12

The highlight of the mission was when Lucy, one of my teammates, puked right next to my shoes during the train ride. Everything just went downhill from there.

Our voyage by train took only an hour, and I was surprised when we pulled into the station at Purgatory. My home town hadn’t changed in the month since I’d seen it last. And yet… Everything seemed different. Fuller. It was as though a blanket had been torn from my senses, allowing them to truly breathe for the first time. My new eyes penetrated the shadows of the poorly-lit street. Every face was crisp, every street sign sharply in-focus. I could hear so much more—every step, every whisper, every breath. I could have done without my newly heightened sense of smell. I’d never realized before how much Purgatory smelled of garbage.

We all walked in silence behind Nero. He didn’t explain why we were here of all places, in my home town. And I didn’t ask. Neither of us even mentioned that it was my home town. It didn’t matter anyway. Whatever we were doing here, it didn’t have anything to do with me.

As he moved through the town, everyone stopped and stared. We’d changed into our new uniforms during the train ride. We certainly were an impressive sight to behold, seven soldiers of the Legion of Angels, decked out in leather blacker than the night itself. And the citizens of Purgatory were clearly impressed. After all, it wasn’t every day that the Legion came to town.

Nero led us to the Legion’s local office. Unlike the impressive skyscraper that housed the New York branch, this one was just a room attached to the Pilgrims’ temple of worship. The Pilgrims greeted us as we arrived. I recognized a few of them from all the times they’d cornered me on the streets to spread the gods’ message. They didn’t seem to recognize me, however; they didn’t see past the Legion uniform. To the Pilgrims, the Legion’s soldiers were the next closest thing to gods. Especially the angels. The raw adoration in their eyes when they looked at Nero made me downright uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to care. With professional efficiency, he ushered us all into the Legion office, then closed the door, leaving the Pilgrims alone in the hallway to finish another round of bowing and praising his unerring holiness.

A smile tickled my lips as I wickedly wondered what the Pilgrims would have thought about Nero’s recent lapse in ‘unerring holiness’ with me back at Firefall. He wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t a machine. He was a man.

The realization intrigued me almost as much as it scared me out of my wits. Nero was powerful, dangerous, and though he’d demonstrated that he did sometimes succumb to the darker side of the human psyche, I wasn’t sure there was room enough for any other feelings in him. Compassion just wasn’t his color.

So I pushed all thoughts of his humanity out of my mind, returning my attention to the matter at hand—and the very small and sterile room we were standing in. A jail cell covered one wall of the room. A desk with a single chair sat in the other. And we stood awkwardly in the middle, trying not to bump or step on each other’s toes as we waited for Nero to tell us why we were here.

He didn’t keep us waiting long. “A group of unregistered vampires recently passed through this town.”

‘Unregistered’ meant they’d been made outside of the system, just like that vampire I’d caught here a couple of weeks ago.

“Over the past two days, Legion soldiers have discovered dozens of dead bodies in New York,” Nero continued. “We’ve linked those deaths to this group of vampires. They’ve fled into the Frontier, past the wall. We are going after them. The preference is on capturing them alive, so we can interrogate them. Kill only if necessary.”

“How are we supposed to fight vampires?” Lyle asked. “They are so fast and strong.”

“So are we. Fast, strong…” said Jace. “Brave.” He smirked. “At least some of us are.”

The Nectar of the Gods might have been a great indicator of someone’s magic potential, but it was a shitty judge of character. Any one of the six initiates who’d died tonight was nicer than this jerk.

“You are just as fast and strong as a vampire now,” Nero said. “You have the power. Now it’s only a matter of waiting and seeing if you can tap into it.”

Hence this little mission, no doubt. Piece by piece, the Legion was weeding us out until only the strongest were left. It was abhorrent. And yet here I was, playing right along with it. Desperation could drive people to do insane things.

“How many vampires are there?” Lucy asked quietly. She was still looking queasy.

“We estimate ten.”

“Ten,” Toren echoed, shaking his head.

Nero opened the door. “Let’s get moving.”

We followed him down into the underground garage, where our ride awaited. Big, tough, and ugly, the off-road vehicle comfortably seated nine. As we piled in, I resisted the urge to point out that seven Legion soldiers plus ten vampires equalled eight more seats than we had. For all I knew, Nero was planning on tying our prisoners to the roof.

Jace and Mina sat in the back row, and they wouldn’t let anyone else join them. Apparently, that row was just for the cool kids. Lyle, Lucy, and Toren squeezed into the middle row, which left me staring at the seat between the two brats. Jace tapped the back of the seat rest, his eyes daring me to sit back there. Yeah, this was going to be fun.

Nero stuck his head out of the window and called out, “Up here, Pandora. I want to keep my eye on you.”

Jace and Mina burst into gleeful chuckles as though the world’s biggest present had just landed in their laps. I slid the door shut and went to sit in timeout beside the teacher. There was a solid wall between us and the two other rows of seats, which at least meant the others couldn’t hear Nero tell me off.

“I haven’t done anything,” I told him under the growl of the starting engine.

“Yet,” he said. “But you have a talent for trouble. I need you focusing on this mission, not tying up two of your teammates with that spindle of cabling sitting in the trunk.”

“I was doing no such thing.”

“Not yet. But you were thinking about it.”

“They are insufferable spoiled brats,” I muttered. “And just because they have an angel for a parent, they think they can bully everyone else. That’s just not right.”

“And you have to fix it?”

“Yes.” I folded my arms across my chest and tried to burn a hole through the windscreen with my non-existent laser beam magic. “Some things are just begging to be fixed.”

“And some things will sort themselves out on their own,” he said as the gate opened before us.

Beyond the borders of the wall, the Black Plains waited. The final battle of the war had raged here over two hundred years ago, but the lands were still scorched, a black mark that refused to fade. Maybe it would never fade, even if we managed to drive the monsters from the Earth.

Overhead a storm was brewing, swirling up the yellow-green clouds. The air was heavy and stank of monsters. I didn’t see them anywhere, but I knew they couldn’t be far away. They were never far away. There was a static charge in the air, a spark just waiting to go off. I hoped we wouldn’t be here when it did.

“When I joined the Legion, we too had our fair share of insufferable angel spawn,” Nero said, unbothered by the coming storm. I didn’t think he was afraid of anything.

“What did you do about them?” I asked him.

“I was one of them.”

I turned to look at him. “You?” I checked my surprise. “Wait, no. What am I saying? Of course you’re one of them. You spent the last month making my life a living hell.”

“That’s my job.”

But I wasn’t done. “And you’re all too pretty. Too perfect.”

His lips twisted into a slight smile. “You seemed to appreciate that earlier tonight.”

“I…” My cheeks flamed. “I don’t know what came over me. The Nectar scrambled up my brain. I shouldn’t have… Can we just forget that whole embarrassing incident happened?”

“As you wish.”

If only I could forget. But the memory of his blood and magic coursing through my body like a burning river, priming every nerve, caressing every curve and peak—it overwhelmed me. I threw up my hands to cover my descending fangs.

“Sorry,” I said through my hands.

“You need to learn to control that.”

“I know. I’d always criticized vampires for being so weak-willed, so out of control. Controlling this—whatever it is—is even harder than I’d ever imagined.”

“Unlike the vampires, we consume the magic straight from the source, so the urges hit us even deeper. That’s why I have to be so hard on all of you. Without willpower, you had no chance of surviving Vampire’s Kiss.”

“You needn’t worry about me. I have stubbornness to spare.”

He chuckled, low and sensual. Wait, no, not sensual. That was just the Nectar talking again. There was absolutely nothing sensual about the angel sitting beside me. No reason whatsoever to reach across and touch… I yanked my hand back before I did something else I’d regret.

“The magic hit you harder than anyone,” he observed. “That happens sometimes, that someone has a low magic tolerance.”

“What can I do about it?” I asked hopefully.

“Nothing,” he told me, dashing those hopes. “It’s just a part of you.”

I slouched. “A weakness.”

“Some would say so. My fellow brats used to taunt me about it relentlessly.”

“You?” I gasped. “But you’re like the biggest, strongest badass around.”

“And yet I too am a magic lightweight. A single sip of Nectar is all it takes to get me drunk.”

“A cheap date?” I teased.

He snorted. “You’ll find, Leda, that we all have weaknesses, every single one of us, no matter how big or strong or badass we might be. You can’t let them drag you down—and you can’t let others drag you down because of them.”

“Wow, that was a surprisingly good pep talk.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “I know that tomorrow you’ll be back to torturing me.”

“I fear you’ve overestimated my magnanimousness. Your torture continues tonight.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I chuckled, then sighed. “I do wish I didn’t have so many weaknesses.”

His brows arched. “Oh?”

“Yes, I have—” I stopped, narrowing my eyes at him. “If I tell you my weaknesses, you won’t use that knowledge against me to more effectively torture me, will you?”

“I am well aware of your weaknesses, and I have already made use of that knowledge.”

“Oh, really?” I sat on my hands. “Please enlighten me.”

“You have a hard time bending to authority and holding your tongue, even in the face of danger. Which makes me wonder why you signed up to join the Legion in the first place.”

I smiled at him. “I heard it’s where all the hot guys hang out.”

“See, that is exactly what I mean. No sense of self-preservation.”

“I happen to have an excellent sense of self-preservation. I don’t mouth off to people I can’t take in a fight.”

“And you think you can take me?” he asked doubtfully.

“I have a taser at my thigh and a bottle of pepper spray in my pocket.” I smirked at him. “And you are too busy driving at the moment to put up much of a fight.”

He met my eyes for a moment, then returned his attention to the road. “As I was saying, no sense of self-preservation. I could take you with both hands tied behind my back.”

“Prove it.”

He remained perfectly still—so still that I didn’t think he was going to do anything. I kept my eyes on him the whole time anyway so I’d be ready if he did try anything. Well, he did try something, and I wasn’t ready. He moved so fast that even my newly heightened senses couldn’t keep up. One moment both of his hands were on the steering wheel and the next my wrist was handcuffed to the armrest. I yanked against my bindings, and a surge of electrical magic tore through my body.

“This isn’t fair.”

“Life never is,” he replied. “But the scales do have a way of balancing out in the end. Which brings us to something else you need to work on.”

“Revenge?” I growled at him through clenched teeth. I pulled on the handcuffs again, biting back a yowl when that didn’t work out any better than last time.

“No.” He tossed me the keys to the cuffs. “Learning to fight opponents bigger and stronger than you. Fighting from a distance isn’t always an option.”

Yeah, I couldn’t slam his head into the steering wheel from a distance, for instance. Then again, I couldn’t do it up close either. My hands now free, I tossed him the keys and the cuffs. He snatched them out of the air, and then they were just gone. I really had to figure out how he was doing that.

“Your performance at Firefall was an improvement over previous exercises,” he said.

“Was that praise I heard?” I asked with a smile, rubbing my sore wrists.

“An observation. And I’d like to see more of that. No more fighting with inflamed dishtowels and broken mirror shards. I want to see you fighting with your body. And proper weapons.”

“Like a sword? A sword has range.”

“For instance.”

“Geez, teacher, I’d love to, but you won’t let me near a sword.” I smirked at him.

“I said I wouldn’t let you have a fire sword.”

“Ah, but they’re so pretty.”

The hint of a smile hovered on his lips. “In truth, I am reconsidering letting you have a fire sword. Under proper supervision, of course,” he added.

“Yours?”

“Yes. Harker would go too easy on you, and Basanti wouldn’t go easy enough on you. You don’t learn much if you spend the whole training session unconscious.”

“I’ll remind you of that the next time you shout ‘loss of consciousness is no excuse for not running your laps, initiate!’ at me.”

“You are an initiate no longer. You are a soldier of the Legion of Angels.”

“Then I guess you’ll need to update your catchphrases.”

“And you need to update your decorum,” he told me. “I am your commanding officer.”

“Does that mean I get to call you ‘sir’?”

“It means you have to.”

I snickered.

He shot me a hard look. “You are not taking this seriously.”

“Did you expect anything different from me? Sir,” I tacked on quickly, clearing my throat to swallow a second snicker.

“No.”

“I’ll behave myself now,” I promised, folding my hands in my lap.

“That I seriously doubt, Pandora.”

Nero parked the car just inside a grove of black-barked trees, then turned off the engine. Everyone piled out and followed him. We walked for about ten minutes, then he stopped at the crest of a hill.

“The vampires are just down the hill, hiding out in the ruins of those old buildings,” he said, squatting down. He pointed down at the firelight flickering across the hill of trees below us, setting shadows into motion.

“There are a lot more than ten of them. It looks more like twenty,” I observed.

“This changes nothing,” he said coolly. “We will trap them as planned.”

Then he instructed Jace, Mina, Toren, and Lyle to lay down a fire line around the camp. Enchanted with magic, flames would shoot up on it when activated. It was one fine piece of Magitech, and it must have cost a fortune.

As the others laid down the line, Nero, Lucy, and I stayed behind to watch the vampires’ camp.

“These are loaded with vampire tranquilizers,” Nero said, handing us each a gun. “It will knock them right out. But be careful. They will knock you out too.”

“Much better than broken glass,” I commented, patting the gun fondly.

“Broken glass?” Lucy asked me.

“That’s how I took out my last vampire,” I told her.

“With glass?”

“Well, technically I smashed his head into a mirror, then hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher.”

Lucy’s eyes grew wide. “You are kind of awesome, Leda.”

I grinned at her. “Thanks.”

The rest of our team had just returned, so we all headed down the hill. The vampires jumped to their feet when they saw us emerge from the woods, but most of them slumped back down again as soon as the reality of our Legion uniforms set in.

“I am Colonel Nero Windstriker of the Legion of Angels.”

Gasps whispered across the crowd of vampires as they realized what his rank meant: our leader was an angel.

“You have been illegally turned,” Nero continued. “Under the authority of the gods, I am placing you all under arrest. Surrender at once and no one has to get hurt.”

The rest of the standing vampires sat down—all except for one. He must have been their leader. “We are outside the gods’ rule now,” he declared.

“There is nowhere on this Earth that is outside the gods’ rule, not even out here on the Black Plains,” said Nero.

The vampire’s lips drew up into a sneer. “We’ll see.”

His fearlessness put fire back into the hearts of the vampires—or maybe they’d just realized there were twenty of them against only seven of us. As they charged toward us, Nero set off the fire line. A wall of flames shot up all around the campsite, trapping the vampires inside. And us with them. I hoped Nero had thought this through. The six of us weren’t veteran soldiers. We were newbies with one month of training under our belts. It had only been only a few hours since we’d gained the physical powers of vampires, and most of us weren’t wielding those abilities at one hundred percent yet—or even at ten percent.

Thankfully, the blazing wall of fire around the campsite seemed to have distracted the vampires. We fired at them. Thanks to my new abilities—and my practiced preference for long-range attacks—I even managed to hit a few of them. As Nero had promised, the vampires went down instantly. This anti-vampire ammunition was awesome.

The vampires’ numbers dwindled. A few of them were eyeing the fire wall, like they were thinking of escaping, but the flames burned too high. The ring of fire had effectively trapped the vampires.

Or so we’d thought.

The roar of a revving engine tore out of the ruins, followed by a vampire riding a motorcycle. It was the leader. He drove up a pile of debris, using it to jump onto what remained of the roof of one of the buildings. Broken shingles bounced off his wheels, raining down as he and his motorcycle leapt over the fire ring.

“Get these vampires chained and brought back to town. You’re in charge, Pandora,” Nero said, tossing me the controller for the flames as he ran after the motorcycle.

His shimmering wings spread from his back in a glorious tapestry of blue, green, and black—and then he flew into the air to give chase to the fleeing vampire. I stopped and stared at the beauty of his wings for a moment, but a charging vampire snapped me back into the fight. I shot him in the chest, then shot two more vampires. The fight was over.

When all the vampires were lying unconscious on the ground, I put out the flames. Then came the fun part. We tied up all of our prisoners and carried them back to our truck. We were much stronger than humans now, which was in our favor, but the vampires were heavier than humans too. And the hike was uphill the whole way. By the time we had them all loaded into the truck, it was an hour later, and we were sweaty, dirty, and tired.

And Nero still hadn’t returned.