Dragon's Storm (Legion Of Angels #4)(63)

She snapped her head around to look at Nero. “Get me healed. Fast. Use a Powershot.”

“What is a Powershot?” I asked.

“A rapid healing technique used in war,” Nero told me. “It gives you a few hours at full power with no pain, but it’s temporary. When the magic wears out, you crash. And your pain returns with a vengeance.”

“No.” Harker’s eyes were locked on Nero. They weren’t angry, though; they were pleading with him. “It could kill her.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” Colonel Starborn said.

“Your magic has just been through the blender. The dark angels have been chipping away at you for weeks. No matter how powerful you usually are, you know you aren’t there now, Leila.”

“It doesn’t matter. I will hold on for as long as we need to stop Battlestorm’s army from taking the castle,” she said. “There’s no time for this, Harker. The other three Dragons are under the Dark Force’s control. If the castle has gone silent, chances are good Battlestorm is already there, torturing Basanti. We have to get there before they turn her and gain control over the castle and all its magic.”

“She’s right,” Nero told him, magic glowing on his hands.

Harker tried to put himself between Nero and Colonel Starborn, but his feet wouldn’t move. Nero had locked them to the ground. It was a telekinetic trick I’d seen him use before. Harker pushed against the invisible magic holding him in place.

“Stop.” Colonel Starborn’s voice snapped with command.

Harker stopped, as if controlled by magic.

“We have to do this,” she told him. “You know that. Our first duty is to this world and the people in it. We stand between them and destruction. We are the protectors of the weak. If the Dark Force controls Storm Castle, they could create storms that rage across the whole world, devastating cities and bringing down the wall that keeps out the monsters. We must stop them, and our best chance of doing that is with me at full power.”

Harker’s sense of duty to the Legion battled it out with his desire to protect his mentor. I saw it in his eyes. It must have been tough for him. He lived and breathed his duty to the Legion, but he loved Colonel Starborn more than anything else. She was the sister he would die for. But she wasn’t asking him to die for her. That wouldn’t help anyone. What we needed right now was all of us at full strength, fighting the Dark Force to take back our castle.

Harker met her eyes with a vicious smile. “Let’s send the Dark Force back to hell where they belong.”





19





Battlestorm





A storm brewed over the Dragons’ Castle—and we were driving right for it. Nero, Harker, Colonel Starborn, and I sat in the truck. Major Singh had come along too. Apparently, kicking Dark Force ass was a hobby of hers.

Colonel Starborn sat beside me, pumped up on the quick-fix magic that injured soldiers used to survive gruesome battles. She kept squeezing her fists, as though she couldn’t wait to plow through the Dark Force, rescue Basanti, and reclaim her castle—not necessarily in that order.

The storm was spreading across Desert Rose, the Sky Plains, and the Wetlands. The fact that it hadn’t yet hit the Fire Mountains gave me hope that Captain Somerset was still holding out.

“Hold on,” Nero warned us as he swerved the truck to the right to avoid a massive lightning bolt.

I looked up at a purple sky streaked with gold. More lightning bolts slammed down, bigger and brighter than their smaller cousins I’d faced in the Dragons’ obstacle courses, big enough to cut right through our truck. The earth shook beneath our wheels. Fissures split the ground, growing into rifts. A raging river flooded the cracked earth like a stampede of a thousand stallions. It froze as it grew, moving like a hyperactive glacier across the land. Nero turned the truck onto it, riding the ice wave toward the castle.

“He’s crazy,” I told Colonel Starborn through the frosty fog swaddling us like a diamond blanket.

“But that’s why you love him, isn’t it?” she said in a low whisper, so quiet I could hardly hear her over the raging storm. I didn’t think Nero, Harker, or Major Singh could hear her from the front seat.

“I…”

“He loves you too, you know,” she told me.

I blinked.

“He wouldn’t risk Nyx’s wrath for just anyone. I’m enormously impressed you convinced Nero Toe-the-Line Windstriker to disobey orders and galavant across the Black Plains with you.” She chuckled.

“Nero didn’t disobey any orders. We just happened to be after the same thing. And going in the same direction. Which we did in an orderly and dignified manner without galavanting of any kind.”

“As befits a soldier of the Legion.”

“Exactly.”

She snorted. “I take it Nyx didn’t buy that load of bullshit either.”

“How do you figure that?”

“She made Nero leave New York.”

“She’s promoting him.”

“Nyx could have promoted him and kept him in New York.”

She had a point.

“The First Angel doesn’t like to shake things up,” Colonel Starborn told me. “She won’t reassign an angel unless she believes there’s a problem.”