Raphael felt his lips twitch. “The rules of war are different from the rules of the household or polite society. If you recall, her etiquette guide had a full chapter on such ‘acceptable deviations from the norm.’”

“I was probably going la-la-la and trying to drown out your voice then,” she admitted, unrepentant. “After this war is over, you can read it to me again.”

Falling into step with one another, they carried on speaking to their people—including an Imani who had her curly hair tightly braided to her skull and was clad in armor of weathered black that featured layered arm plates as well as neck protection. “The young and foolish”—a pointed look at Raphael—“can expose their arms.” Lush lips pursed in a tawny-skinned face of arresting beauty. “I prefer to keep my limbs.”

Is Imani scared of anyone?

How did you describe her to me once? Ah yes. A grande dame who has no time for anyone’s bullshit. That is Imani. Raphael wanted to smile. I have always liked her for that.

I should’ve guessed. A laughing glance. You do have a thing for a certain kind of woman.

It is a weakness. Raphael sometimes thought he must’ve fallen for Elena the first time she stood toe to toe with him, though she’d been a mere mortal and he an archangel.

Later, after they’d moved on from Imani, she said, “Why don’t most of you wear arm and neck protection?”

“Such armor has little impact on one who fights with a heavy weapon such as a war hammer, but the added weight and stiffness causes a minor reduction in speed for those who use a lighter weapon.” And in a battle among immortals even that miniscule reduction could mean life or death.

“Got it,” Elena said at once. “Either you all wear it or none of you do.”

They reached a gathered squadron a moment later, and their attention shifted.

When they finally took off from Central Park, it was to heavy darkness. Flames flickered against the night sky, as both his people and Lijuan’s lit them for light, for heat. Elijah’s pulling energy from the city’s grid had blown out critical circuits in many areas. The Tower itself had large generators, but they’d decided to prioritize use by the infirmary and by the Tower’s technical team.

Raphael’s side also had flashlights and high-power lanterns at the ready, batteries stored all over the place. They would show none of that right now, however. Let the enemy believe that Raphael’s army was blind in the dark, too. All the while, Naasir and his team crept about in enemy territory, their task to cause as much destruction as possible.

It was time they took the war to the enemy’s door.

65

The explosions came at three o’clock in the morning.

Warned by Naasir, Raphael was high in the sky near the main front, while Elijah had taken the other half of the city. Their troops were hunkered down and ready to move using the cloudy and moonless night as a shield. Ten senior squadrons had made their way to rooftops close to enemy territory.

Others watched to ensure Lijuan’s people weren’t doing the same.

Elena had joined one of the archer and shooter teams. She’d given him all the wildfire she’d regenerated, but it had little to work with in him—the constant battles against Lijuan’s proxies had taken a toll, his body struggling to produce wildfire at a fast enough speed to keep up with his expenditure.

So be it.

He remained an archangel, one more skilled in strategy and tactics than Lijuan. Lost in her delusions of godhood, she could be pushed into unwise decisions. If she rose today, it wouldn’t be at full strength—he’d husband his and Elena’s combined wildfire, use it in a strike that turned Lijuan into a mindless creature of screaming pain.

Regardless of the threat posed by Lijuan, they couldn’t not launch the assault today—they had to find a way to cripple her army or his and Elijah’s troops wouldn’t have a fighting chance of survival. Another major battle and their people would be massacred, the streets awash with their blood.

A fireball punched the night sky as the windows of the first building blew out with a massive smash of sound. Many of Lijuan’s troops had bedded down in that building. They died in a hail of heat and crumbling foundations. Another building blew at the same moment, then a third.

Raphael scraped the sky with angelfire in the aftermath, cutting down the disoriented mass of fighters attempting to escape the shrapnel from the buildings.

More explosions lit up the night in enemy territory, these finely targeted. Naasir’s team was blowing up the remaining pipes that brought in clean water, and they were disrupting sewage lines so that the filth would flow into the enemy camp. A small demolition team had been tasked with destroying roads that led out of the port area.

Their aim was to trap Lijuan’s ground troops and annihilate her winged fighters.

Raphael’s archers slammed fiery death down on anyone who escaped the angelfire that burned in the sky. His troops began to move forward, squadrons landing on rooftops in a wave of silent death, while ground teams pushed their way through the rubble, eliminating the enemy on every side as they went.

Obsidian rain began to slam at them minutes later, but it was too late. They’d reclaimed much of what they’d lost. Raphael didn’t hold back his angelfire, his aim to wipe out as many of Lijuan’s generals as he could. But the senior leaders suddenly all dropped out of the way at precipitous speed.

KNEEL TO YOUR GODDESS!!

He saw her then, higher in the sky than him.

Her face was skeletal, and she appeared to be missing one side of her body. Her gown flapped against empty air where her thigh should’ve filled it out, and above, the fabric was being sucked in against her side—her rib cage was partially or fully missing. None of that stopped her from raining death down from the sky across a vast, vast area.

Lovely shimmering starlight obsidian shards of pain and horror.

He’d intended to save his wildfire until he could get it into her body, but hundreds of people would die if he didn’t stop her.

He spread out his wildfire in a shield across the sky. The deadly rain hit and dissipated. But Lijuan wasn’t done. She threw down another barrage. His shield held. Just. Wounded she might be, but her power was a terrible thing.

Whatever Lijuan had become, she was growing stronger with each passing day. Even at full power, he couldn’t hope to defeat her, not in a direct fight as this had become. Not when she could spread her attack across such a devastatingly large area.

He could carry on, infuriate her into a mistake so he could get close enough to inject her with wildfire, but the price of his choice would be grave upon grave upon grave.

He had no choice. Retreat! he ordered. Fall back!

Even as he gave that order, he shaped the last drops of wildfire in his body into small pellets, then shot them through his shield. He’d taken a precious extra second to time it just right, so the pellets—so small they were near invisible against her rain of starlight obsidian—would pass through in the gap between one blast of the rain and the next.

Lijuan hadn’t moved since this began; he hoped that held true for another second.

Two of the pellets were smashed out of existence by falling shards, but the other five punched into Lijuan’s heart.

Lightning lit her up from within. Blood trickled out of her mouth.

Raphael didn’t take that for an advantage of any kind. The only reason he’d achieved so much with so little was because she was already wounded. But wounded or not, she had plenty of firepower in her. She targeted him alone with the next volley.

His shield collapsed, the wildfire dissipating under the rain of black.

Raphael had nowhere to go that wouldn’t put his troops in the line of fire. An angelic squadron was retreating below him. He used angelfire to disrupt the starlight obsidian. It couldn’t eliminate or cancel out Lijuan’s poison, but it was strong enough to send it off course.

The shards smashed into the buildings on either side of the squadron; they flew out of danger moments later. It was the ground troops he had to worry about now—they were too deep in enemy territory. It’d take them time to retreat to safe ground. Even had the subterranean network of tunnels survived the aboveground detonations, they’d been designed for lone operatives, not large numbers of troops.

Lijuan laughed and the sound was incongruously lovely. Why do you fight so? A chiding tone to her mental voice, almost of the archangel she’d once been. You have only the power in your flesh. I am a goddess. I have the power from my people. Another hail of pain and death clothed in beauty.

He had nothing left. No wildfire. No angelfire. Nothing but his swords, with which he’d attempt to deflect some of the shards, so his ground troops would have a slightly higher chance of a safe retreat.

Gray bodies suddenly filled the sky in front of him.

His Legion took hit after hit, each body falling limply to the earth as the black poison ate them up from the inside out.

Bronze lightning fell from the sky at the same instant, aimed directly at Lijuan. One got her in a direct strike, burning great swathes of flesh from the healthy side of her wildfire-riddled body. She screamed and aimed her firepower up above, but the person there was invisible against the smoke-hazed sky.

Raphael recognized that lightning but he couldn’t spot Michaela, either. Infuriated, Lijuan shot another hail of black at the Legion, poisonous shards that they blocked with their bodies. Michaela hit Lijuan with another direct strike—this one succeeding in destroying a wing. Lijuan’s face faded and then her body rippled and she was gone, no doubt to feed again.

Raphael had survived the skirmish but the damage done was catastrophic. For the first time, he saw despair in the faces of his people. It had cost them so much ingenuity and skill and blood to gain that ground. Only for Lijuan to claw it back in a matter of minutes.

Elena. Fly with me. He needed his consort in a way that had nothing to do with war or power—and his people had hurt Lijuan’s forces enough that they weren’t pursuing the retreating soldiers, just holding their side of the line.