I rose to my feet. Rather than replying with something snarky, I said, “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, Lord Aleris?”
“The other gods are all focused on you right now.” When he spoke with that quiet arrogance of his, his voice was like the wind, soft but projecting far. “They seem worried. I wanted to see what’s gotten them so worked up.”
I took a long, slow drink from my water bottle, wondering at his bluntness. Why would he admit that the gods were worried? Then again, they had every reason to be unsettled right now. The Legion was crumbling to pieces from the inside, its own soldiers coerced to work against the gods’ will.
“There’s a lot going on right now in the Legion and in the greater world,” I said.
Aleris watched me in reflective silence, not giving away anything more. Of course not. After all, he was a god. He was less confrontational than the other gods, but his goal was the same: for me to tell him everything I knew. Well, it was high time we turned the river of knowledge in the other direction.
“And what do you think?” I asked him.
“I am still undecided about you and your place in everything. One thing is for sure, however: you are at the center of all the chaos. Whenever trouble breaks out, you aren’t far away. What I’m still trying to ascertain is whether you are drawn to the chaos, or the chaos to you.”
And then he was gone, just like that. Just like a god.
I was still looking at the spot where Aleris had disappeared when Harker entered the gym. Though his injuries had healed, he still looked as bad as I felt. He was haunted by what he’d seen, the sight of the Venom destroying his comrades from the inside. And like me, he was worried about Nero too.
I managed a small smile. “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
“No.”
I snatched two swords from the rack on the wall and tossed one of them to him. We both needed to get our minds off of our worries.
“So, are you going to ask out Bella again?” I asked him, trying to lighten the mood.
Harker parried my strike. “I don’t know. The last time I asked her, she said it wasn’t a good idea. I have the feeling she doesn’t quite trust me.” He set his sword on fire and swung it toward me.
I countered by casting a frozen sheet of magic across my blade. Fire clashed with ice. The flames went out, the frosty glass shattered into tiny icicles, and we were both back at square one.
“Of course she doesn’t quite trust you. You did try to poison her favorite sister, you know,” I pointed out.
“You’re not ever going to let that go, are you?”
I smirked at him. “Nope.”
I didn’t mean it. Harker had made a mistake. He’d thought he was serving the gods, but Faris had just been manipulating him, using his faith to gain the upper ground over the other gods.
“Your past mistakes don’t matter,” I told him. “What matters is what you’re doing now. And what you will do in the future.”
He moved quickly, sliding under my defenses. He locked my arm in his grip and pulled hard. Pain blossomed in my shoulder as he popped it out of its socket.
I sidestepped his followup attack, cradling my pulsing, aching arm. “Though maybe you should be less…less like an angel,” I said through my teeth. Grimacing, I popped my shoulder back in.
“What do you mean, ‘less like an angel’?”
“Angels have an annoying habit of deciding things for people—and for always knowing what’s best for them.”
I snatched hold of his arm, sinking my magic through it. His hand shifted into a gargantuan tortoise shell that dropped to the ground like an iron ball, taking him down with it. He tried to lift his arm off the floor, but the shell that was his hand did not budge. He shot me an irked look.
“Like feeding Bella your blood,” I said. “Especially when she didn’t know the consequences.”
He pushed against the enormous weight of the shell, his muscles bulging from the strain. “I did that…” He locked his free hand around his trapped wrist and heaved. “… to protect her.” His face was turning red. “… to save her.”
I swung a punch at his head to end our fight. He was glued to the floor, and he still somehow managed to duck to the side. In a world without magic, that would have been impossible. In a world with magic, it was still cheating.
“You know, the ‘I’m just protecting you’ excuse is the same failed logic that got Nero into trouble,” I warned him.
“I don’t get your point. Nero marked you and you threw up a big fuss to make him remove it, but in the end, you are his.”
He evaded my next punch as well. The laws of gravity didn’t even seem to apply to him. His leg swept out, kicking my feet out from under me. My back smacked the floor.
Harker looked down at me. “You didn’t just accept your fate. You embraced it.”
I kicked back up to my feet. “See, that’s the angel talking again. Yes, I’m his, but he’s mine too. Angels and gods think so one-dimensionally. The road to heaven is paved in one-way streets. But for a relationship to work—to really work—it needs to go both ways.”
Harker was silent for a moment, as though considering the idea. “There might be something in that,” he finally said.
I grinned at him. “Don’t be shy to tell me I’m right, Harker. After all, I managed to glue you to the floor.”
He gave his arms a hard heave. The shell launched off the floor, his arms following in a smooth arc. He held the shell over his head for a moment—just to show that he could—then he slammed it down like a hammer. My spell broken, the shell cracked into a thousand tiny pieces, then dissolved to smoke.
I just gaped at him.
“As much as you’d like to make yourself out to be a badass, independent, take-no-shit rebel, you’re one of us, Pandora.”
“One of what?”
“An angel. Not in name but in nature. You make decisions for your family, for your subordinates, and even for your superiors. You couldn’t be more of an angel if you had wings.” Harker’s smile widened as mine faded. “You marked Nero. I can sense it on him—your magic, your scent, your unique magical perfume. It is the mark of an angel, faint but unfading. That is the first mark from a non-angel that I’ve come across. How did you do that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps love is more powerful than magic,” I added with a mischievous wink.
Harker laughed. “Who would have guessed that you’re such a romantic.”
“Yeah, you know me. All flowers, sunshine, and lacy petticoats.”
He snorted.
I gave him a sly look. “But we’re not here to discuss my love life. We’re here to discuss yours.”
“I was under the impression that you thought I wasn’t good enough for your sister.”
“No one is good enough for my sister,” I told him. “But she likes you. I can see it in her eyes when she talks about you. I can feel it when you’re around her. And, besides, you did a very brave thing.”
Actually, he’d done two very brave things. One, he was playing double agent, spying on Faris and reporting back to Ronan and Nyx on how the God of Heaven’s Army was plotting against the other gods. And two, he was protecting the secret of Bella’s origin. But I didn’t elaborate. There could have been gods watching.
“And you care about her.”
Harker said nothing.
“It’s not a mortal failing in an angel to care about another person,” I told him.
A dark look crossed Harker’s face. “Nowadays, Leda, it just might be. The Pioneers exploited our weaknesses, our human connections. Legion soldiers betrayed us in order to protect the ones they loved. None of us can afford to have weaknesses, especially not angels.”
“We’ll get the Pioneers, Harker. They won’t use our people again.”
Determination gleamed in his eyes. “Yes, we’ll get the Pioneers. And the next threat. And the next one after that. We will always get them in the end. But what about the people we put at risk in the meantime? What about the people we lose?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Stop,” I said gently. “You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like this. You can’t isolate yourself from the world.”