An entire squadron flew right at Elena’s roof, not flinching when five of their team went down with bolts through their wings and necks, every shooter on the roof switching focus as they understood this was a full-on assault designed to take them out. But there were too many of the enemy, the roof overrun in seconds.
Rising up out of her hide, Elena dodged the bolts of two enemy fighters and kept shooting, aiming for the vulnerable eyes and necks now that they were so close. Several headed right for her, swords drawn, while their brethren engaged the other defenders on the roof. Out of bolts, she dropped the crossbow and, with the same movement, reached for the machine guns she had strapped to her thighs. “Fire in the hole!”
Her people dropped at the warning and she sprayed the rooftop with gunfire, the bodies of the enemy jerking, limbs twitching where they fell as the strong ones struggled immediately to heal from the assault. Blood and brain matter splattered the concrete, and still they kept coming, an endless wave. That was when she realized she was being driven to the edge of the building. They wanted her to fall, to fly off.
“Fuck!” It was a trap, one they were willing to sacrifice their people to set. “Ransom!”
Gunfire erupted from her left, the other hunter careful not to hit her as he took over. Screaming a battle cry, she shot out a heavy spray of her own, then, instead of going over where they wanted her to go over, ran right through the enemy. “Keep shooting!” she said, her own guns pumping fire.
Her boots pounded over crushed and bloodied feathers as she shot her way past the startled angels still standing, the air full of bullets she couldn’t totally avoid. One caught her a glancing blow on her arm, the other dug a fiery groove across her cheek, but she reached her target without any real injury, going over the opposite side of the building from where she’d been herded. The enemy turned to follow her en masse, which hopefully meant the others on the roof would be all right.
“This is my city, you bastards.” Managing to get her guns strapped down in midair as a result of hours of practice doing the same, she swept down a wide avenue, the wind whipping off the blood trickling down her cheek. “Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
As the battle raged overhead and buildings shuddered after being hit by stray bolts of power, the city as a whole began to go progressively darker. She’d seen this before, during the fight with Uram, and knew it was because Raphael and Lijuan were both sucking power from the electricity grid, batteries, anything that could supply them with the energy they used to supercharge their strikes.
The darkness was her friend. Teeth bared, she led the enemy angels in and out of streets, through buildings she knew had accessways wide enough for flight, under the High Line and between certain widely spaced trees in Central Park. They were fast, the ones on her trail, but they didn’t know Manhattan.
Of course, she couldn’t keep this up forever. Naasir, you f**king smart predator, she thought as her wings began to tire, it’s showtime. She’d managed to make a short cell phone call halfway through her darting flight, and, as instructed, now led her pursuers into a narrow gap between two high-rises.
It dead-ended at the back of another building.
Reaching the end, she spun around, wings spread. The leader of the pack, his left eye a pulpy mess where a bullet had hit him, grinned . . . and ran right into the steel net that snapped into place in front of the speeding squadron. The ones at the back tried to fly up to avoid the net, but it fell from above, too—courtesy of a certain blue-winged angel—before a net sprung up behind them.
Trapped, the enemy fighters tried to land, but their wings were too fouled up in the net and with each other. Falling hard to the asphalt, they dragged the nets down with them—nets that, she saw with a wince, had cut lines into their flesh and wings, the edges razored. “I love you right now, Naasir, but you have a scary, scary mind.”
She flew up and out before the enemy figured out how to escape the trap. “I need to get to the Tower!” she yelled to Illium—since it was obvious Lijuan had put a target on her back, she was now a liability to the shooting teams.
“I’ll take you in!”
“What about Lijuan’s generals?” If he’d broken off that engagement to help her, he had to get back to it—those generals had serious firepower.
Illium’s grin was satisfied. “I and my brothers in arms earned our power! Lijuan trusts no one with real power! Her generals are puppets—and right now, the Sire is holding all her attention!”
“As long as Lijuan lives, Xi will continue to gain power. Without her, his body wouldn’t be able to hold what it does.”
Illium had told her that at the Refuge, in reference to one of Lijuan’s generals, but she hadn’t realized the male was this closely linked to his archangel. But there was no more time to think about that—the two of them had reached the battle zone.
They had to go in shooting, Illium faster with a crossbow than she’d realized, given his preference for using a sword. Halfway through, Tasha appeared out of the mass of wings to flank her other side as Lijuan’s men and women deliberately blocked Elena’s path to the Tower. Much as Elena would’ve liked to nurture her dislike for Tasha, the other woman had fought with brilliant fury in the battles, as she did now.
Grabbing her guns, Elena took aim at the enemy. “Get the f**k out of my way!”
Their wings shredded, Lijuan’s fighters crashed to the streets and buildings. Illium and Tasha rejoined the fight as soon as Elena landed safely on the Tower roof. Frustrated at having been grounded, she ran inside and to the Tower “aerie,” a small nest directly above the war room and connected to it by an internal staircase. It had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view, as well as windows that could be shoved up.