Dragon's Storm (Legion Of Angels #4)(16)
Damiel had changed his clothes since his return from the Wilds. Instead of black leather, he now wore a t-shirt and jeans. He wore them comfortably, as though he’d dressed like this every day of his life instead of donning the Legion’s battle leather. But there was something that wasn’t quite right. Even though Damiel’s outfit consisted entirely of egregiously expensive high-end designer clothes—probably stuff of Nero’s that he never wore because he preferred to be in uniform—the clothes looked shabby compared to the elegant angel wearing them. He was a king in peasant clothes. The king shone right through. Or in this case, the angel.
“Hello, hello,” Damiel said, his stern expression evaporating the moment his eyes met mine.
Thank goodness he was speaking aloud this time. I can’t even begin to describe how unsettling it is to have someone poking around inside your head.
“Pancakes?” Damiel asked brightly, flipping a pair of them onto a large plate.
“It’s three in the afternoon. It’s too late in the day for pancakes,” Nero told him.
“It’s never too late in the day for pancakes.” I watched with morbid fascination as Damiel poured maple syrup all over the pancakes. “There’s enough sugar on them to kill a fairy.”
“One of the perks of immortality. You can survive most things that kill others.” Smiling, he handed me the plate. “Dig in.”
“So, sixty-five vampires captured. That’s quite an impressive catch. Have any of them spilled their secrets yet?” Damiel asked casually as he poured more pancake batter into the pan.
I pushed a piece of pancake into the pool of maple syrup. “How do you know how many vampires we captured?”
“I eavesdropped.”
Of course he had.
“If you’re reading my mind, you know everything I know,” I said.
“I stopped reading your mind five seconds after you entered the building. That’s when you started thinking about my son naked.”
I almost choked on my pancake. I coughed, trying to dislodge the piece stuck in my throat. Damiel calmly handed me a glass of water. I glanced at Nero, who had a rather smug expression on his face. Naturally. Angels didn’t get embarrassed. Modesty wasn’t even in their vocabulary. Things that would make any decent person flash bright red, they just regarded with cool indifference. Or pride. Apparently pride wasn’t a sin if it was well-deserved.
“As far as I know, the vampires haven’t spilled their secrets yet. We shot them full of sedatives before loading them into the trucks, so they’re probably only now waking up in an Interrogator’s chair.”
Damiel smiled fondly as he flipped a pancake. “I do miss the days of brutal interrogations.”
I looked at him in shock. I really shouldn’t have been shocked, not after all I’d lived through in the Legion. Angels were not human. When would I finally remember that?
“Have you had any luck activating the armor and weapons of heaven and hell?” Damiel asked me.
“I haven’t tried again recently. I’ve been too busy.”
Damiel looked disappointed. He thought the armor, which had once belonged to the Guardians, was the key to contacting them. Since they lived outside our dimension, separated from us, it wasn’t easy to get their attention. Damiel believed his wife Cadence was with them. Raven Rhodes was supposed to confirm that, but he’d turned out to be a pretty worthless source of information. All we knew now was that Raven had been a despicable human being long before he’d become a despicable vampire.
There was actually another thing we’d accomplished this morning: Nero now knew his father hadn’t killed his mother. Raven had seen Cadence alive after she’d supposedly died in the fight with Damiel. I’d known from the start that Damiel hadn’t killed her. The way his eyes lit up when he spoke of her was undeniable. How could Nero, an expert at reading body signs, have missed it? It seemed that even angels had blindspots and Nero’s father was his. He was convinced that Damiel was perpetually up to no good.
“I couldn’t get the armor and weapons to work when I tried them at Calli’s house after our return from the Lost City,” I told Damiel. “I think I need to level up my magic more.”
“You got them to respond before,” Damiel pointed out.
“That was under extreme circumstances, extreme stress.” The stress being a psychopath trying to kill me, Nero, and Damiel. “I’m not even sure how I did it. And I can’t repeat it.”
A calculating gleam slid across Damiel’s eyes. I had the sinking suspicion that he was thinking up a plan to recreate the horrible conditions that had allowed me to access the power to control the immortal artifacts. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him. He’d done it before, tortured me to force me to unlock the memories that opened the doorway to the armor and weapons.
Damiel was quite possibly the scariest angel I knew, maybe even scarier than Nyx. He seemed like a great guy on the outside, but then he could switch just like that. I saw it in his eyes. He was crueler than Colonel Fireswift, more calculating than Nyx, and darker than Nero. He was fueled by his desperation to find his wife, the love of his immortal life. And that desperation stemmed from his guilt. He’d promised to find her after they’d put on a good fight for the Legion, but he’d never seen her again.
His guilt and desperation had blended together, hardening into a cold shell. It had made him very, very dangerous. He was looking for Cadence with the same chilling brutality that he’d once used to execute the gods’ justice.