14

We traveled to Purgatory on board a private airship owned by an old friend of Nero’s. As far as I could tell, Dominic was completely human. I hadn’t even known Nero knew any humans.

It was a good thing he did, though, because we couldn’t trust any supernaturals right now. Technically, this was Colonel Fireswift’s mission, so we weren’t supposed to interfere. Nor would we ask to join. Nero didn’t trust Colonel Fireswift after what he’d done to me, and neither did I. I saw what he’d done with just normal weapons and magic. If he got his hands on the weapons of heaven and hell, he would hurt people. I felt that in my gut, and I’d learned to trust my gut.

Not that Osiris Wardbreaker was any better. The first thing he’d done after defecting from the Legion was butcher an entire town. That meant we couldn’t let him get the weapons either. We had to find the relics, stop a rogue angel, and do it all without letting anyone know we were there.

“Why do our plans always sound so impossible?” I asked Nero.

“Because you come up with them,” he replied.

“We’ll just have to be stealthy.”

I pulled on a black cap, stuffing my pale hair inside of it. The rest of our clothes were black too. We looked more like we were getting ready to rob a bank than save powerful ancient weapons from falling into the wrong hands.

“Captain Somerset is covering for me back in New York, and everyone thinks you’re off by yourself on a secret mission,” I continued. “No one is expecting us.”

“I think you’re underestimating the paranoia and viciousness of angels,” he told me.

“You realize you are an angel, right?”

“So I know all about being paranoid and vicious.”

“I prefer your other qualities,” I said with a smirk.

“Oh?”

“Yes, I’m especially fond of your smile.”

He gave me a hard look.

“That’s the one.”

Dominic plopped down on the sofa opposite us. A man in his late thirties, he wore a long coat of light brown leather over dark denim pants and a chocolate brown dress shirt. A gun was strapped to one hip, a knife to the other. He looked like he would be right at home at the Frontier—or on a pirate ship.

“Colonel, when were you going to fess up to me that you hang out with swindlers?” I asked with a coy smile.

“I like her, Nero. She’s such a sweet-talker,” Dominic said with a grin.

“You should hear how nicely I follow orders,” I told him.

Dominic burst into laughter. “I’ll bet,” he said, rising. “All right. We’re coming up on Purgatory. We’ll be landing soon.”

He went back to the front of the ship, leaving me alone with Nero, who was looking at me like I was dying.

“What’s wrong? I guess you don’t appreciate my humor as much as your friend does?” I said.

“I’m not feeling much like laughing right now.” He paused. “I nearly drained you dry. I couldn’t stop.”

“But you did stop.”

“I lost control. I never do that.”

“Around me you do. I can see that perfect control breaking in the twitch of your eyebrows, of your lips—every time I talk back, every time I use a water bottle or car antenna in a fight, every time I don’t act like a pompous stiff soldier of the Legion.”

Nero’s eyebrows crinkled.

“Yes, that. Exactly that. You like my spunk.” I shot him a saucy smile. “Admit it.”

“You are incorrigible.”

“Admit it.”

He tucked a loose strand of hair into my hat. “I like your spunk.”

“Of course you do,” I told him, looking down over Purgatory.

It looked so different from up here. The wall dwarfed the town, casting a dark shadow over the small houses. I could see the districts clearly, like they were pre-cut slices of a pizza pie. A tall, slender tower sat in the middle of each district. That was where the men who called themselves lords looked down upon their territory. Their gangs were not out tonight. Instead, paranormal soldiers patrolled the streets. Hundreds of them, all over the city. I wanted to believe the government had finally made a move to take out the crime lords, but I wasn’t feeling delusional tonight.

Nero’s phone rang through the silence, like a heavy stone dropping into a tranquil pond. “Basanti, what do you know?”

“They figured out Leda is gone,” I heard Captain Somerset say through the speaker. “Sorry, Nero. There was only so long I could hold off the doctors. And since Leda wasn’t checked out or cleared for duty, everyone is on the lookout for her.”

“Colonel Fireswift?” Nero asked

“He’s issued a statement that Leda was weakened by her close call with death and that she probably wandered out while in a state of delirium.”

“Delirium, my ass,” I ground out.

Captain Somerset continued, “Colonel Fireswift furthermore stated that she is dangerous. He believes she will return to Purgatory on her way to the Lost City, and everyone has been ordered to keep on the lookout for her. For her own safety and for the safety of others.”

By now, I was swearing so loudly that Colonel Fireswift could probably hear me all the way in the Lost City.

“All the paranormal soldiers in Purgatory are on the lookout for her, Nero,” Captain Somerset said. “Watch your backs. Both of you.”

“Thank you, Basanti,” Nero said.

“Thank me by giving your girlfriend a kiss.”

“I can hear you, you know,” I told the phone.

“I know you can, sweetheart.” Captain Somerset made a loud kissing noise, then hung up.

Nero tucked his phone back into his pocket.

“The paranormal soldiers should be guarding the wall from monsters,” I said, anger simmering in me. “Or how about keeping the people of the town safe from the crime lords? Instead, all those resources are being put into one of Colonel Fireswift’s dominance games.”

“These are the games of angels, Leda,” Nero said. “If you want to play in our ranks, you need to learn to deal with it. Fast.”

“Ok, how do you suggest we win this game?”

“This is your town. You tell me.”

Wow. He was leaving it up to me? The fact that he trusted me to come up with the plan meant more to me than he realized. It meant so much, I could have kissed him—if we weren’t so busy right now.

“We can’t get past the wall as long as they are watching,” I said, talking it through. “There’s only one gate, and we can’t fly out because this ship is too easy to spot in the sky.”

“Dominic is crazy, but not crazy enough to fly over the Black Plains anyway,” Nero said.

“Hell, no,” Dominic called out from the front of the ship. “There are flying monsters out there. And giant monsters that grab things out of the air.”

“And you can’t fly us out because people would see the angel in the sky and know you’re here too,” I told Nero. “If Colonel Fireswift knows we’re coming, we won’t be able to get down underground to those relics. He will be ready. We have to catch him off guard, to sneak in when he’s not looking. But first we need to sneak past the paranormal soldiers and make it past the wall. But how…” The idea came to me, one simple, perfect idea. “We have to climb the wall.”

“If they turn on the magic barrier, we’re dead,” Nero told me.

“Come on, Colonel,” I said, grinning. “What’s life without taking a risk now and again?”

* * *

It was a crazy plan. And to make it work, we would need help.

As it turned out, Dominic was the best kind of pirate: the kind with secret smuggling compartments. The paranormal soldiers who searched the airship walked right over us, none the wiser.

We snuck down the streets, keeping to the shadows, taking shortcuts through houses, cutting through the old underground train tunnels, and hiding under bridges—all those little things I knew about that the paranormal soldiers didn’t. I was a town native, and they were just passing through, another stop on the career train. They came here for only weeks or months at a time before going home. And what little time they had here was spent mostly at the wall.

A bunch of them were clustered there now, but the wall’s Magitech wasn’t on. It burned too much power to keep it on all the time, so there was an alert system to decide when to turn it on, based on the monster attack risk level. Green, yellow, orange, and red were the alert levels. Green meant ‘safe’, and red was ‘apocalypse imminent’. At the moment, the alert board was yellow, which meant monsters had recently been sighted close to the wall but there were none in sight right now.

We wouldn’t be getting over that wall as long as the soldiers were standing guard at the bottom. We had to draw them away, and for that, I needed Calli’s contacts. She knew people who could be bribed to create a distraction so we could get out. I’d had contacts once too, but it had been too long. I didn’t know which people I could trust and which ones would turn around and double-cross us for a payment from the paranormal soldiers. But Calli had people who owed her favors and people she had dirt on. She could make them behave.

The problem was getting to Calli. Paranormal soldiers patrolled the sidewalks, streets, and lawn around my house. Colonel Fireswift must have thought I’d try to go home. The thick curtains were on the windows, so Calli was expecting me too.

“This way,” I whispered to Nero, leading him into the abandoned building across the street from my house.

We squeezed into what had once passed for a bathroom. I pulled up a hidden panel in the floor.

“Is it common for people in this town to have secret tunnels?” Nero asked, looking down into the dark hole.

We jumped down. The hole really was just a hole—with a single locked door.

“No, this is a Calli thing,” I said, entering the combination on the lock. “My mom dug this passageway herself in case we ever needed to make a quick escape. Or get in secretly like now.”

We followed the musty, dirty tunnel to its end, where another locked door awaited us. And then we were in the cellar of my house, surrounded by shelves of canned goods and other long-lasting treats.

“Is your mother preparing for the apocalypse?” Nero asked, looking around.

“Calli says the apocalypse already hit Earth once, so chances are good it will hit again. And she plans to be ready. It’s kind of her motto. She likes to be prepared for everything.”

Calli was waiting for us at the top of the stairs, dressed in a flour-dusted apron. “I was expecting you.” Her gaze flickered briefly to Nero before returning to me. “I was not expecting him.”

“Long story.”

“You can tell it to us at dinner. I was just about to put the food on the table. Gin, put two more settings at the table!” she called in the direction of the kitchen. “We have guests.”

“Did Leda come like you thought she…” Gin froze halfway through the door, her jaw dropping when she saw Nero. She quickly retreated back into the safety of the kitchen.

“Do you have someone you can bribe to create a big distraction?” I asked Calli.

“How big?”

I slapped a fat wad of money into her hand. “Big enough to distract all the paranormal soldiers in town so Nero and I can climb over the wall onto the Black Plains without anyone spotting us.”

Most mothers would have fainted at that statement. Calli didn’t even blink. “You ask for miracles, Leda.”

I grinned at her. “And you always deliver miracles.”

She slipped off her apron, hanging it onto its hook on the wall. “One of these days, I won’t have a miracle up my sleeves.”

“But not today?”

Calli wrapped her arm around me, leading me toward the dining room. “Don’t you worry about a thing. I have just the guy for the job. I’ll give him a call. By the time dinner is over, you’ll have your ‘big distraction’.”

* * *

Bella gave me a knowing smile as Nero and I sat down opposite each other at the table. Gin didn’t even have a look to spare for me. Her wide eyes were glued firmly on the angel who had come to dinner. My little sister looked like she couldn’t decide whether to faint or flee, so she just stared.

My other little sister had more than enough to say for the both of them.

“Your picture is being projected all over town with some fancy Magitech machines the Legion dropped off,” Tessa told me. “It must be costing a boatload of magic to keep that all running.”

I felt my jaw clench up involuntarily. Colonel Fireswift was being such a pain in the ass.

“Are you two on the run from the Legion? Are you going rogue?” Tessa asked me.

“No.”

“Then what’s going on?”

I scooped potato pancakes onto my plate. “It’s classified.”

Tessa gave me a hard look. “You really are one of them now, aren’t you?”

“One of what?” I asked, spreading applesauce over the pancakes.

“One of them. The Legion. A soldier. The old Leda wouldn’t keep things from us.”

“It’s for your own protection.”

Tessa pouted out her lips. “I bet you told Calli.”

“Calli is an adult, not a seventeen-year-old girl.”

“I’ll have you know that I’ll be eighteen in four months.”

“Then we can revisit this topic at that point.”

“Not cool, Leda. Not cool.”

“Leda is just teasing you,” Bella told her.

Tessa gave me a challenging stare.

“Yeah, I am.” I snickered. “You are such an easy target.”

Tessa was sensitive about her age. She wanted to be an adult—yesterday—and she didn’t like being called a kid. You had to know your loved ones’ weaknesses so you could tease them properly. And protect them. Especially that.

I told them all why Nero and I were here. When I was done, Bella said, “This Colonel Fireswift doesn’t sound like a very nice person.”

“What a dingleberry,” Tessa declared.

Nero’s eyebrow twitched like he’d appreciated the insult. “Indeed.”

“I can’t believe we have a real-live angel in our house. At our table.” Tessa smiled sweetly at him. “How old are you? How many feathers does an angel have? Is it true an angel’s wings are an erogenous zone? I read that in Paranormal Teen. Oh my gods, I have so many questions! How many people have you killed? What do angels like to eat? How many lovers have you had? Do angels really mark their lovers? I read that in Paranormal Teen too. And that angels can have sex like twenty times in a row.”

“Are you writing a piece for Paranormal Teen?” I commented.

She ignored me, her attention firmly on Nero. “Inquiring minds want to know.”

Translation: she was going to repeat back everything he said to her friends at school and thereby become even more popular than she already was.

“How many Legion soldiers passed through here yesterday?” I asked Calli, before Tessa could come up with any more crazy questions for Nero.

“Nearly a hundred,” Calli replied. “It’s the biggest excursion onto the Black Plains that I’ve ever seen.”

“Do you think we could borrow your motorcycle, the one you keep outside in the wall in that shed?”

“The last time you borrowed one of my motorcycles, you almost got killed trying to rescue an angel.” She looked at Nero like it was his fault.

Nero responded to the accusation with cool silence. That silence held for a few minutes, while we ate our pancakes and applesauce.

Tessa finally broke it to ask Nero, “Is it true you once fought nearly two hundred monsters all by yourself?”

“No. It was over two hundred.”

“Wow.” She looked at him in awe. “My sister’s boyfriend is a super-hot angel.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh?” Tessa asked with a challenging grin. “Then what is he exactly? Because you have been staring at him all of dinner like you want to jump his bones.”

I blushed.

“And?” Tessa persisted. “What is Colonel Stud to you?”

I looked to Calli for support, a silent plea to tell off Tessa for being inappropriate.

But Calli braided her fingers together and said, “I’d like to know the answer to that too, Leda.”

“As would I,” Nero said.

Tessa latched onto him like a drowning woman holding onto a life raft. “Do you think you and Leda are soulmates? And when you get married, can I plan the wedding? I’m thinking white roses, pale like Leda’s hair. Or do you think she’ll look washed out all in white?”

“The Legion uses white roses at funerals to honor our soldiers who have fallen in battle,” Nero informed her.

Gods, he did not just take the bait.

“Red?” Tessa asked.

“The Legion uses red roses for promotions, to signify the blood that was spilled on our path to glory.”

Tessa shot him a cute scowl. “You are just making this up.”

Nero shook his head once.

“Well, do you have a color chart or something for what wedding-approved colors I can chose from?”

“Golden roses. They signify new beginnings and the gods’ will. That is the flower color of weddings.”

I had a feeling he was playing along to tease me. Angels had a twisted sense of humor. Kind of like family.

“Only golden roses? That’s it? That’s the only flower you can use for an angel wedding? What happened to freewill and choice?”

“Dear, I don’t think you understand how a military works,” Calli said gently. “The Legion of Angels isn’t about freewill or choice. It is about rules and regulations, duty and honor.”

“Sounds like a dull wedding,” Tessa pouted.

Calli had failed me, so I shot Bella a desperate, silent plea for support.

“Speaking of weddings, do you know who’s getting married soon?” she said. “Dale and Cindy. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Not as wonderful as an angel wedding,” Tessa said, refusing to be derailed. She looked at Nero. “What are they like?”

“Marriages of angels in the Legion are arranged. The goal is to make good magical pairings, which in turn produce offspring with a high magic potential to become angels one day.”

“Wait, what? So they tell you who you will marry?” Tessa looked horrified.

“Yes, every angel’s magic is tested, and then we are paired with a Legion soldier with a high magical compatibility.”

“Another angel?”

“Rarely. For some reason we don’t understand, angels generally have a low magical compatibility with other angels, so their spouses are chosen from the greater pool of Legion soldiers.”

“So you don’t have a choice who you get to marry?” Tessa asked.

“You may choose from the five or six soldiers whose magic is highly compatible with yours.”

“What about love?”

“Love doesn’t enter the equation,” he said.

“That really sucks, you know. So basically every soldier of the Legion doesn’t get to fall in love.”

“They can. These rules only apply to angels. The offspring of an angel is a hundred times more likely to later become an angel too.”

“So what if two people get married, then one of them later becomes an angel. Will the Legion split them up?” Tessa asked.

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re like two hundred years old,” she said. “Why aren’t you married yet?”

How had I known that question was coming?

“The Legion hasn’t found anyone yet who has a high magic compatibility with me.”

“I wonder what your and Leda’s magic compatibility is.” She winked at me.

And I’d known that one was coming too.

Calli’s phone chimed. She glanced down at the screen, then said to me, “Your distraction is ready. Ten minutes.”

“Saved by the bell.” I rose from my chair. “We have to go. Relics to find, villains to thwart.”

Nero patted his napkin to his mouth, then set it down, standing. “Thank you for the meal. Mrs. Pierce.” He nodded to my sisters. “Ladies.”

Tessa and Gin put their heads together. Whispers and giggles rose from them. I thought I caught the word ‘wings’. Nero and I walked out of the dining room. Right before he passed through the door, golden swirls of magic slid down his back. Wings appeared where nothing had been the moment before, the full tapestry of black, green, and blue feathers spreading wide so the girls could get a good look. They squealed in delight. Nero tucked his wings against his back, then he followed me into the cellar.

“You shouldn’t encourage my sisters’ silliness,” I told him as we strapped on the weapons we’d brought along. We would need them to survive the monsters who roamed the Black Plains.

Nero’s eyes were laughing at me.

“What?”

“It was worth it just to see you so flustered.” His wings vanished. He’d put them away to leave more space for swords and guns. “I’ve never seen you like this. Well, except maybe that time you marched up to my apartment to confront me after you’d tossed your panties on the floor of my office.”

“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed yourself at my expense,” I said through clenched teeth.

“It’s only fair.”

“What do you mean?”

“After all those times you tried to incite me.”

“I never do that.”

“Purposely forgetting Legion decorum, tossing found objects in a fight…”

“Ok, so maybe I sometimes do that to get a reaction out of you,” I admitted. “But mostly I do it because it’s just who I am.”

“Wearing those skirts,” he added.

“Which ones?”

“You know which ones, so don’t play coy with me.” He cast a long, languid look down my body, and though I was dressed in long sleeves and pants, I suddenly felt very naked. “The ones so short that I can’t help but think about what you’re wearing under them. Or not wearing under them. Leda, do not walk around me with no underwear on if you expect me to behave myself.”

“Ah, I hadn’t thought you’d noticed,” I said coyly, just for him.

“Of course I noticed.” He inhaled slowly, deeply. “You knew I would. You are tempting me after making me promise to take this slow. Leda, I cannot take it slow with you.”

My back hit the doorframe.

“And then there are these tops you wear. Designed to torment me.”

He popped open the buttons of my jacket.

“Oh, you mean my uniform?”

“Yes. That.” As soft as an angel feather, his fingers slid below my tank top strap, teasing it aside. “When this mission is over, we are going to have a second date. We will eat dinner and dessert, and then I will bring you back to my apartment.”

His mouth dipped to my throat. He drew my hard, throbbing vein between his teeth and sucked. A harsh, unintelligible noise scraped past my lips.

“You don’t want to take it slow,” he told me.

“Oh, is that so?” I replied, breathless.

His lips came down hard on mine, devouring the inside with insatiable hunger. It was like kissing a lightning storm.

“Leda.”

Calli’s voice brought me back down to Earth. I ducked under Nero’s arm.

“I found what you were asking for on your last visit,” Calli said.

My last visit? It took a few moments for my head to clear. And then I remembered. I’d asked Calli if she knew anything about my past.

“What did you find?” I asked her.

Calli’s gaze darted to Nero.

“It’s fine. We can trust him.”

“He’s an angel,” Calli said.

“An angel who has kept our secret, even from the Legion. An angel who is training me so I can gain the power I need to find Zane. An angel who helped me catch a glimpse of Zane to know he’s safe.”

Calli sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Leda.”

So did I.

“Julianna Mather was an alias,” Calli said. “Your foster mother’s real name was Aradia Redwood.”

“I know that name,” Nero said.

I looked at him in surprise. “How?”

“Major Redwood was a soldier in the Legion of Angels. She died in battle about twenty years ago.”

“Around the time I was born.”

Calli showed us a photograph of a red-haired woman in a Legion uniform. Julianna…no, Aradia. That was the woman who’d raised me until she died.

“Why was she hiding her true magic?” I asked, not directing the question to anyone in particular. “And why did she fake her death? Why was she raising me? Who were my parents?”

“I don’t know. That’s all I could find,” Calli said.

“Thank you.”

“Be careful, Leda,” she said, then walked back upstairs.

She wasn’t just talking about being careful out there on the Black Plains. She was telling me to be careful with Nero. And when looking into my past.

I glanced at my watch. “Let’s go.”

We hurried down the tunnel. Just as we stepped into the old abandoned house on the other side, Calli’s distraction went off. Paranormal soldiers ran past the grimy windows, chasing after the loud music playing on the next street. A trashcan exploded, drawing more soldiers. And that was just the beginning.

A woman was dancing naked on the rooftop of the Witch’s Watering Hole. The soldiers were real quick to check out that disturbance. A few blocks over, a drunk was shouting out profanities. A street fight closed down an entire block. A motorcycle gang drove in front of the wall, singing lewd songs and throwing empty liquid bottles at the soldiers.

Someone with a pale blonde ponytail jogged toward the wall. She saw the paranormal soldiers, then turned back around and ran away. They took the bait.

“Your mother sure knows how to create a distraction,” Nero commented.

“She’s a pro,” I agreed.

This wasn’t a distraction; it was a whole freaking symphony of distractions. With the soldiers distracted, and the rest of the town in a state of chaos, no one noticed the two shadows rushing toward the wall.

We climbed, keeping close to the stones. The soldiers in their towers over the wall were watching the gate, as if they expected something to happen there. They didn’t see us slip over the edge of the wall and climb down the other side.

Alarms blasted, and the alert screen turned orange. Magic slid across the wall, enveloping it in a golden light, electrifying anything touching it. That included me. I let go quickly, falling the rest of the way down to the ground. Nero landed beside me, also in a low crouch. The guards still hadn’t seen us. I unlocked the shed and rolled out Calli’s motorcycle.

“Why does your mother keep a motorcycle on this side of the wall?” Nero asked me.

“It’s her contingency plan in case we ever need to flee into the Black Plains and disappear."

“She really has planned for everything.” He looked impressed.

“Now comes the hard part,” I said. “How to turn on the engine without attracting the soldiers’ attention.”

“Look out there.” He pointed across the blackened plains.

An Orange alert meant monsters had been spotted in the distance. I saw them now, a stampede of buffalo-like monsters.

Nero pulled me onto the motorcycle behind him. “We need to direct the monsters here, then when they are all around us, we start up the motorcycle. The monsters are so loud that the soldiers won’t hear the engine revving up. And then we ride with the herd out onto the plains.”

“How do we get the monsters to surround us?”

“We compel them.”

“That works on monsters?” I asked, surprised.

“It works very well on monsters.”

“I’ve never seen that.”

“The monsters were made by gods and demons. They were made to be controlled. It’s built into them. Their minds are simple,” he explained. “Long ago, they changed, evolving. So now we can’t control them passively, but as long as you are concentrating on them, you can actively control their movements.”

Cool. “How many of them at a time?” I asked him.

“It depends. Together, I believe we can control this entire herd. We should be able to handle simple direction changes when they are in herd mode like right now, but don’t try to make them do anything fancy. We have to direct the herd like it is one being. Got it?”

I gave him a thumbs-up.

“Follow my lead. We’ll do it together,” Nero said, his green eyes glowing greener as he stared across the plains at the approaching herd.

They changed direction like an ocean wave, heading for us. I reached out with my magic, sensing for their minds. They were like one mind, and I could feel Nero controlling that mind. I hitched my wagon to his magic, so we could work together, a link made easier because we’d so recently exchanged blood.

As the beasts surrounded us, engulfing us, Nero turned on the motorcycle. We drove away inside the herd. The beasts were so huge and running so close to one another that I doubted anyone had noticed us hiding in the wave. And Nero drove tightly to them, his reflexes amazing, reacting to every step, quick but never jerky.

Together, Nero and I compelled the herd of monsters, directing them where to go. It felt a bit funny, really cool, and extremely exhausting. We traveled with the beasts until we were out of sight of the wall, then we sent them off in another direction, releasing their minds as we turned down the road toward the Lost City.

I yawned. Compelling the monsters had taxed me.

“Sleep,” Nero said. “I’ll wake you when we got to the ruins. Or when monsters attack.”

“You sure?”

“Would it make you feel better if I made it an order?”

“Nah, I’d probably just disobey it.”

“Sometimes I think you are just trying to incite me.”

“If I wanted to incite you, angel, I wouldn’t be wearing underwear right now.”

Nero grunted. “Go to sleep, Pandora, bringer of chaos.”

I smiled against his back. “You won’t let me fall off?”

I felt a gentle pressure wrap itself around me, holding me to his back. “I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”