I used the dagger to reopen the passage to the Hive world.
Damiel looked at the swirl of magic before us. “We have entirely too little information to successfully complete this mission.”
“Then we’ll just have to do some reconnaissance of our own.”
“So it would seem.” He didn’t look very happy about traveling to a hostile enemy world without any backup or any idea of what to expect.
But we angels didn’t allow personal feelings to get in the way of doing our job. Damiel stepped into the magic passage and I followed.
On the other side, I took a sudden, unexpected plunge into a very cold body of water.
I pushed up above the water’s surface, drenched from head to toe. I hadn’t put up my water elemental defenses in time. There had been precious little time. I sure hadn’t expected to land in water.
I began swimming toward land, cursing whoever had made this passage. Who created an interworld portal over the water?
The shore wasn’t far away. Damiel was already standing on the beach, watching my progress.
“Do you require assistance?” he asked me.
“I am quite capable of getting myself out of here. I can swim, you know.”
“I was just trying to be chivalrous.”
That was not a quality many people would have expected to see in the Master Interrogator, the angel feared by any and all in the Legion. But I had long since realized that when it came to Damiel Dragonsire, there was more than met the eye.
Damiel watched me tread out of the water, onto the shore. I could have sworn he looked amused.
But the humor I thought I’d seen flicker in his eyes was not there when I got closer. Maybe it had just been my imagination.
Damiel apparently had expected the drop into water, or at least he’d expected something would go wrong.
And I should have expected something too. We had entered enemy territory. We were lucky to have only fallen into water, not fallen into the middle of a firing squad.
Get a grip, Cadence, I mentally chided myself. Get your head in the game.
Damiel clearly had his head in the game. He was dry and standing firmly on land. He’d probably walked on water to get here too.
He’d spent years as an angel. His powers were pretty much second nature by now.
I’d always been destined to be an angel; my father had raised and trained me to one day ascend. Still, I felt out of sorts. Damiel knew more about being an angel than I did—a lot more. Why was that? What was his story? I knew very little about the person he’d been before joining the Legion. Maybe he had been raised to be an angel too.
He offered me his hand.
“Chivalry,” I asked with lifted brows.
“Well, you are my wife.”
It sounded so weird to hear the words. Here we were, married to each other, and we hardly even knew each other. I had to remedy that.
“Tell me of your life before the Legion,” I asked him.
“It was nothing special. My beginnings were very humble, certainly nothing close to your pedigree.”
Many Legion soldiers were resentful of me because of who my father was. They saw only the glitz and glamor of being an archangel’s daughter. They didn’t understand the enormous pressure to live up to everyone’s expectations.
But Damiel wasn’t like those soldiers. He knew exactly what it took to become an angel—and the sacrifices you had to make to get there. And like me, his heritage was Immortal. I was no more special than he was.
“We are—both of us—something more than we’ve ever realized,” I said. “The daggers see something in us, something uncommon. Something special.”
“Something Immortal,” he added.
“Yes.”
As he lifted his hand, casting a wind spell to dry me off, I saw that one of his sleeve cuffs was wet. And that’s the moment I realized he had in fact fallen into the water just as I had. He’d merely dried himself off and hurried to land before I’d noticed.
And that realization made me laugh.
“Missed a spot,” I teased him, tapping his wet sleeve with my finger.
He glanced at the wet spot. “Indeed I have,” he replied without shame.
Then he quickly dried himself with magic. As he did it, he watched me. His expression was amused, almost flirtatious.
No, surely I was reading into things, reading what I wanted to see. Damiel was indeed handsome. And honorable. Back in the Magic Eaters’ temple last week, he’d been willing to take the fall for me, to save me, and that meant a lot to me. I would never forget it. I could not forget it. No one had ever made such a sacrifice for me.
Damiel turned away before I could try to read into his expression further. His eyes swept our surroundings, surveying the lay of the land. It was the only reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. We were alone in unfamiliar, enemy territory.
And yet, even knowing all this, I was struck by an intense burst of disappointment. He was looking away. I didn’t want him to look away.
Beware of Dragonsire, my father’s words echoed in my head. I couldn’t shake them. The Master Interrogator has hunted down, interrogated, and killed many Legion soldiers. He sows distrust. He sees bad everywhere. It’s in his nature.
At Colonel Spellstorm’s office, I had seen firsthand the way Damiel interrogated prisoners. I had seen the darkest corner of the Master Interrogator’s psyche—and it had scared me. Because I did care about Damiel. I didn’t want him to lose who he was, to surrender himself to the enemy within.
All of my father’s warnings and all my fears about what Damiel might become—they clashed against how I felt about him. He was a good person. If I worked at it, I knew I could draw out that goodness in him. And I knew I could help him realize he was a good person.
Damiel had protected me. My father had protected me. Could both of them each be trying to protect me, and yet be pulling me in completely different directions?
“Look.” Damiel pointed up at the sky. It was thick with magic, like a sea of vanilla pudding speckled with chocolate sprinkles. It buzzed and twinkled and quite honestly made the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end.
“Some magic is brewing up there,” I said. “We should get to higher ground and try to figure out what it is.”
“Someone’s coming.”
I followed his gaze to a squad of eight soldiers. They were dressed like the Hive soldiers we’d fought on Nightingale: in red uniforms. Each soldier wore two pins on their jacket.
The first pin represented a magical ability—from Vampire’s Kiss to Ghost’s Whisper, eight symbols in all, a different one worn by each soldier.
The second pin was a symbol I didn’t recognize, but it was obvious what it meant. All eight soldiers bore it. This shared symbol clearly meant they all belonged to the same squad. Eight Hive soldiers combined magic to form a group. And those groups combined with other groups to grow even more powerful. We’d seen that cumulative power at work during our last battle with the Hive.
Damiel pointed at a nearby cave along the shore, and we ran into it. Angels abhorred the very idea of hiding, but right now, we couldn’t afford to draw attention to ourselves. We couldn’t let the Hive know that we were coming. For this to work, for our mission to succeed, the Hive had to be complacent and sloppy, not expecting an attack. After all, we were heavily outnumbered. We needed to get a sense of the situation before we attacked. And when we did make our move, surprise would be our best weapon.