The Legion told us it was wrong to get caught up in earthly matters. We needed to be separate, above humanity, not mixing with it. Connections with humans were discouraged. They were seen as a weakness.
Except I saw them as a strength. My friends and my family were part of who I was. My connection to them helped me stay human, even as I grew closer to becoming an angel. My humanity was my anchor. You see, sometimes, it was not only about being ‘right’ or ‘just’; it was about being kind. About caring for others. Compassion—that’s what was too often missing when you tried so hard to do things in a perfectly orderly manner.
“I couldn’t join the Legion,” Carmen said, her voice trembling with anger. “And not just because I’m scared. I think it would be even worse to have all that power and yet be completely powerless to use it, to stand by as everything crumbles to ash. I don’t know how you do it, Leda.”
Well, the truth was I didn’t always follow the rules. I was the black sheep of the Legion. Soldiers in the gods’ army were trained to fight with proper technique, with dignity. With finesse.
I, on the other hand, was a dirty fighter. I had no qualms about using anything around me, fighting not only with swords or guns. I was not above fighting with a water bottle, a clothesline, or a car antenna. Or even the dirt beneath my feet. Many Legion soldiers—especially the angels—saw that as abhorrent behavior. But it did give me an advantage. Fighting with dignity was too predictable and not always practical. I’d learned to fight out here on the streets of the Frontier, in the dark alleys of Purgatory, where survival was more important than how polished your steel was and more relevant than how shiny you kept your leather.
“Adjusting to the Legion’s ways has been challenging,” I told Carmen. Honestly, adapting to the code of conduct had been harder than the training or the poisonous Nectar I had to survive to gain new magic.
I waved at Dale and Cindy as they passed us, their hands inside the back pockets of each other’s jeans. Dale, my sixty-year-old former neighbor, was a kind man, though he enjoyed the moonshine a little too much. The curvy, buxom Cindy with her long legs, full lips, and bouncy locks, looked like a retired model who spared no expense when it came to looking fabulous. Her crimson lipstick was a perfect match to her hair, and her dark eyeshadow really made her green eyes pop. I’d been present in the Witch’s Watering Hole, Purgatory’s favorite bar, at the dawn of Dale and Cindy’s relationship. It had been that same fateful night Zane went missing.
“Your secret admirer is stalking us,” Carmen whispered to me.
I turned around and waved at Jak, the shy nerdy kid who’d had a crush on me since third grade. “Hi, how’s it going?”
“F-fine,” he stuttered, looking even more nervous than usual. No, forget nervous; he was downright intimidated. “You j-joined the Legion.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve h-heard scary things about the LLegion.”
“Those stories are exaggerations,” I said, which was only partially true.
I’d heard all the stories too. At least half of them were pretty close to reality. In the case of the other half, reality was much worse than the rumors. Still, there was no reason to scare Jak any more than he already was. He was actually a nice guy.
“Is it true angels’ wings glow?” someone asked.
The townies were gathering around me.
“Is it true that you drink poison for breakfast every morning?”
“Do you really set each other on fire?”
“She’ll set you on fire, Mick, if you don’t give her some space.”
They all laughed. If I’d been any other Legion soldier, they’d never have dared bombard me with their questions, but they’d known me for years. And they knew Calli had raised me not to set my neighbors on fire.
“Are your uniforms made of dragon leather?”
“Are your swords made of angel tears?”
“Show us some magic tricks, Leda,” Mick said.
“Yeah, show us, Leda.”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“Show us! Show us!” chanted the crowd, over and over again.
“I’m not a stage magician,” I said drily.
I glanced at the magician performing nearby. Though he was dressed in a very nice silk robe, he wasn’t using any actual magic. His fire-breathing display was just a trick. Not that there weren’t real fire elementals out there. It’s just this guy wasn’t one of them. In fact, he was as human as they came. What he lacked in magic, however, he made up for in showmanship. He was a natural performer, possessing an innate ability to captivate an audience. When the townies realized I wasn’t nearly as entertaining as they’d thought, they peeled away from me and went to watch the magician’s show.
Over the roar of the fire and the clink of fake magic, I picked up a soft scratching noise. It was a few blocks away but coming in fast. Running footsteps. Four pairs. I looked past the houses and blinking carnival lights. I saw three women in the distance running after a man. They were bounty hunters, their outfits of shorts and tank tops complemented by light-colored scarves and goggles to protect their eyes from the sand in the air. From the looks of them, they were Magitech goggles with information readouts, high-end tech that allowed you to lock onto a target and track them through thick crowds and behind blind spots.
That ability was coming in handy for them as the man they were chasing darted behind the carousel and cut through the sea of people. He was running fast, but they were gaining on him. Realizing he was cornered, the man grabbed a child from beside the balloon booth.
“Don’t take a single step!” he shouted at the bounty hunters.
They stopped. The crowd fell quiet. Everything was silent, all except the mechanical tune of the turning carousel and the little girl’s howl of despair as her airship balloon floated up, lost to the wind.
“No one move!” the man snapped, holding the little girl in front of himself as a shield.
Now that just made me mad. No matter how desperate he was—which was very desperate from the manic twitch in his eyes and the stain of sweat on his silk suit—you didn’t take children hostage. But if the man had ever possessed any moral boundaries, they’d dissolved under the weight of his desperation. He looked like he would do anything to not be captured. He would cross any line.
From the looks of him, he wasn’t a hardcore criminal. His crimes were probably really minor. But that was then, and this was now. Taking a child hostage was worse than whatever he had done to get a bounty on his head. And it wiped away any sympathy I might have had for him. My foster mother Calli used to say that most people only showed their true colors when put under enormous stress, and he’d done that surely enough. By taking a child hostage, he’d shown the world that he was a piece of shit.
“How can you just stand there?” Carmen demanded of me as the man began backing up with the little girl. “You have to do something!”
Despite my feelings, my humanity screaming at me, I wasn’t allowed to interfere. Those were the Legion’s rules. I could only fight monsters and threats to the gods’ order. These lesser matters were not relevant to the gods. They were handled by local law enforcement and bounty hunters.
The gods didn’t get that these small things—how we acted in everyday life—all added up to one big picture. It determined what kind of people we strived to be. We had to fight for what was right. We couldn’t just battle the monsters beyond the wall. We had to tackle the monsters within head-on.
I was considering interfering anyway, Legion rules be damned, but before I could act, the bounty hunter in the blue outfit pressed a button on her arm band. A tiny flying robot, roughly the shape of a ship and the size of an alley cat, flew through the crowd and shot straight at the man. It stopped mere inches from his face, a cannon pointed right between his eyes.