“Great. We wouldn’t want you to get a paper cut while flipping the page.”
This time he didn’t miss my sarcasm.
He shot me a stern look. “I don’t understand your attitude. Don’t you want to expose any and all traitors hiding in our midst? Don’t you want to stop the demons’ return and the resulting war that will tear our world apart?”
“Of course I want to stop them,” I said. “But you can just read their thoughts. There’s no need to break their will.”
“Thoughts can be masked, or even manipulated with sufficient practice. Using Siren’s Song is the fastest, most reliable way to accomplish our mission and save the world.”
“But at what cost?”
“I am quite experienced in the art of interrogation, Cadence. Everyone I question here will recover.”
“I wasn’t just talking about the cost to the people you interrogate, Damiel. I was talking about the cost to you. I meant what it does to you—how it changes you—to break so many people.”
“As I said, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep this world safe.”
A knock on the door interrupted whatever I might have said to him, and Damiel waved in the next person on his very-long, meticulously-sorted interrogation list.
4
Angel on a Pedestal
I sat at a table in the Legion’s dining hall, sipping from a cup of raspberry tea. Unlike the building in which it was situated, the dining hall had a distinctly modern look to it. Six metal barstools were positioned like flower petals around each glass table. At the back of the room, a long glass table stood atop a raised platform. That’s where I sat now. It was where any angel who came here was expected to sit—on display, on a pedestal.
Behind me, the entire wall was one enormous sheet of glass. The window looked out onto a private forest of tall green trees. It was a beautiful place—and a practical one. The Legion soldiers stationed here often trained in that forest.
Before me, past the pedestal, men and women in uniforms sat around the little glass tables, eating their lunch. Between bites, they stole covert looks at me.
“Do see how calmly and properly she is sipping her tea?” one whispered to another.
“How can she be so calm?”
“Especially with what she and Colonel Dragonsire are doing?”
“People emerge shaky and dazed from their interrogations. Hardly able to walk.”
“Or speak.”
“Hours later, they are still twitching.”
“And stuttering.”
I ate the tiny, single-bite cookie on the side of my tea saucer.
The soldiers’ flood of whispers didn’t stop.
“She is so calm. So cold.”
“The daughter of an archangel, now an angel herself, and married to an angel. She was born to this, to the screams of others’ suffering.”
Their words dripped delight, not the horror they should have felt. It was as though our arrival was the best source of gossip that they’d experienced in years. They spoke as though our interrogations—and the sorry state of their colleagues—did not bother them at all.
I refilled my blue-and-white teacup from the tiny metal pot on my serving tray.
The soldiers in the dining hall still weren’t finished with their gossip. The whole hall was buzzing with it.
“I’ve heard a lot about General Silverstar’s daughter, but I had no idea how hot she is,” said a female soldier with dark double pigtails.
“Her skin is so beautiful. So perfect,” lamented her friend with the rosy lips. “It has that heavenly, ethereal glow.”
“And her hair shines like sunshine. Her eyes glow like amethyst gems,” Pigtails added.
“I’d give up common decency for an angel’s body,” said Lips.
“Forget the body. It’s the magic you want. Have you ever seen an angel in battle? It’s glorious. The whole Earth seems to stop and bow every time they cast a spell.”
Lips sighed. “And it sure would be nice to be able to follow the gods’ will without remorse.”
Without remorse? Truth be told, I was not as calm as they thought I was. In fact, I felt pretty twisted up inside about what Damiel and I were doing to the soldiers here. If freedom from remorse was one of the gods’ gifts, I’d missed out on that perk.
The canteen doors swung open by magic, a sharp telekinetic snap, and then Damiel entered the dining hall. He grabbed a plate, filled it up, and went to join me on the angel pedestal.
I glanced at his full plate, packed with perfect efficiency. “Hungry?”
“Yes. I have expended a lot of magic today.”
I suppressed a cringe. I’d just been making casual conversation. I hadn’t actually been thinking about why he was hungry: because he’d interrogated so many soldiers today. The Legion bred willpower. Its soldiers were tougher than anyone on Earth—and Damiel had broken their minds as though they were as frail as eggshells.
Damiel took a bite of his steak. What I do bothers you, he said in my mind.
I’m fine.
You cannot allow anyone to see that our interrogation has upset you.
I know.
I was an angel. I had an image to maintain, for the sake of the Legion, for the Earth. Angels had to be strong, unwavering. If we faltered, so would humanity.
During Damiel’s interrogations, as I stood by and watched him usurp one person’s will after another, that knot in my stomach had tightened and twisted. I’d had to stand by, tying and untying soldiers when ordered, all the while pretending that it didn’t bother me for a second. No, more than that. I’d had to pretend that I was absolutely confident that we were doing the right thing.
You’ve fooled everyone else, but not me, Damiel said.
I know.
He saw right through me. He knew how much I hated this. Back in Colonel Spellstorm’s office, I’d wanted to leave, or a least to look away. But I couldn’t. I had to watch. Always and unfalteringly. That was what was expected of me.
Finally, after a few hours of interrogations, Damiel had ordered me out of Colonel Spellstorm’s office to get something to eat. We would be leaving Florence soon, and he had no intention of fighting alongside an angel with low blood sugar. Or so he’d said. And he’d made himself sound very, very convincing.
That had been my way out. Had Damiel sent me away because my disapproval was aggravating him as he tried to work? Or because he knew I was bothered by these interrogations and he wanted to spare me?
The optimist in me hoped it was the latter.
But the optimist was having trouble reconciling with the scene I had witnessed, the sight of the Master Interrogator at work, in his element. Seeing that had brought me face-to-face with the darkness inside of him, a darkness that grew stronger with every person he interrogated, and with every mind that he crushed.
Damiel continued to eat his lunch. Though he was obviously very hungry, his bites were orderly and controlled, one after the other, never rushed or wild. He was emptying his plate in a very meticulous manner.
Every pair of eyes in the dining hall was staring at us.
“The first and only marriage of two angels,” one soldier whispered to the others at his table.