“Come back to the Legion. We can fix this.”
“Come back to the Legion?” Eva scoffed. “Why? So the Master Interrogator and his lackeys can throw me into an interrogation chamber?” She shot Damiel a look of pure loathing. “No, thank you.”
She slashed out with the dagger, but this time I was faster. I hurled a ball of concentrated wind magic at her, knocking the weapon from her hand. As she watched the dagger slide all the way across the hangar, rage flared up in her eyes.
Eva lifted her hands over her head, summoning a tidal wave. It shot straight up in the air behind her. Then she blasted that wave at me. I hastily drew an intricate series of fire symbols in the air around me. I finished not a moment too soon. Eva’s wave crashed down. As water met fire, my spell flared to life, swallowing the tsunami. Smoke hissed, the thick fog of the dissolving elements filling the hangar.
The airship was already taking off, but Eva didn’t try to get on it. Through the fog, I saw a white and silver streak shoot out of the hangar. Eva was making a run for the fallen dagger.
I gathered the magic in the smoke, morphing the swirling energy into something else. The air sizzled and crackled. I wrapped my will around the magic storm. Lightning flashed. When the smoke cleared, Eva lay unconscious on the ground.
I bound her feet so she couldn’t run—and her hands so she couldn’t attack me when she woke up. Then I picked the dagger off the ground. The hilt was warm. As soon as my fingers closed around it, a harsh, heated melody began looping inside my head. The dagger was singing to me. And it was angry.
I shook the ridiculous notion from my head. How could a weapon possibly possess feelings? I listened to its song, stroking its hilt as I whispered calming words to it. Slowly, its anger subsided. Its fear departed shortly thereafter.
It was then that I realized that anger and that fear belonged to Eva. She’d transferred those emotions to the dagger, infecting it. Now that she didn’t hold it anymore, the weapon was slowly calming down. As I tucked the dagger into the holder at my thigh, a swell of contentment pulsed between it and me.
I went back into the hangar and lifted Damiel off the floor. His body was already healing the black burn marks on his right arm. It was the gash in his stomach that worried me.
“Why didn’t you tell me she cut you with the dagger?” I demanded as I set him down on the ground outside the hangar. I peeled back the ruined edges of his shirt.
His eyes fluttered open. A soft noise broke his lips.
“Could you repeat that?” I said, leaning in closer.
His hands curling around the back of my neck, he pulled me hard against his chest. He captured my lips with his mouth, swallowing my surprised cry. His kiss started out slow—a paper-thin sliver of decorum wrapped around a core of savage sensuality—but that didn’t last long. His tongue teased mine, stroking, feeding the dark, dizzying desire growing inside of me. My fingernails dug into his back, clutching him roughly to me. He groaned against my lips.
I pulled back suddenly, releasing him. “What the hell is wrong with you?!” I punched him in his shoulder, where he wasn’t wounded. “You are injured! And you’re hurting yourself just to get a chance to kiss me?”
He sat up, his eyes pulsing with magic. “If you think that was a groan of pain, then you’re even more innocent than I thought.”
My whole body buzzed in anticipation, like I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, even as clarity returned to my mind. Damiel was wounded. Just because the crazy angel’s priorities were all screwed up—just because seducing me was more important to him than getting healed—that didn’t mean I would let him bleed to death on the ground.
“I’m going to heal your wound now,” I said, reminding myself that getting involved with Damiel Dragonsire, the Master Interrogator, was a terrible idea.
“No, it’s a fantastic idea,” he countered. “Give me five minutes to convince you, and I promise you’ll agree.”
He didn’t need five minutes. I doubted I’d last five seconds. And Damiel could read my thoughts again. Shit.
A sly smile twisted his lips. I avoided his eyes. And his mouth. And pretty much his whole face. His body wasn’t much safer to look at either. I focused my attention on the bloody gash in his stomach.
“What were you trying to say to me before, when you were lying there?” I asked as I managed to get the bleeding under control.
“Your magic is sexy.”
I shot him a hard look. The man was incorrigible.
“You asked what I said, and that’s it,” he told me. “But mostly I was just muttering to lure you in, so I could kiss you.”
“You were feigning pain and suffering so you could kiss me?”
“Basically. Except for the feigning part. My pain and suffering are both very real.”
“Oh, really?” I said warily. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad are your pain and suffering?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what answer is most likely to convince you to sleep with me.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help it. The angel was devilishly charming.
“You’re good to go, Colonel,” I told him. “I healed the wound in your stomach. But it was made with the blade of an immortal weapon. It will scar.”
He looked down at the slender white sliver that spanned the left side of his abdomen. “I’m surprised you managed to heal it as well as you did.”
“The blade barely touched you.”
“It touched me enough,” he replied. “It’s your magic that made all the difference.” He watched me, his gaze unblinking.
“Flattery won’t work out any better than feigning pain and suffering,” I told him.
“I don’t know about that. The pain and suffering worked out pretty well for me. I kissed you. And you kissed me back.” If he’d looked any more smug, his head would have collapsed under the weight of his own ego.
“I’d say it’s high time we got out of here,” I declared, standing.
Damiel rose with me. His eyes scanned the rocky terrain, pausing on Eva’s unconscious body. “You have secured Major Doren.”
I swung Eva over my shoulder. “Yes, but the ship got away.” I looked up at the sky. The airship was only a tiny dot in the distance. “I failed.”
“A rogue dark angel is dead. A traitor has been captured. And you recovered an immortal weapon. The airship full of pirates is just a battle for another day.”
“That’s very glass-half-full of you, Colonel.”
He chuckled. “What can I say? I’m an eternal optimist.”
The complete collapse of the airship hangar behind us muted my laughter. Red dust billowed up from the impact point, and the wild winds of these wild lands carried it long and far away.
15
A Debt to Pay
“That’s quite a story,” Nyx said.
Damiel and I had just recounted our misadventures on the Sienna Sea.
“And quite a weapon,” the First Angel added, eyeing my new dagger.
Would the First Angel force me to give it up? I really didn’t want to do that. Strange as it sounded, I felt a connection to the dagger. An affinity with it. Even so, it was a rare weapon, forged using an ancient art. We didn’t even know how to make immortal weapons anymore. Nyx surely wasn’t going to let me keep it.