Elena switched focus. There. She flew right over the bastard and turned him to flame. She took no pleasure in his scream, but he had to die. As he did, she saw things crawling out of him and scuttling quickly away. Her blood ran cold. Raphael, they’re bringing in the insects!
A breath of cold in her mind she could almost feel. This part of the city is now infected. A moment while I take care of the aerial assault—there is no point in accumulating power to fight Lijuan if she takes the city by stealth.
Elena had to turn away from the furious blaze of his power as he raked angelfire across Lijuan’s troops. Ash fell like rain from the sky. She tried not to think about what she was breathing in—but Raphael’s deadly assault achieved its intended outcome. Lijuan’s people retreated en masse.
Elijah had achieved the same outcome by the port.
Raphael’s next order to the ground and aerial troops was to evacuate their wounded and create a fireline that would encompass a large chunk of the city. As soon as that was done, the area clear of their people, Raphael began to rain down hell on the infected area. Standing watch on top of a skyscraper just behind the blaze of the fireline, Elena watched and felt tears burn her throat, her eyes.
New York was going up in flame and that bitch Lijuan was responsible. Her and her disease-ridden friend. The only mercy was that the entire city had been evacuated of noncombatants. “We’ll rise again,” she promised herself and all their people.
Another woman stood not far from her, her moonlight hair dancing in the hot winds and her armor glowing in the firelight. “It is a horrible truth to accept that the person I most hate in this world, the person who is my worst nightmare, is so far beyond me in power that I can never do her harm.”
“But you’ll try anyway, won’t you?” Sometimes, you had to fight the monsters even if you knew you’d fail—as a frightened and traumatized ten-year-old Elena had fought Slater Patalis while Ari and Belle’s blood was an iron-rich scent that clogged her throat.
“Yes.” Suyin’s murmur was a soft vow, the weight of her presence a portentous heaviness. “To the death.”
It took pathetically little time to erase so much of Elena’s beloved city. The angelfire not only razed buildings, leaving a smoking red ruin of earth, it ate up the reborn and any insects they’d brought with them. Do we have to worry about the side Venom’s ground team is handling? she asked her archangel as she swallowed her tears for her city.
No. He landed next to her, his wings aglow and his eyes chips of Antarctic glaciers. There have been no reports of insects there—I don’t think they can be controlled. Even Lijuan wouldn’t risk releasing them so close to her own people.
Below them, the lost part of their city smoldered.
61
Once the casualties from the engagement were tallied up, Raphael discovered that, together, he and Elijah had lost an entire squadron of strong, powerful warriors. Rage burned in him, but it was a cold hard thing. He couldn’t afford to be hot, to give in to the sorrow that bit at his throat. To lose warriors in battle was a thing that could not be fought. But he had never lost so many so rapidly.
Elijah’s face showed the same strain and anger.
The sheet-wrapped bodies of their dead lay in the cold embrace of a morgue set up in a warehouse. It was a necessity Nisia had quietly taken care of when battle first began. Each and every fighter here, Raphael promised himself, as he carried in one of the fallen himself, would have a burial with full honors. They would go home to the Refuge.
The meeting he next held, with all his senior people and Elijah’s who weren’t out on watch or fighting in small skirmishes, was brutal in its grimness. Now that they knew Lijuan could turn part of her army noncorporeal again if she had enough fuel, they had to be ready for an attack from any quarter.
“My entire city is seeded with machines that watch.” Raphael waved Vivek Kapur forward. “But we can’t watch for what we can’t see. And even if we could, the feeds would be far too many for even a team to monitor constantly.”
The angels and vampires gathered around Dmitri’s battle strategy table parted for Vivek’s wheelchair. A few of Elijah’s warriors gave him a curious look, but that was to be expected. It was rare that a vampire was Made when he had such terrible injuries.
“Tell us of your machines,” Raphael said.
The vampire—ridiculously young in immortal terms—did not flinch at being the focus of so much powerful attention. “The surveillance grid covers nearly the entire city—the only gaps are where Archangel Lijuan’s forces have destroyed cameras, drones, or bugs.”
Taking a small “bug” from his pocket, he put it on the table for reference. “I’ve been able to set the sky-focused system to sound a warning for any movement big enough to be an angel but I still need bodies to look at every alert and verify if it’s a friendly or an enemy.”
“The wounded,” one of Elijah’s female warriors suggested. “They are distraught at falling at the dawn of battle—to watch for the enemy, it will give them life.”
Elijah, new lines carved around his mouth, glanced at Vivek. “Can wounded warriors do this task?”
“As long as they have their sight,” Vivek said. “I also have another job that only needs hearing, no sight—I was able to reprogram our electronic spies to listen for dialects you’d usually only hear among older residents of Archangel Lijuan’s territory. I don’t know if noise escapes that invisible thing she does, but it can’t hurt to listen—and I figured since a lot of her generals and commanders aren’t exactly young . . .”
The looks shot Vivek’s way by Eli’s people were not curious this time—they were assessing.
I see why you Made this man, Raphael, Elijah said. He is an asset.
You cannot steal him yet, Eli. He is under Contract.
“I also thought of trying to program a system to alert us of areas of dead air without birds,” Vivek continued, unaware of the judgments being made around him, “but with all the fighting, the only birds still in the city are yours, Archangel Elijah.”
Even Elena’s owls had disappeared, perhaps because their lady was stirring.
Discussion ensued, but no matter how they looked at it, they had no way to moderate Lijuan’s one major advantage. “The only reason we managed to hold her off in the latest attack,” Raphael said, “was that we were both close enough to respond quickly.”
“And because your consort can do something I have never seen anyone do.” Elijah smiled at Elena, who stood silently beside her onetime nemesis, Galen.
Her responding smile was enigmatic. “A woman must have her secrets.”
Shifting their discussion to what they could control, they used the battle layout on Dmitri’s table to plan troop movements, but the harsh fact was that they did not have enough people—not when faced with the size of Lijuan’s army.
“How is she feeding them?”
Everyone turned to Vivek. He flushed under the deep brown of his skin, realizing he’d interrupted two archangels and their most senior people, but to his credit, he held his ground. “Archangel Lijuan has far too many people for there to have been enough food on the submarines. So how is she feeding them?”
“Angels do not need to eat as much as mortals,” Raphael said, but he was frowning. “Wounded angels, however, do need food to have enough energy to recover.”
“Well, that explains it,” his consort muttered. “She just eats her wounded.”
Everyone stared at Elena this time.