again.
Part II
Two hundred years later
14
The Saviors
Once again, I’d found myself in a precarious situation.
I was balanced atop a wooden ceiling beam. Black shadows, painted across a sunset-red mural looked down on me, as though they were waiting for me to fall.
Normally, such a tumble wouldn’t have concerned me. I was an angel, after all. But at the moment, I didn’t have any magic at all. That meant no wings to help me fly and no spells to catch me should I slip and fall the very long way down to the ground. It also meant I had no supernatural strength to hold me up here. Right now, all I had to help me were my sheer willpower and my centuries of experience. Neither one was dependent on my having magic.
“Everything is progressing as planned,” said Ria, one of the Guardians seated around the conference table.
I was listening in on their meeting using a mundane, no-magic microphone I’d constructed. Right now, with my supernatural senses muted, I couldn’t hear any better than a human. Neither magic nor magical technology—Magitech—worked inside the Guardians’ temple. So I’d had to get creative. Hence, the microphone.
I hadn’t yet figured out why magic didn’t work inside this building, though I suspected the Guardians had constructed the effect to level the playing field on their home turf. They did not possess any magic themselves.
“The goddess is completely under our control,” said another Guardian.
I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know most of their names, actually. Though I’d been in the Guardians’ Sanctuary for nearly two centuries, I’d seen little of them. The angels Taron and Giselle served as the voice of the Guardians. They even called themselves Guardians, but everyone knew they weren’t. The Guardians didn’t possess magic; Taron and Giselle did.
The two angels ran things around here—while the Guardians remained hidden away inside their temple, supposedly engrossed in prayer. But this ‘praying’ seemed an awful lot like scheming to me.
“Windstriker and the Pandora are investigating the control collars,” said another Guardian.
Windstriker. That was Nero’s angel name. My Nero, my son. And the reason I was here right now, spying on the Guardians. I’d overheard Taron and Giselle talking about the Guardians’ plans for him. I was here to find out what those plans were—and to stop them if need be.
“Windstriker and the Pandora won’t be able to stand in the way of the cleansing. The goddess is under our control. They are no match for her power.”
Cleansing? What cleansing? Whatever it was, it didn’t sound good.
“It will happen in Purgatory, in a few hours’ time.”
“The Earth will be cleansed, and the surviving humans’ faith in their false gods will be shaken.”
Just as I’d thought: this cleansing meant nothing good. The Guardians were planning to kill a whole lot of people and then stick the blame on the gods. Which goddess were they controlling?
Not that it mattered. Any god or goddess had enough magic to deal massive damage to humanity.
I had to stop them. I wasn’t a member of the Legion of Angels anymore, but I’d taken an oath long ago to protect the people of Earth. I was not going to allow anyone to massacre them as part of some political ploy.
The Guardians presented themselves as saviors. They sent their loyal followers all over the world to ‘save’ supernaturals in danger. The Sanctuary, a self-contained natural paradise far from the troubles of Earth, was full of these saved supernaturals. Telepaths, sirens, witches, shifters, and more. The Guardians offered safe haven for any supernatural whose magic was powerful enough to make them a target.
How convenient.
The Guardians were collecting these special people. The question was why. What where they planning on doing with us?
So far, all I knew was what I saw with my own eyes, which wasn’t much. The Guardians didn’t let anyone out of the Sanctuary unless their magic had been balanced. They took dark magic people and gave them light magic too. And vice versa. They’d been trying to ‘fix’ me for nearly two hundred years. And somehow I still wasn’t fixed. They claimed angel magic was too powerful, too complex, to fix in a mere two centuries.
No, I didn’t buy their bullshit. Not one bit.
They’d allowed me to leave the Sanctuary a few times under supervision, but never unattended. Some of the other supernaturals had been here even longer. This Sanctuary was, in truth, a prison. It’s just that none of the prisoners realized it.
Except for me. My father had raised me to have