Elijah’s face showed the same strain and anger.
The sheet-wrapped bodies of their dead lay in the cold embrace of a morgue set up in a warehouse. It was a necessity Nisia had quietly taken care of when battle first began. Each and every fighter here, Raphael promised himself, as he carried in one of the fallen himself, would have a burial with full honors. They would go home to the Refuge.
The meeting he next held, with all his senior people and Elijah’s who weren’t out on watch or fighting in small skirmishes, was brutal in its grimness. Now that they knew Lijuan could turn part of her army noncorporeal again if she had enough fuel, they had to be ready for an attack from any quarter.
“My entire city is seeded with machines that watch.” Raphael waved Vivek Kapur forward. “But we can’t watch for what we can’t see. And even if we could, the feeds would be far too many for even a team to monitor constantly.”
The angels and vampires gathered around Dmitri’s battle strategy table parted for Vivek’s wheelchair. A few of Elijah’s warriors gave him a curious look, but that was to be expected. It was rare that a vampire was Made when he had such terrible injuries.
“Tell us of your machines,” Raphael said.
The vampire—ridiculously young in immortal terms—did not flinch at being the focus of so much powerful attention. “The surveillance grid covers nearly the entire city—the only gaps are where Archangel Lijuan’s forces have destroyed cameras, drones, or bugs.”
Taking a small “bug” from his pocket, he put it on the table for reference. “I’ve been able to set the sky-focused system to sound a warning for any movement big enough to be an angel but I still need bodies to look at every alert and verify if it’s a friendly or an enemy.”
“The wounded,” one of Elijah’s female warriors suggested. “They are distraught at falling at the dawn of battle—to watch for the enemy, it will give them life.”
Elijah, new lines carved around his mouth, glanced at Vivek. “Can wounded warriors do this task?”
“As long as they have their sight,” Vivek said. “I also have another job that only needs hearing, no sight—I was able to reprogram our electronic spies to listen for dialects you’d usually only hear among older residents of Archangel Lijuan’s territory. I don’t know if noise escapes that invisible thing she does, but it can’t hurt to listen—and I figured since a lot of her generals and commanders aren’t exactly young . . .”
The looks shot Vivek’s way by Eli’s people were not curious this time—they were assessing.
I see why you Made this man, Raphael, Elijah said. He is an asset.
You cannot steal him yet, Eli. He is under Contract.
“I also thought of trying to program a system to alert us of areas of dead air without birds,” Vivek continued, unaware of the judgments being made around him, “but with all the fighting, the only birds still in the city are yours, Archangel Elijah.”
Even Elena’s owls had disappeared, perhaps because their lady was stirring.
Discussion ensued, but no matter how they looked at it, they had no way to moderate Lijuan’s one major advantage. “The only reason we managed to hold her off in the latest attack,” Raphael said, “was that we were both close enough to respond quickly.”
“And because your consort can do something I have never seen anyone do.” Elijah smiled at Elena, who stood silently beside her onetime nemesis, Galen.
Her responding smile was enigmatic. “A woman must have her secrets.”
Shifting their discussion to what they could control, they used the battle layout on Dmitri’s table to plan troop movements, but the harsh fact was that they did not have enough people—not when faced with the size of Lijuan’s army.
“How is she feeding them?”
Everyone turned to Vivek. He flushed under the deep brown of his skin, realizing he’d interrupted two archangels and their most senior people, but to his credit, he held his ground. “Archangel Lijuan has far too many people for there to have been enough food on the submarines. So how is she feeding them?”
“Angels do not need to eat as much as mortals,” Raphael said, but he was frowning. “Wounded angels, however, do need food to have enough energy to recover.”
“Well, that explains it,” his consort muttered. “She just eats her wounded.”
Everyone stared at Elena this time.
“What?” She threw up her hands. “It’s the truth.”
“It is indeed,” Elijah said. “That leaves blood for the unwounded vampires. So she must have a store of mortals who’ve been kept away from the fighting.”
“One second.” Dmitri grabbed Vivek’s ever-present tablet and brought up something. “This came in just before all hell broke loose—one of the snipers reported seeing a small group of ‘scared mortals’ being ushered into a building. They were dressed like farmers. Healthy, but only about fifty in number.”
Cristiano, a powerful vampire in Elijah’s team, shook his head. “That’s nowhere near enough for the number of vampires she has in her ground forces. Also, she still has to feed the mortals and Venom tells me you left no food behind when you evacuated that area.”
“Her plan was to take this city in a violent surge—plenty of food and blood then.” The courage of Raphael’s people had stopped her advance, but they were exhausted and they had lost too many of their own.
He locked eyes with those of liquid silver, his hunter with whom he had no shields. If we do not stop her, hbeebti, Lijuan will feed on our own.
* * *
• • •
The fighting over the next two days was brutal. Lijuan was still down, possibly as a result of having been badly injured twice in quick succession, but her generals and commanders were determined not to let that stop them. Even more of them were now shooting Lijuan’s obsidian power from their hands.
When Elijah got hit in the chest with a bolt, they all panicked—but it became clear in a matter of seconds that while the energy was deadly to an ordinary angel, it did not incapacitate an archangel. Neither were their strikes infectious. Elijah was soon able to shake off the effects.
The law that only an archangel could kill another archangel remained an immutable one. However, that so many of Lijuan’s senior people could now end members of New York’s troops in a single strike meant both Elijah and Raphael had to be out there—being worn down by constant battle while Lijuan rested.
Elijah’s birds of prey were vicious fighters who’d torn holes in angelic wings and gouged out eyes, but neither they nor the Legion could even the odds when Lijuan was feeding near-archangel level power to the top echelon of her army. Take Raphael and Elijah out of the field of battle and it’d be a bloodbath.