Wounded angels lay on rooftops all over the city, their wings crumpled and bodies bloodied. Healers and field medics attended to Raphael’s wounded, while hard-eyed warriors watched over Lijuan’s wounded to make certain they wouldn’t rejoin the attack.
He returned his attention to the enemy squadron that surrounded their goddess. I am willing to agree to a cease-fire for long enough for us both to collect our wounded. Some of his people had fallen in what was now enemy territory.
He’d deliberately sent his message so it would hit every mind in the vicinity. So her people would know the choice she made. If he could demoralize her army, he would. As he waited for a response, he told two of his warriors to drop from the air, clearing his line of sight . . . then blasted another one of her squadrons with angelfire. It incinerated them. The massive container they’d carried until their deaths crashed to the unforgiving street far below.
The distance didn’t fully muffle the loud shatter of its destruction. From the sky, it was a toybox spilling tiny broken dolls. Most lay unmoving, but the odd one crawled, pitiful and slow.
Ransom’s team has it, Dmitri told him, and he knew hundreds of meters below, a group of hunters was bearing down on the crawlers.
Raphael was already moving to destroy a second carrier, but Lijuan’s forces had seen what was happening, dropped precipitously to avoid his strike. Lijuan rose up out of the knot of her people at the same time to blast him once again. Her wing was badly damaged but she was no green angel in her first battle. She nearly got him.
He threw wildfire at her in a relentless volley until she dropped back into her protection. Sweat dripped down his back. It might appear as if he was winning, but he wasn’t. He’d used up so much wildfire that, Cascade power or not, his body was having trouble generating enough to keep up.
Much longer and he’d be forced to use ordinary angelfire—which didn’t have much of an impact on Lijuan. As he’d feared after his failure to heal Antonicus, even his wildfire wasn’t working as it had in the last battle.
Then, he’d truly hurt her.
Just now, when she’d risen, he’d seen signs that her body had already stopped the progression of the wildfire on her wing, the same for the damage to her leg. If Lijuan decided to wait him out, she’d win by default. He had, at least, given his people a little breathing room by crashing that carrier. Lijuan’s troops were being more cautious, and those with the carriers had dropped back behind the fighters and changed direction to head back to the port.
Aodhan, Illium, Jason, can you get to a carrier? They were the only three angels on his team with enough strength to take out the massive metal constructs.
The answer from all three was negative. Jason was fighting an advance on their left flank, Aodhan on their right, while Illium was at the frontline. Any withdrawal and Lijuan’s squadrons would fall on the archers and shooters in a bloody massacre.
Izzy is close to the one at your eleven o’clock. It was Elena in his head.
Raphael had included his consort in the communications as a matter of course.
He demolished a swathe of enemy warriors, something about two of them striking him as odd, but he didn’t have time to stop and think about it before he obliterated them from existence. I know he is your favorite, hbeebti, he said in the aftermath, but Izzy is a baby angel without the ability to light a candle with his power, much less that to throw bolts of energy.
That’s why he has a missile launcher, his hunter replied patiently. Ash taught him to shoot one last month and insisted he carry it into battle.
54
Raphael located Izzy in the chaos of battle. No wonder the young angel was flying slightly crooked. That weapon had to be heavy, even worn across his chest. Izak, launch your missile at the carrier directly ahead of you. Jurgen and Imani, protect Izak.
The two senior angels, their leathers already bloody from combat quickly flanked the younger one. Who, to his credit, reacted with smooth precision. Lifting the launcher into the correct position on his shoulder while maintaining a slightly wobbly hover, he ignored the screaming enemy warriors coming at him and launched.
Those flyers smashed into Jurgen’s dual swords and Imani’s war hammer. A head went flying, a face was smashed in . . . and the carrier was torn out of angelic hands by the power of the blow from the missile. Izak went flying backward from the momentum, was halted by two of the Legion who body-slammed him to a stop.
Archers scrambled out of the way of the carrier as it careened down toward a building, only for one of his people operating a massive crane to whack it out into open air using a huge iron ball hanging on a muscular chain.
Said ball then swung angrily through a heavy knot of enemy fighters. Raphael’s portside fighters had clearly already received the order to withdraw when the crane came into operation. Lijuan’s people were chasing them, thinking it a true retreat. The crane took them down like bowling pins.
Crushed bones, pulverized faces, red pulp raining from the sky.
Using the cranes across the city as stealth weapons had been Galen’s idea. No one really saw cranes. They were a part of the landscape. The surprise would only work once, but it had worked very, very well. Multiple cranes had come online at the same time, and they’d managed to catch Lijuan’s forces unprepared, smashing down hundreds in a matter of minutes.
Lijuan’s generals rose up high into the air, above the reach of the cranes, their hands ringed with obsidian.
Eject! Raphael ordered the crane operators.
The men and women literally dived out of the control boxes, all of the operators winged for this very reason. Obsidian power hit the cranes on the heels of their dives. Raphael couldn’t tell if any of the operators had made it.
Raphael, we’re starting to lose people. Dmitri’s voice, as steady as he always was in battle. There’re just too fucking many of them.
I know. His forces had done a massive amount of damage, but no one city could take on an enemy army of this size. It was incomprehensible. Have you heard from Eli’s second?
They’re on their way.
But they wouldn’t arrive for at least another day. Elijah would probably come ahead, but even then, it’d take him hours. Raphael’s city was going to be dead by then. He had to find a way to delay Lijuan, stop this full-frontal assault. He and his people needed time to reassess their plans. Not even in their worst-case scenario simulations had they imagined an army of this magnitude.
There was no point hoarding power when New York was on the brink of a catastrophic defeat.
Decision made, he ordered all his fighters nearby to collapse their wings and drop. Not all of them could get disentangled fast enough, but enough did that he had an opening. Exhaling, he released all the wildfire in his body and shaped it like a spear, then threw it with tactical calculation at the squadron locked around Lijuan.