“Where are your minions?” I asked him.
“Preparing for the mission. As you should have been doing. Instead of sleeping.” His lower lip twitched.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“I could hear you snoring.”
“What you heard was me training.”
“It sounded like a bulldozer was rattling the train car.”
I shrugged. “It was strenuous training.”
A smile flashed across his lips.
“Much better,” I told him.
He gave me a quizzical look.
“All that frowning will give you wrinkles.”
“I’m under a lot of pressure, Leda.”
“From yourself or from your father?”
“Both. I have to live up to my potential.”
“Why? Living up to your potential is so overrated. Slacking off is way more fun.”
Laughter broke through his facade. “You don’t follow that philosophy yourself.”
“Perhaps not,” I admitted. “Can I ask you something?”
“That depends. Will it get me into trouble?”
“No,” I chuckled. “It’s about magic.”
“Fire away.”
“What do you know about magic and counter magic?”
Surprise lit up his face. “How do you know about that?”
“What’s the matter? I know I’m just a thug, but even I know some things.”
Jace frowned. “You shouldn’t listen to my father’s soldiers.”
“They’re your soldiers too, Jace. You could have stopped them.”
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Life is complicated.”
“If I’d stepped in, you would have looked weak, like someone in need of protection. And then they would have become even more vicious.”
“Vicious to me or to you, my knight in shining armor?” I smirked at him.
Jace just stopped, as though he didn’t know what to say. “I see. So your plan for winning our little competition is to have General Windstriker murder me in a fit of jealous fury.”
“Nah,” I laughed. “That wouldn’t be fair. I fight my own battles.”
“Then why didn’t you fight your own battle by standing up to my team? You’ve never had a problem standing up for yourself before.”
“Some battles just aren’t worth it. Even if you win, you still lose, you know?”
Jace looked at me for a long time. Finally, he said, “You’ve really grown up in the last year, you know.”
I gave my eyebrows a mischievous wiggle. “Well, not completely. I’m still not above throwing dirt in your face.”
“I’m starting to realize beating you won’t be as easy as I’d thought,” Jace said solemnly.
“As I told you, Firestorm, I fight dirty. This was never going to be easy.”
Jace nodded, looking reflective.
“Magic and counter magic,” I reminded him.
“Right,” he said. “When the gods came to Earth, they brought magic. They created seven casts of supernaturals: vampires, witches, sirens, elementals, shifters, psychics, and fairies. And they created the Legion of Angels, the protectors of Earth, soldiers they bestowed with these powers and more. The best would become angels.”
Jace spoke the words with reverence—and with hope. His greatest wish was to one day become an angel.
“When supernaturals interbreed with humans, their children are usually born with diluted magic. After a few generations, there’s only a hint of magic left. They have the potential but not the magic.”
“Like Drake. He’s always been strong and fast thanks to his magical ancestry.”
Jace nodded. “These sort of people, those with magical potential, make great candidates to join the Legion of Angels. They’re more likely to survive the gods’ Nectar than normal humans are.”
And the Legion brats made the best candidates of them all. ‘Legion brat’ was a term for a person with an angel parent. Rather than an insult, the term was one of high esteem. The brats had claimed the expression as their own, embracing their angelic origins and their magic ancestry.
“Every supernatural group on Earth has a patron god, a deity who was the origin of their magic,” said Jace. “For example, Ronan created the telekinetics, and Meda made the witches. As a rule, magic doesn’t typically mix well with other magic. A shifter can’t also be a witch. A vampire can’t also be an elemental. If you have magic, you have only one kind of magic.”
“Unless you’re a Legion soldier,” I said.
“Our magic works differently. We drink Nectar to absorb the magic into us.”
Or we died. Drinking Nectar was not something to be taken lightly. You trained and trained, and if you were good enough, you built up enough resistance to survive the next sip of Nectar and gain the gods’ next gift.
“Think of a Legion soldier as a blank slate, a canvas of magical potential,” Jace said. “A candidate must be balanced, not have too much or too little potential in any one magical field. That’s why you can’t so easily take a witch or vampire and turn them into a Legion soldier. Every so often, one of them survives, but their mortality rate at the initiation is even worse than a mundane human with no magical ancestry. You need people with mixed magic ancestry and lots of magical potential.”
In other words, the children of angels.
“This is where we get to magic and counter magic. And to how the Legion breeds angels,” Jace told me. “The Legion breeds angels for two qualities: magic balance and magic potential. To create a child with the highest magic potential, you would need to breed two angels together, but those pairings rarely work out.”
I nodded. My friend Nerissa had explained it to me. Like their personalities, angels’ magic was sharp, dominating, and unrelenting. So while a dual angel pairing had magic potential to spare, it was severely lacking on the magic balance component. The magic of two angels didn’t blend well; it clashed. It was like one nonstop explosion of poison and egos. So when the Legion wanted to breed an angel, they paired them with lower level Legion soldiers, someone whose magic was more amenable.
The only exception I knew of was Nero, whose parents were both angels—but that pairing had only worked because his mother had very light magic and his father had a lot of dark magic for an angel. Their magic had obviously found a balance between light and dark.
“The Legion’s breeding methods work, but some angel families have refined them,” Jace told me. “Mine, for instance. We’ve taken the process further.”
I wasn’t surprised. Colonel Fireswift was precisely the kind of angel who would have optimized every possible thing.
“How do you do it?” I asked him.
“Magic is a spectrum.”
Jace drew the magic spectrum on a sheet of paper, eight gifts around a color wheel. It included not only the gods’ seven gifts of magic, but also an eighth, that of telepathy. Telepathy was a special gift, one granted only to angels. The telepaths of Earth didn’t have the gods to thank for their magic; they’d received it from another source, presumably from the original immortals who ruled the realms before the gods and demons. Some of their magic had made it to Earth.
“Over the centuries, my family has bred us so that each generation has more magic potential than the previous ones. Our ultimate goal is to create children whose magic potential covers the entire spectrum.”
“How do you accomplish that?” I asked.
“An angel takes a mate with a specific set of abilities we want to boost in their offspring. These abilities have to be powerful enough not to fade beneath all the magic of an angel, but not so strong that they cancel out the abilities on the opposing end of the spectrum.”
“How’s that working out?”
“Slowly,” he said. “We have managed to boost our magic potential beyond that of any other family, but we are still working on the magic balance. A few weaknesses remain.”
I glanced at the magic color wheel he’d drawn. “Which ones?”
His eyes hardened. “Nice try, but I’m not giving anything away.”
“You’ve already given everything away in your lecture about opposing magic,” I told him. “All I have to do is think about what your strongest abilities are and use that to determine your weaknesses.”
He clenched his jaw.
“Luckily for you, I don’t fight dirty.” I grinned at him.