“Yes, for fourteen years the girls remained hidden, but I knew they would turn up eventually. Their magic was too extraordinary to stay secret.” She hit me with a smile as sweet as it was sharp. “But in the end, I found them because of you.”
I blinked in confusion.
“Leda, you really do draw far too much attention to yourself. You led me straight to your sisters.”
My empty stomach clenched up with guilt. My journey to gain the magic I needed to find Zane had put my sisters at risk. This was all my fault. I should have kept my head lower.
“Don’t fret. It was Callista Pierce’s failing as much as your own. Gin and Tessa are of ancient breeds. So few of them are left, and those that remain are scattered throughout the realms. In their natural, fully-powered state, they are too powerful to easily capture. But these two sweet girls can’t even use their powers. Your foster mother practically gift-wrapped them for me,” Sonja said with a smirk. “All I had to do was be patient for them to turn up again.”
Patience, the favorite immortal virtue.
“You’d be surprised. Some of my fellow demons are horribly impatient,” she said, reading my thoughts. “Every few years, they—they meaning usually Ava or Alessandro—try to launch yet another failed attempt at building up an army of supporters here on Earth, soldiers who will supposedly break the Legion and topple the gods.”
Like the army the demons had been building last year, right around the time I’d joined the Legion. That grand army hadn’t made it very far.
Sonja made a derisive noise. “If it were that easy, we would have done it centuries ago. I’ve told them time and time again, we need to play the long game.”
Since stepping into the dungeon, Sonja had talked a lot, but she hadn’t really given much away, and I didn’t think that was an accident. I still had no idea what my sisters’ powers were. All I knew about the magic was it was rare. Sonja wanted to give their powers to the soldiers of her Dark Force—and, I was guessing, to the demons as well. Then the demons would possess powers the gods did not. Sonja believed that would give them the upper hand in this immortal war.
“Enough chitchat. Let’s begin.” Sonja waved over Soulslayer. “Give her the first dose.”
The dark angel grabbed my arm, his grip ironclad, unrelenting, cruel. He pricked me with a needle, injecting me with something.
It was Venom. I felt it immediately—the burn in my veins, like a firestorm consuming me, burning me alive. The tidal wave of magic crashed and rocked inside of me, pulling me under. My vision grew splotchy, clouded. I saw only fire.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.
“Your sisters have rare and powerful magic, but you, my dear, are something else altogether,” said Sonja. “You are one of a kind. The first. The only.”
As the demon and the dark angel closed in on me, I hardly felt the pricks of their needles. The tiny jabs were nothing compared to the inferno blazing inside of me.
“First what?!” I shouted. “Only what?!”
I had to keep them talking. And I had to stay conscious. The Venom was making my head fuzzy, groggy. The fire of dark magic was burning through what was left of my energy.
“Amazing.” Sonja’s voice snapped me awake.
I blinked and saw the demon sitting at the desk, looking at my blood through a microscope.
“The Venom is balancing against the Nectar inside of her,” she told Soulslayer. “They are becoming one, interlocked, cohesive. It’s remarkable.”
I could feel the battle of light and dark magic in my blood. They were fighting, clashing, but slowly, they began to reach an equilibrium, a harmony of opposing magics.
“I saw that in the previous samples after the arena battles. Her light and dark magic worked together. She used both sides of the magic spectrum in unison,” said Sonja. “But seeing the Venom and Nectar work inside her body, at the core, as they merge, as they become part of her, is something else altogether. It’s simply amazing.”
Perhaps it was amazing on paper. In reality, as the Venom and Nectar tried to negotiate a balance inside of me, it burned like a wildfire through my body, drowning me in agony.
“After another dose of Venom, her dark magic will be up to the same level as her light magic.”
“And then?” I asked. It hurt to speak.
Sonja turned to look at me. “Then we will push you higher, alternating Venom and Nectar.” Her sparkling eyes, alight with delight, turned to the microscope again. She obviously couldn’t wait to see the results of her experiments. She really was the epitome of the mad scientist.
“Your plan won’t work,” I told her. “You can’t level up my magic with Nectar and Venom alone. It requires training.”
“We will train you if necessary,” she replied with a dismissive flick of her hand. “As I said, I am patient. We will do this for years if need be.”
I coughed, choking on the Venom’s magic.
“But I don’t think it will take so long,” she said.
The river of fire raging inside of me was splitting me apart.
“You overestimate me,” I said.
Sonja laughed. “You don’t know what you are, do you?”
I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of withholding information I so desperately wanted to know.
“The gods are too detached from reality to see anything right in front of their eyes,” Sonja continued. “Which is why they missed your friend Stash, the demigod. They don’t know Damiel Dragonsire survived his execution either. They don’t realize Cadence Lightbringer is alive, being held by the Guardians. They miss everything.”
How did Sonja know so much?
“We are not on Earth, but we are watching. Always watching,” Sonja told me. “Nyx must have figured it out. She always had an uncanny ability to cut through the bullshit.”
Soulslayer tensed at the mention of the First Angel of the Legion.
Sonja glanced at him. “Ronan won’t survive the war to come. Nyx will join us.”
They obviously didn’t know the First Angel at all. She would never roll over. She wouldn’t cooperate, and neither would I. They would just have to kill me.
“You will cooperate. You will train and embrace the magic and survive.” Sonja’s smile was savage. “Because, otherwise, your sisters will pay the price. And you will never rescue your brother.”
“He is safe,” I stated in defiance.
A shrill laugh broke past her lips. “If you truly believe that, you are even more naive than I’d thought. Your brother is in the greatest danger of you all. You will soon come to wish that either we or the gods had taken him instead of the Guardians.”
I frowned at her. “I don’t trust you.”
“Good,” Sonja said, nodding. “That’s the first truly intelligent thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth.”
My chains disappeared in a whiff of smoke, and I dropped off the wall. Soulslayer caught me by the shoulder. He dragged me across the room like I weighed nothing. I didn’t resist. My limbs were limp, my body shaking. I couldn’t have lifted a cup of water if I’d tried, let alone a sword.
My vision blurred. My sisters’ cells faded out, dripping into darkness.
“She needs some time for the Venom to settle before we can push more magic into her,” Sonja’s voice echoed in my ears.
Soft footsteps sounded her and Soulslayer’s departure. They left me alone to the firestorm of opposing magics trying to balance, to merge, inside of me. I was shaking so hard that my teeth rattled in my mouth. I clenched my jaw, just trying to stay conscious.
Time melted and twisted. I wasn’t sure how long my mind drifted in that half-conscious state between dreamland and reality.
“Leda?”
I tried to pull my head out of the magical storm raging inside of me.
“Leda?” Tessa called out to me again from the abyss.
The sound of her voice was like a tether. I held onto it and pulled myself back into consciousness.
I blinked, clearing my vision. The demon and the dark angel were gone. Tessa stood in the cell across from me, looking at me from behind the glowing magic barrier. Gin’s cell was empty.
I tried to go to Tessa, but my body didn’t cooperate. I was chained to a wall again.
“Where’s Gin?” I asked her. My voice was as broken as the rest of my body.