Archangel's Legion (Guild Hunter #6)(112)

The word reverberated between them. With that many ground fighters and short-range weapons, Lijuan’s people would swarm his own, coming up from below while the angels kept the winged squadrons occupied. “I must take the planes out before or directly after they land,” he said, knowing he spoke of the death of hundreds. “It’s the only option.”

“You can get past her using glamour,” Dmitri said with coolheaded strategy, “but the instant she hears of their destruction, she’ll know you’re not in Manhattan and unleash all her power on the Tower.”

And if the Tower fell, the battle would be over in the eyes of the world, New York and the entire territory Lijuan’s. Raphael would fight to take it back, of course, but he knew the loss of the Tower would crush the morale of his people, for it wasn’t simply a place, it was the symbol of their strength.

Seeing movement from the enemy side at the same instant as his second, he dropped the discussion for the moment and left to take to the skies, the second wave of attack far more vicious than the first. Blood splattered the snow everywhere he looked, innocence forever tainted.





41





A day of punishing fighting later, Elena lay in her hide again after a short break, protected from the light snow falling out of a sky patchy with cloud. It was a pretty night, peaceful with occasional starlight that glinted through the clouds and devoid of the sounds of battle, but her heart thundered in her ears because Raphael had left the city almost twenty-five minutes earlier.

Lijuan had managed to wound him in their last skirmish, his chest raw and burned down one side, but he’d shrugged off the injury—one that made Elena want to stab out the eyes of the murderous bitch who’d hurt him—to focus on how to stop the cargo planes that carried such a deadly payload. His plan, if it succeeded, would provide a much-needed boost to the spirits of their battered people, but it could also go spectacularly wrong.

“Naasir, you crazy bastard,” she muttered under her breath, “I hope to hell you come through.” The cargo planes would be landing around about now, and somehow, their side had to keep Lijuan distracted long enough for Raphael to make it back after destroying the planes.

“I’ll take many lives this night,” Raphael had said to her in the single private moment they’d had in the midst of the fighting. “Hundreds of vampires who’ve done nothing but be loyal to their archangel. I know it must be done to protect my own people, but that doesn’t change the fact that their blood will stain my soul.”

The bleak acceptance in his eyes had broken her heart. And she’d known that even two years past, he wouldn’t have said the same thing, the remoteness of over a thousand years of violent power hardening him to the lives of others. “That their deaths matter to you,” she’d whispered, “it’s your salvation.” Unlike Lijuan, he didn’t see either his own or the enemy fighters as disposable.

Now, she waited for him to return, wanting only to hold him after the brutal ugliness of what he’d been forced to do, all because an archangel believed herself a goddess. More like a f*cking specter of pure evil, Elena thought, knowing that if there was any way on this earth she could kill Lijuan, she wouldn’t even blink before raising the blade.

“Bees, Ellie,” came Sara’s voice in her earpiece less than a minute after the scheduled arrival of the planes, her friend in the control room, tasked with handling the Guild teams. “It’s the weirdest thing—there are gazillions of bees around Lijuan’s people and from what we can see they’re mad and stinging like crazy.

“And even weirder, the ones not squirming and slapping off bees are grinning like lunatics because they’re coated in butterflies. I’ve never seen so many in one place. I didn’t even know butterflies flew around at night.”

Grinning, Elena pressed the reply button on the comm device. “Naasir apparently has some tricks up his sleeve.” Hell, if he kept this up, she might have to risk being eaten and kiss him on that gorgeous and freaky mouth the next time she saw him.

“I’ll say.” Sara logged off.

Two minutes later, Elena got a confirmation that Raphael had destroyed the planes. “On alert,” came the order in her earpiece seven minutes after that, the ongoing distractions having apparently bought them that much time. “Enemy forces preparing to launch major offensive.”

Breathing calm and heart rate steady, Elena kept her eyes on the night sky . . . so she saw the flares that lit it up, dazzling the senses. An enraged scream sounded from Lijuan’s side of the line with the second flare, bolts of archangelic power going completely wide of the Tower by several blocks. Glass smashed, bricks fell, but the Tower remained unscathed.

Was the crazy old bitch sensitive to light?

It made sense, given the paleness of her eyes. But since she appeared fine in daylight, it wasn’t a debilitating weakness, simply one that could be aggravated by the right conditions. Elena decided she really would have to kiss Naasir for figuring that out with his sly tiger-creature brain.

Flares continued to light up the sky over the next few minutes, exacerbating Lijuan’s screams of fury and keeping her own forces down because her bolts were going so awry, she could as easily hit them. Then the fireworks started.

Elena couldn’t help it; she began to giggle. They were fighting a battle for their lives and it was going to be fireworks that saved them?