2

After Nero and the First Angel left the gym hall, I hurried down the corridor to Demeter, the Legion’s canteen. I grabbed a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and orange juice, then joined my friends Ivy and Drake at our usual table. They looked fresh and awake this morning; they must have gotten to the coffee before it had run out. It always ran out before I got here. Every single morning. The cynic in me was convinced Nero purposely kept me in training until the morning coffee was gone. The angel believed any weakness—even a minor one like caffeine dependence—was a mortal failing in a soldier of the Legion. I’d noticed it had been getting easier to wake up since I’d ditched the morning coffee, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. I wasn’t even going to think it in case he managed to tune into my thoughts again.

“I saved a donut for you,” Ivy said, her long, red hair bouncing off her shoulders as she turned her head to look up at me.

“Thanks,” I replied, sitting down opposite her and Drake.

Ivy had the body of a supermodel, but she’d put on more muscle in the past two months. Drake had the wide shoulders and build of a football player—which he’d been before joining the Legion. But his smile was so good-natured, so friendly. If I hadn’t seen him tear werewolves apart with his bare hands, I’d have had a hard time believing he could ever get angry. But as soon as Ivy had been in danger, he’d broken through those werewolves, no fear in him, only rage—like a switch had been flipped inside of his brain.

The two of them looked so beautiful together, even though they weren’t actually together. They were both wearing the standard Legion workout suits just like I was. But they hadn’t been training since five in the morning, so their clothes were unwrinkled and clean. And they didn’t smell like sweat and angel.

Ivy’s gaze panned down my body. “Early morning?” she asked, a smile spreading her mouth.

“Too early. Like every morning.” I took a bite out of the donut. A jolt of energy shook my body. Whoa. “Did I mention I’m not a morning person?”

Drake laughed. “Only every single morning.”

I sighed, finishing up the donut. Whatever magic was in it, I wanted more. “What I wouldn’t give for a long bath.”

I shared a dorm room with five people. We had one shower. And no bathtub.

I rolled back my neck, stretching out the stiffness in it. “A long bath and a massage.” I sighed.

Ivy smirked at me. “Why don’t you ask Colonel Sexy Pants for a massage?” That was her name for Nero. “I bet he’d oblige,” she added with a mischievous twinkle in her brown eyes.

I poked the eggs on my plate. “He was too busy throwing me across the gym to listen to requests for a massage.”

“You two sure have been spending a lot of time together,” she said. “People are talking. Especially the brats.”

The Legion brats were people with an angel parent, and there were six of them in our initiation class. Their bloodline ensured they had more magic in them than most people, and they’d been trained from birth to join the Legion like their parents before them. They also had the egos to go with their esteemed pedigree.

“What do the brats say?” I asked.

“That you’re failing combat training and had to take remedial classes,” Drake said.

“But they’re just jealous they don’t have a sexy angel training them one-on-one,” Ivy added quickly.

“Training with an angel is not all it’s cracked up to be, you know,” I told them. “I wasn’t kidding about that bath and massage. I feel like my body has been put through a meat grinder.”

“Didn’t he heal you?” Ivy asked.

“No, he got distracted.”

She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I’ll bet.”

“No, not like that. The First Angel walked into our training session.” I spread raspberry marmalade across my toast. “I wonder what she’s doing here.”

“She’s here to investigate the supernaturals in New York in the aftermath of what happened last month,” said Ivy. “Her team is rounding up vampires, witches, and shifters all over the city and interrogating them, trying to figure out how much of a foothold into this world the demons have gotten. They believe the demons are still recruiting for their army.”

“How can you possibly know about this?”

“I chatted with Captain Horn and Lieutenant Bradshaw on the way to breakfast this morning, and they told me,” she said, as though it were perfectly normal for two officers of the Legion to openly share information like that. Then again, people were always telling Ivy things. It was astounding how much she could get out of someone just by smiling at them. “The First Angel thinks the demons’ influence on Earth is stronger than we thought. And she believes that even though the Legion took out the operation at Sweet Dreams, this is far from over.”

Ivy’s smile faded during that last sentence. Her mother had been the one behind recruiting people for the demon’s army, the act of a desperate woman dying of cancer. In exchange for the demons making her immortal, she’d made a deal with them to set up this operation. She hadn’t told Ivy about any of this. Ivy had found out the hard way. After the battle at the Sweet Dreams bakery, I’d had to be the one to tell my friend that her mother was dead.

A month later, Ivy was still struggling with her conflicting feelings. On the one hand, Rose had been the head of recruitment for a demon army. On the other hand, she was Ivy’s mother. Ivy loved her mother but hated what she’d done. The whole thing was tearing her up inside.

I reached across the table and gave Ivy’s hand a good squeeze. She squeezed me back, wiping her tears away and putting on a happy face. She wasn’t the best fighter in our group, but she was more resilient than people gave her credit for.

* * *

After breakfast, we headed over to Hall Four, where Captain Somerset was waiting for us. Nero had overseen our initial training, but as the top ranking person in New York—and the only angel—he had more important things to do than to spend his days torturing lowly soldiers. That was now Captain Somerset’s job, and she took that job very seriously.

We approached cautiously to see what the good captain had for us today. Yesterday it had been a field trip to the plains of monsters to go hunting for a pack of fire wolves. As someone who’d grown up next door to the plains of monsters, I’d learned that you never crossed that big stone and magic wall standing between us and the beasts who’d taken over half of the Earth. Sure I’d ignored that sensible rule a few times in my years as a bounty hunter, but I’d never gone hunting for monsters out there. It was insane. When I’d told Captain Somerset that, she’d responded that the Legion didn’t require sanity from its soldiers, only obedience. She’d almost managed to keep a straight face as she’d said it.

Today’s offering wasn’t monsters or field trips beyond the wall. Instead, Captain Somerset had set up the gym hall with an obstacle course of infinite impossibilities.

“Come in closer now. Don’t be shy,” she said, grinning. She might have been trying to kill us, but at least she was doing it with a smile.

“What is that?” Toren said, his eyes widening as he looked up at the obstacle course looming over us like a storm cloud ready to let loose.

“That is your latest challenge,” Captain Somerset declared.

“That’s not challenging. It’s impossible,” Lucy gasped.

“Some of those jumps just aren’t even doable,” Lyle agreed.

“You have supernatural skills,” the captain reminded us. “You have the speed, strength, and stamina of vampires.”

“And the self-healing too,” said Roden, one of the brats. “If we fall and get hurt, we can just nibble a little on Ivy’s neck to heal ourselves.” He flashed her a grin, and the other brats chuckled.

Ivy smiled at them. “Sorry, not my type.” Everyone knew Ivy had a thing for the Legion officers—and that they had a thing for her.

“Ok, enough chitchat. Shut up and listen,” Captain Somerset told us.

Had Nero been here, he would have made us run laps or do pushups for talking. He believed if you had enough energy to talk, you weren’t pushing yourself hard enough—and so he pushed you harder. But Nero wasn’t here, and I really needed to stop thinking about him. Obsessing over an angel wasn’t healthy. I had to get a new hobby. Like eating chocolate. There wasn’t anything unhealthy about that.

“You will begin the course with a dash across these raised platforms,” Captain Somerset said. “But beware. If you put your weight on any one of them for too long, it will drop to the floor. The final platform in the sequence leads to a big jump directly onto this climbing wall.” She indicated a leap worthy of a spider. “The climb will bring you to your next challenge.”

She walked beneath a series of wooden posts twenty feet up. Hall Four had the highest ceiling of any of the Legion’s gyms. Maybe this was where they taught angels how to fly. No, come to think of it, they probably just pushed new angels off the roof of the building. That was more like the Legion’s style.

“Jump from one post to the next until you reach the tightrope,” she said. “After a quick walk across the rope, a jump into this vertical tunnel awaits you. Next is a dash through a labyrinth. Some of the walls are equipped with motion sensors and will shoot out smoke and debris at you as you pass.”

Someone coughed in disbelief behind me, but I wasn’t surprised. For the past two months, the Legion had been putting us into one difficult situation after the other—and they’d made no secret of the fact that they didn’t expect all of us to survive. From the fifty people who’d shown up at the initiation ceremony, only sixteen of us remained.

“After you escape the labyrinth of exploding walls, a door stands in your way.”

She led us to a metal door we all knew well. It was identical to the ones Nero had put us in front of every day for weeks. He’d made us punch the door again and again until our hands bled, and we’d learned to tune out that pain. He’d called it an exercise in willpower, and it really was. It had taken enormous willpower not to punch him instead. As it was, I’d just imagined his face on the door while punching it.

But I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Nero. I returned my full attention to Captain Somerset.

“Each time you punch the door, it will open a little more, until the opening is wide enough for you to go through,” she explained, passing the door. “On the other side, your final challenge awaits.”

She indicated a bar used for pull-ups—except these weren’t mere pull-ups in store for us. To complete this challenge, we had to hop the bar up a series of levels until we reached the top. And then we had to hop the bar back down again, level by level. The best part was we had to do all of this while our hands were still bleeding from punching that door how many ever times it took to open it.

“After you’re finished with the salmon ladder, hop down onto the landing platform. Then run ten laps on the track before you get in line for the course again,” Captain Somerset finished.

She put half of us in line in front of the obstacle course and assigned the other half to run laps as they waited. I was third in line. I watched two others struggle through the obstacles before me. We were all still working on mastering our vampire abilities—some of us more than others. After all, it hadn’t been so many weeks ago that we’d received the gods’ first gift. When the Legion didn’t have a job for us, we trained the whole day long. Lots and lots of training. The key to surviving the gods’ gifts of magic was willpower, so every training session we did was designed to force our bodies and minds to the breaking point.

I pushed through the course, refusing to give up even as it tested my muscles in new and excruciating ways. I had to make it through, to make my body accept all the magic I’d been given. It was not automatic. You had to master one gift before you got the next. That was how the Legion of Angels worked—and I had eight more levels to go before I could gain the power I needed to find my brother.

I’d made it past the insanity of the exploding walls and was halfway through the final challenge when Nero stepped into the gym hall. He looked fresh out of the shower, every drop of water visible on his mostly dry hair. I watched him walk across the room to Captain Somerset, and my distracted mind cost me. My hands slipped, and I nearly fell off my bar. I could have sworn I caught a hint of amusement on his lips before it was swallowed by his usual marble expression.

Cursing that arrogant angel, I powered through the rest of the course, then hopped down. I closed up beside Ivy on the track, and we ran our ten laps together. As we entered the line for round two, Drake was just entering the obstacle course. Ivy’s eyes were glued to him, so of course I had to tease her about it.

“Enjoying the show?” I asked her, keeping my voice low so Nero didn’t hear me. If he realized I was chatting, he’d assign me more laps.

“Are you?” Ivy shot back with a grin, her eyes darting between me and Nero.

His stare honed in on us, as though he’d heard us. He opened his mouth, but his phone rang at that moment, saving the day.

“Not that I blame you,” Ivy added, sighing. “That angel looks good enough to eat.”

“Nah, I’d choke on all the feathers.”

The corner of Ivy’s mouth drew up into a smirk. “He’s really helped you, Leda. You’re getting faster and stronger every day.”

“Tell that to my ribs,” I said, pulling up my shirt to show her the bruised skin on my side.

“Those are impressive love marks, honey.”

“You can see the imprint of his fist. I’d hardly call that a love mark.”

Ivy shrugged. “He’s an angel.”

It was her turn to take on the obstacle course, so she hurried forward.

“No, I’ll handle this myself,” Nero said into his phone, walking toward me. He slid the phone into his jacket. “Pandora,” he said, using his nickname for me. “Fireswift, Ravenfall.” He motioned to Jace and Mina, two of the Legion brats. Apparently, there was some unspoken Legion rule that stated the children of angels got to be called by their parents’ esteemed surnames—those magical names bestowed upon Legion soldiers when they became angels—rather than being stuck with mocking nicknames like the rest of us. “Come with me.”

We followed Nero out of the gym hall, leaving the others to deal with Captain Somerset’s obstacle course. Hellish as it was, I had a feeling it was harmless compared to whatever Nero was about to have us do. He didn’t leave the office to rescue cats from trees or to parade down the street for the delight of the city’s residents.

“There’s been an attack on the city,” Nero said, not slowing for a second as he led us down the corridor toward the Legion’s garage.

“What kind of attack?” I asked.

“Every single person in a ten-story building suddenly dropped dead.”