Then Stash’s army rose and turned as one, facing us down.
Stash had risen from the platform. He was now several feet off the ground, his wings spread wide. White and silver tipped with orange, they beat in a slow, powerful rhythm. Stash had become an angel.
23 Divine Origins
Stash was an angel. Angel Fever had progressed beyond anything we’d seen before. The name had been meant as a joke, a stab at the Legion of Angels by some of New York’s disgruntled supernaturals. I didn’t think they’d really expected the magic infection to create a real angel. And that was exactly what Stash was now, feathers and all.
Beside me, Nero’s expression was wary, like he was calculating how hard it would be to take out Stash now that he was an angel. Harker wore a similar expression. I could almost see the battle against Stash playing out in their eyes.
Basanti held a gun in each hand, watching Stash like he might explode at any second. She had one gun pointed at him. Her other gun was aimed at Constantine Wildman. The witch was on the ground near her feet, kneeling like all the other infected people.
“This isn’t possible,” Nero said. “For someone to become an angel, it requires divine magic. No spell could have done this.”
“If he’s really like an angel now, it’s going to be a bitch to take him down. We should have shot him when we had the chance,” Harker said.
“How can you say that? He is a victim in this.”
Stash flew up, several of his feathers twirling in the air, as though they were caught in an invisible cyclone. White, gold, and orange—they danced on the wind. His army watched his every move, transfixed.
When he spoke, his voice bellowed, shaking the very ground beneath my feet. “For centuries, we have been pawns in this war between heaven and hell, between gods and demons. The war they brought here. The war that savaged our lands, boiled our oceans, crumbled our cities. But today is the day we make a stand. Today is the day we take back our world and expel these outsiders, gods and demons both.”
His army cheered.
Harker pointed at Stash. “You call that a victim? He’s a threat, Pandora.”
They aren’t wrong, Leda, Stash spoke in my mind. From my friends’ expressions, he was speaking to them too.
He landed in front of me. His glistening wings tucked in against his back.
“I am a threat,” he said to me, speaking aloud this time. “The threat that will end the gods’ injustice once and for all.”
The crowd roared with approval.
Constantine Wildman rose to his feet with difficulty, his face strained. He was fighting back, resisting the magic taking over his mind and body. Nerissa’s potion was helping him. Step-by-step, he moved toward Stash.
But it was not enough. Stash waved his hand, and just like that, the witch dropped back down to his knees. His eyes flickered about, as though caught in a trance. Elemental magic sizzled on his hair.
“The infection has settled in fast this time,” I commented.
“I can turn any one of them in an instant now,” Stash said. “I’ve gained powers you could only dream of, Leda.”
“Listen to yourself, Stash. You are forcing people to do things against their will. That’s exactly what you don’t do, why you’re not in a pack. You believe in choice. You are sick, Stash. This spell has messed with your mind. This isn’t you.”
He let out a pained laugh. “This is me, Leda. It always has been. I just didn’t know it.” His eyes were glowing, dilated. He looked at the witch and said, “Tell them.”
When Constantine Wildman spoke, his voice was distant and dreamy. “Stash is the child of a shifter mother. Her name was Eveline. She was a Chicago werewolf pack leader. Leader of the strongest shifter pack in the city.”
Shifter magic was inherited; you couldn’t be made into one. Not like a vampire. Shifters were born, vampires were made.
“Eveline was scarred at an early age, so she wasn’t considered a great beauty,” Constantine Wildman continued. “But she was one of the best warriors in the world. Her skills were highly prized—and admired. She had no shortage of lovers. One of them was the angel Sirius Demonslayer.”
The witch paused, as though for dramatic effect. That must have been Stash conducting his performance. “Another of her lovers was a god of heaven. And it was that god who fathered Stash.”
I blinked at Stash. So that meant…it meant he was a demigod. Like Nyx.
I thought back, running through every time I’d seen Stash. I tried to find any hints that would have clued me into his divine origins. I couldn’t think of a single thing.
“Twenty years ago, my mother fell in love with the god,” Stash said. “But matings between gods and mortals are frowned upon. Gods guilty of such matings lose face with the other gods. When my father found out she was pregnant, he tried to kill her.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. But it wasn’t surprising.
“My mother barely escaped with her life. She made a deal with a witch coven who had recently grown very powerful. It was said they could perform miracles. They cast a spell on her. The next time my father came for her, he stabbed her in the belly, and she died. He thought he’d killed me too, but I lived, protected inside a magic shell in her womb.”
“How did the witches have enough magic to fool a god?” I asked. I’d never heard of any witch possessing that kind of power.
“They didn’t. They used my mother’s life force to shield me. She faced my father knowing she wouldn’t survive. When she died, the power of her magic, of her life, fueled the spell.”
Just like the gods had expected Nero to use the magical release of our bond—of my death—to power the Magitech barrier in the City of Ashes.
“My aunt later recovered me from my mother’s body and ran far away. The witches’ spell didn’t just cloak me from my father. It buried the magic I’d received from him, hiding what I really was. I had only my mother’s shifter magic. People who knew her believed that Sirius Demonslayer was my father, and that the two of them—and me, their unborn child—had died in battle.”
“And you never knew the truth?” I asked him.
“No. Angel Fever brought out the magic I’d received from my father. At first, I didn’t realize what was happening. It took some time before my mind could focus. I didn’t remember the flashes of my power returning, piece by piece. It wasn’t until all my powers returned that I realized what had happened to me. That’s when I fled to the Black Plains.”
“How did the contagion start?” I asked him. “Who did it? Who unleashed Angel Fever?”
“It was you and Nero Windstriker.”
I blinked. “We did this?”
“Not intentionally,” Stash said. “When you broke the seal in the City of Ashes, you released the sirens trapped inside the vault.” He looked at Constantine Wildman. “It turns out the witches who made a pact with my mother had grown strong by stealing talismans and other immortal objects of power from a siren clan. The sirens came knocking at the witches’ doorsteps, seeking revenge. They planned to expose the witches’ trickery, including my escape from death. To keep their secret—and keep themselves safe from my father’s ire—the witch coven trapped the sirens inside the vault in the City of Ashes. It took all the magic in their stolen immortal artifacts to do it.”
“So when Nero and I broke the seal…”
“The sirens escaped their twenty-year prison.”
I gestured toward the witch. “How is he involved in this? Do you know?”
“I can read every thought in his scheming head. When the sirens got free, they decided to plot their revenge on the witch coven who had betrayed them.”
I found myself unsurprised that Constantine Wildman had stolen magic from the sirens. He really was a sleazeball.
“The sirens wanted to expose the witches’ trickery of my father, knowing he would come down hard on them. So they traveled to New York and found Constantine Wildman. Disguising themselves, they met with him. They played on his greed to sell him a spell that would make his coven more powerful than any other witch coven on Earth, a spell that would give them powers to rival the Legion of Angels itself. The witches had grown tired of not being powerful warriors like the vampires and shifters. They took the bait.”