“I will not sacrifice people,” Raphael said to Elena in the short lull between one battle and the next. “I will not allow them to be mowed down like dispensable pieces on a chessboard.”
“You know I’m on your side.” If he won the war by walking on the bodies of his people, he would lose the greater battle—to remain Raphael.
She was bone-tired, too, but she stayed on the front line beside their people, sometimes with the ground teams fighting the reborn, others with those on rooftops. With her wings retracted and her hair hidden under a knit cap, the enemy couldn’t find her. Permanent dye would’ve been better, but they’d discovered it didn’t stick. The energy that arced through her wings occasionally zapped her hair, too, and poof, no more dye.
Yesterday, she’d been back-to-back with Venom as they cut down a swarm of reborn. Today, she was firing a ground-to-air gun. When three of Lijuan’s squadrons managed to overwhelm them with sheer numbers, swarming the rooftop, she fired the weapon at point-blank range until it ran out of projectiles, then threw it aside and went for her knives.
Blades were close combat weapons, no room for squeamishness.
Blood sprayed her face, but she continued on with relentless focus, images of Zoe and Maggie held close to her heart. If the city fell, the little girls would become prey for Lijuan and her forces. A momentary gap between two sets of wings and she saw that Hiraz was trapped behind the enemy soldiers, his sword moving with blurring speed. But even a skilled swordsman couldn’t hold off that many of the enemy.
If he didn’t get some backup soon, he was dead.
She stabbed one of her assailants in the eye, threw a blade that slammed home in the eyeball of the second attacker. One thing she’d learned during all of this—didn’t matter if it was a vampire or an angel, they hated to get a blade in the eye. Both of the two that she’d attacked had the dead black eyes, but even they screamed and pulled out the knives, putrid greenish-black fluid leaking down their cheeks.
Elena had seen enough of these reborn angels now that she didn’t flinch. As the loss of an eye led to a loss of coordination, she was able to slice open the throat of one, while an archer who’d been fighting beside her used a small scythe to slice off the head of the other.
Archers were elite specialists. But turned out that when you had hundreds of years to become a specialist, you picked up a few other skills along the way.
Dropping and rolling as an enemy combatant swung for her own throat, she slid her blades across the back of his ankles, severing the Achilles tendon on each foot. He dropped to the ground with a scream, but she was already moving, confident the archer would finish him off. Hiraz was fighting three angels at once now, and he was losing. Blood dripped from his arm and his cheek had been sliced open.
Elena wrenched a knife through the wing of the nearest angel while kicking out the knee of another, giving Hiraz enough room to thrust his sword into the stomach of the third angel and twist. But the one whose wing she’d injured wasn’t down; he spun around with blank-eyed determination . . . and she faltered. “Gadriel.”
The haunting gray-green eyes were gone, his pink-tinged skin holding a greenish cast, but it was the solid senior angel she and Raphael had last seen in China. Her entire being rebelled against seeing him turned into this abomination.
Teeth bared, he swung his sword toward her neck.
Instinct took over. Ducking, she slammed a blade into his gut, then ran straight through to slam into Hiraz, taking them both off the roof.
It had been a purposeful action and she managed to slow their descent, though the vampire’s weight was more than she could handle. When they made a bruising but survivable landing on the balcony a couple of stories down, Hiraz ran back inside the building without a word. She knew what he was planning—to go up a set of internal fire escape stairs and come up behind the attackers.
Elena had the same idea. Rising up into the air, she went to rejoin the fight, coming at Lijuan’s troops from the back—but it was too late. Another swarm of troops was heading their way. Fuck! She didn’t have the mental ability to tell their people to withdraw and they had to withdraw. They couldn’t win this one, not with so many fighters coming at them. It would be a slaughter.
Raphael was involved in heavy combat against multiple squadrons and at least five of Lijuan’s generals. Elijah was down with a wounded wing that would take a couple of hours minimum to heal.
Wiping the sweat and blood off her face with her forearm, she looked desperately around—and spotted Galen. Raphael’s weapons-master was on the leading edge of the fighters on the roof. He moved like lightning, his red hair sweat damp and two swords dancing in his hands as if they weighed nothing when she knew they were heavy as hell.
Dropping down beside him, she took on an assailant and yelled, “Massive incoming force! We have to retreat!”
Galen was a warrior, and the light of battle glinted in his pale—almost translucent—green eyes, but he was also a highly intelligent angel. Slicing off the heads of the two angels he’d been fighting, then finishing off the one she’d taken on, he followed her gaze to where the new squadrons were heading their way.
Opening his mouth, he issued a command in a voice that carried across the entire rooftop—she’d known he could do that, had heard him do the same in the Refuge. Then, he’d been yelling at a group of recalcitrant children to fall in line. Though the kids had obeyed at once, they hadn’t looked the least scared; most had been grinning while trying hard to maintain correct wing posture.
The sight had gone a long way toward making Elena understand how kind, soft-hearted Jessamy could’ve fallen in love with this barbarian angel.
“Fall back!” he ordered. “Begin defensive maneuver alpha!”
Elena continued to fight beside Galen as the rest of their people fell back behind them; she swapped out her knife blades for a long blade another retreating fighter slapped into her hand. Her own had been lost in another skirmish earlier that day.
Everyone had their assigned tasks in this maneuver and hers was to hold the line and buy their people time. The vampires and two other guild hunters on the roof would be flown to the next nearest safe position by the angels who were strong enough, but before the guild hunters went, they’d lay a little trap for Lijuan’s troops.
Gadriel, wing damaged and stomach bleeding, was suddenly in front of her again. Her eyes burned as she swung the deadly sharp blade of her weapon across his neck, separating head from body. Gadriel had died in China. This was nothing but Lijuan abusing an honorable warrior’s corpse. She would remember him as he’d once been, not as this monstrosity.
“Run! You will all run in the end!” yelled one of Lijuan’s squadron leaders as he landed on the roof, his face bloody and his eyes hot with battle fury—he had normal hazel eyes, which meant he’d chosen this, chosen to walk with Lijuan. “We will own you!”