"Kill them," Elena ordered, slamming her pity into a dark corner. "If she thinks enough to call them . . ."
"She could disable Raphael and the rest of the Cadre." Jason looked at the gun in her hand. "The quickest method is beheading." He slid out a gleaming black sword from a sheath she hadn't seen until that moment, hidden as it was in the curve of his back. "Take out their hearts, Elena. We'll do the rest, ensure full death."
"Works for me." She began shooting. Turned out that the gun meant to shred angelic wings wasn't as effective as a normal gun would have been on reborn hearts - vampiric and human - but it did the job. When she ran out of bullets, she switched to knives.
The task was grim . . . and sad. Without Lijuan's active guidance, the reborn didn't know what to do. So they mostly just stood there. A few tried to run but even that was a weak effort. Elena didn't feel good about doing what she was doing, but it had to be done.
Because if the reborn began to feed, if they left their victims dead, but whole, those victims would rise. And the reborn would creep a murderous tide across the world.
If even one of them realized that . . .
A pair of tired blue eyes met hers as her arm lifted. There was only gratitude in them as her knife hit home. Jason's sword cut off his head an instant later, the black blade rippling with a fire that reduced the reborn to embers in less than ten seconds. Elena stared at that blade, at the angel who seemed kin to the dark.
"It is done." Aodhan sheathed his swords, having cut those Jason hadn't burned, into several neat pieces.
Nazarach and Dahariel had used their own methods, but the end result was a courtyard empty of life but for the Cadre, and their small group.
"I believe it's time to leave." Nazarach offered her his hand. "A dance at last."
"I can fly myself out." She'd slit her own throat before going anywhere with him.
The amber-eyed angel bowed his head. "Then I hope you'll save me a dance the next time we meet." He lifted off.
Dahariel waited until Nazarach had gone to say, "If Raphael survives, tell him he can have the vampire he wished to buy into his service. The boy's too broken to be of much use to me any longer." He rose into the sky even as the last word left his lips.
"We must go," Jason said, his voice so tight, she could hardly understand him.
Elena glanced back, saw nothing but a blaze of white heat, a wall of static blocking her attempts to reach Raphael with her mind. Her heart clenched. But she left. Because her archangel had asked her to. And he'd be pissed to survive - and hewould survive - only to find her dead. Power began to increase behind them at an exponential rate as they ran, an inferno that shoved at them with waves of searing fire.
Jason and Aodhan ran beside her as she climbed up a small flight of stairs. "It's too low!" she yelled, knowing she'd never make it up.
One hand gripped her under her left arm, the other under her right. She snapped her wings together in the nick of time. Jason and Aodhan took off even as a massivelack of sound filled the air - power being sucked into a vacuum before expanding outward. It threatened to crush, but somehow, the two angels managed to get airborne.
"Go!"
But Jason and Aodhan waited three more seconds before releasing her. Her wings spread instinctively, the tips curling away from the death racing toward them. Heat waves licked across the air, each more dangerous than the last. She saw vampires fall even as they ran, heard screams as human homes went up in flames, saw angels flying ever higher in an attempt to escape. But Jason and Aodhan stayed stubbornly by her side, though she was weaker, far slower.
Fire singed her nape. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the edge of the inferno mere seconds behind them. "Drop!" she screamed. "Drop!"
The blast hit with the force of a two- ton truck, crumpling their wings and slamming them to earth like pieces of glass.
Killing Lijuan was impossible. Raphael realized that with the first wave of her power.
She tasted of death and life intertwined, a being who straddled worlds.
Blood continued to streak down her shoulder, black and viscous, but still her power grew, her wings backlit by the glow until they ceased to exist. The rest of the Cadre rose with her, holding back the blinding wave that might destroy the world itself. Already, thousands had likely died. If they stopped, if they let her release the unmitigated fury of her strength, that death toll would reach millions. Billions.
But that wasn't why his fellow archangels fought. Human life meant little to most. They fought for their own lives, and because Lijuan had made a mistake. He'd felt their shock as Adrian tore apart the vampire who'd had the ill fortune to be enthralled by Lijuan. The blood, the death, was nothing new. But the control she had over her reborn, the strength of those reborn against the vampires . . . no archangel wanted to face that kind of an army. The fact that that army was a plague that held the potential to end them all was the final nail in the coffin.
I will not be contained. I cannot be contained.
Lijuan's voice in their heads, the seeming sanity of it more disturbing than Uram's viciousness had been in those last minutes above New York. Now Beijing burned below them and in that rubble lay Elena. The primal core of him raged to go to her. But he held his position. Because his warrior with her mortal heart would expect nothing less.
He felt one of the tendons in his left wing snap against the wake of a power that slapped into him over and over. Only Favashi, younger than him, was showing signs of similar damage.
"Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal."
He was weaker than he should have been, but he was also stronger. Looking up into Lijuan's face, the human mask stripped away to reveal the screaming darkness, he said,