17

I couldn’t believe my luck when my restraints popped open, freeing my hands and legs. I backed up slowly, not knowing where I was going but just glad to be able to go somewhere.

“Wardbreaker, what are you doing?” one of the men protested. “This isn’t a game.”

It was then that my foggy mind snagged on the realization that the angel had been the one to open my restraints. His companion was wrong. This was a game, that deadly mind game angels played.

“I know what I’m doing,” Osiris declared. “If you want results, then leave me to my work.”

The men grumbled but left the chamber to go down a narrow tunnel. Where did it lead to? Nowhere useful, I feared. The only doors the angel seemed to care about were the gateway to the outside, now buried under rock, and that gold-framed door that led to the real treasure, the weapons of heaven and hell.

I realized that while I might be unchained, right now I was in even more danger than when I’d been nailed to the wall. I looked away from the angel’s dark, unyielding eyes, trying to find a way out, but there wasn’t one. The angel stood in the doorway to the blocked tunnel. There was no way in or out of this nightmare. Maybe—just maybe—I could get to Nero, but Osiris would catch up to me long before I could dig him out. I didn’t have telekinetic powers, and I wasn’t that strong, not strong enough to move boulders. And right now I could barely lift my own head, let alone a pile of rocks. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t walk straight.

Osiris watched me with cool patience, with that confident air that he would eventually get exactly what he wanted. I wouldn’t be able to frustrate him, to make him emotional. He was clearly prepared for the long game.

So what could I do? He was a powerful angel, more powerful than even Nero. I’d seen his power for myself. I couldn’t even beat Nero, so how did I have any chance of beating this original angel, hardened by centuries of training and killing. He was faster, stronger, and more powerful than I was. I didn’t have a move he hadn’t seen.

Or didn’t I? Maybe I couldn’t win the way Legion soldiers fought, but I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t disciplined. I was chaotic, rough, dirty. Uncivilized. And maybe that unpredictability would be just what I needed to catch this well-trained angel off guard. It was a long shot, but it was my only hope.

“Why did you leave the Legion?” I asked.

“We are not here to discuss me. We’re here to discuss you. And what you have in your head.”

“I have nothing in my head,” I quipped.

He laughed. “I’ve caught glimpses of those memories, those visions you’re afraid to talk about. Seeing things doesn’t make you crazy, Leda. It makes you special. You can help me save the Earth, save countless lives, prevent a war that would tear the world apart.”

“By giving you a weapon that will make you invincible, that will give you the power to kill angels? To kill thousands. Or even millions. Are you taking it for yourself or for your demon masters?”

“There is so much you don’t understand, Leda. The gods are not the saviors of the world. They were the ones who brought this destruction upon us.”

“I know what happened. I know that both gods and demons released the monsters and that they lost control of them.”

“And yet you serve those false gods.” He looked at me as though he could drill through to the core of my soul. “You need something from them.”

I locked down my mind.

“Nectar. Power.” He laughed. “You don’t seem like the sort, but it always comes down to power, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know what I’ve seen in your delightfully manic mind. Until you blocked me. Impressive. It takes a lot of mental fortitude to do that.”

“Mental fortitude is just another word for stubbornness, and I’ve got stubbornness to spare.” I smirked at him.

“It won’t last, you know.”

“I can hold you off.” I tried to make my words ring with strength, but they clanged weakly in my ears. My head felt like it was splitting open from the burden of being alive.

“I wasn’t talking about blocking me,” he said. “I meant your honeymoon with the Legion. You will come to wish you’d never joined their ranks, that you’d never cast your lot in with the gods.”

I didn’t fail to register the threat laced into the pleasant tone of his voice. He was going to torture me. Nice.

“Threatening me won’t convince me to help you,” I told him.

“It wasn’t a threat. It was a truth. People like you, they can’t be happy in the Legion. You don’t fit in there.”

“Is this the part where you confess to me how you never felt like you fit in? The part where you say how alike we really are? Cut the crap and save me your lies. You’re an angel. You managed to fit in well enough, I’d say. Maybe too well. What happened? Did you get restless? Did you want more power, more magic? More than they would give you?”

“I told you we aren’t here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you. What you can do for me. And what I can do for you.”

“I have nothing for you. I want nothing from you.”

He let out a resigned sigh. “I didn’t think you’d want to do this the easy way.”

“With angels, there is no easy way.”

He laughed. “Indeed.”

I didn’t even see him move. One moment I was mouthing off to him and the next I was hitting the ground hard. Telekinesis. If only I could block that power like I could the mind-reading. I got up groggily, slowly. He could have hit me twenty times over in the time it took for me to stand, but he was just watching me. He was probably someone who liked to draw out his brutality, torturing his victims. That’s what I had heard about him. Osiris Wardbreaker. Osiris the Black-hearted.

I patted down my body, surprised to find I still had all of my weapons and potions. He really was arrogant. He thought I was no threat. Maybe he was right. Maybe I wasn’t a threat. But sometimes you didn’t need to be a threat. Sometimes being an annoyance was good enough. He wouldn’t be the first to underestimate me. I was used to it.

He watched with amusement as I pulled out some potions from the pouches at my belt, mixing them. I tossed them, sprinkling them all over the treasure chest behind him. The lid burst open. Gold coins and jewels and other sparkling things shot up like a geyser, raining down on him.

He gave me a bored look. “Pretty but ineffective.”

Behind him, the chest was growing larger, thanks to the growing spell I’d put on it. He was too busy judging my inadequate magic to notice.

I tossed another potion. A stream of sparkles hit him, a wind spell. He stood there, his hair rippling in the wind, his feet planted firmly on the ground. He didn’t slide an inch.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he told me.

The wind spell slammed into the big empty treasure chest behind him, tossing it up in the air. It fell over him, trapping him beneath. I sprinkled a sticky potion at the box, sealing it to the ground. And not a second too soon. The box was rumbling, like he was trying to hurl it off of him.

But he couldn’t do that now. Even an angel wasn’t strong enough to break that seal. The glue moved with you, absorbing the force of your movements, using them to power the sticky spell. All that potion-studying was coming in handy. Now if I could just figure out how to get around that big box and make my way out of here.

The box exploded in my path, wood shards flying everywhere. He’d broken through. I gaped as I saw the bottom of the box was still glued to the ground. The glue had held, just not the rest of the box.

“Cute magic trick, but the time for games is over,” he told me.

He whirled an air spell like a lasso, wrapping it around me. A band of cold air pinned my arms to my sides. I couldn’t even wiggle my little finger. Fire poured down the magic ropes, igniting the air spell. As it burned through my skin, I screamed out in agony. Osiris swung his hand across my face, hitting me hard. Pain bloomed up beneath my raw, wind-cut, fire-blistered skin.

Time bled away. Osiris’s spell squeezed harder, sucking the air out of my lungs. Delirious, I started to see things, things that weren’t there.

A red-haired angel putting on the silver armor. She lifted the shield. She slashed out with the sword, warming up her arm. Instead of air, her blade met flesh. A monster, lured into the city from the wilds. Its jaws snapped at her. She cut across its body, ending it swiftly. It was not the enemy. The enemy lay further on. They had invaded her city.

The cries and calls of the battlefield melted into me, mixing inside my mind, pulling me under.

* * *

I snapped out of the memory of the city’s destruction to find I was fighting Osiris again. Or was that still fighting him? Time was bleeding together here too. I didn’t know which was worse: the memory that always had the same inevitable end, playing out over and over again—or the real-life torture right now, tearing through my body with unbearable pain. My throat was so cracked that I couldn’t even scream anymore.

“Move past the final battle,” Osiris commanded me. “I need you to go deeper.”

I didn’t want to go deeper. I no longer had the strength to keep him out of my mind, so I was screaming profanities at him inside my head, looping those curses again and again.

He looked into my eyes and said cooly, “You really are stubborn.”

“I did warn you about that,” I rasped.

The magic holding me up dissipated, leaving me with burns and cuts and bruises and broken things. My feet slipped on the gold coins that covered the ground, and I fell. Osiris stood back, watching me pretend that it didn’t hurt as much as we both knew it did.

He’d left the doorway open. I could make a run for it. I knew he was baiting me, that he would throw me back. Not that he needed to bait me to have an excuse to hurt me. I needed a plan, some way to counter him, but the only way to hurt an angel was to overwhelm him with sheer numbers, or with the super weapon behind the gold-framed door. I didn’t have sheer numbers, and even if I could open that door, he would plow me down long before I made it to the weapon, assuming it was even in there.

“Wardbreaker,” one of the angel’s comrades said as the two armored men entered the chamber.

“Just a moment, precious. I’ll be right back,” he told me with a sick smile, then looked at the men. “I told you never to bother me while I’m working.”

“You promised progress. We don’t see progress.”

“Unlocking imprinted memories takes time. Patience,” Osiris said.

“You should just kill her.”

“She is the only one who has any memory of how to open that door,” the angel explained with cold patience. “The others have been dead for a long time. So unless either of you knows how to raise the dead, leave me be.”

“Raising the dead would be faster,” one of the men quipped.

“How do you even know that she’s the one?”

“The spell doesn’t lie. It showed us the one the Guardians entrusted these memories to,” said Osiris.

“What spell?” I asked.

Osiris turned to give me a smile. “The one I cast the first time you came to the Lost City, the one that unlocked the treasure trove of memories inside that precious little head of yours.”

Who were these Guardians, and why did they give me memories that were not my own? What did they want? How did they give me these memories if they’ve been dead for so long? And did this have anything to do with my strange reaction to the Nectar?

As I watched the angel and his companions, these thoughts buzzing in my head, an odd flicker danced in front of my eyes. Osiris’s face blurred. I blinked to clear my vision, but it was still there. I recognized that effect. Someone with glamour.

“You aren’t who you appear to be,” I said, laughing at the angel. It hurt to laugh, but I didn’t care. “Where is the real Osiris Wardbreaker?”

He snapped his hand to the side, hitting me with a hot lash of magic. The pain catapulted me back into my own mind, what should have been a sanctuary but was nothing short of a nightmare.

I didn’t see the battle this time. I saw a wedding, a union bound in secrecy. The doors of the temple burst open, and Legion soldiers stormed inside. A different battle in a different time and place than the Lost City—and yet it played out the same. They always began and ended the same. With death.

I saw a pale-haired angel walk across the Black Plains, her wings drooped, her wingtips drawing a trail of blood across the ruins of the Lost City. She set her hands on the angel symbol to open the gateway, passing through it. Then she went to the gold-framed door. Her head bowed, she leaned against the door. A tear of pure despair fell from her eye, splashing against the panel of symbols. They pulsed once, and the door opened. The symbols weren’t a puzzle; they were a poem, written in a dead language. And it was tears that opened the door.

Wiping her wet face, she put on the armor. The pieces fit to her body, adjusting to her like magic, sliding over every dip and curve until they were like a second skin. She clasped her locket, kissing it. Then she tucked the necklace into her armor, over her heart, and prepared to meet her end.

The memory faded away, and as my eyes adjusted to the real world, I realized I was standing in front of an open doorway. The weapons of heaven and hell lay inside the small room, just as I remembered them.

“How…”

“It’s an old magic. A magic to make you go through the motions of your memory, like you’re in it,” Osiris explained, setting his hand on my shoulder.

I tried to take a step toward the relics, but my body didn’t move. I pushed against the spell holding me in place, but my mind slammed against a wall it couldn’t break.

Frozen, helpless, I watched Osiris and his companions go for the relics at the same time. Magic flashed, steel clashed, and then the two men hit the ground.

The rocky wall barring the way to the Gateway exploded, and Nero rushed through, a storm of magic swirling around him. A dozen armored men were hot on his heels, but they weren’t from the Legion. They looked like they belonged with the two men now lying at Osiris’s feet. The angel turned to Nero, his eyes sparkling with the first hint of impatience I’d seen from him.

“It’s about time,” he declared. “You’re late. I thought you’d be through that last layer of rock five minutes ago. What took you so long?”

“You’re working together?” I asked Nero, shocked. I only realized after I’d spoken the words that I had control of my body again.

“No,” Nero said.

Osiris slid his hand across his face, peeling back the glamour. The illusion faded away to reveal an angel I recognized from the picture of the original twelve hanging in Nero’s office.

Nero blinked back surprise. “Father.”