16

When faced with a horde of vampires, there was really only one thing you could do. No, not run away screaming like hell. The Legion of Angels frowned upon displays of outright cowardice in its soldiers. So we raised our guns and shot the vampires full of Legion-issued magic tranquilizers. They dropped like flies.

The werewolves didn’t react so kindly. In fact, the tranquilizers didn’t seem to do anything but make them angry. I kept shooting anything that moved anyway. What else could I do? We weren’t armed for anything but vampires.

If it had been just the vampires, we would have been ok, even with their numbers. We hadn’t counted on the supernatural support squad. What were they doing helping the rogue vampires?

Captain Somerset dashed forward, drawing her freakishly large sword. She slashed and slid, cut and cleaved, tearing through anything that made it past our firing line. I was really glad she was on our side. That woman was frighteningly fierce. And deadly efficient.

But it wasn’t enough.

The werewolves were breaking through, and I had no idea what cloud of impending doom the witches were brewing up in the back. I did know that if we didn’t take care of it fast, that cloud would escalate beyond impending. The Legion brats already had their knives drawn, and they were holding their own against the shifters. Drake was wrestling with one of the wolves, putting those magic-enhanced football tackling skills to good use.

Ivy and I went for the witches. The cloud was descending on our teammates, along with all kinds of potions the witches were throwing at us.

“We’ve got to put a stop to that,” I told Ivy as a bottled lightning bolt exploded beside my foot.

We moved in, evading firebombs and insect swarms and weird green goo. One of the potion bottles broke right in front of me, splattering my legs with tiny red drops. Those red drops promptly burst into flames all across the leather. Pain permeated the surface of my pants, burning into my skin. I patted out the flames, but the damage was done. I grabbed hold of the witch and sank my fangs into her neck. Drinking her blood wasn’t the orgasmic experience drinking Nero’s blood had been. Not even close. But it did heal me. I sort of loved the irony of using her blood to heal the damage she’d caused to my body. Her eyes trembled with fear, as though she were afraid I’d drain her dry.

“You don’t taste that good,” I told her, then shot a tranquilizer into her.

I pivoted, shooting down the rest of the witches around me. A shriek of agony drew my attention across the room. A seven-foot werewolf held Ivy in his claws, his teeth dripping with blood. She had a werewolf-sized bite mark on her arm. When he snapped his jaws at her to take another bite, she punched him in the face. Roaring, he flung her across the room. My friend landed in a limp heap on the floor.

I ran right for her, but a pair of werewolves jumped in my way. I tried to get around them with no success. They were too big and fast. They blocked me at every turn.

“Help Ivy!” I shouted to Drake.

The werewolf who’d thrown her wasn’t done with her yet. He raked and clawed at her. Every time she tried to get up, he knocked her back down. She rolled into a ball, protecting her face. Drake was cut off from her by a wall of four werewolves. I had to help her.

I faced down the two wolves in front of me, drawing my knife. I slashed at the first werewolf, but she knocked the knife from my hand. Then both wolves jumped at me. I sidestepped, knowing I was no match for those claws. If they got in a blow, I’d be in even worse shape than Ivy. The werewolves were stronger than I was, and there were two of them.

I evaded them again, diving for my knife lying on the ground. As the first wolf landed, I jammed it up into her paw. She roared, running around wildly on three legs as she cradled her wound. I grabbed Ivy’s gun and mine off the floor and unloaded everything I had into the second wolf. That knocked him out.

I ran past the limping wolf, who was trying to grip the hilt of the knife in her mouth so she could pull it out. But her mouth was too big and not meant for precision work. She would be busy for a while. Drake had broken through too. His four wolves lay unmoving on the floor, but he was still grappling with the one who’d mauled Ivy. The wolf stood in front of our friend, preventing anyone from getting to her.

Ivy looked bad. She was unconscious with a huge bruise on her head. Her leather suit was torn open, reduced to shreds across her abdomen. She was bleeding out of it all over the floor.

And that damn wolf was not moving. It reared to its back legs and backhanded Drake out of range. I ran at the wolf, picking Ivy’s knife off the ground as I moved. I dove under its peddling front legs and stabbed it through the heart. It jerked, trying to knock me off. I held on, even as its blood poured down my arm, making my grip slick. The beast continued to buck and rear. And I continued to dig the knife in deeper, trying to shred its heart. Its claws slashed across my face, drawing blood.

My arms shook and spasmed under the strain of wrestling a five-hundred pound werewolf, but I could not let go. If I did, not only was I dead—so was Ivy. I swung my legs around the wolf, locking them together behind its back. Then I heaved with everything I had to plunge the knife all the way through its heart.

The wolf died, collapsing on top of me. No matter how much I tried to push and wiggle and kick, I could not get him off of me. I tried not to think about the dead person bleeding out all over me—and especially not about the fact that I’d killed him. Instead I focused on breathing. That was starting to get hard. Between the blotches of yellow and purple light. I saw boots clicking by, then stopping beside me. I looked up into the face of Captain Somerset.

“You did well,” she told me as I struggled to breathe.

She lifted the beast off of me and threw it aside like it weighed nothing. My jaw would have dropped if it had had any strength left to do so. I rolled over and pushed up to my knees to check on my friend.

“She’s not breathing!” I said desperately.

* * *

Captain Somerset got Ivy stabilized. She hadn’t yet acquired the gods’ gift of healing magic, but she was fully stocked with mega-dose healing potions. As soon as she gave Ivy a few, my friend began to breathe again. We loaded up the truck with the surviving members of the enemy army, then carefully spread Ivy across one of the rows. Drake and I watched over her the whole drive back to town.

Once there, we brought Ivy to the local fairy healer, who patched her up as best he could, but he warned us that her wounds were beyond his magic. We had to get her back to the healers at the Legion building in New York.

We were on the train now, counting down the minutes until we drove into the city. Drake was holding Ivy’s hand. Even though she wasn’t conscious, I knew she’d have appreciated the gesture anyway. Mina, Roden, and Kinley were standing guard over our prisoners—at least what few we’d managed to catch this time. When we were swarmed, survival had trumped the need for prisoners. I only hoped the Legion saw it the same way. They were funny about things like that.

“Ok, see you in half an hour,” Captain Somerset spoke into her phone, then tucked it into her jacket.

I was sitting next to her, eavesdropping on her conversation with Nero and Harker. She hadn’t even tried to shoo me away.

“You were right,” she told me with a sigh. “The vampires the Legion tortured for these locations knew they were sending us into a trap. The same thing that happened to us happened to Nero’s and Harker’s groups. This is bigger than vampires being turned outside of the system. We all infiltrated sites that were supposed to be just vampires, but we each found a lot more.”

“Is everyone all right?” I asked.

“There were no casualties on our side,” she replied to my great relief. There had been enough death already.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Who is behind this?”

“Demons.”

That single word stunned me to silence.

“It’s demons,” she continued. “And they aren’t only turning vampires. They are also turning shifters and getting witches to defect. The bodies we found over the past few days were the people they were unable to turn to their side. They’re building an army to challenge the gods.”

“Why don’t they just use the monsters?” I wondered. “They control them, right?”

Captain Somerset lowered her voice to hardly above a whisper. “No.”

“No?” I whispered back.

She leaned in closer. “What I’m going to tell you doesn’t leave the Legion. No one can know about it. Not your friends or family. No one.”

I nodded.

“In the war of gods and demons, it wasn’t just the demons who unleashed the monsters,” she said. “The gods and the demons both did. As the war escalated, they bred stronger and more resilient monsters to fight the other side’s monsters. But they lost control of them. The beasts would no longer obey their masters’ commands. The monsters tore across the Earth, devastating it rather than attacking the other side’s army. In the end, the gods won the war. They pushed the demons back to their realm. But it was too late. They and the demons had made the monsters too strong. Too resilient to magic.”

“And that’s why the gods gave humanity magic,” I realized. “That’s why they built the wall.”

It hadn’t been an act of mercy. They were only trying to mitigate the mess that they themselves had made.

“Yes,” she said. “The gods needed us to help them rebuild the Earth. Two hundred years later, the battle for this Earth still rages on. What we do here at the Legion is important.”

The gods gave us magic and strength that empowered us to slay their enemies. We were the next generation of monsters. And now the demons were trying to build their own next generation of monsters too.

The revelation was troubling—but not surprising. Humans were nothing but tools to the gods, something to be used. Well, I was going to use them right on back to save Zane. Dark angels had taken him, and that meant demons. So I was going to side with the gods. For now. I just wouldn’t tell them about Zane.