3

When we arrived at the Brick Palace, the site of the attack, the paranormal police were already there. We got out of the truck, following Nero past a dozen police officers, every single one of them gaping at us as we entered the building. Well, we did look menacing in our black leather uniforms, but that was the point. The Legion was able to maintain order on Earth because everyone was afraid of us. That fear started with the black battle leather and weapons, but the outfits weren’t everything. During the drive over here, Nero had lectured us on the importance of maintaining a menacing demeanor. No laughing or smiling or joking. We were supposed to walk around like we were ready to kill anyone at anytime. That was what gave the Legion its true power. The magic we had just allowed us to follow through on that silent promise.

We walked up the stairwell, passing forensic teams and corpses I was trying really hard not to see. Bodies were everywhere, so many bodies, their faces frozen in the moment of their death. I’d seen dead people before, but I’d never seen so many in one place. There were no wounds on their bodies, but just because this wasn’t a bloodbath didn’t mean it wasn’t a massacre—or a harrowing experience. One moment these people had been walking around, and then the next they were dead, just like that.

Tightness tugged on my heart. I wanted to weep for these poor strangers, to let them know that someone cared about their passing, but I couldn’t. I had to keep up my menacing appearance. The Legion didn’t approve of breaking down into tears at the scene of a massacre. Nero’s eyes, as hard as green diamonds, panned coolly across the corpses, not a hint of emotion in them. Jace and Mina weren’t as cold as Nero, but they didn’t appear to be on the verge of tears either. Their Legion parents had probably taught them to detach themselves from their humanity.

Every living person we passed paused to stare at Nero. He was a celebrity around these parts, the only angel in all of New York. Most people were enamored with angels, but the police knew better. They were obviously more scared than in awe of him. They’d probably dealt with the Legion often enough to realize the truth: angels were cold, vicious, and even more deadly than they were beautiful. I should really remind myself of that the next time I daydreamed about Nero.

“Detective,” Nero said as he stopped in front of a man in a dark suit.

The rest of us stood behind Nero, his silent backup. Truth be told, we were really kind of superfluous next to an angel, but I had a feeling we were here to learn more than to actually do anything. As we stood there, I tried to keep my eyes hard, my body still, and my mouth shut. It was a battle against everything that I was.

“We weren’t expecting you, Colonel,” the detective said. He didn’t look very happy about our arrival—ok, Nero’s arrival. His wary eyes never flickered away from our fearless leader.

“Tell me what happened here,” Nero said.

The Legion didn’t make requests. They gave orders. And if you didn’t obey those orders, there was no power on Earth that could save you. So while the detective bristled at the power behind Nero’s command, he complied.

“The victims are all vampires, and they were poisoned,” he said.

I hadn’t even known you could poison a vampire.

“From what we can tell, someone tampered with the magic steam system used for heating and cooling the building,” the detective continued. “They distributed the poison in the air. All eighty-two people died instantly. We’re bringing the evidence back to the station for analysis.”

“No, you’re not,” Nero said. “This is a Legion matter now. You will hand over all evidence to us, and your people will leave immediately. This whole building is being put under magic quarantine.”

The detective opened his mouth to protest, then he snapped it shut. Obviously he’d thought better of arguing with an angel. “Tell everyone to pull out of the building,” he told a police officer. “And to give all samples they’ve collected to the Colonel’s team.”

Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing. One of the forensics people, a woman with a high ponytail, handed me a small sealed plastic bag with white residue inside.

As I tucked the bag into the pocket of my pants, Nero turned to us and said, “Load the bodies into the truck.”

But before we could move, an explosion rocked the building. The walls burst apart, pommeling us with rocky shards. Flames raged behind the broken walls, and they were spreading fast. Nero dashed toward the fire, using his magic to hold back the flames. But it wasn’t enough. As more walls collapsed around us, the whole building groaned in pitiful protest.

Everyone ran for the exit, but we were four floors up. The stairwell had collapsed, and the fire escape was behind a curtain of flames. A second explosion shook the building. Wooden beams fell into our path, the wood engorged with crackling flames. The floor beneath our feet split. Holes opened up, one of them as large as a sofa.

“Over there!” I shouted to the panicking crowd. “Line up in front of the hole.” I looked at Jace and Mina. “Jump down and catch the people I throw to you.”

Mina rolled her eyes at being ordered around, but both she and Jace jumped down. I began picking up people, tossing them down. Jace and Mina caught them and pushed them toward the fire escape. When the last human was safely off this crumbling floor, I jumped down. Nero was still battling the flames up above, but I couldn’t stop to worry about him. He was an angel and could take care of himself. The rest of us didn’t have elemental magic to protect us from the fire. We had to get out of here.

But another explosion quaked the building. We zigzagged between the burning posts that fell all around us. It seemed Captain Somerset had been right after all. Practicing those obstacle courses again and again had come in handy.

The police had already made it through the fire exit, and the three of us headed there now. We ran, our feet so fast they barely touched the ground. Even so, the floor was crackling under the weight. With an ominous crunch, it split apart beneath our feet, swallowing us whole. We fell two floors. I rolled out of my landing and so did Mina, but Jace fell onto a burning wood post and hit his head. Fire raged all around his still body. Mina gaped in shock, pulling back from the flames. I pushed past her, slipping off my jacket. I leapt at Jace and hit him with my jacket to put out the flames on his body. Then I swung him over my shoulder and jumped over the fire again. Thank goodness for vampire strength. Back when I’d been a regular human, I never would have been able to lift him, let alone jump so high while carrying him.

I punched Mina in the arm to snap her out of her shocked state. We hurried outside onto the fire escape, running down the shaking metal steps to the ground. As soon as we were at a safe distance from the burning building, I set Jace down on the sidewalk. He’d recovered consciousness and was coughing up a storm, but besides that and some blistered skin, he appeared to be fine. I tossed him a healing potion, then stood up to stare at the building.

Nero had been inside for a long time. He might have been powerful, but even angels could be blown apart by explosives. I was just about to run back inside to look for him when he burst through a window. His wings were extended, the shimmering feathers a devastatingly beautiful mix of blue, green, and black feathers. He flew over the building, his wings beating in a steady rhythm as he blasted magic at the raging fire, trying to contain it before it spread further. It was mesmerizing to watch—his power against that of the raging wildfire. That was no mundane fire. Someone must have enchanted the flames. They were spreading too quickly, too mercilessly.

Firetrucks pulled up on the street, their lights flashing and sirens blaring. Two dozen men and women in rubber suits piled out of the trucks and hurried toward the building, blasting it with their magic. Streams of water and ice joined Nero’s magic in the battle against the flames. The fire spat and sizzled in protest, countering with fiery whips, but after a few minutes under that constant barrage, the flames went out. As the water and ice elementals approached the smoking building, Nero landed beside us, his wings vanishing in a whiff of golden smoke as his feet touched down.

“My team has entered the building,” a fireman wearing a headset told him.

“They will find nothing,” replied Nero. “The fire consumed everything. The bodies are gone. The evidence is gone.” He looked at us. “What do you have?”

I pulled out the plastic bag containing the residue the police had found. Surprisingly, the bag had survived. It was a good thing it had because that bag was the only evidence we had left.

“Someone didn’t want you to investigate this,” the detective commented.

“No, they didn’t,” Nero agreed, giving the building a dark look.

* * *

The firefighters said the building wasn’t stable, but that didn’t stop Nero from going in anyway. The hard look in his eyes said he wasn’t going to allow a collapsing building to keep him from figuring out who’d tried to blow us all to pieces. So while he proved how badass he really was, I waited outside with Jace and Mina. Apparently, we weren’t invincible enough to go in with him. After a minute of standing with the silent staring twins, I was ready to take my chances with the collapsing building.

Unfortunately, I was supposed to behave myself and follow Nero’s orders like the good little soldier I was most certainly not. I was smart enough to know my own mind and crazy enough to listen to it. The problem was my mind was feeling rather bipolar at the moment. We’d all just nearly died. One part of me felt this restless need to be doing something other than standing here. The other part, the rational part, reminded me I needed to behave if I ever wanted to receive the magic I needed to save my brother. Today, I listened to the rational part of my brain, which was truly every bit as exciting as it sounded.

Mina glared at me, as though it were my fault I’d witnessed her freezing up inside the building. Maybe she was afraid of fire or of collapsing buildings. If so, she clearly didn’t want me to know about it. Weaknesses made a person human, and the children of angels prided themselves on their utter lack of humanity.

Jace wasn’t glaring at me, but his stare was certainly unsettling. He was looking at me like warts had sprouted up all over my face. I slid my finger across my cheek and found only smooth skin still warm from our dash through the fire. And yet Jace continued to stare in silence. I’d just saved his life. The least he could have done was say thank you.

Insults were preferable to this silence. I wished he would just go back to making fun of me like he and the brats had been doing since I’d joined the Legion. After I’d rescued Nero from vampires on the Black Plains, my actions had shocked the brats enough that they’d given me a week of respite from the taunts. But as soon as that had worn off, they’d grown worse than ever before. One night, they’d even tried to jump me as I was returning from a run outside. My extra training with Nero had made me strong, but not stronger than two people who were descended from angels and had been training to join the Legion their whole lives. It was only by luck—and a bit of scrappy fighting I’d picked up from my days of living on the street—that I’d managed to knock them out. After that, I’d dragged them down the hall and deposited them inside Captain Somerset’s office.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” she’d said, her lips curling up with amusement. “A kitten bringing me mice?”

“These mice tried to beat me senseless.” And I’d had the bleeding lip to prove it.

“It appeared that plan backfired. Two against one and they still lost. How embarrassing. I don’t think they’ll try that again.”

“Or they’ll just bring more people next time.” That’s me, the eternal optimist.

“Then you’d better get practicing, Pandora. Have Nero teach you to fight with an electric whip.”

So I had—and immediately regretted it as Nero demonstrated the electric whip by using it on me. He claimed this was the best way to learn, but I had a sinking suspicion he just liked to torture me. Every time he’d hit me with that electric whip, it had felt like I was being struck by lightning.

When I’d complained to Captain Somerset about her brilliant idea, she’d laughed and told me I had to learn to move faster. Eventually, I did. The next time the brats came for me, they brought three people. When I pulled out the electric whip, they’d been surprised—but not as surprised as they’d been when I’d defeated them again.

“Well done,” Captain Somerset had laughed the second time I dragged unconscious brats into her office.

They hadn’t attacked me since then, but I knew it was only a matter of time. I didn’t wonder why the brats hated me. I’d humiliated them by standing up to their attacks—and winning. But what else could I have done? Laid down and let them beat me bloody?

“The Magitech in the whole building was out,” a fireman told Nero as they walked up to us, breaking through my self-reflection. “That’s why the sprinklers and other anti-fire measures weren’t working. The explosions were centered around the Magitech generators in the building, so we suspect sabotage, but we didn’t find any evidence of it. It must have all burned up in the explosions and resulting fires.”

Nero nodded, waving his hand to dismiss the fireman. It was just the four of us now. Nero had commanded the police to leave half an hour ago, and the firefighters were all in and around the building. Nero looked at us, saying nothing. The silence dragged on.

“Someone poisoned a building full of vampires,” I said, unable to take the silence any longer. “Then they torched this building to wipe out all evidence. They didn’t want anyone to find out what had happened here.”

“Yes,” Nero said, his voice hard and low. “But we do have evidence. If I’m right, the residue you have in that bag is from the poison that killed the residents of this building. And we’re going to track that poison back to the guilty party.”