Angel Fever (Immortal Legacy #3) - Ella Summers Page 0,9
weren’t normal. Not by any means.
“Do you have any interest in any of your suitors?” Damiel asked Leila.
“No.”
“They will continue to besiege Storm Castle until you pick one of them.”
“I know,” Leila sighed.
“Maybe she would find one of the angels more to her liking,” I said to Damiel.
“Why would she?” he replied. “Angels are an insufferable lot.”
“There are a few sufferable ones. And if Leila had an angel lover, that would clear the horde of her suitors from my castle.”
“Please don’t try to play matchmaker with me,” Leila told us.
“You really want to set her up with an angel?” Damiel asked me, ignoring her plea. “Which angel? Wardbreaker? He’s formidable—when he’s not wearing women’s shoes.”
“You really shouldn’t spread fake rumors about other angels, Damiel. They already don’t like you.”
“They aren’t fake rumors if I have photographic evidence to back them up.”
“What did Wardbreaker do to annoy you?”
“Far too much. If I listed it all, we’d be sitting here for the next few weeks.”
“Let’s not do that.”
Damiel nodded. “Then we are in agreement.”
Agreement of what? Sometimes talking to Damiel was like navigating through a labyrinth. Or trying to swim through quicksand.
“What do you like in a man?” I asked Leila.
Damiel chuckled.
I frowned at him. “What is so funny?”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, love.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, she’s not interested in any of those men because she’s just not interested in men.”
I let his words sink in.
“She likes ladies,” he said helpfully.
“Yes, I got that, thank you, Master Interrogator.”
“That’s twice, sweetheart.”
Double damn. I’d thanked him again.
But Damiel said nothing more of my error—or of Leila’s love life. We’d arrived at the Cactus Crossroads, the site of several recent dark angel sightings. Any time multiple dark angels were sighted in an area, that was cause for worry. The demons were surely up to something. It was our job to unearth their scheme and stop them.
“Over the past week, my scouts have spotted dark angels and other traitors. Including Leon Hellfire…”
Leon had been one of the Legion’s first angels. He’d served with my father. Back in those days, he’d been known as Leon Ironfist. But then he’d switched sides to the demons and been dubbed the First Betrayer.
“…Seth Battlestorm and Razeel Silverwing…”
The two dark angels always appeared together. Both were very strong telepaths, a power they used to distort reality and bend their prisoners’ minds to their will. Those two dark angels were responsible for more Legion defections than anyone else.
“…Thea…”
Just as Nyx was the First Angel, Thea was the First Dark Angel. She was a demigod, the daughter of a human and Valerian, the Demon of Technology and Dark Lord of Witches. Thea was Valerian’s great experiment, part of his quest to understand how to bestow magic on humans.
“…Balin Davenport…”
Balin wasn’t an angel. He’d joined the Legion some years after my father, roughly around the same time as Damiel. Balin had made it as far as the rank of major before one day disappearing without a trace. Everyone had thought he was dead…until years later, when Legion soldiers had encountered him leading a mercenary band. That’s when we’d realized he’d not died, but instead deserted.
“Davenport is a mercenary,” I said as we all hopped out of the parked truck. “He doesn’t serve the Dark Force. So what is he doing out here, with all these dark angels?”
“Up to no good, no doubt,” replied Damiel.
We left our truck parked at the Cactus Crossroads, one of the world’s natural magic wonders. It was an intersection of four cactus carpet paths, each one about five feet wide, each extending in a straight line as far as the eye could see.
A short hike from the Cactus Crossroads lay the ruins of an old city that had fallen when monsters overran the Earth. Little was left of the city here—or of the monsters that had destroyed it. The beasts were now nothing but skeletons, mere whispers of their former glory.
We moved through the monster graveyard. Huge skeletons dwarfed the toppled buildings. The beasts looked like some kind of cross between a mammoth and a dinosaur.
A rusted harpoon was lodged in one skeleton’s ribcage. Another of the skeletons had no head. And one was missing the entire back half of its body.
“Someone—or something—killed these beasts before the Magitech walls went up,” I said, my eyes panning across the monster graveyard. “Because the moment the wall around the Elemental Expanse went active, it vaporized any and all monsters still living inside. And vaporized monsters don’t leave skeletons behind.”