Chapter 32

Ilooked down at my round belly. I rubbed it slowly. "What have you done to me?"

"Nothing crazy," replied Indira. "Just channeled some extra life magic into speeding up your pregnancy. You're welcome."

I opened my mouth to say something, then realized I didn't even know what to say to that.

"It's an easy phoenix spell," Indira said to Gin with a smile. "I can teach it to you."

Gin was speechless. She could only gape at her mother. This clearly wasn't how she'd envisioned meeting her real parents.

"You shouldn't mess with nature," I told Indira.

The phoenix looked at me, perplexed. "The gods and demons ask for the quick-fix treatment all the time."

"Quick-fix," I repeated, shaking my head in disbelief.

"Why are you complaining?" Indira looked honestly confused. "I spared you the long, grueling months of pregnancy. I hear the final stretch is especially bad."

Tessa found her voice. "You've heard? You're a mother. Shouldn't you know?"

Indira looked at her, then at her sister Rosette. "No. Rosette and I…well, we were never actually pregnant."

"Like Thea?" Bella asked.

"Oh, no," Rosette said. "Not quite like Thea. There were no immortal artifacts involved in your creation, girls. We—"

"Careful," Indira said. "We can't say too much."

"Why the hell not?" Gin demanded. My sister seemed to have found her voice too, and she was fuming mad. "You just pop up here and declare that you're our mothers. And that's that, no explanation of why you abandoned us, no apology for doing it. Nothing."

"We didn't abandon you," Indira told her.

"Then what happened?" Gin planted her hands on her hips. "Explain."

Indira shook her head. "We can't."

"How convenient," Gin said drily.

Indira looked like she didn't know what to say. Her happy, comfortable manner had evaporated. She'd talked us through all the people she'd killed without even batting an eye, but Gin's reaction had frozen her.

"We don't have time for this." Gretchen looked at me. "You don't have time for this, Leda. In a few hours, your babies will be here. Now you have a choice. You can either use that powerful moment of birth to channel the life magic into destroying the barrier that keeps the Guardians hidden inside their Sanctuary. Or you can stew over how very horrible we are and do nothing. In the latter case, you will have doomed all the people in the Sanctuary to death, including Arina's children."

Arina's hands tightened into fists.

"And if you allow those people to die, the Guardians will gain magic that rivals the Immortals," Gretchen said. "That will put everyone in danger, including your babies."

I scowled at her. Nero looked like he wanted to rip her head off with his bare hands.

"You still have a chance to make the deaths of your angels and soldiers mean something," Gretchen told us. "They can mean the end of the Guardians. Or you can sit here and argue morality while the Guardians move ever closer to their ultimate goal. The choice is yours."

We didn't have a choice. Not really. Gretchen and her sisters had manipulated us into a corner, and they knew it.

Another pegasus shot through the air at the airship, full speed. When it got close, it did a long somersault to slow down, then landed on the deck. An armored woman slid off the saddle. She took off her helmet to unveil herself as yet another octuplet.

"Are you all right?" Indira asked her.

"Better than the other guys," her sister replied. "The Guardians' forces tried to take control over the Vault, but I changed the password. They're locked out."

I guessed this ‘password' was what allowed people to get into the Vault without picking the lock at the full moon, when the magic was just right.

She took a shaky step forward. Bloody and bruised with half of her armor plates dented or knocked clean off, she looked like she'd barely escaped a battle with her life.

"Great." Basanti's voice sizzled with sarcasm. "Now there are five of them."

"Which one is that?" Leila wondered.

"It's River," Zane answered. "The one who got me out of the Sanctuary."

River bowed to him. "Nice to see you again, Zane."

"Wait, if you can get someone out of the Sanctuary, can't you just sneak someone in?" I asked the rogue Guardian.

"It's not that easy," River told me. "My magic nullified Zane's magic. It made him appear dead, thereby tricking the Sanctuary's system."

"I used the same trick to get out," Cadence said. "I pretended to be dead."

"But I can't hide all of your magic." River shook her head. "And getting in is even trickier than getting out, especially right now. After I got Zane out, the Guardians locked me out of the Sanctuary."

"Why did you get him out anyway?" I asked her.

"I told you before, Leda. You need your family. They make you strong, strong enough to fight the Guardians. And strong enough to beat them."

"Yes, you did say that. But there's something else, another reason you helped Zane escape and find me. You wanted me to trust you," I decided.

"You should trust us," Inali told me.

"It's hard to trust someone who hides behind another's face," Calli told the person she'd once considered a friend.

"But we aren't hiding," said Inali, the mimic. "We revealed ourselves to you."

"But you haven't revealed everything. You're still hiding behind secrets," I told her. "For example, why was River staying with the Guardians for all those years?"

"As a spy. I was their eyes inside the Sanctuary. It was my job to keep an eye on the Guardians' dangerous plans."

"Their eyes?" I said. "Whose eyes were you inside the Sanctuary?

River said nothing.

"Well?"

"I can't say."

"Can't?" I asked. "Or won't?"

River didn't answer. I had not missed these evasive conversations with her.

"Can you at least tell me more about the Prophecy the Guardians are so worked up about?" I asked River.

She looked at Gertrude, who nodded.

"Very well," said River.

"So apparently the Guardians had a plan for Nero's parents—and, presumably, Nero," I said. "You've shown us my past, but what about Nero's? Did you interfere in his past as you did in mine?"

"No, that wasn't our doing. It was the Guardians." River looked at Cadence and Damiel. "The Guardians watched you throughout your lives. They arranged for you to meet. They set the scene so you would fall in love."

Damiel's face might have been etched in stone. Even the usual spark of humor was missing from his eyes.

River turned to Nero. "They wanted you to be born, so you could father a child with Leda Pandora. This child was to be the instrument the Guardians would use to create their new order."

"The Guardians tried to kill Leda." Nero's voice scratched like gravel. "Up on that rooftop in Purgatory, when they'd gained control over Meda."

"One of the Guardians tried to kill Leda," said River. "One who, out of the belief that the Angel of Chaos was too dangerous to be allowed to live a moment longer, acted against the other Guardians' plans. The others didn't want Leda killed until after she'd served her purpose and given birth to the child."

That showed the Guardians were not a single, unified force. If they had different ideas on how to do things, maybe we could use that against them. Maybe we could get them to turn against one another.

"You seem to know a lot about the Guardians' plans," Cadence commented.

"I have been watching them very closely for a very long time," River said.

"What about Illias?" Cadence asked. "He took credit for my relationship with Damiel. He had a plan for us too: to get him the daggers."

"There was a time when Illias's plans for you overlapped with the Guardians' plans for you," River said. "So for a while, they worked together, united in their hatred of the Immortals."

"Illias told the Guardians how to kill the Immortals and trap their souls inside immortal artifacts," Gertrude said. "And the Guardians helped Illias set the scene for Cadence and Damiel to meet."

"But Illias and the Guardians had different motivations," said River. "Illias only wanted to get rid of the Immortals so that they were out of the way, while the Guardians went about achieving their goal of gaining the magic the Immortals had specifically denied them."

"As long as the goals of Illias and the Guardians were aligned, they worked together," Gertrude said. "But when their goals diverged, they parted ways."

"So, to answer your question, Leda, that's how both Illias and the Guardians had a plan for Cadence and Damiel," River concluded.

"This is so nice, but we really must start our preparations. We have very little time left for question and answer." Indira glanced at our very round bellies. "You have very little time until your babies are here."

"To gain magic, the Guardians are planning on a mass sacrifice of magic energy of their ‘rescued' people—and it's all happening very soon. If you want to save everyone…" River glanced at Arina. "…if you want to save your children, then we need to begin our preparations for battle."

I did not like the octuplets' savage rearranging of life and death, as though they got to decide who lived and who died. But right now, we didn't have the luxury of arguing with them. We had little time left, and we needed Indira's magic to attack the Guardians.

I'd promised Arina that I would help her save her children, and I was determined to save the other people the Guardians held prisoner too. In my heart too, I knew I had to stop the Guardians now and save my daughter's future.

"We're ready." I looked at the other pregnant women.

They all nodded. I saw the same determination shining in their eyes that I felt burning in my heart.

Nero caught my hand. "Wait."

"I'm not sitting this one out," I told him. "Not this time. You can't do this without us."

His voice was softer, gentler. "It's too dangerous, Leda."

"We must stop the Guardians, Nero," I told him. "We can't allow our daughter to lose her goodness or her family."

"There's an entry point to the Guardians' Sanctuary not far from here," River said.

"Then that is where we'll make our stand against them," I decided. "And save our children's futures."