11

Jace slammed into me, throwing me to the floor as furniture exploded all around us. Smoke saturated the air, stinging my eyes and burning my throat. I blinked and looked up into Jace’s face.

“Uh, thanks,” I said. Why had he thrown himself over me? He hated me.

We stood and looked around. There wasn’t much left of the room. The furniture was in pieces, the window shattered, and the carpet burning. Nero waved his hand, and a fresh breeze blew in through the demolished window, putting out the fire and dispersing the smoke. Captain Somerset was already picking through the debris.

Nero had his phone out. “There’s been an incident,” he said brusquely. “Send me the bomb squad and an inquisition team.” Then he hung up. “Let’s go,” he told me and Jace.

“What do you want us to do?” I asked him.

“We’re going to keep an eye on those witches until the inquisition team arrives to interrogate them.”

“What if the people who set the bomb are already gone?”

“That is unlikely. I put a magic barrier around the campus,” he said. “No one is getting in or out unless I allow it.”

“You put a barrier around the whole campus?” I gasped.

“Yes,” he said, as though it were no big deal.

“How long can you hold the barrier?”

“Long enough.”

We headed toward the door. The bomb had gone off on the other side of the room, which was probably the only reason the door was still standing. I took a glance at the bomb debris. The boom had certainly been impressively loud, and the furniture had exploded spectacularly, but it all seemed so…cosmetic.

“That bomb wasn’t supposed to kill us, was it?” I asked him.

“No.”

“It was a warning,” I realized. “Someone knows what we’re doing here, and they’re warning us to stay away. Who is even crazy enough to threaten the Legion of Angels?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But whoever it is, they will soon wish they’d killed us instead.”

* * *

Rather than spending my afternoon trying to sneak into those restricted access labs on the second floor as planned, I found myself heading back to the Legion. Nero and Captain Somerset were still back at the university supervising the hundred or so soldiers who’d arrived to investigate the bombing in the dining room. Even though Jace and I weren’t staying behind, that didn’t mean we were off the hook. Nero had instructed us to spend the afternoon training in Hall Six.

Hall Six was one of the Legion’s smaller gym halls. It didn’t have space for complex obstacle courses or large group exercises. It was better suited for one-on-one training. So that’s what we did. For hours, Jace and I dueled with swords and knives and sticks, each weapon in turn. And then we dueled hand-to-hand, or fist-to-face on my end. Though I’d improved a lot since joining the Legion, Jace was still a lot better than I was. I was a big enough person to admit that—but just not out loud.

“You’re getting better,” Jace commented when we took a break to sit on the floor and gulp down water.

“Are you just trying to make me feel better?” I asked, rubbing my sore ribs.

“That’s not my style.”

“Of course not.” I snorted. “I forgot. You hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Leda.”

Leda was it? He’d never called me by my actual name before. He and the other Legion brats had adopted Nero’s nickname for me: Pandora, the bringer of chaos. So what had changed? What was going on with Jace?

“You don’t hate me,” I repeated with disbelief. “Right.”

“You saved my life,” he said. “I’ve been nothing but awful to you, but back in the Brick Palace when it was on fire, you saved me. You could have left me there to die, but you didn’t. Why?”

“Because you don’t just leave people to die, no matter how much of an asshole they’ve been to you.”

He watched me for a few moments, as though he didn’t know what to make of me. “You aren’t like other people.”

I laughed, and he frowned at me.

“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s not normal to care about people who’ve been mean to you.”

“Ok, so now I’m not normal?”

“That’s not what I meant. I just meant…” His usual hard arrogance cracked, leaking the uncertainty that lay within. “We’re competitors.”

“How do you figure that?”

“There are only so many spots at the top of the Legion. Some fail, some succeed. The more other people who succeed, the more competition you have for those spots. We can’t all be angels.”

“What makes you think I want to be an angel?”

“You wouldn’t push yourself so hard if you didn’t want to make it to the top,” he said. “You train harder than anyone, even me. And it shows. You’ve already passed most of my fellow brats.”

I looked at him in surprise.

A slight smile touched his lips. “Yeah, I know the term. Oh, did you think your friend Ivy came up with it herself? The children of angels have been called ‘Legion brats’ since there have been children of angels. And we don’t mind the term. On the contrary, we wear it as a badge of honor. Each and every one of us is proud of our family’s legacy.”

“Maybe pride is the problem,” I said. “You consider anyone outside your prestigious circle a potential threat. The paranoia must be exhausting.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “You’re right. We would be much happier if we weren’t so competitive.” He sighed. “But then we wouldn’t be who we are, would we?”

“You’re pretty philosophical for a brat,” I told him, smirking.

He returned the smirk. “And you’re surprisingly alive for someone who mouths off to an angel. Regularly.”

“It must be my infinite charm and wit that’s saved me from his wrath.”

Jace snorted. “One of these days, your luck is going to run out. You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”

“Oh, no. I’m not going to spill my secrets and give your competitive side the chance to use them against me.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” he said with an easy shrug. “You did a really brave thing back on the Black Plains, by the way. Brave but crazy.”

“That is Pandora’s favorite combination.”

We both turned toward the door. Nero stood there, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes hard.

“Colonel Windstriker,” Jace said, scrambling to his feet.

Nero looked past him, his eyes panning with me as I rose slowly from the floor. Mischief flared up in me, and I shot him a wicked smile.

“I ordered you to train,” he said coolly.

Jace didn’t respond, so I spoke for the both of us. “We’ve spent the last four hours training. I can show you my bruised ribs to prove it.” My hand lifted to my sore right side.

“There is no need to remove your clothing at this time.”

A low grunt shook Jace’s chest.

Nero turned his hard stare on him. “Is something funny, Corporal Fireswift?”

Jace put the stopper on the chuckles, molding his face into an expressionless block. “No, sir.”

“Good,” Nero said, his eyes shifting to me. “Show me what you’ve been practicing.”

I turned toward Jace. Slowly, we began to circle each other.

“I hope you haven’t spent the last four hours playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie,” Nero said sharply.

At his words, Jace surged forward. I knew he would target my injured ribs. With Nero watching, he wanted to make this quick and clean. Our surprisingly civil chat didn’t change the fact that he saw me as a threat to be taken down.

Well, I wasn’t going to make it that easy for him. I waited until he was nearly upon me, then I pivoted, kicking the back of his legs as he passed me. Jace stumbled, but he recovered immediately. He spun around so fast that I couldn’t react in time. His fist hammered into me, and I doubled over from the fresh stab of pain to my ribs. I straightened, but I was too slow. Jace’s second blow hit me hard in the face. I snapped my head up, blood pouring out of my nose. I caught his fist on its next swing and twisted it behind his back. My hold on him was too slippery, however, and he flipped me over him, throwing me.

“Move faster, Pandora,” Nero called as my back smacked against the floor.

I didn’t have any spare energy to curse at him, so I focused on getting back up again. My bones groaned in agony when I jumped to my feet. The whole world seemed to tip like a ship caught in a storm. I blinked back the blackness creeping across my vision and turned to face Jace. His next sequence of punches streaked across my already-blurred vision, but I managed to avoid his fists at least.

“Stop running away and fight,” Nero chided me from the sidelines.

“Stop distracting me,” I ground out.

Jace’s leg swung low, tripping me. I rolled to avoid his followup stomp and my leg bumped against a water bottle. Grabbing the full bottle, I jumped up and launched it at Jace’s head. It hit him square between the eyes. I took advantage of his brief moment of shock to rush him, tackling him to the ground. As we touched down, I flipped him over to plant him face-first against the floor. I pulled back on his arms, and he grunted in pain. He tried to thrash free, but I’d pinned him too well.

“Stop,” Nero said, and Jace stopped struggling. “Let him up,” he told me.

I released Jace, and we both got to our feet.

“Your performance was satisfactory. You may go,” Nero said to Jace.

Nero waited until he was gone, then he turned his eyes on me. He maintained a cold, silent stare until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Ok, what is it?” I said. “What did I do wrong?”

His eyes hardened. “You tell me.”

“He’s too strong, so I can’t let him get in so many blows,” I said, wiping the blood from my face.

Nero’s eyes flickered briefly to the blood on my hands. “Yes, you need to move faster or get more resilient. Preferably both. What else?”

“I got slippery hands?”

He sighed.

And so did I. “Gods, Nero, why don’t you just spit it out?”

“This.”

Something shot at my head. I threw up my hands and caught the water bottle I’d used in my last fight. Nero had moved so fast that I hadn’t even seen him pick it up.

“This is a water bottle,” he stated.

“Why thank you for telling me, Mr. Obvious. Or should I call you Colonel Obvious?” I winked at him.

“A water bottle is not a weapon,” he continued.

“It is the way I used it.”

“You know how I feel about your improvised weapons.”

“That they are clever?”

“This isn’t funny,” he told me.

“It is from where I’m standing,” I replied with a smirk.

“Let’s see if I can’t change that.” He motioned me forward.

“I don’t let men spank me until the second date.”

“What has made you so bold?”

I was asking myself the same thing. Part of it was my mouth’s tendency to fire off whenever Nero was around, but that wasn’t all. I’d nearly been blown to pieces today. Ok, if we were right, the bomb had never meant to kill us, just scare us, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t have died. There was something about facing my own mortality and surviving that made me feel oddly immortal—and bold.

“What has made you so hard on me?” I shot back, embracing the boldness.

“I’m always hard on people.”

“You weren’t hard on Jace.”

“He didn’t fight his opponent with a water bottle.”

“Maybe that’s why he lost.”

Nero caught my wrist. “No, he lost because you’ve done something to him.” He wiped the blood from my hand with a towel, then released me.

“What did I do to him?” I asked.

He tossed the towel aside. “You were kind to him.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“You reminded him of something we Legion brats have been trained from birth to forget,” he said.

“Which is?”

“That we’re human. When you treated him with kindness, Leda, you made him care about you. You made him more human.”

“Are we talking about Jace or you?” I asked him.

He ignored my question. “And at that moment, he ceased to be the merciless soldier he is supposed to be. Between the two of you, he is the superior fighter. He could have beaten you many times over during the course of your duel, and yet you won. Because he didn’t press his advantage. You have made him weaker.”

“So basically you’re accusing me of ruining a perfectly good soldier.”

“No, I’m blaming him for letting you,” he told me, his eyes burning with emotion.

I still couldn’t help but think that we were really talking about Nero, but I said nothing. If he was afraid I made him too human, then any relationship between us was doomed from the beginning. That bothered me more than it should have. Didn’t I want to avoid a relationship that would only end in heartache? The problem was that a small part of me refused to believe our relationship was doomed—and despite my best efforts, that small part was growing.

“Now,” Nero said, all traces of emotion gone from his eyes. “Let’s see how well you hold up against someone who isn’t distracted by flying water bottles.”