Chapter 27

"Iam not behind everything," replied Aerilyn, her stance relaxed. "Only some of it. You said so yourself, Leda. There are two different supervillains wreaking havoc on the Earth right now."

How could she remain so calm with two angels closing in on her? Granted Nero and I couldn't use our magic right now, but we were armed, well-trained, and outnumbered her two-to-one. And yet she hadn't even made a move to draw her weapon.

"You're not human," I said.

"No, I'm not."

"Then what are you?"

She smiled. "Something far more mysterious."

"She's a dark angel. A demi-demon," Nero told me. "The daughter of Ava, the Demon of Hell's Army."

Well, Aerilyn had said her mother was a soldier. So that's why I'd thought she looked familiar. She looked a lot like Ava.

Aerilyn blew me a kiss. "Hello, cousin."

"Do I get to choose whether I'm related to you?" I made a disgusted face.

She laughed. "You didn't mind me so much earlier. You even tried to recruit me into the Legion of Angels."

Nero sighed. "Pandora, why did you try to recruit a dark angel into the gods' army? I'm sure we covered our recruitment policies quite thoroughly during your initiation."

"I must have been unconscious for that one." I tried to look contrite. "I just thought she fights well. And she has cool toys."

Aerilyn chuckled. Nero just sighed again.

"It's not like I knew she was a dark angel," I said in my defense.

"We'll talk about this later, after we've neutralized her," replied Nero. He looked like he wished he'd called in sick to work today and foregone all this nonsense.

"Neutralizing me won't help you solve your monster problem, Windstriker." Aerilyn sat down on the edge of the wall. "Not that you could neutralize me."

Nero took a forceful step forward.

I stepped in front of him. "What do you mean?" I asked Aerilyn.

"What I mean is, this monster problem cannot be solved with force. But you can solve it."

"You want me to solve this." I narrowed my eyes at her. "Why?"

She folded her hands together on her lap. "Just think of it as a little test the demons have set you."

"And if I pass?"

"Then they will accept your proposal and form an alliance with the gods to fight the Guardians."

"This…all of this…" I waved my hands around, indicating the besieged town. "All the danger you've put people in, that was all part of some ridiculous test?"

"The test is not ridiculous," she countered. "It's very important. The fate of this world—of the universe—hangs in the balance."

I threw my hands up in the air and expelled a puff of bottled exasperation. "I'm so sick of deities and their stupid power games!"

"That's why I prefer to remain independent," she said.

"I hate to break it to you, Aerilyn, but you're not independent. Not if you're doing what your mother and the rest of the demons' council tell you what to do."

"It's a job, Leda, not a mantra. You won't believe how much intergalactic gambling debt a girl can accumulate in a few millennia." She shrugged. "The demons' council paid me, so I took the job. It's not much different than what you did when you were a bounty hunter."

"I never accepted a job to put someone in mortal peril, let alone a bunch of someones."

"To each their own, Leda Pandora," she replied frostily. "Now are you going to put an end to this, or are you too damn stubborn and proud to accept my help to save all these people?"

"You are behind this disaster, and now you want to help fix it?" I demanded.

"I'm just here to guide you. You need to take the final step yourself."

None of this made any sense, but I didn't see any other option than to accept her ‘help'. First of all, I needed to figure out the extent of what she'd done before I could even begin to clean it up.

"You attacked the witches at Desert Rose?" I asked her.

"The shock from the overloaded Magitech generators attacked the witches."

"But you sabotaged those generators?"

"Yes."

"I take it you also sabotaged the generators here in Pandemonium?"

"Yes."

"And you attacked Leila Starborn?"

"Yes."

"Why?" I asked.

"She was chasing me. I had to keep her off my back."

"While you were under the alias of Carver Spellsword?"

"Yes. I've been using the Spellsword alias for years. I share that alias with a few others."

That explained the conflicting reports Alec had found on Spellsword. If more than one person was using the alias, Spellsword could indeed be in several places at once.

"I didn't take you for a sharing kind of gal," I said.

"The more jobs Spellsword completes, the better his reputation, which leads to even more jobs. I can't possibly keep Spellsword always in the limelight all by myself."

"Why did you invent a fake dark angel at all?" I asked.

"For anonymity, of course. You don't actually believe I'd commit crimes wearing my own face, do you?" she laughed. "Once everyone knows your face, you can't go anywhere in peace. They follow you to the grocery store, to the beauty salon, on vacation. No, it's much better to have a work persona and a free time persona."

Her statement actually made sense—in a twisted kind of way. Sometimes I wished not everyone in the world knew my face.

"So Leila Starborn was never infected by the curse?" I asked.

"No."

"And you didn't create the curse?"

"No."

Aerilyn had been lying to me since we'd met, so maybe I shouldn't have believed her, but my gut told me she was telling the truth now.

"The witches at Desert Rose, Leila, and this disaster here at Pandemonium. That's everything?" I asked her.

"Everything I've done lately."

"What's the connection?"

She smiled. "That's for you to say."

I hated tests.

I began to pace. "Your attack on Leila isn't connected. You were only trying to get her off your tail. But the other two." I stopped pacing and looked at Nero. "Magitech barriers. Both here and at Desert Rose, she sabotaged the Magitech generators. But why?"

"To let monsters in," he said. "If the gods can't keep the Earth's cities safe from monsters, people will lose faith." His gaze slid over to Aerilyn. "And perhaps turn to the demons instead. The demons have tried that ploy before."

"Yes, they have. You know what they say about old dogs and new tricks." Aerilyn chuckled. "But that wasn't the trick this time."

"Both times, at Desert Rose and here in Pandemonium, the Magitech barrier never went down," I realized. "The barriers weakened a bit. They even got a few tiny holes in them. But they never went down. The weirdest part of all was once the barriers were at full strength again, the monsters on this side of the wall didn't die instantly as they should. Why?" I set my hand on Nero's arm. "Do you remember the beasts we found last year on the Elemental Expanse? They were on the wrong side of the barrier too."

"Because Leila engineered them to have a perfect light-dark magic balance," Nero remembered. "The barriers' magic didn't see them as a threat."

I looked at Aerilyn. "Did you engineer the monsters who broke through the barriers at Desert Rose and here?"

"No, I did not engineer their magic. Those monsters are like any other monsters that spawn from the plains of monsters." She tapped her index finger thoughtfully to her cheek. "Ok, maybe not exactly like all the other monsters. No monster is exactly like all the others. They come tall and small, weak and powerful."

Powerful…

"The monster who broke through the barrier at Desert Rose had magic beyond anything I'd ever seen," I said. "And so do the monsters rampaging through Pandemonium right now. That's it, isn't it? All the monsters who broke through the barriers have new and powerful magic."

Aerilyn clapped her hands together. "Yes."

"You lured those special monsters to the barrier, didn't you?"

"I did. And it was a real pain in the ass, I'll have you know. Have you ever tried to shepherd a behemoth armored panther that can make itself invisible whenever it wants and shoots swarms of magic discs at you when it's pissed off?"

"No, I just killed one."

"Killing them is easy. It's not killing them before you get them where you need them to go that's the problem."

Aerilyn and I clearly had very different ideas of what the word ‘easy' meant.

"Back to the barriers," I said. "They were built centuries ago. They can't handle these new, powerful monsters, can they?"

"The barriers could handle them. Except…" Her voice trailed off.

"Except for what?"

She gestured toward the control panel for the Magitech barrier. "See for yourself."

"You wanted me to come to this tower. It was your suggestion."

"Yes, it was," she said. "Now how about you learn why?"

I went to the control panel. "I'm logged in. Finally."

"Sorry about that," Aerilyn said casually. "My monster homing beacons make communications a bit sluggish."

That explained how, a few days ago, no one had been able to contact Storm Castle or Desert Rose from beyond the Elemental Expanse.

"This homing beacon. That's how you ‘shepherded' monsters to Desert Rose and Pandemonium?"

"That was part of it. I had to get them to chase me. Or sometimes I had to chase them. But to convince them to take the final step through the sizzling magic barrier, I put a beacon high in the city that kind of made them go a bit berserk."

"And made them kill even more people," I said.

"No one died. Your bounty hunters down below have made sure of that, and so have General Windstriker's soldiers."

"You let super-powered monsters loose in two towns. Someone could have died."

"A lot of people would have died if the demons' council had hired anyone else but me. Be thankful I show a lot more restraint than my competition."

"How about you show some restraint now and shut off your monster homing beacon," Nero said sharply.

"Fine." She pressed a button on her watch. "Done. The monsters are less enraged. They should be more straightforward to kill now." A sly smile lifted her lips. "Should give your soldiers an easier time, Windstriker."

Nero leveled a cold glower on her.

I looked at the barrier's control panel. It displayed information for not only this barrier, but all the other barriers throughout the world.

"Notice anything odd?" Aerilyn asked.

I scrolled through the various screens. There was a lot of information on them, all neatly organized into dense little graphs and charts I could barely read and hardly understand. Magic input. Magic output. Location. Coverage. History. The list went on and on. Impact report. I understood that one. It tallied all the times something had hit a Magitech barrier.

Nero came up behind me.

"Does any of this look weird to you?" I asked him.

"Not so far," he said.

He was so close that his chest hummed delightfully against my back as he spoke. Goosebumps rippled across my entire body.

"Oh, honestly! And you two call yourselves angels!" Aerilyn puffed in exasperation. "Go to ‘magic output' and overlay ‘actual output' over ‘maximum possible output'."

I did as she said.

"The Magitech barriers are only operating at one-quarter of the strength that they could do," Nero noticed immediately.

"If we could bump up the barriers' magic levels, that might keep out the new, more powerful monsters," I said.

"Then why don't you try that?" Aerilyn suggested.

So I tried. "It's not working." I frowned. "The system says the magic's already allocated to another job. What the hell? What could be using three times as much magic as keeping the monsters on the other side of the wall?"

I felt a flush of heat as Nero's arm slid along my ribcage.

He reached past me to touch the control panel. "I'm tracing the magic allocations." His fingers deftly navigated the system's convoluted organizational system.

"I hate menus. And sub-menus. And sub-sub-menus," I muttered.

"You're not very patient."

"No, I'm not." I glanced over my shoulder at him. "But this obviously isn't your first time."

His fingers continued to slide and tap, even as his eyes met mine. "Are you flirting with me, Leda?"

"Yes."

Nero grunted. He offered no words to accompany that grunt, so I chose to believe it was a grunt uttered in approval of my totally inappropriate behavior.

"You're here," I whispered. "In Pandemonium."

"I go where trouble leads me."

I leaned back into him, molding my back into the hard contours of his body.

"Leda, you're making it hard for me to move my arms," he protested, but he made no attempt to move away.

I considered that a step in the right direction. So I took the next step.

"I've missed you, Nero."

His head dipped closer to mine, and I could have sworn I felt him inhale the scent of my skin. Still, he said nothing. Nero Windstriker, my silent archangel warrior. That's all right. I could make more than enough conversation for the both of us.

"I dreamt about you. A lot," I added.

He continued to zip through the system.

"Last night, when I dreamt of you, you were naked."

His hand stopped for a moment, then returned to what it had been doing. "I trust I didn't do anything unbefitting of my station in this dream?"

I chuckled softly. "Of course not. I really enjoyed it actually."

"Stop it, Leda. You're making me feel guilty."

"You shouldn't feel guilty." I turned around and set my hands on his face. "Maybe I'm the one who should feel guilty."

He sighed. "This isn't the right time to discuss this."

"Don't mind me. I'll wait," Aerilyn said. I could hear the smile shining through her words.

I held Nero's gaze. "We shouldn't let anything stand between us. I love you. I know I'm not perfect, but I'm glad you reached out to me in my dreams. I'm glad you told me to come here to Pandemonium. I'm just so glad to see you again."

He peeled his hand off the panel and brushed it gently down my cheek. "I'm glad to see you again too, Leda. But I didn't visit you in your dreams."

"Not even once?"

"No."

"So you didn't tell me to come here?

"No."

I'd hoped that it had really been Nero in my dreams, but I wasn't really surprised that it had been nothing more than my own mind fulfilling my deepest wish to see him again. Honestly, I'd known it was just a dream.

"Leda."

I smiled through my disappointment. "Yes?"

"I'm going to need my arm again."

"Right." I ducked under his arm, giving him space to work.

"I've found it," Nero declared after a few long, silent minutes. "I know where the magic is going."

Aerilyn pressed her hands together. "Well? Don't leave us hanging, pretty boy."

He shot a cool look at her. "How long have the demons known about this?"

"Since the Magitech barriers first went up. It happened at the same time, so it was rather obvious, you know." She smirked at him. "Makes you wonder why no one at the Legion has figured it out by now."

"What is she talking about?" I asked Nero.

"All that extra magic, three times as much as what goes into the Magitech barriers that protect humanity from the monsters…" He pointed at the graph on the screen. "…it's all going into powering the ward the gods cast to keep the demons off the Earth."

For a moment, I couldn't say anything, but then the words started tumbling out. "This is the real reason the gods had humanity build the walls and Magitech generators, isn't it? Their design, our labor. They didn't do it to save us from the monsters. They used us to banish their enemies from this battlefront."

"Indeed," said Aerilyn. "But the monsters have continued to breed and evolve over time. They've grown stronger and developed new magical abilities. All the while, the barrier that is supposed to keep them out remains the same. Already, some of the monsters are strong enough to pass through it. Right now, their numbers are so few that you might be able to fight them off. But the monsters' magic evolves quickly. Give it a few years, or maybe as little as a few months. There will be so many of them who can pass through the barriers that you won't be able to stop them. The Earth's cities will fall. And humanity will fall along with it."

I looked at Nero. "The gods won't let that happen, right? They want the Earth."

"The Magitech generators can make enough magic to keep out all monsters, but only by sacrificing the ward that keeps out the demons," said Aerilyn.

"What do you think?" I asked Nero.

"I think that as much as the gods want the Earth, they'd rather see it all burn to the ground than yield a single inch to the demons," he replied.

I sighed. "I think you're right."

"The gods' choice is clear," said Aerilyn. "The question is, Leda Pandora, what is your choice? Will you break the gods' ward to save the people of Earth from the monsters? Or will you uphold the gods' will and spearhead the end of humanity?"

I clenched my fists. "My choice is clear too. I choose the people. I swore to protect them, and that's just what I'm going to do. Their lives matter more than immortal politics." I glanced at Nero.

He nodded. "Agreed."

Nero returned his attention to the control panel. The flash of light across the Magitech barrier—followed by the sudden end in monster snarls and the cheers of people on the streets—told me that we'd succeeded. We'd saved the Earth from the monsters. And from the looks of the barrier, it would stay safe from them for a very long time. A bright white glow had replaced the barrier's dull gold sheen. It was more powerful now than it had ever been before.

"Congratulations, Leda Pandora. You've passed the demons' test." Aerilyn clapped her hands together, a sardonic smirk lifting up one corner of her mouth. "You've proven you aren't just some mindless puppet who blindly follows the gods' orders. You really are a champion for the greater good, and the demons welcome you as a true ally."

I'd done it. I'd accomplished the impossible task Faris had set me when he'd made me Heaven's Emissary to Hell. However, I didn't think he'd be pleased by how I'd gotten the job done.

"The demons can freely roam the Earth now," Nero commented. "There will be consequences to what we've done here today."

"Bring them on, gods and demons, and their stupid immortal war," I declared. "Their war has been here all along. It didn't leave with the demons; the Earth simply became a battlefield by proxy. It's time now for gods and demons to finally put their differences aside. They need to stop fighting one another and unite to fight the real threat: the Guardians."

I looked up at the sky for a sign that gods and demons had heard me, but there was no sign to be seen. Figured. Deities always made such a show when it suited them, but when you needed them to give you a sign that they were listening, they were completely silent.

"Well, my work here is done." Aerilyn jumped up onto the ledge. Bright, shimmering silver wings unfolded from her back, their feathers rippling in the wind. "Be seeing you around, Leda." Grinning, she saluted me, then stepped off the edge of the tower.

"She is so weird," I commented to Nero as I watched her fly away from town.

"Well, you two are related."

"You really amuse yourself with your own jokes, don't you?"

"I have my moments."

His gaze ensnared mine. I couldn't look away, and I didn't want to either. I took a step toward him.

He stepped back. "Our work is far from done."

"Of course." I checked the urge to slouch in disappointment—and the need to grab him and demand what the hell I had to do to make things right between us again. "The curse. If Leila was never infected, do we think angels are immune? Aerilyn seems to think so if she's flaunting her wings."

"Dr. Harding is investigating that possibility."

"Investigating? So we still can't use our magic?" I asked.

"I'm afraid not."

"Great." I looked down, over the tower's edge, our way back to the ground. "Somehow, it looked less steep on the way up."

Humor flashed in Nero's eyes. "It's a wall, Pandora. All walls are built perpendicular to the ground."

"Not the walls I build," I said proudly.

He laughed, and that made me laugh too.

"So do you want to go down first, or should I?" I asked him.

* * *

We endedup climbing down side-by-side. Doing things the hard and human way sure brought back memories of my days as Nero's initiate. As we descended the tower—with nothing standing between us and an untimely drop except our hands, feet, and sheer strength of will—I wondered if he was remembering those days too.

When we were back on street level, I saw that a Legion airship had just reached the edge of town.

"Expecting visitors?" I asked Nero.

"That is Nyx's airship."

"Then let's go say hi to the First Angel."

By the time we reached the place where the airship had docked, there were Legion soldiers patrolling every street leading to and from the dock in every direction. Nyx was there too, talking to Calli, of all people. My foster mother looked particularly grave.

When the First Angel saw us, she walked toward us, her dark hair swirling all around her, defying gravity as usual. "Windstriker. Pandora. You're late," she declared. "So we had to go ahead and save the world without you."

Nyx sure appeared to be in an awfully good mood. She didn't usually smile so brightly in front of all these people.

"You've discovered who's behind the curse," Nero guessed. Except when he made a guess, it sounded like an irrefutable statement of fact.

"Discovered and arrested," Nyx confirmed.

She waved toward a line of soldiers marching two handcuffed prisoners toward the airship.

"Gemini and Sagittarius?" I gasped. "But they don't have any magic. How could they cause a magic curse?"

"They might not have any magic, but they are adept tinkerers," replied Nyx. "Remember the collar the Guardians used to control Meda?"

How could I forget? Under the collar's influence, Meda had nearly destroyed most of humanity. That had been only a few weeks ago, but it felt like an eternity had passed since then. So much had happened in that time. Nero and I had gotten married, I'd trained for one week with Heaven's Army, Nero and I had quarreled, and I'd spent nearly every waking moment since then chasing the curse's trail of death and destruction.

"It appears Gemini and Sagittarius found broken pieces of the Guardians' control collars and managed to put one back together again," said Nyx. "Then they took that collar and put it on someone with magic: an angel with magic, to be precise. They forced that angel to create the curse."

"Which angel?" Nero asked.

"Colonel Fireswift."

"Colonel Fireswift?" I could hardly contain my shock. In fact, I didn't contain it at all. "Gemini and Sagittarius stuck a control collar on Colonel Fireswift and made him create the curse?"

"That's what I said, Pandora," Nyx snapped impatiently.

"And then they had Fireswift infect the rogue vampire nest in Purgatory?" Nero asked.

"Exactly." Nyx looked far more pleased with his question than she had with mine. "We found Colonel Fireswift early this morning. He'd been missing for nearly a day. He had black spots in his memory going back over a week. The Legion's Interrogators are trying to reconstruct his memory now. When they do, Fireswift will be able to tell us how he created the curse, and we can get started on a cure."

"Why would Gemini and Sagittarius want to create a curse that causes people's own magic to turn against them?" I asked.

"We've determined that they are members of an anti-magic organization, one which believes the world was better off before the gods and demons came here," Nyx said.

Given the mess I'd just sorted out with the Magitech barriers and the gods' ward against demons, all done in the name of their blasted immortal war and at the expense of humanity, I wasn't sure this anti-magic organization was wrong about that. In fact, I was certain the Earth had been better off before the gods and demons had come. But creating a curse that killed innocent people wouldn't make the gods and demons behave. It only killed innocent people.

"This anti-magic organization wants to bring things back to a world before magic," Nyx continued. "They hope to kill all the supernaturals, or at the very least make them afraid to use their magic."

"So let me get this straight. Gemini and Sagittarius found the control collars we destroyed. Then they somehow managed to not only reassemble them, but also overpower an angel long enough to stick a control collar on him. With Colonel Fireswift under their power, they forced him to create a curse that killed supernaturals who used their magic. And they did this all to push the agenda of a crazy anti-magic organization."

"That about covers it," Nyx agreed.

I frowned. "Doesn't anyone else think this all sounds, well, rather convenient?"

Nyx's brow furrowed. "What are you implying, Pandora?"

"I'm not implying anything. I'm stating straight-out that this whole thing stinks like week-old fish."

Nyx gave me a frosty look. "Your opinion has been duly noted."

And duly forgotten, no doubt. It seemed like Nyx was so happy to have solved the mystery of this catastrophic curse that she wasn't thinking things through. She wasn't digging deep. She wasn't questioning things as an angel should. The solution was just too neat.

Nyx clearly wasn't interested in my skepticism right now. Maybe later, if the investigation she'd usurped from me stalled. Maybe then, she'd finally listen to me. I really hoped so. Because my gut told me this was far from over.