The husk of a once-living angel dropped from the core at that very instant . . . right as the wildfire cut through the protective guard like butter.
It punched to the center. And found its target.
Lijuan’s scream was a serrated saw in his head. Gritting his teeth as she reappeared at last, burning in wildfire, he lifted his hands as if to throw more at her. She ran, heading to the port area while her fighters collected around her in suicidal loyalty. He followed, smashing them down with archangelic fury, but had to turn back when a large enemy squadron broke through the front line to close in on a rooftop full of archers.
He blew the squadron out of the sky, but Lijuan was out of reach by then, her fighters falling on his people in chaotic hordes to keep him from following her.
I will accept your offer of a cease-fire to gather our wounded. Lijuan’s nightmare of a voice, awash with the thready screams and begging cries of the dead.
Both sides will retreat, Raphael replied. One squadron from each side comes forward to collect the bodies. His people were lying broken all over the city, too. And he was out of wildfire. Nothing else could really touch Lijuan.
It is agreed. Rage in every word, but he’d done enough damage to her that she was slinking off to lick her wounds.
He waited for her to order her troops to retreat before he gave his own the same order. As expected, Lijuan’s army retreated to the neighborhood by the port area. Raphael’s people had booby-trapped entire neighborhoods long before and would set off those traps once Lijuan’s ground troops began to crawl forward—because his forces hadn’t managed to destroy all the carriers.
At least five had landed.
He could hope that the reborn had been in the ones he and Izak had destroyed, knew they wouldn’t be that lucky. The Cascade wanted destruction and destruction it would get. But Lijuan wouldn’t find any safe harbor in his city. For her, all of New York had teeth.
His archers and shooters stayed in position as the rest of his people withdrew.
Raphael, too, waited until Lijuan’s army was far enough away that they couldn’t mount a stealth attack while his back was turned. When Elena flew up to join him on his return flight to the Tower, he saw a splash of sticky red on her side. Not her blood. Someone else’s.
Enemy angel, she said, having caught sight of his glance. Someone cut off his head in the sky and he bled all over me as he fell. Her voice was grim as she continued. We lost two archers on the roof I was on. Two more are badly wounded.
Four. It wasn’t a huge number . . . unless you considered how long this war would likely rage, and how few people his side had in comparison to Lijuan’s. With that in mind, he shifted the oncoming strategy meeting to the infirmary. He might be able to heal enough warriors that his forces could hold the line until Elijah’s army arrived.
Ahead of them, the Primary landed on the Legion building. Raphael had seen the gray-winged fighters in the thick of battle. If one fell, another rose in his place. They were Raphael’s greatest advantage. Seven hundred and seventy-seven warriors who couldn’t be killed. Except . . .
“Something is wrong, Guild Hunter.” He dropped into a rapid descent.
The Primary was crouched over one of his people who lay on his back on the ground, one hand clutching at his chest as he coughed black liquid out of his mouth.
“What is this?” As far as Raphael knew, the Legion were invulnerable to disease.
“Death,” the Primary said in a voice that held a chorus of hundreds. He slipped out his sword and, looking into the eyes of the other fighter, sliced the cutting edge straight through the other’s neck, severing the head from the body.
The body didn’t dissolve into dust as the Legion always did when they fell in battle. It began to liquefy into a noxious sludge that had the Primary looking to Raphael. “You must end this, sire,” he said as Elena landed beside Raphael.
Raphael torched the dead Legion fighter with angelfire . . . but parts of the corpse yet moved in the aftermath.
“Hell.” Elena touched his arm . . . and a lick of wildfire jolted into him even as she gasped. The wildfire tasted of her. Of defiant life.
He used a droplet of what she’d given him to eliminate the last pieces of the corpse before glancing at the Primary. “Do you feel him regenerating?”
The Primary shook his head. “His body was consumed. We are now seven hundred and seventy-six in flesh.”
“I’m sorry.” Elena placed her hand on the Primary’s shoulder, her expression scored with pain. “I know you’ve been together eons.”
Cocking his head to look up at her, the Primary said, “He is not lost. He is part of us. Only his body has been destroyed.”
Raphael had never quite understood the level to which the Legion were enmeshed, but he was glad to hear they hadn’t permanently lost one of their own. “Was he hit by Lijuan’s power?”
“No. He was bitten by one of her angelic fighters.”
“Bitten?” Elena shoved a flyaway strand of hair impatiently behind her ear. “Like a vampire?”
“The angel sank his teeth into the arm.” The Primary indicated his biceps area. “Others have also been bitten but none of mine.”
Raphael took off without warning at the same instant that Elena said, “Raphael! Go!” His flight buffeted Elena and the Primary into flattened positions on the roof, his wings white fire.
He landed on the infirmary balcony in a matter of split seconds, ran inside.
“Sire!” Nisia looked to him with desperate eyes from her position kneeling on a bed. It held brown-haired and blue-eyed Andreja, her wings a slightly darker shade of brown than the rich mahogany of her hair. The tall and muscled angel was twisting and fighting the hands that sought to hold her down for Nisia’s attempts at healing.
Her bare leg was bloody from an injury, but that wasn’t what caught Raphael’s attention. An ugly blackness coughed from Andreja’s mouth, stark against the cream of her skin.
Placing his hand on the angel’s breastbone, Raphael punched in the tiniest possible droplet of the wildfire Elena had given him.
Wildfire hurt Lijuan, was not meant for even old angels.
The tough canvas of Andreja’s fighting tunic disintegrated in a scorched burst where he’d touched her. She screamed, high and agonized, before collapsing. The visible bite mark on the decaying flesh of her arm crackled with wildfire.
That didn’t stop Nisia from putting her hands on the angel. “She’s alive. Laric, finish stitching up your patient, then attend to Andreja’s leg.”
The younger healer nodded, his head bare today. Though he continued to wear a cape over his damaged wings, his hood had fallen off in the chaos of having to deal with so many badly injured patients. It was the first time Raphael had seen the thick, deep auburn of his hair touched by light.