Flares continued to light up the sky over the next few minutes, exacerbating Lijuan’s screams of fury and keeping her own forces down because her bolts were going so awry, she could as easily hit them. Then the fireworks started.
Elena couldn’t help it; she began to giggle. They were fighting a battle for their lives and it was going to be fireworks that saved them?
Giggles passing when a glance at her watch showed Raphael would only be halfway home at this point, she kept her eyes on the brilliant display—and suddenly became aware of midnight blades slicing through the storm of color to hit the Tower and surrounding buildings. “Shit. Lijuan’s figured out a way to adapt to the light.” Trying to spot Lijuan’s people among their own as wings filled the air, she found herself blinded by the fireworks. “Dmitri! Get Naasir to shut it off!”
“Three seconds.”
The last firework went out as Lijuan’s second blow hit the Tower, leaving a significant dent and destroying an entire row of windows. Scanning the sky, she spotted the Archangel of China’s distinctive white hair above the sea of wings. There was no way to hit her that far up. “Fuck.”
Teeth gritted, she started aiming at the enemy angels as they swarmed, their objective clearly to land on the buildings that housed the aerial defense systems and the shooting teams. Precision aim was near impossible with the lack of light and the enemy’s sheer numbers, so she switched approach to go for the wings.
All they had to do was hold on until Raphael’s return.
Angel after angel went down with torn and badly damaged wings, but there was a constant wave of reinforcements, giving the wounded angels time to heal and arise anew. Meanwhile, Elena knew their own forces were being worn down by the constant barrage, above and below, the vampires on the ground no doubt locked in violent combat against vampires and wounded angels both.
Black lightning splintered the sky the next instant, taking down a number of Lijuan’s people. The lightning didn’t stop Lijuan, but it irritated her enough that she tried to aim for the source, only to find her way blocked by a rain of glittering stone so sharp it threatened to shred her wings. On its heels came a pulse of golden power that smacked into the enemy fighters and Lijuan both, cutting the ordinary angels down like bowling pins and making Lijuan fight to hold her position in the sky.
Stabilizing, the Archangel of China raised her arm to unleash her power, and the black lightning struck a second time.
Jason, Illium, and Aodhan, Elena realized, were working together to keep Lijuan annoyed and distracted. It worked, at least for a while. Then Lijuan decided to leave them to her generals, while she flew above the fighting, her focus on the Tower. Her first blast blew out another row of windows to shower the streets in glass; a second one to the same spot would do serious structural damage.
“Archangel,” Elena whispered, taking aim at one of the enemy generals, “if you’re planning to do something, now would be the time.”
Her bolt ripped through the red-winged angel’s right wing, just as another hunter hit his left . . . and a spear of incandescent blue kissed with wildfire slammed straight into Lijuan—or it would have, if one of her troops hadn’t angled across her in a suicide intercept.
Screaming an eerie high-pitched scream, Lijuan retaliated with a hail of black knife blades. Raphael had told Elena the glamour was near impossible to hold at this level of combat, and now she saw him come into view, dodging Lijuan’s power while attempting to find a hole in her defenses. That was all Elena had time to see, enemy fighters continuing to fill the air, Aodhan, Illium, and Jason locked in combat with Lijuan’s generals.
Notching in bolt after bolt, she continued to shoot, her concentration absolute.
When blood splattered her face as an angel crash-landed in front of her, her eyes went immediately to his wings. “He’s one of ours!” she yelled to the trainees by the rooftop door, covering them in concert with another shooter as they dragged the angel to safety. Wiping the blood off using her sleeve, she returned to her task, but it was as if the enemy was multiplying.
An entire squadron flew right at Elena’s roof, not flinching when five of their team went down with bolts through their wings and necks, every shooter on the roof switching focus as they understood this was a full-on assault designed to take them out. But there were too many of the enemy, the roof overrun in seconds.
Rising up out of her hide, Elena dodged the bolts of two enemy fighters and kept shooting, aiming for the vulnerable eyes and necks now that they were so close. Several headed right for her, swords drawn, while their brethren engaged the other defenders on the roof. Out of bolts, she dropped the crossbow and, with the same movement, reached for the machine guns she had strapped to her thighs. “Fire in the hole!”
Her people dropped at the warning and she sprayed the rooftop with gunfire, the bodies of the enemy jerking, limbs twitching where they fell as the strong ones struggled immediately to heal from the assault. Blood and brain matter splattered the concrete, and still they kept coming, an endless wave. That was when she realized she was being driven to the edge of the building. They wanted her to fall, to fly off.
“Fuck!” It was a trap, one they were willing to sacrifice their people to set. “Ransom!”
Gunfire erupted from her left, the other hunter careful not to hit her as he took over. Screaming a battle cry, she shot out a heavy spray of her own, then, instead of going over where they wanted her to go over, ran right through the enemy. “Keep shooting!” she said, her own guns pumping fire.
Her boots pounded over crushed and bloodied feathers as she shot her way past the startled angels still standing, the air full of bullets she couldn’t totally avoid. One caught her a glancing blow on her arm, the other dug a fiery groove across her cheek, but she reached her target without any real injury, going over the opposite side of the building from where she’d been herded. The enemy turned to follow her en masse, which hopefully meant the others on the roof would be all right.
“This is my city, you bastards.” Managing to get her guns strapped down in midair as a result of hours of practice doing the same, she swept down a wide avenue, the wind whipping off the blood trickling down her cheek. “Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
As the battle raged overhead and buildings shuddered after being hit by stray bolts of power, the city as a whole began to go progressively darker. She’d seen this before, during the fight with Uram, and knew it was because Raphael and Lijuan were both sucking power from the electricity grid, batteries, anything that could supply them with the energy they used to supercharge their strikes.
The darkness was her friend. Teeth bared, she led the enemy angels in and out of streets, through buildings she knew had accessways wide enough for flight, under the High Line and between certain widely spaced trees in Central Park. They were fast, the ones on her trail, but they didn’t know Manhattan.
Of course, she couldn’t keep this up forever. Naasir, you fucking smart predator, she thought as her wings began to tire, it’s showtime. She’d managed to make a short cell phone call halfway through her darting flight, and, as instructed, now led her pursuers into a narrow gap between two high-rises.
It dead-ended at the back of another building.
Reaching the end, she spun around, wings spread. The leader of the pack, his left eye a pulpy mess where a bullet had hit him, grinned . . . and ran right into the steel net that snapped into place in front of the speeding squadron. The ones at the back tried to fly up to avoid the net, but it fell from above, too—courtesy of a certain blue-winged angel—before a net sprung up behind them.