Angel Fever (Immortal Legacy #3) - Ella Summers Page 0,69

searched. “Have you ever wondered what is the true purpose of the immortal daggers?”

“Many times, but I have been unable to arrive at a satisfactory answer. We don’t know enough about the Immortals to make speculations about their motives.”

“But they are generally seen as benevolent beings, as deities who represent balance and harmony.”

“Where are you going with this?” he asked me.

“The Immortals must have recognized the dangers these powerful daggers represented, and yet they made them anyway. Why?”

“We may never know.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me. I prefer to know everything,” he replied. “In the course of this journey, we might discover the Immortals’ intentions for creating the sixteen daggers. Or we might not. Whatever the case, our mission remains the same: to destroy them before they kill anyone else.”

We hopped to the next island. This one was completely blanketed in a tropical jungle. The further down the island chain we went, the hotter and more humid the air grew. It wasn’t long before my skin was drenched in sweat. I peeled off my jacket and stuffed it into my pack. I’d clearly come overdressed.

“Yes,” Damiel agreed. His eyes slid over me. “You are overdressed.”

“Damiel, you really need to learn to stop reading people’s minds.”

“Princess.” He cast a languid, sidelong glance my way. “You can’t invite me in, and then get upset when I take you up on your offer.”

A roar of thunder cut through my response. Dark clouds rolled over the sun at many times their usual speed. Hurricane winds lashed the islands. In the matter of just a few seconds, the weather had gone from bright and sunny, to dark and stormy.

There was another roar, but this time it hadn’t come from the sky.

“Monsters,” I said to Damiel.

Feral wolves burst out of the jungle, fourteen of them in all. We drew our swords, slashing and cutting. A few slashes and a few cuts later, they all lay dead on the ground.

“Well, that was easy,” Damiel said, looking down upon the dead beasts.

More monsters were already coming out of the shadows: wolves, giant frogs, and monkeys too. Damiel thrust out his hand and threw a telekinetic blast at the attacking horde. The spell went right through the monsters, hardly affecting them at all. He tried a curse next, but it too had little effect on them.

“Interesting,” he commented.

The monsters were almost upon us. I lifted my sword. It seemed to work much better on them than spells.

“Wait,” Damiel told me. “Use a shifting spell on them. I want to test a theory.”

So I wrapped my shifting magic around the monsters, turning them into a bunch of fluffy yellow ducklings. Then Damiel compelled them to waddle off into the jungle.

“That was bizarre,” I said as we cleared the jungle. “The monsters were very weak against some kinds of magic, yet almost completely immune to other kinds.”

“Precisely following the wheel of magic and counter magic. Vampire magic was extremely effective. Elemental magic worked, but it wasn’t as strong. Telekinetic and fairy magic didn’t work at all.”

We flew to the next island. From up here in the air, we had a view of the entire island chain.

“But we were fighting three distinct kinds of monsters,” I said. “Their strengths and weaknesses shouldn’t be completely identical.”

“Which means it must be this world which possesses the magical strengths and weaknesses, not the monsters themselves.”

The earth down below began to shake violently. A volcano erupted on one of the islands. Large red birds shot up from that island, fleeing the fiery explosion. As soon as they saw us, they decided attacking us was far more fun than escaping certain destruction.

Sometimes monsters had no sense of self-preservation.

Damiel and I met the belligerent birds in the air. Experience had taught us the monsters here were very weak against physical attacks—vampire magic—so we attacked with our swords. Our steel hardly scratched their bodies; the blades only sank in, like they’d hit a big, fluffy marshmallow. I tried setting those flying marshmallows on fire, but they didn’t burn. I tried shifting them into stones, but they remained stubbornly avian.

My wings suddenly vanished, and I fell out of the sky. Damiel was in the same boat. Luckily, the birds’ attack had pushed us lower, toward a large jungle island. We didn’t have far to fall. And we landed on our feet, a kiss of good luck in a very unlucky day.

“No magic seems to have any effect whatsoever on the birds,” I said, looking up. I didn’t see