“The idea is sheer madness. To impersonate the First Angel—it’s blasphemy!” he replied in a hissed whisper.
“And that’s why Leon Hellfire will believe the illusion.”
No spell was perfect. The knowledge that no Legion soldier would dare impersonate Nyx should convince Leon Hellfire’s mind to heed what every supernatural sense he had was telling him: that the First Angel was standing before him. But it was his desire to see Nyx that would convince his heart.
Doubt was the bane of shifting spells. Doubt made it easier for someone to see through the illusion. Belief, faith, desire—on the other hand—fortified a shifting spell. They sealed the deal, making an illusion virtually bullet-proof.
I moved around the battling soldiers, moving toward Leon with Nyx’s strong and balletic gait. Nyx’s hair swirled around me. And though I didn’t have any wings of my own, Nyx’s gold-dusted white wings seemed to unfold from my back.
Leon froze. He immediately disengaged from his fight with a group of Legion soldiers and moved toward me.
“Nyx,” his voice was both a silky caress and a hot flash of sharpened steel.
“Leon,” I replied coolly.
Fire burned in his eyes. His halo flashed brighter. His emotions were burning hot. He was buying my illusion.
When his soldiers began moving forward with him, he lifted his hand in the air, commanding them to hold position. “Stop. Nyx is mine. This fight is mine alone. And I will win it alone.”
That was his pride speaking. I sincerely hoped that pride really did come before the fall.
Leon didn’t waste time. He shot a putrid cloud at me. It was a curse, one of his favorite attacks. I knew his fighting style—and the style of many other angels and dark angels—because in my childhood years, my father had shown me video recordings of angels in battle. I’d analyzed their style, strengths, and weaknesses. Then my father had imitated the angels one by one and attacked me. If I’d managed to develop a fighting style to successfully counter theirs, I’d made it through the exercise with fewer broken bones.
I remembered from my early years of training that Leon Hellfire tended to favor fairy magic, one of his strengths. In particular, he used a lot of curses.
I shifted the curse he’d aimed at me into a light, fluffy cloud of harmless butterflies. Nyx and I both counted shifting magic among our strengths, which made it easier to imitate her magic spells.
That was another exercise my father had used to train me: he had me mimic various angels’ moves and magic.
“It’s been a long time, Nyx, but you have not forgotten how I fight,” Leon said as I blasted apart one of his spells.
“I should hope not,” I replied in Nyx’s voice. “I taught you how to fight.”
“Yes.” Anger reverberated through that single syllable, but also love, deep and desperate.
So he still loved Nyx. And hated her. He wanted her and wanted to hurt her. Love and hate were a lot like light and dark magic. They were both very similar and yet completely different. Two sides of the same emotional coin, easily flipped.
I quickly pushed my latest philosophical musings aside. I had to focus on the battle. Leon was a trained warrior and a powerful dark angel—more powerful than I was for sure. My father’s training had made me a capable fighter, but eventually Leon would figure out that I was not Nyx. My illusion would fade and my shifting spell shatter to pieces.
I had to end this before that happened. I needed to really fire him up. To make him lose focus and just attack me blindly.
“You should not have come back to Earth,” I told him. “You should have known you are too weak to face me.”
“I am growing stronger every day. Soon, I will be more powerful than the gods.”
I turned slowly, positioning myself right in front of the cage holding Colonel Beastbreaker. “It won’t matter. It won’t change anything between us.”
“Of course it will,” he growled. “You respect power.”
“I will never love you.”
His whole body quaked with rage. Magic shot out of his hands, a continuous barrage of spells fueled by his fury. I rolled out of the way, and his magic collided with the cage, cracking it open like an egg.
The resulting shockwave threw me down, shredding my shifting spell. When I rose from the ground, I was myself again.
Leon glared at me, his fury turned to ice. “You are not Nyx.”
His gaze shifted behind me, to where Legion soldiers were helping the unconscious Colonel Beastbreaker crawl out of the remains of the cracked cage. Leon had just realized I’d tricked him in more than one way. Not only was I not really Nyx; I had used his own dark magic to open the tree prison and free his angel prisoner.
Leon waved his forces forward. ‘Nyx’ was gone, and he clearly had no interest in fighting me in single combat. The Dark Force charged. We were seriously outnumbered.
“Take our soldiers and bring Colonel Beastbreaker back through the tunnel,” I told Captain Walker. “Get everyone to safety.”
Captain Walker waved the soldiers toward the tunnel entrance, but he remained by my side. He added his own spells to mine as I blasted the Dark Force, covering our soldiers’ retreat.
“You must get away now, Captain,” I said. “Before it’s too late. I can’t hold back the Dark Force for long.”
“Together, we can hold them off longer.”
“Go.”
“General Silverstar will skin me alive if anything happens to you, Major.”
“I promise I’ll do worse than that to you if you don’t obey my commands,” I snapped. “I’ll report your misconduct in the tent. And I’ll report you for disobeying my orders right now.”
According to the Legion’s code of conduct, disobeying orders was a mortal sin. Even so, Captain Walker stood his ground.
“As you reminded me earlier, angels are essential to the Legion’s survival and success,” he said. “And everyone knows you’re next in line to become an angel. The Legion needs angels more than they need me.”
When he talked like that—when he was willing to stand up to me for the sake of the greater good—I couldn’t help but respect the guy. I’d already labeled him as a supremely arrogant ass, but it turned out he was actually a decent person.
That just went to show that you shouldn’t prejudge people before you got to know them—or at least fought to the bitter end with them. I liked to think I’d learned that lesson long ago, but it seemed I hadn’t. I’d been guilty of the same prejudice as Captain Walker when he’d labeled me as just some green, ditzy, lowly soldier from the moment I marched into his tent, dripping water and mud everywhere.
I glanced down at my buzzing watch. “Our soldiers have made it through the tunnel.” I met Captain Walker’s eyes. “Time to go. We’ll do it together.”
I blasted away the debris the Dark Force’s storm of spells had left at the tunnel entrance. Enemy spells chased us all the way there. Captain Walker was hit. He fell unconscious to the ground.
The Dark Force was already launching their next volley of spells. I jumped over Captain Walker, shielding his body. He’d already been hit hard. Another barrage of dark magic would surely have killed him.
But not me. I’d learned long ago, even before joining the Legion, that I had a strange resistance to magic. I could take a lot more hits than other people. My father had commanded me to keep this ability a secret because my magic resistance just wasn’t part of the laws of magic as we knew them—or, more importantly, as the gods knew them. Possessing a power the gods did not understand was generally considered a pretty bad idea. Not that I had chosen this power. It was just part of me.