“Raphael.” Her pale, pale gaze turned to flint as she took in the mark on his temple. “You’ve been keeping secrets.”
“It appears we’ve all been doing that of late,” he said. “You must’ve worked long and quiet indeed to gain the trust of Uram’s scattered forces.” Until the ordinarily loyal men and women had abandoned their assigned posts and territories to swell her ranks.
“A goddess,” she said, her physical form fading to turn her skin translucent, “thinks not only for today, but for many tomorrows.” The eerie shift revealed the skeletal structure of her face, the sight merging with the crawling sense of screams beneath the surface of her voice, the trapped souls of those Lijuan had murdered.
“Your men wear only swords and crossbows.” Guns, at least, were a familiar weapon to most angelic fighters and wouldn’t have weighed down a winged fleet. “Do you foresee an easy victory?”
“I have been gathering my forces for ten thousand years, while you are a boy. We outnumber you until it will be no battle but an annihilation.”
Her arrogance, Raphael thought, might just be the Achilles’ heel that’d give his people victory in this unbalanced war. “Such is your belief, Lijuan. That doesn’t make it the truth.”
“It soon will be, but before the inevitable, I give you one more chance and invite you to surrender,” she said in that voice full of horror. “I cannot leave you or your consort alive, of course”—utmost civility as she spoke of his and Elena’s executions—“but I will treat your people as I would my own. Your Seven are extraordinary and will serve me well.”
His Seven, Raphael thought, would spend their existence attempting to erase Lijuan from the planet rather than lift a finger in her service. “There is a better way,” he said, extending the talk to give Naasir a final few minutes to put his plans in place. “You do not have to start a war.”
“I am not starting a war. I am stopping one before it begins.” She smiled at him, her eyes pale orbs with fetid shadows hidden within—as if to look too deep would be to fall into an inescapable hell. “You have never respected me as you should. I cannot allow that to continue. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand.” That Lijuan was a being of perfect madness, so mad she believed herself sane. Raphael recognized the signs; he’d seen them first in his father. But the powerful man who’d once played tag with him above the Refuge had never become the ugliness that was Lijuan. She was something new, a nightmare born of the rot at the core of her soul. “In turn,” he said, “you must understand that I cannot allow you to take my Tower and my city.”
“Then I’m afraid we are at an impasse.” Her smile never faltered, her teeth and jaw visible through skin turned to smoke. “We will be civilized about this. I will not attack you until you are with your troops, and you will not attempt the same.”
Accepting the stipulation, he said, “If you wish to cease hostilities at any stage, you need only remove your forces from my territory.”
“And should you wish to surrender, your fighters need only lay down their arms. Mine will not attack once your people are no longer a threat—unlike Charisemnon, I have no wish to degrade. My aim is only to conquer.” A pause. “It was not well done of him to so dishonorably use the reborn I gave him as a gift. I have told him I will not tolerate any further acts that bring disgrace upon my name.”
Raphael inclined his head. “I will see you in battle, Lijuan.”
“Good-bye, Raphael. You would’ve made a great Ancient one day, if only you had learned to respect your betters.”
Flying back to his troops at high speed, Raphael reached out to Elena. He needed her touch to erase the ugliness that permeated his bones, Lijuan’s presence a seeping wrongness in the fabric of the world. Elena, battle is imminent.
We’re ready. A kiss of untamed wildness that could be no one but his consort. I’m watching for you.
Ordering his troops to retreat inside the siege zone, Illium leading them in, he took the rear with Jason and Aodhan at his flanks. It was a wise move, Lijuan sending a blast in his direction the instant he hit the edge of Manhattan. Her power manifested as a hail of black daggers, gleaming and deadly.
The other archangel, however, was too far away to do much damage, her aim no doubt to send his troops into disarray. Brushing the daggers aside with a minimal use of power, he turned to see that none of his people had dropped even an inch out of formation. There was no second attempt, Lijuan obviously realizing she couldn’t do any real harm from that distance, and a few minutes later, his squadrons crossed the line of their defensive perimeter.
Wings filled the sky in every direction, each and every fighter dressed in a distinctive black uniform to distinguish them from the dark gray and red of Lijuan’s forces. To further avoid confusion, every single pair of wings—including Raphael’s—was marked above and below with streaks of a shimmering blue paint developed exactly for this purpose. Designed not to clog or otherwise harm their feathers, it meant the shooters could see if an angel was friend or foe at a glance.
Those shooters lay concealed in protective hides on the rooftops and in the now windowless top floors of several high-rises, as well as on the perimeter line alongside vampires expert in anti-wing weaponry, the guns pointed skyward. More vampires stood on the ground armed with flamethrowers and swords, their task to attempt to eliminate or so disable downed enemy fighters that they couldn’t heal and rise again. A third group of vampires prowled the city, on alert for any reborn threat.