Dragon's Storm (Legion Of Angels #4)(64)

I guess that made me the problem.

“Nero doesn’t see you as a problem,” she told me.

“Are you reading my thoughts?”

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“No.”

The truck quivered as we broke through into the eye of the storm. But a whole other storm was brewing here. The road to the castle was saturated in dark magic.

“The Dark Force’s soldiers are inside,” Nero said, stopping the truck. “The mountain is too exposed. If we try to climb up, they’ll shoot us down before we reach the top. We’ll take the lower entrance.” He pressed his hand against the mountain. The rocks groaned, parting to reveal an opening.

“There’s a lower entrance.” A pitiful laugh broke my lips, and I shook my head. “Why did I even bother climbing the mountain?”

“Because it builds character, Pandora,” Harker said with a smile, slapping me on the back.

We entered a tunnel only to be ambushed by Dark Force soldiers. Major Singh cracked the icy tail of her whip in the air. Beside her, Nero’s telekinetic tug pulled the soldiers in, and she froze them with a snap of her whip. Tug and snap, tug and snap—they worked in perfect unison.

“Don’t feel bad,” Harker told me as the last enemy soldier fell. “They’ve had decades to train and fight together.”

I resisted the urge to knock him upside the head. We’d probably need him to defeat Battlestorm’s forces and take back our castle.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a real—” Pain exploded in my neck, pouring out in pulsing, burning waves from the exact spot Battlestorm had bitten me.

“What’s wrong?” Harker asked me, genuine concern crinkling his brow.

“I can feel him,” I choked out. The pain had spread to my head. Right now, I was fighting the mother of all migraines.

“Who?”

“Battlestorm.”

Harker’s gaze dropped to my neck. “He bit you.”

Nero was suddenly beside us. “Who bit you?” he asked me, his hand locking around my arm.

“Battlestorm. Back in the mountain on the Sea of Ice.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” His eyes burned with cold fire.

I met those eyes. “Because I knew how you’d react.”

“I’m going to kill that dark angel,” Nero swore.

“Yep, just like that.”

“This is serious, Leda.”

“No shit, Nero. Whatever he did to me, it hurts like hell.”

“That’s the Venom,” Colonel Starborn told me.

“Venom?”

“In his fangs. Legion soldiers have a small dose of Nectar in their blood and their bite. Dark Force soldiers are the same, except with Venom,” she explained as we entered the stairwell. “Don’t worry, the amount of Venom in even a dark angel’s bite is really, really tiny. Battlestorm bit me too when he was trying to turn me. It stings for a while until the Nectar in your body destroys the Venom.”

Icicles fell from the spiral stairwell’s high ceiling. Nero waved his hand in a smooth, overhead arc, drawing a burning rainbow on top of us. The icicles dissolved into steam when they hit the rainbow.

“The Sea Dragon,” Nero said, waving at Major Singh. “We’re going after her. Be right back.”

Without another word, he punched through a wall of frost, running down a chilly hallway with Major Singh in search of the rogue Dragon.

The rest of us kept climbing stairs.

“It’s not getting better,” I told Colonel Starborn two floors later. “It’s getting worse.”

“Oh.”

“Oh? What does that mean?”

“It means your body isn’t fighting the Venom, and you’re probably going to die.”

You could always trust an angel to be brutally honest.

“I’m not going to die,” I told her, biting back the pain.

“How do you figure that?”

“It’s not convenient for me to die right now.”

She laughed.

“Plus, I’ve had some experience with Venom,” I added.

“What kind of experience?”

“At my last promotion ceremony, someone laced my Nectar with Venom.”

“What?” she gasped in shock. “Who did this? How did they do it?”

“I don’t know.” I pressed my hand to my throbbing neck. “I think… I think the pain is growing stronger the closer I get to Battlestorm.”

“So you can track him?” Harker asked.

“Yes. He’s in the Fire Tower,” I said.

Colonel Starborn and Harker exchanged loaded looks.

“We should wait for Nero,” she said.

“But we’re not going to,” he replied.

“No. We’re not. I can feel Basanti’s mind breaking. We can’t afford to wait. We move on Battlestorm now.”



We found Seth Battlestorm at the top of the Fire Tower. Captain Somerset was chained to the wall in front of him. Her uniform was in tatters, her dark braid unraveling, her body a timeline of cuts and bruises. Tiny tremors shook her shoulders, rippling down her torso to her arms and legs. Her jaw was clenched in stubborn defiance. She was still fighting Battlestorm—and whatever he was doing to her.