Blood spread from beneath the fan of her hair, a scarlet carpet on the asphalt.
But even worse was the creep of black that was a growing sun around her heart. “Lijuan got her poison into you.” At point-blank range.
Cat green eyes held Elena’s. Flickers of fire lit the archangel’s irises.
Elena looked up.
The sky was aflame above them, as Neha unleashed the flip side of her ability to create ice. Even from so far, it felt as if the heat kissed Elena’s skin through her clothes.
“My son,” Michaela whispered and it was barely comprehensible. “The healer . . . he will be kind.”
“Keir? You want Keir to be the foster dad?”
“Yes.” Rattling sounds in her throat. “Tell him . . . tell him . . . I did not mean . . . to leave him. My . . . son. Protect . . .”
“We will.” Elena wanted to close her hand over Michaela’s, but the archangel’s bones were shattered. When she looked up again, to see if Raphael could help, she found him in a pitched battle against Lijuan.
Fires continued to burn in Michaela’s eyes when Elena turned back to the archangel. A sudden fierceness lit them. Her voice came into Elena’s mind now, the feel of her a sensual perfume. But the words she spoke were hard with resolve—though her voice, it was faded there, too.
I need you to lift my hand and bring it to my chest, above the infection. A cough that bubbled blood. Once I do what needs to be done, take me to a safe place.
Elena had no idea what the hell Michaela was talking about, but she lifted one shattered hand, not flinching when the bones rattled, and placed it in the correct spot. “You’re about two inches from the top of the infection.”
Bronze fire erupted from Michaela’s fingers.
Elena closed her eyes reflexively against the sudden brightness. When she opened them again, Michaela’s eyes were closed, her body limp . . . and most of her chest gone, cut out by her own power. Elena could see the gleam of bone, the spongy texture of one lung.
And blood, so much blood.
Stomach roiling, Elena nonetheless looked carefully at the massive open wound. No sign of infection, all the black cut away. Along with most of Michaela’s ribs and internal organs, part of one hip, a section of pelvis.
“Ellie.” Dusty black boots slamming down beside her, Jason’s wings in her vision. “I’ll carry her to the infirmary.”
Elena nodded jerkily. “I think her neck’s broken.”
“No,” Jason said after crouching down to examine Michaela more closely. “It’s not broken. It’s almost severed from her body.”
Swallowing hard, Elena said, “She was talking.”
“She is an archangel.” He gathered Michaela into his arms.
Elena didn’t ask him if Michaela would survive; as long as none of Lijuan’s infection remained, the Archangel of Budapest would come back. Given her massive injuries, however—injuries that had come on top of having given birth not long ago—it might take a long time.
She flew escort for Jason until they were in friendly territory, then he went onward and she flew back to the battle zone. The sky remained full of fire. Neha was attempting to burn Lijuan’s troops out of the sky.
She thought suddenly of Laric, scarred by his time caught in a fire sky. She hoped he was deep in the infirmary far from any windows. And she hoped the flames didn’t bring nightmares to Caliane and Raphael.
As she got closer, she saw Aegaeon was right next to Neha, appeared to be protecting her so she could focus on her fire. In the orange-red glow, his wings appeared as pure blue as Illium’s. As she watched, he razed an entire squadron with a scythe of sea green power.
“At least the bastard is useful,” she muttered before firing a crossbow bolt through the wing of an angelic fighter who was about to thrust his sword into Andreas’s gut.
The squadron leader raised a hand in thanks before slicing out with his blades to remove the head of another winged fighter. Surrounded by battle, she couldn’t take even a second to search for Raphael in the sky, but she could feel him high above, exchanging blow after blow with Lijuan.
Lijuan, who could heal from any injury.
Fear tried to clamp its claws around her heart.
Gritting her teeth, she shoved it off, and fought on.
Sweat dripped down Raphael’s back, and dampened his hair. His wildfire was being rapidly depleted. He was going to need to draw from Elena again soon, but the second he did that, they were in the endgame. There was no more power after that and Lijuan appeared unstoppable.
He’d deliberately drawn from Elena before battle began—not the totality of what she held, but enough so their energies would combine to create the green-tinged wildfire. However, since feeding from two archangels, Lijuan seemed all but impervious to even that.
Not far in front of him, Caliane took a massive wave of poisonous strikes from Lijuan’s troops. His mother fell to a rooftop held by Raphael’s people, her wings badly mangled and her bones shattered.
Mother?
I will survive this, my son. But I am out of the battle. Her mind cut off on the heels of that statement.
Just as Lijuan went noncorporeal again. He’d done enough damage that she couldn’t seem to hold it for long, but even a second was too long. This time, she appeared close enough to Elijah to target him with her starlight obsidian.
The Archangel of South America couldn’t avoid it, but Raphael was close enough to slam wildfire into both him and Lijuan. Eli’s body jerked as the wildfire punched through to the poison in his system and began to fight it, while Lijuan’s eyes lit up with wildfire before she screamed and fired back at Raphael.
Galen caught Elijah as he fell, lowered him to a rooftop. A flash far below caught Raphael’s eye, Venom’s face outlined in heat as he blasted a flamethrower at a horde of reborn right on top of him.
Raphael had no time to check on Eli or help Venom—Lijuan hadn’t gone noncorporeal after wounding Elijah, and he blasted bolt after bolt at her. Her entire body burned the white-gold and blue of wildfire kissed with green, but she didn’t break apart. Instead, she ran from Raphael and directly toward Neha. The Archangel of India avoided her bolts, but her avoidance strategy put her under a massive hail of obsidian rain shot by Xi and another general.
Neha went down.
Aegaeon attempted to cut Lijuan with his sea-green scythe, but it only seemed to irritate her. He did manage to avoid being hit, which meant Raphael still had three other friendly archangels in the sky with him. Then a mind with a weight as heavy as Caliane’s touched his.
I am running out of power. Alexander, his words spoken in the instant between one attack and the next. I have never in all my existence come this close to the edge. Aegaeon will not admit it, but he must be the same.
Raphael got Lijuan once again, just as she readied herself to hit Alexander. Spinning around, she sent her power at Raphael instead. “You cannot kill me!” she roared as wildfire arced through her veins . . . and didn’t end her.
The hail of starlight obsidian she sent at him was a wall.
He threw up a wildfire shield but it threatened to buckle under the pressure almost immediately.
Archangel. Elena’s hand on his calf, the wildfire from her body entering his.
Using some of that power to dissipate Lijuan’s as Elena broke away to take position by his side, he saw the reason why he wasn’t under a secondary attack. A burst of violet energy had broken the sky to slam into Lijuan. A woman with hair of lilac, her gown pale green and her eyes impossible to see from here, was pounding Lijuan with blow after blow.