“All right, Brielle. Take your defensive stance, and we’ll each practice coming at you with a full-blooded angel power,” Michael instructed.

I gulped.

“And remember to protect yourself like you would in a real battle. Use shields, both sides of your magic, whatever you have at your disposal. You won’t hurt us,” Raphael added.

Looking over my shoulder, I glared at my husband—it was his brilliant idea to do this—but when he shrugged, I faced forward once more.

“Okay.” Pulling my sword free, I held it aloft in one hand, picking up my metal shield with the other. With ease, I called forth my power, creating the energy shield I had learned to do easily, and dragging it over myself like a dome.

The back doors creaked open, and Emberly and her best friend, Mel, walked in then.

Oh God. An audience?

Mel was an adorable redheaded human, with twice the sass of Emberly. When I looked over, Emberly waved and joined Lincoln and the others on the sideline.

Michael stepped up to the plate first, staring me down. He was looking at my energy shield, seeing the edges of it.

“I’m going to break your shield,” he declared, pulling his sword free with a burst of blazing blue light.

“The hell you are!” Emberly razzed him from the sidelines.

I grinned, but it was short-lived. When Michael’s face turned menacing and he raised his sword, my humor faded, and I braced for impact. Holding my metal shield above me, I tried at the same time to bolster the other one. Michael’s sword came down hard on my energy barrier, causing it to flex and wobble. Pain sliced through my body, everywhere at once, but the shield held. Tiny blue cracks appeared in its outer wall, but his sword didn’t puncture it.

Hell yeah!

Michael looked dumbfounded for a second. “Fascinating. Gabriel, come break this.” He stepped aside.

Oh God.

I tried to repair the cracks Michael’s blue light had made, but they seemed to be growing by the second. Gabriel didn’t wait for an introduction, simply tossed a ball of white fire at me. Coupled with Michael’s blue cracks, the force sent my shield crumbling around me.

My onlookers booed.

“I thought so,” Michael mumbled curiously.

I decided to give them a little taste of what fighting with Brielle was like. If I were fighting Lucy, I wouldn’t let him stand around and talk.

Dropping my metal shield to the ground, I sprang from where I was crouched, sword held aloft and aimed right for Michael. Obviously, I wasn’t going to hurt him if he didn’t move, but I had a feeling he would be ready.

Sure enough, the archangel snapped to the side, grinning as he parried my blow with such a force, that my sword was flung from my grasp.

Damn superhuman power.

“Good!” he shouted. “Never underestimate the power of a surprise attack.”

Yeah, but it didn’t work, and now I was weaponless. I stood there frozen, body tensed, unsure what to do.

Raphael stepped forward. “A Celestial is never weaponless. You have magic within your every pore.”

Right. I kept forgetting that, and it made me really miss Sera. She would make me look like such a badass right now. Maybe this was what I needed to hear all along. I was powerful without her.

Would I go to Hell if I flung black magic at Archangel Michael?

“Give him all you’ve got,” Raphael encouraged.

Mind reader.

Without missing a beat, I clapped my hands together, creating a small baseball-sized black blob of magic. Michael’s twenty-foot wings flapped, causing the other angels to step back a foot, and I chucked the ball. Michael didn’t flinch or try to deflect it; instead, he let it splash across his chest, where it molded to his metal breast plate, constricting it.

“I just wanted to see what that felt like,” he observed, looking down at the dark magic with fascination. “It stings.”

I was glad I could satisfy his curiosities.

Bringing up his sword, he cut lengthwise along his armor, shredding my black magic like it was made of paper. The dark blob fell to the floor and shriveled in on itself, leaving behind dented armor in its wake.

Michael assessed the dents with fascination. “Does it work on the Dark Prince?” he queried.

I shook my head. “No, but a mixture of both sides of my magic does.”

Kind of. My memories of my time down there were full of depression and drug-induced fatigue, so I couldn’t be entirely certain.

“Incoming!” Uriel shouted out of nowhere, then ran at me full speed.

Wind picked up and tossed my hair to the side, and panic ripped through me. Our friendly, chatty, sparring session had taken a turn. Clearly Uriel really wanted to get to his poker session.

My wings snapped out and I pumped them, causing me to rise higher and go over his head. As he passed under me, I collapsed my wings and dropped to the ground near my sword, bending to pick it up again. The moment I wrapped my fingers around the cold steel, a gust of wind slammed into my back, knocking the wind out of me.

I fell forward a bit, trying to get back the air that had been slammed from my lungs.

What the hell? Wind magic? Really?

“Lucifer will often surprise you. He won’t hesitate to harm you when your back is to him. He has no morals,” Uriel’s voice carried on the wind from behind me.

Motherfricker. He was right, and I wanted to prove to the archangels that I could do this. Anger rose up within me and I spun around in my crouched position, before bursting into the air, allowing my wings to help me gain speed. Uriel was ready, wearing the same grin Michael had. These men were angels, yes, but they were also warriors, that much was clear.

I came down hard with my sword, and it clinked against his midair. The shock of the metal weapons coming together stung my arm, sending vibrations throughout my body. We slashed our swords out, back and forth for a few moments when Raphael called out to me.

“Now, throw magic at him with your other hand, and pull up your energy shield. You must be able to do things simultaneously to even think about defeating Lucifer,” he explained.

What? I could barely process his words, too focused on meeting each strike of Uriel’s sword with my own. I could easily lose an arm in this “sparring” session.

Trying to pull attention away from my sword fight, I allowed a ball of my mixed silvery magic to form in my hand. Uriel brought his non-wielding hand up, and that gust of wind came at me again, breaking my ball apart in a second.

“Arghhh!” I screamed in frustration and snapped out with a kick, planted squarely at his chest. It was enough to knock him backward and give me the advantage I needed. Calling up another ball, I chucked it before he had the chance to break it apart with his wind magic, or whatever the heck that was. The mixed energy wrapped around the lower part of his face and started to squeeze off his air supply.

“Woo-hoo!” Emberly and Shea both screamed at the same time.

There was surprise in his eyes, and then something else. Pride, maybe? The shimmery magic around his face suddenly ballooned as if he were blowing a bubble and then popped. Shards of the magic flew in every direction before disintegrating.

Uriel stood, relaxed, and lowered his sword. “If you could have pulled up your shield and taken your blade to my neck while I was incapacitated, that might have given you the edge you needed,” he observed.

Wondering if God was watching me kick his beloved angels’ asses, and putting me on the naughty list, I simply nodded.

“She needs to work on multitasking,” Gabriel agreed.

I spun around, unsure if training was over, or if another one of them was going to come at me.

Raphael stepped forward. “Brielle, call up your shield.”

I gulped.

Pulling my sword up, I stood with my feet planted shoulder-width apart, and started to pull my energy outward in a dome-like barrier.

Raphael stepped closer, inspecting the shield. “No. Make it stronger.”

What? I groaned, pulling another layer over the shield, straining to reach for my power deep inside of me.

Raphael made a fist and punched the shield dead-on, and it wobbled, shaking with the force of his hit, but it held.

“Stronger! Like steel!” he shouted. “You are a healer. You have endless amounts of energy. Find the weak parts of the shield and strengthen it until nothing can defeat it.”

Something about his words set off a light bulb in my head.

Healer.

I was a healer. Like him.

If the shield were a sick patient, I would send energy to the frail spots, and that’s exactly what I did now. I focused on the smallest nano-cells of my energy protection, funneling more and more into it, until it was a thick clear dome that looked like it was made of glass.

Raphael nodded, and waved over the other archangels. “Now, I want you to throw your energy balls at us, Brielle.”

A ‘what the hell did you just say’ expression took over my face. “I can’t. I’m trapped in here now,” I told him, my voice muffled through the fortified barrier I’d just created.

“That’s not true!” Emberly piped up from the sideline. “When she protected us from the demon attack, she thinned part of her shield to allow me to come inside.”

I shot her a look.

Traitor.

Raphael grinned. “Come on. Give it a try.”

Exhaling in frustration, I tried to hold my shield strong while also thinning part of it, just enough to fit a baseball-sized black energy ball through it. Instead of what I’d intended, the entire thing weakened.

Walking closer, Michael stuck his metal-booted foot out, kicking my barrier, and sending the whole thing crumbling down instantly. I looked up at him in frustration, and he smiled. “Now you know what you need to work on.”

Yeah. Everything.

Lincoln stepped onto the gymnasium floor and bowed his head slightly. “Thank you, guys, so much. I really appreciate it. We can run drills with her now, working on the shield and multitasking.”

They nodded and shook his hand one at a time, waving goodbye to me before disappearing out the doors for their poker game, like they hadn’t just whooped my ass.