40
Five hours into the new day, Raphael’s spymaster flew back to tell him Lijuan’s troops had crossed the early-warning border. A single command and Raphael’s offensive squadrons formed around him, the defensive perimeter tight and in place as he led the squadrons out across the city and over the water.
“Hold this position,” he told his commanders when they reached a location where his people could see the approaching army but remained within a hard, fast flight distance to their perimeter.
Leaving them hovering in precision formation, he flew out to meet Lijuan midway between the two armies. His move was a risk, given her increasing madness, but he believed part of her remained an archangel of old as yet, and seconds after he began his flight, his belief proved true. Cleaving to the rules of battle laid down at the dawn of angelkind, the Archangel of China flew alone to meet him in neutral space.
“Raphael.” Her pale, pale gaze turned to flint as she took in the mark on his temple. “You’ve been keeping secrets.”
“It appears we’ve all been doing that of late,” he said. “You must’ve worked long and quiet indeed to gain the trust of Uram’s scattered forces.” Until the ordinarily loyal men and women had abandoned their assigned posts and territories to swell her ranks.
“A goddess,” she said, her physical form fading to turn her skin translucent, “thinks not only for today, but for many tomorrows.” The eerie shift revealed the skeletal structure of her face, the sight merging with the crawling sense of screams beneath the surface of her voice, the trapped souls of those Lijuan had murdered.
“Your men wear only swords and crossbows.” Guns, at least, were a familiar weapon to most angelic fighters and wouldn’t have weighed down a winged fleet. “Do you foresee an easy victory?”
“I have been gathering my forces for ten thousand years, while you are a boy. We outnumber you until it will be no battle but an annihilation.”
Her arrogance, Raphael thought, might just be the Achilles’ heel that’d give his people victory in this unbalanced war. “Such is your belief, Lijuan. That doesn’t make it the truth.”
“It soon will be, but before the inevitable, I give you one more chance and invite you to surrender,” she said in that voice full of horror. “I cannot leave you or your consort alive, of course”—utmost civility as she spoke of his and Elena’s executions—“but I will treat your people as I would my own. Your Seven are extraordinary and will serve me well.”
His Seven, Raphael thought, would spend their existence attempting to erase Lijuan from the planet rather than lift a finger in her service. “There is a better way,” he said, extending the talk to give Naasir a final few minutes to put his plans in place. “You do not have to start a war.”
“I am not starting a war. I am stopping one before it begins.” She smiled at him, her eyes pale orbs with fetid shadows hidden within—as if to look too deep would be to fall into an inescapable hell. “You have never respected me as you should. I cannot allow that to continue. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand.” That Lijuan was a being of perfect madness, so mad she believed herself sane. Raphael recognized the signs; he’d seen them first in his father. But the powerful man who’d once played tag with him above the Refuge had never become the ugliness that was Lijuan. She was something new, a nightmare born of the rot at the core of her soul. “In turn,” he said, “you must understand that I cannot allow you to take my Tower and my city.”
“Then I’m afraid we are at an impasse.” Her smile never faltered, her teeth and jaw visible through skin turned to smoke. “We will be civilized about this. I will not attack you until you are with your troops, and you will not attempt the same.”
Accepting the stipulation, he said, “If you wish to cease hostilities at any stage, you need only remove your forces from my territory.”
“And should you wish to surrender, your fighters need only lay down their arms. Mine will not attack once your people are no longer a threat—unlike Charisemnon, I have no wish to degrade. My aim is only to conquer.” A pause. “It was not well done of him to so dishonorably use the reborn I gave him as a gift. I have told him I will not tolerate any further acts that bring disgrace upon my name.”
Raphael inclined his head. “I will see you in battle, Lijuan.”
“Good-bye, Raphael. You would’ve made a great Ancient one day, if only you had learned to respect your betters.”
Flying back to his troops at high speed, Raphael reached out to Elena. He needed her touch to erase the ugliness that permeated his bones, Lijuan’s presence a seeping wrongness in the fabric of the world. Elena, battle is imminent.
We’re ready. A kiss of untamed wildness that could be no one but his consort. I’m watching for you.
Ordering his troops to retreat inside the siege zone, Illium leading them in, he took the rear with Jason and Aodhan at his flanks. It was a wise move, Lijuan sending a blast in his direction the instant he hit the edge of Manhattan. Her power manifested as a hail of black daggers, gleaming and deadly.
The other archangel, however, was too far away to do much damage, her aim no doubt to send his troops into disarray. Brushing the daggers aside with a minimal use of power, he turned to see that none of his people had dropped even an inch out of formation. There was no second attempt, Lijuan obviously realizing she couldn’t do any real harm from that distance, and a few minutes later, his squadrons crossed the line of their defensive perimeter.
Wings filled the sky in every direction, each and every fighter dressed in a distinctive black uniform to distinguish them from the dark gray and red of Lijuan’s forces. To further avoid confusion, every single pair of wings—including Raphael’s—was marked above and below with streaks of a shimmering blue paint developed exactly for this purpose. Designed not to clog or otherwise harm their feathers, it meant the shooters could see if an angel was friend or foe at a glance.
Those shooters lay concealed in protective hides on the rooftops and in the now windowless top floors of several high-rises, as well as on the perimeter line alongside vampires expert in anti-wing weaponry, the guns pointed skyward. More vampires stood on the ground armed with flamethrowers and swords, their task to attempt to eliminate or so disable downed enemy fighters that they couldn’t heal and rise again. A third group of vampires prowled the city, on alert for any reborn threat.
Rising above the squadrons, so he was visible to all, he raised his arm and his sword. “This is our land,” he said, augmenting his voice so it’d reach every man and woman, mortal and immortal, who’d fight this day. “We will not be intimidated, and we will not surrender. We did not begin this war, but we will end it!”
A roar shook the world, arms and voices raised in solidarity.
? ? ?
Pride rocked Elena’s heart where she lay on her front on a rooftop, crossbow notched and eyes alert. Protected by a hide that meant flying troops wouldn’t immediately spot her, the shell also one that’d protect her from shots from above, she had a perfect line of sight to the man who was her own.
You should be proud, Archangel. Your people fight not because of fear or arrogance, but because it’s the right thing to do.
A caress of the sea and of the crashing storm of him. Be safe, Guild Hunter.
You, too. Heart a hard knot inside her chest, she took a deep breath and wiped her mind clear of all thought, the word having just gone out that Lijuan’s troops were about to hit.
The enemy was heralded by a hail of black daggers and the staccato sound of gunfire as the anti-wing weapons went into action. But they’d calculated correctly—there were too many enemy fighters for the guns to catch and the first wave of unmarked wings came into view and into range within thirty seconds . . . as Raphael’s troops dropped toward the earth in a sudden, planned plummet, leaving the sky full of the enemy.
Elena’s first bolt hit the neck of an angel with wings of dappled brown; she was already slotting in a second bolt before the angel registered the hit and began to spiral down, one hand clasped over his bloody throat. At the same time, black and blue collided in the sky above as two archangels went head-to-head. Knowing she’d be of no use to Raphael if she couldn’t hold it together, Elena shook off her fear for him and focused on the enemy, trusting her consort and lover not to break her heart while she did her part.
Bolt after bolt she shot, until the sky was suddenly empty of wings unmarked by shimmering blue. Elena waited for a message through the communications devices everyone had tucked over their ears. It came within seconds, the voice Dmitri’s.
“Lijuan’s troops have retreated beyond our defensive perimeter, but we’ve lost a quarter of the anti-wing guns. Stand down but do not leave your positions.”
Elena used the opportunity to check her supply of bolts. Seeing that she was nearly out, she switched channels to send a request to the senior Guild trainees running supplies, flicking back in time to catch an updated report from the Tower.
“Enemy troops have settled on buildings outside the reach of our weapons. We injured a large number, but they’re recovering and are likely to strike again within the hour. Alternate breaks authorized.”
? ? ?
With Lijuan falling back with her troops, Raphael had time to return to the Tower, get a report from Dmitri. His second was coordinating their entire force, making the split-second decisions so necessary in a fight, and which Raphael couldn’t make so long as he was battling Lijuan. He knew Dmitri would rather be out in the field, fighting like the honed blade he’d always been, but the other man was the best commander he had. Even Galen deferred to Dmitri when it came to matters of strategy.
“No fatalities,” the vampire said, bearing out Raphael’s judgment and faith. “A number of serious injuries among the aerial defense gunners, but the angelic fighters nearby acted quickly to cover the injured, while other shooters dragged them to safety.” He pointed out several black Xs on the map laid out on a large table in the war room. “Here’s where we lost the aerial defense weaponry, but that loss was expected and is already factored into our plans.”
“Did Lijuan suffer any fatalities?”
A nod. “Significant in the first wave, when the shooters sent near to half a squadron to the ground for the vampires to clean up, but the enemy learned from that loss. When one fighter falls, two more land with him to fight off the ground teams and lift the injured to safety.”
It was more or less what Raphael had expected of this first engagement. “The true test will come with the next clash, now that we no longer have the element of surprise.”
Jaw a harsh line, Dmitri nodded. “Elijah called not long ago, wished to speak to you.”
“I’m sending you two of my elite fighter squadrons,” the other archangel said, when Raphael returned the call. “They’re already halfway to your Tower.”
“The reborn?”
Elijah’s smile held blood fury. “My animals have learned the hunt now, and their sense of sight and smell is beyond anything the reborn have the capacity to avoid. While I continue to need most of my forces to ensure we get each and every one of the creatures, the two elite units will be of far more use to you.”
“I’ll have Dmitri send through a clear flight path,” Raphael said, his trust in Elijah such as he’d never expected to have in another one of the Cadre. “Lijuan’s people haven’t yet managed to surround us, so your squadrons can come in without encountering enemy fire.”
The good news was rapidly followed by bad. Satellite images showed several aircraft flying low over the ocean perhaps an hour’s flight from the city, then ejecting what appeared to be large pods from their holds that floated rather than sank.
“Looks like a quarter of Lijuan’s fleet is taking off toward the pods, likely to tug them in,” Dmitri said, having eyes on the enemy through the city’s network of surveillance cameras as well as the special spy cameras Naasir’s team had put in place. “They have to contain ground troops.”
Raphael agreed. Which meant Lijuan would soon have vampires to battle his own, leaving her angels free to remain in the sky rather than go to the aid of downed winged fighters. Even with the addition of Elijah’s squadrons, Raphael’s forces would’ve remained badly outnumbered. This simply tipped the scale further in Lijuan’s favor.
Three minutes later, one of Jason’s people called in a report: cargo planes had just left Lijuan’s territory, loaded with rocket launchers and guns, as well as further ground forces. It seemed the “goddess” had changed her mind on certain points. Raphael’s people had both types of weapons, but the rockets, they’d decided, would only be used in a last-case scenario; no matter how well aimed, the resulting damage would leave not only Manhattan but the entire city a ruin.
And the fact was, they weren’t particularly useful in a sky filled with friends and enemies locked together in such close combat. Not unless you didn’t care about murdering your own people in order to destroy the enemy.
Lijuan annihilated her own city, he said to his consort, after he’d assimilated the information, images of the smoking crater that was Beijing at the forefront of his mind. She won’t worry about obliterating ours to win this war.
It was as well that no large-scale technological weapons of any kind were acceptable in an archangelic war, be they tanks on the ground or bombers in the air. It was the reason why the mortals who’d come up with the ideas for such items of warfare had abandoned the research decades ago—there was no market.
Even the rocket launchers and anti-wing guns were short-range, line-of-sight weapons. For a win to count in the immortal world, for an archangel to keep the respect of his or her own people, it had to be intimate, face-to-face. An odd stipulation perhaps, until you remembered that an archangel couldn’t be killed by any weapon, no matter how destructive—it was only the lesser angels, vampires, and mortals who’d be among the maimed and the dead.
“Sire.” Dmitri walked to where he stood in front of the glass wall that looked out over the field of battle. “Jason’s man just sent another report confirming the number of cargo planes heading our way.”
Raphael knew it was further bad news from the brutal lines of his second’s face. “How many?”
“Ten.”
The word reverberated between them. With that many ground fighters and short-range weapons, Lijuan’s people would swarm his own, coming up from below while the angels kept the winged squadrons occupied. “I must take the planes out before or directly after they land,” he said, knowing he spoke of the death of hundreds. “It’s the only option.”
“You can get past her using glamour,” Dmitri said with coolheaded strategy, “but the instant she hears of their destruction, she’ll know you’re not in Manhattan and unleash all her power on the Tower.”
And if the Tower fell, the battle would be over in the eyes of the world, New York and the entire territory Lijuan’s. Raphael would fight to take it back, of course, but he knew the loss of the Tower would crush the morale of his people, for it wasn’t simply a place, it was the symbol of their strength.
Seeing movement from the enemy side at the same instant as his second, he dropped the discussion for the moment and left to take to the skies, the second wave of attack far more vicious than the first. Blood splattered the snow everywhere he looked, innocence forever tainted.