Dragon's Storm (Legion Of Angels #4)(6)

With that said, she turned and followed Captain Norton toward the door. It groaned open, spitting out two Legion soldiers dressed in black leather uniforms. Marina and Captain Norton left the room. The two new arrivals pulled the vampire off the ground and followed them out. Only Major Singh remained. She looked up at the balcony, her dark eyes watching us. She didn’t blink. Neither did I. I could feel my comrades’ micro movements as they resisted the urge to fidget under her penetrating stare. Finally, after what felt like a hundred years, she turned crisply on her heel and left the room.

“That sure was eerie,” Ivy commented. “I have this unsettling feeling she could reach deep inside of me and yank out my soul.”

“Selena Singh has many grim talents, but soul-snatching is not one of them,” Captain Somerset declared.

I turned around in surprise. How long had she been standing there, observing us? She moved like a ninja.

“Pandora, a word,” Captain Somerset said, using my nickname. “The rest of you, head down to Hall Three for evening training.”

They filed out without a word.

“Pack your winter wear. The perfect mission just came up,” Captain Somerset said.

“This perfect mission wouldn’t have anything to do with the Wicked Wilds and a band of rogue vampires, would it?”

She grinned at me. “Indeed it would. We’re going vampire hunting tomorrow morning.”





2





Wicked Winter Wilds





“When I joined the Legion of Angels, no one said anything about Abominable Snowmen,” I said, looking down at the heap of dead monsters at my feet. Sometime during the battle, the sky had split open like a punctured balloon. It was now dumping an entire winter’s quota of snowflakes down on us.

“It was in the fine print.” Captain Somerset stabbed her sword through a twitching monster arm. It stopped twitching. “But these creatures hardly qualify as Abominable Snowmen. They’re just plain old snowmen.”

“Yeah, except for the steel-trap jaws, razor claws, spiky fur, and their appreciation for the taste of human flesh, they are exactly like snowmen,” I said drily.

I gave the pile of dead monsters a wide berth as we continued up the snowy mountain path. Monsters were nothing new to me. I’d faced a few in my days as a bounty hunter, and I’d fought even more of them since joining the Legion of Angels, the supernatural army that served the gods. The Legion’s job was to protect the Earth and its people from supernatural threats and to uphold the gods’ laws—not necessarily in that order.

As a soldier in the Legion, I’d fought everything from dinosaurs, to carnivorous plants, to misbehaving vampires and witches. I’d had to kill more living beings than I cared to think about. The first kill had been a shock. Each following one was getting easier—and that’s what I was worried about. The gods’ gifts of Nectar bestowed us with new powers, but it also changed us. It changed who we were inside, at our very core.

Nectar was a double-edged sword, a brutal ally. You were either strong enough to gain the new power or it killed you. Most people thought that this dance with death was the true price of power.

They were wrong. The Nectar’s price came in the subtle ways it changed you, sip by sip, week after week, until one day you realized you were no longer the same person who’d set down this path. That was the price of power. Each time I drank the gods’ Nectar, I could feel the change penetrate me deeper.

I was fighting that change with everything I had. I’d joined the Legion to gain the magic I needed to save my brother. I had no intention of gaining that magic only to find that I had become a heartless monster who didn’t care about saving anyone I wasn’t ordered to help.

“How do you do it?” I asked Captain Somerset.

Her dark brows, frosted with snowflakes, arched. “How do I do what?”

“Hold onto who you are. You’ve been serving the Legion for over a century, and you are still so human.”

Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “None of us are human anymore.”

“And yet you have held onto your humanity.”

I’d never have ventured the subject if we’d been out here with a full team. Badass Legion soldiers did not wax poetic about their feelings. And they certainly didn’t talk about their humanity. Angels were supposed to be too perfect to be human, and we were supposed to aspire to become angels.

But it was just the two of us here. The Legion’s scouts had determined that Charles Rune’s base was in fact made up of six castles spread across the mountainside, connected to one another by a massive underground tunnel system. So we’d broken up into groups to hit the castles from every direction—well, as much as you could hit six castles from every direction with a team of sixteen soldiers. Yeah, we might have underestimated the size of House Rune just a bit. Captain Somerset and I were taking the south castle.

“Yes, I’ve held onto my humanity,” Captain Somerset finally said. “The angels are beautiful, powerful, seductive. It’s easy to be swept away by them, so easy to lose yourself. It happens to us all. It happened to me too. I was starting to think exactly like them. The day I realized that was a major wake-up call.”

“What did you do?”

“I couldn’t leave the Legion, but I could hold onto who I was.”