2

“When I joined the Legion of Angels, no one said anything about Abominable Snowmen,” I said, looking down at the heap of dead monsters at my feet. Sometime during the battle, the sky had split open like a punctured balloon. It was now dumping an entire winter’s quota of snowflakes down on us.

“It was in the fine print.” Captain Somerset stabbed her sword through a twitching monster arm. It stopped twitching. “But these creatures hardly qualify as Abominable Snowmen. They’re just plain old snowmen.”

“Yeah, except for the steel-trap jaws, razor claws, spiky fur, and their appreciation for the taste of human flesh, they are exactly like snowmen,” I said drily.

I gave the pile of dead monsters a wide berth as we continued up the snowy mountain path. Monsters were nothing new to me. I’d faced a few in my days as a bounty hunter, and I’d fought even more of them since joining the Legion of Angels, the supernatural army that served the gods. The Legion’s job was to protect the Earth and its people from supernatural threats and to uphold the gods’ laws—not necessarily in that order.

As a soldier in the Legion, I’d fought everything from dinosaurs, to carnivorous plants, to misbehaving vampires and witches. I’d had to kill more living beings than I cared to think about. The first kill had been a shock. Each following one was getting easier—and that’s what I was worried about. The gods’ gifts of Nectar bestowed us with new powers, but it also changed us. It changed who we were inside, at our very core.

Nectar was a double-edged sword, a brutal ally. You were either strong enough to gain the new power or it killed you. Most people thought that this dance with death was the true price of power.

They were wrong. The Nectar’s price came in the subtle ways it changed you, sip by sip, week after week, until one day you realized you were no longer the same person who’d set down this path. That was the price of power. Each time I drank the gods’ Nectar, I could feel the change penetrate me deeper.

I was fighting that change with everything I had. I’d joined the Legion to gain the magic I needed to save my brother. I had no intention of gaining that magic only to find that I had become a heartless monster who didn’t care about saving anyone I wasn’t ordered to help.

“How do you do it?” I asked Captain Somerset.

Her dark brows, frosted with snowflakes, arched. “How do I do what?”

“Hold onto who you are. You’ve been serving the Legion for over a century, and you are still so human.”

Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “None of us are human anymore.”

“And yet you have held onto your humanity.”

I’d never have ventured the subject if we’d been out here with a full team. Badass Legion soldiers did not wax poetic about their feelings. And they certainly didn’t talk about their humanity. Angels were supposed to be too perfect to be human, and we were supposed to aspire to become angels.

But it was just the two of us here. The Legion’s scouts had determined that Charles Rune’s base was in fact made up of six castles spread across the mountainside, connected to one another by a massive underground tunnel system. So we’d broken up into groups to hit the castles from every direction—well, as much as you could hit six castles from every direction with a team of sixteen soldiers. Yeah, we might have underestimated the size of House Rune just a bit. Captain Somerset and I were taking the south castle.

“Yes, I’ve held onto my humanity,” Captain Somerset finally said. “The angels are beautiful, powerful, seductive. It’s easy to be swept away by them, so easy to lose yourself. It happens to us all. It happened to me too. I was starting to think exactly like them. The day I realized that was a major wake-up call.”

“What did you do?”

“I couldn’t leave the Legion, but I could hold onto who I was.”

When you joined the Legion, you joined for life.

“I gathered the shreds of my humanity and wove them around me like a cloak,” she said. “And I’ve worn that cloak of humanity ever since.”

“That’s beautiful. You’re a real poet,” I told her.

“Yeah, well this poet can still kick your ass.”

I knew she could. Two weeks ago, the First Angel had served notice that Nero would not be returning to his post commanding the New York Legion office and all its underlings, myself included. I’d thought my early-morning one-on-one training sessions with Nero would fall to the wayside, but Captain Somerset had taken them over. Though it didn’t hurt as much when she kicked my ass as when Nero had done it, it hurt more than enough.

“How much further?” I asked Captain Somerset, looking up the steep and snowy mountain trail.

The path was hardly wide enough for a person, let alone one of the gigantic off-road vehicles the Legion used to cross the world’s wildernesses. So we’d parked our trucks at the base of the mountain. At the rate the snow was coming down, we might have to dig them out.

“Tired already?” Captain Somerset’s mouth quirked.

“Of course not. I just want to know when to pull out my big, ferocious sword and wave it about in the air.”

“You can do that now if it makes you feel better.”

“Only if you light the blade on fire,” I replied.

“You try.”

I pulled out my sword and stared at the blade. Nothing happened. I stared harder. The sword remained stubbornly mundane.

“Leda,” Captain Somerset said.

“Just another few moments,” I said stubbornly, willing that accursed blade to catch on fire. “I think I’m almost there.”

It was a lie. I wasn’t there. Not even close. I was just too stubborn to admit defeat.

I wasn’t yet a master of elemental magic. It was called Dragon’s Storm, the magic to cast fire, water, earth, and wind. The perfect storm of the four elements. It was a fourth level Legion ability, which meant I was supposed to be working on it. Unfortunately, the elements had proven completely unresponsive to my efforts.

I was trapped. I couldn’t use elemental magic until drinking the Nectar that bestowed the gods’ fourth gift. And without some affinity for elemental magic, I wouldn’t survive that same Nectar. Some people had a natural power over one or more magical abilities. For me, that was Siren’s Song, the power to compel people.

Legion brats, those with an angel parent, could do a little bit of every kind of magic. For that reason, they were the soldiers most likely to survive the Legion’s promotion ceremonies—and to become angels. The rest of us had to train twice as hard for half the results. It sucked and was completely unfair, but such was life. My foster mother Calli had told me often as a kid that life was pitilessly unfair. And that you could either give up and be life’s bitch, or you could grab it by the horns and make it yours. I’d chosen the latter. There was nothing worse than feeling helpless.

“We have to keep going,” Captain Somerset said after a while.

“Right.” I sheathed my sword.

We had a job to do. There was a difference between being determined and being hardheaded. Hardheaded soldiers got themselves—and their comrades—killed. The rogue vampires of House Rune wouldn’t catch themselves while I stood here in silence, glaring at my sword. I could always glare at my sword later.

The trail was thick with snow. It was halfway to my knees by now. Every step felt more like swimming than walking. The vampires hadn’t selected the Wilds by accident. No one was crazy enough to come out here to this frozen, monster-infested wasteland. Not even the Legion sent soldiers out here unless there was a damn good reason. Criminals knew that. That’s why so many of them hid within the dangerous lands beyond the wall. Of course, most criminals hiding in the world’s wildernesses didn’t survive the first month. There were too many hungry monsters hunting for their next snack.

A generous pile of snow dropped into my path. If I hadn’t hopped aside in time, it would have landed on my head.

“I know I can’t set my sword on fire, but you can,” I told Captain Somerset. “We could melt the way to the vampires’ castle.”

“I’m not going to waste magic on that.”

I sighed. The snow was so high it was pouring into my boots.

“Suffering builds character,” Captain Somerset said.

That was easy for her to say. She was several inches taller than I was. The snow hadn’t yet reached the inside of her boots.

“Good one. But let’s not forget ‘what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger’ and ‘if you can complain, it doesn’t hurt enough’,” I said, reciting some of Nero’s favorite sayings. My relationship with Nero was…complicated. Yeah, that was it. Complicated.

Captain Somerset nodded, her eyes twinkling with amusement. “Exactly.”

“I didn’t think you were a disciple of the Nero Windstriker school of thought.”

“I’m not. But with him gone, someone has to whip you into shape.” She shot me a grin that would have sent a shiver down my spine—if I weren’t already frozen solid from the inside out.

“I’m sure Nero wishes he were here trudging through this snow with us,” I said. “He loves torturing himself to build his character. He’d happily push himself to the breaking point, all the while bearing it with angelic demeanor.”

Which meant bearing it without betraying a hint of emotion on his face.

“He always was an overachiever,” Captain Somerset said fondly. She and Nero were best friends. How she managed to be friends with an angel while remaining perfectly human was nothing short of a miracle.

“Yes, he really is,” I agreed. “Which is why he’s being promoted.”

“Nero is being promoted because the First Angel wants him in a different office than you. You two are too much trouble together. You’re a bad influence.” She said it like it wasn’t a bad thing.

I pointed at myself and formed my face into an expression of pure innocence. “Who me?”

“Yes, you, Pandora,” she chuckled.

Nero had come up with my nickname, and it had stuck. Nowadays, everyone at the Legion was calling me Pandora. It’s almost as though they thought I was the official herald of the second apocalypse, the bringer of chaos.

“During your recent adventure to the Lost City, you and Nero broke fifteen separate regulations.”

“Only fifteen? I always aim for at least twenty.”

“I’m glad you find this so funny.”

Not really. Humor was the bandage I was sticking over that awful experience in the Lost City. I’d been captured, tortured, forced to see visions, and shot with an immortal weapon. No magic could completely heal the mark of an immortal weapon. I’d carry the scar for the rest of my life. If it would just hurry up and scar over already. It had been two weeks, and the wound was still not closed. I had to keep a bandage on it when training or going out on missions. All it took was my body moving the wrong way, and the delicate threads of my skin popped open and I bled out all over.

The wound in my stomach, coupled with Nero’s continued absence, was a constant reminder that breaking the rules had a price. But sometimes the price for toeing the line was even worse. If I’d played the good little soldier, the immortal weapons of heaven and hell would have fallen into the hands of a psychopath on a mission to kill each and every supernatural in the world.

Nyx, the First Angel of the Legion, the most powerful angel of them all, was well aware of the fact that my and Nero’s rule-breaking had saved the supernatural world. She hadn’t wanted to punish us. Nyx liked our rule-breaking as much as she liked rules. The First Angel was a dichotomy like that. She was cool. I liked her—when I forgot to be afraid of her.

“Actually, you helped me and Nero break quite a few of those rules,” I said, keeping the smile planted on my face. Just keep smiling. Keep smiling. No matter what.

She winked at me. “Shush. Don’t tell anyone. I want to keep my bad behavior under the table.”

“Aspiring for a promotion yourself?”

She snorted. “I’m too busy covering your asses to worry about a promotion. But it might come knocking just the same. Our new leader Colonel Fireswift doesn’t care if someone is ready for a promotion,” she added grimly.

Colonel Fireswift had stepped in to take charge of the Legion’s New York office, filling the power void Nero had left. We all hoped his presence was temporary, but he hadn’t yet shown any signs of leaving. He was too busy killing us. The Legion needed high-level soldiers to counter the expected demon activity. Colonel Fireswift’s solution to the problem was to promote everyone and see who lived. He’d taken the Legion’s level-up-or-die philosophy to the next level.

The Legion was usually cautious, only submitting someone for promotion if they thought the soldier had a good chance of surviving the Nectar. It didn’t make sense to kill off perfectly good soldiers.

Colonel Fireswift didn’t care about casualties. He only cared about results. If a promotion ceremony resulted in a hundred Legion soldiers with new magic and twenty corpses, he didn’t even blink. Those were acceptable losses to him. And Nyx gave him free reign. She was all right with his methods, even though the promotion ceremony death toll at the New York office had exploded. Did I mention Nyx could be inhumanly frightening?

“Wait,” Captain Somerset said, indicating tracks in the snow. They looked like boot prints. She crouched down beside them. “Two sets. Spaced far apart, like they were running. But no normal human has that stride. The spacing between them is too large. They must be vampires or someone else with supernatural speed.”

I looked from the prints to her. “Wow, I’m impressed. You’re brainy. I thought you only knew how to hit people over the head with a hammer.”

Captain Somerset smirked at me. “Don’t flirt with me, Pandora. You’ll make Nero jealous. He’ll attack me in a rage.”

“He’d never do that. You’re his best friend.”

“So was Harker,” she said, her face suddenly solemn.

Nero and Harker, best friends, had once fought because Harker had given me a little party Nectar. That’s the first time I’d seen Nero’s hard exterior crack. He’d attacked like a man without conscience or compassion. Like an angel. It had been one of the most terrifying things I’d ever witnessed.

“What’s wrong?” I teased her. “Don’t think you can handle Nero?”

“Mmm, let me see. A fight against an angel.” She pretended to consider her odds. “Of course I can’t beat him. Not if I play fair anyway.”

“You’ve beaten him before?” I asked, intrigued.

“Yes.”

“How did you do it?”

“I tied his shoelaces together before the fight.”

Laughter burst out of my mouth. I didn’t even try to hold it back. Nero was as sexy as sin, but Captain Somerset was my hero. She was everything I wanted to be. She was a good soldier who knew the rules better than anyone. She followed them too—well, most of the time. But she also knew how to get her hands dirty when she had to. She was strong, but she often won by outsmarting her opponent.

I’d had to learn the same thing back when I’d lived on the streets: winning by fighting dirty, by using tricks and traps. When you were the smallest kid on the street, you got smart or you got dead.

Nero was not like us. He fought with honor, dignity, and precision. And he won by being a better fighter than anyone else. His presence was overwhelming. You knew when you faced him in battle that he would destroy you—and that there wasn’t a damned thing you could do to stop him.

He’d trained my initiate class for that first month after we’d joined the Legion. Everyone had been so afraid that he would call on them when he was demonstrating something. Some of my fellow initiates decided to hide in the back of the crowd. Naturally, that was a surefire way to encourage Nero to call on you. He didn’t suffer a coward; he wanted us to confront our fears and to push through them.

One time, I’d had enough. I did the unspeakable: I volunteered. I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe I just wanted to prove he didn’t scare me. Maybe I wanted to show everyone that they shouldn’t be scared of him either. If that was my goal, I failed miserably. Nero didn’t take it easy on me because I’d volunteered. If anything, he’d taken it harder on me. I’d cursed his name back then, thinking he relished breaking people. But that didn’t stop me from volunteering again the next session. The look on his face when I came back for seconds and thirds and fourths… It was priceless. And it was worth every bump, bruise, and broken bone.

I later realized that he didn’t enjoy torturing me. He was impressed that I could hold out for so long, that I didn’t give up. And he wanted to help me reach my magical potential. The more I could take, the higher my chance of surviving the Nectar. That was the true reason he pushed us so hard. That’s why he didn’t show mercy and didn’t let up.

“If you’re done chuckling over my pranks, let’s move on,” Captain Somerset said to me.

I nodded, swallowing the last laugh. Charles Rune and his house of rogue vampires needed to be stopped. The Legion had taken out their hideouts in several cities, but they just kept coming back stronger than ever. Not being choosy about what lowlives you turned into vampires was a quick way to build an army, but fear and a twisted sense of loyalty to the man who’d given them supernatural powers would only go so far. It was just a matter of time before someone snitched. Mr. Farrows had been that snitch.

We followed the trail up the mountain. Vampires had run along this path recently, but the heavy snowfall was quickly covering their tracks. In a few minutes, the tracks would be gone completely. The vampires hadn’t chosen this location at random. It was easy to be invisible out here, here where snow fell like goose down from the heavens. Here where the cold dulled the vampires’ scent trail, and the sweet aroma of fresh needles diluted it further.

The path cut through the rocky forest. I swiped my hand across my scarf, breaking the thick crust of icicles that had glued it to my mouth. A stone castle peeked through the pine trees, tall and imposing. The vampires were living in a castle. They sure had delusions of grandeur.

A cloak of slow, steady decay hung over the castle. Broken bricks jutted out at awkward angles from its weather-warped exterior. We snuck up on the castle, stepping softly. Or at least trying to. It wasn’t easy to step softly through a foot of snow. There were no guards keeping watch outside. They thought they were safe, that no one would find them out here on the snowy shores of winter.

Captain Somerset pointed at a passageway into the dungeon blocked by a cage of vertical metal bars. Then she pointed at me. She didn’t speak because we didn’t want the vampires inside to overhear us, but that simple gesture was clear enough. She wanted me to make an opening for us to pass through. I gripped the bars and heaved. Predictably, they didn’t move. They were made of hard, heavy iron.

I shot Captain Somerset an annoyed look.

She waved at the bars.

I pantomimed setting off explosives.

She shook her head. She pointed at me, then flexed her biceps.

I rolled my eyes.

It was amazing the conversations you could have without speaking a single word. She could have broken those bars already five times over, but she’d left it entirely up to me. With Nero gone, she saw it as her job to make me stronger.

I grabbed the bars again and pulled, trying to move them apart. They didn’t budge. I tried again, this time thinking warm, liquid thoughts. I’m not sure if it was my burgeoning elemental magic skills or if I’d simply put more muscle into it, but the bars began to separate. I kept pulling, widening the opening until there was just enough space for me to squeeze through. I moved into the dreary castle dungeon. I’d taken only a few steps when the soft clink of metal jingled behind me. I looked back to find Captain Somerset stuck halfway through the opening in the bars.

She motioned for me to draw the bars further apart.

I responded with a series of rapid hand movements.

Her eyebrows drew together in genuine confusion.

I slowed down the hand movements and exaggerated the motion of shoveling one cupcake after the other into my mouth.

Comprehension dawned on her face. She flipped me off.

I laughed under my breath and pulled the bars apart. Truth be told, Captain Somerset’s plight wasn’t due to her fondness for cupcakes. Our supernatural metabolism almost immediately burned through anything and everything we ate. No, her hours each day of lifting weights in the gym was the reason she couldn’t fit through the bars when I had. She was only about ten times stronger than I was. I don’t care what people say about magic’s ability to distort the rules of the universe. There was only so much strength that magic could buy you. The body’s muscles had to pick up some of the slack. Captain Somerset was just buffer than I was. Then again, so were most Legion soldiers. I was more of a runner than a lifter.

The dungeon’s ceiling was so low that we had to bend over to avoid bumping our heads. The passageway was colder than winter’s kiss, but for once I welcomed the cold. There was no proper ground to this tunnel. We were walking on ice—or, as I suspected, old frozen sewage. Winter had reigned in this part of the Wilds since the monsters overran the Earth two centuries ago, so whatever was frozen beneath our feet must have come from that era. I prayed that it stayed frozen.

In theory, it would. The monsters’ magic had dropped the temperature in the whole area, plummeting it into perpetual winter. The monsters and the Wilds were trapped in a never-ending cycle, each affecting the other. It would take an incident of enormous magical power to melt these frozen wastelands, something that could kick this magic ecosystem out of its loop.

As far as I knew, there wasn’t a power on Earth that could do it. If the Legion had such a power, sometime in the last two centuries they would have used it to kill the monsters and return the lost lands to civilization. And then we wouldn’t be out here in the wilderness, sneaking across a layer of frozen sewage, infiltrating a castle occupied by the vampire mafia. On the bright side, at least the vampires hadn’t yet noticed us.

Gunfire erupted from the far end of the tunnel, shattering that fragile illusion.