“No fatalities,” the vampire said, bearing out Raphael’s judgment and faith. “A number of serious injuries among the aerial defense gunners, but the angelic fighters nearby acted quickly to cover the injured, while other shooters dragged them to safety.” He pointed out several black Xs on the map laid out on a large table in the war room. “Here’s where we lost the aerial defense weaponry, but that loss was expected and is already factored into our plans.”
“Did Lijuan suffer any fatalities?”
A nod. “Significant in the first wave, when the shooters sent near to half a squadron to the ground for the vampires to clean up, but the enemy learned from that loss. When one fighter falls, two more land with him to fight off the ground teams and lift the injured to safety.”
It was more or less what Raphael had expected of this first engagement. “The true test will come with the next clash, now that we no longer have the element of surprise.”
Jaw a harsh line, Dmitri nodded. “Elijah called not long ago, wished to speak to you.”
“I’m sending you two of my elite fighter squadrons,” the other archangel said, when Raphael returned the call. “They’re already halfway to your Tower.”
“The reborn?”
Elijah’s smile held blood fury. “My animals have learned the hunt now, and their sense of sight and smell is beyond anything the reborn have the capacity to avoid. While I continue to need most of my forces to ensure we get each and every one of the creatures, the two elite units will be of far more use to you.”
“I’ll have Dmitri send through a clear flight path,” Raphael said, his trust in Elijah such as he’d never expected to have in another one of the Cadre. “Lijuan’s people haven’t yet managed to surround us, so your squadrons can come in without encountering enemy fire.”
The good news was rapidly followed by bad. Satellite images showed several aircraft flying low over the ocean perhaps an hour’s flight from the city, then ejecting what appeared to be large pods from their holds that floated rather than sank.
“Looks like a quarter of Lijuan’s fleet is taking off toward the pods, likely to tug them in,” Dmitri said, having eyes on the enemy through the city’s network of surveillance cameras as well as the special spy cameras Naasir’s team had put in place. “They have to contain ground troops.”
Raphael agreed. Which meant Lijuan would soon have vampires to battle his own, leaving her angels free to remain in the sky rather than go to the aid of downed winged fighters. Even with the addition of Elijah’s squadrons, Raphael’s forces would’ve remained badly outnumbered. This simply tipped the scale further in Lijuan’s favor.
Three minutes later, one of Jason’s people called in a report: cargo planes had just left Lijuan’s territory, loaded with rocket launchers and guns, as well as further ground forces. It seemed the “goddess” had changed her mind on certain points. Raphael’s people had both types of weapons, but the rockets, they’d decided, would only be used in a last-case scenario; no matter how well aimed, the resulting damage would leave not only Manhattan but the entire city a ruin.
And the fact was, they weren’t particularly useful in a sky filled with friends and enemies locked together in such close combat. Not unless you didn’t care about murdering your own people in order to destroy the enemy.
Lijuan annihilated her own city, he said to his consort, after he’d assimilated the information, images of the smoking crater that was Beijing at the forefront of his mind. She won’t worry about obliterating ours to win this war.
It was as well that no large-scale technological weapons of any kind were acceptable in an archangelic war, be they tanks on the ground or bombers in the air. It was the reason why the mortals who’d come up with the ideas for such items of warfare had abandoned the research decades ago—there was no market.
Even the rocket launchers and anti-wing guns were short-range, line-of-sight weapons. For a win to count in the immortal world, for an archangel to keep the respect of his or her own people, it had to be intimate, face-to-face. An odd stipulation perhaps, until you remembered that an archangel couldn’t be killed by any weapon, no matter how destructive—it was only the lesser angels, vampires, and mortals who’d be among the maimed and the dead.
“Sire.” Dmitri walked to where he stood in front of the glass wall that looked out over the field of battle. “Jason’s man just sent another report confirming the number of cargo planes heading our way.”
Raphael knew it was further bad news from the brutal lines of his second’s face. “How many?”
“Ten.”
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 fucking 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.