since the fighting began. In Amanat, he’d only been able to create it for a tiny period of time, the power new. It might have developed in the interim, but it was still new.
Skin chilling, she realized he had no more in him.
42
Already moving, Elena didn’t stop to question the instinct that drove her to put down her gun, leave the aerie, and run to take off from a nearby balcony as Raphael spiraled down from above, his wing mutilated by the black.
Archangel!
Get inside, Elena!
Hell, no. Having instinctively calculated the speed of his descent, she slammed into him, wrapping her arms around his torso. “Use it!” she said, her left arm beginning to pulse with stabbing pains, though nothing touched her skin. “Use me!”
One of Raphael’s arms clamped around her, the other shooting a bolt of angelfire toward Lijuan. That arm, his left, she saw, was scored with wounds.
“You need to get back in the Tower!” It was a furious order as they began to fall faster and faster, his “infected” wing pitch-black and useless. “I can’t protect you and fight at the same time.”
“You’re not listening to me! Don’t you sense it, the connection?” Her own wing felt as if it were being eaten alive by the black, the pain excruciating. “Us, Raphael! Us!”
The dream word hung between them as a laughing Lijuan created a rain of lethal black needles. “Fitting you should die with your mortal!”
Slamming up a hand, Raphael deflected the black with his own power, but the shield began to buckle almost at once, his injuries having apparently depleted his ability to draw power from outside sources.
Elena grabbed his jaw, slamming a kiss on his lips. “Batshit Lijuan will get us anyway so forget about protecting me and reach!”
A hard glance out of eyes of wild blue yet free from the oily black, and then she felt a wrenching inside her that made her scream . . . as Raphael’s shield turned electric with wildfire. Yes! Throat raw and chest aching, she looked at his wing to see the black eaten away to leave only luminous white-gold in its wake.
Another chilling scream, Raphael having deflected Lijuan’s needles right back at her. Stay close.
Snapping out her wings when he released her, she grabbed the handguns at her hips, mourning her custom-built crossbow, as well as the absence of the machine guns. As it turned out, she only had to shoot a couple of enemy fighters. Clipped by one of Raphael’s bolts, which destroyed the bottom half of her right wing, Lijuan called a retreat, and her entire force fell back behind the defensive perimeter.
Elena didn’t fly to the Tower but to her shooting team, dreading what she’d find. But somehow, the entire group had made it through, injured but alive. Walking over to her, a bloodied but whole Ransom said, “You owe me a big, wet kiss,” the wound on his thigh bleeding through the field bandage.
When she scowled and told him to get himself to a medic, he rolled his eyes and withdrew his hand from behind his back. “Your crossbow, Consort.”
She did kiss him then, to the wolf whistles of the rest of the team.
That, however, was the sole point of light in the darkness. As night turned to dawn, the city drained of power, the Tower running on massive generators stored below ground and turned on only when Raphael and Lijuan weren’t in the air, they cataloged their losses while watching for any movement from the opposing camp. The news was bad.
“Half of the injured,” Dmitri said, after sharing the pitiless numbers, “will be able to fight again in a few hours, but the rest are either dead”—a grim look—“or so badly injured they’ll be out for days at least.” Black T-shirt wrinkled and bloodied from where he’d fought a squadron that had landed on a Tower balcony, he shoved a hand through his hair. “Jason, did you manage to get any reliable numbers on Lijuan’s casualties?”
The spymaster nodded. “Double ours.”
Everyone in the room understood that even with the impressive abilities of the Seven in the mix, that still left Lijuan at a huge advantage, and the remainder of the time was spent discussing what they could do to lessen the near-impossible odds. It was grueling, because there weren’t many more rabbits they could pull out of hats. Especially given the fact that while Lijuan hadn’t begun any hostilities in the Refuge, Galen reported that her stronghold was bristling with aggression.
“The instant they see any sign that we may head your way,” Raphael’s weapons-master had said, “there’s no question they’ll attack.” A tic in his jaw, he’d shaken his head. “If Lijuan survives this war, she’ll do so with more enemies than she knows. Every man, woman, and child in the Refuge understands the threat originates from her.”
An hour after Galen’s message, Jason received another report—more cargo planes were being stocked with weapons in Lijuan’s territory, and this time, instead of vampires, there would be reborn in the holds.
“It appears,” Raphael said, rage a cold burn in his blood, “the goddess has decided there is no dishonor in using her ‘servants’ to win this war.”
