Angel Fury (Immortal Legacy #2) - Ella Summers Page 0,10

to swallow the tremors and, most importantly, not fall on his face in front of two angels.

Damiel handed him a bundle of papers. “Send in the next person on that list for questioning.”

Major Grant’s bloody fingers smeared the top page. He barely managed a salute, then he left the room with the list.

I waited until he was gone—until Damiel and I were alone in Colonel Spellstorm’s office—then I frowned at him. “How many people are you going to interrogate?”

“As many as it takes to prove my suspicions about Colonel Spellstorm.”

“Suspicions? I thought you were certain that he’s a traitor.”

“I am certain.”

“Based on what evidence?”

“His pattern of activities has changed.”

“And?”

“And he’s an angel,” said Damiel. “Angels don’t change. We follow very clear patterns, without deviation.”

“Ok, so if angels don’t change, then how did you get to be so cold-hearted? You sure didn’t start out that way.”

I knew he was more than this person he pretended to be. But every day, he was changing, becoming more and more the Master Interrogator, and less and less Damiel.

“Angels don’t change abruptly,” he replied. “Change is slow. But recently, Colonel Spellstorm’s behavior suddenly shifted. Something big is happening.”

“Maybe he has a secret lover he’s hiding away from the Legion,” I suggested.

“That is unlikely. Colonel Spellstorm has never had a problem taking a lover, or sometimes several lovers at once. As long as angels marry whom they command us to marry and we do our duty to produce children when the time comes, the Legion doesn’t care how many lovers its angels take, or even who they are.”

He spoke so casually about it, so matter-of-factly. I wondered how many lovers Damiel had taken. And whether he still had any of them.

Wait. No. Stop. I didn’t want to know.

“Colonel Spellstorm is a highly-decorated angel,” I said. “As I recall, he even helped you hunt down other traitors in the past.”

“That is true.”

“He is an unlikely traitor. And your insistence that he’s a traitor is based solely on ‘his pattern of activities has changed’? I hope when my day comes, I will receive a fair hearing before you tie me to my own office chair.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cadence.” His words pulsed with impatience. “You are incapable of treachery. We’ve already been through this.”

“Have we? Because all of this is feeling pretty damn familiar. Around and around the wheel of treachery goes; where it stops, nobody knows.”

“Being melodramatic will not help us in our investigation.”

“Neither will torturing everyone in this office,” I pointed out.

“I hope to uncover some information of value long before I’ve interrogated everyone. We are on a tight schedule, so I sorted the interrogation list by which soldiers are most likely to know something, in descending order.”

“Then I guess we’d better hope that some lowly initiate wasn’t the only soldier to overhear Colonel Spellstorm communicating with demons.”

“Indeed. There are over one thousand soldiers in this office. It could take us weeks to make our way down to the initiates. The demons might have already acted by then,” he said, missing my sarcasm—or at least pretending he had. “But I do find it unlikely any initiate knows anything. I’ve spent many years developing this interrogation ordering system, based on soldiers’ psychological profiles and mission history. It’s quite accurate. I rarely need to move past page one.”

“Great. We wouldn’t want you to get a paper cut while flipping the page.”

This time he didn’t miss my sarcasm.

He shot me a stern look. “I don’t understand your attitude. Don’t you want to expose any and all traitors hiding in our midst? Don’t you want to stop the demons’ return and the resulting war that will tear our world apart?”

“Of course I want to stop them,” I said. “But you can just read their thoughts. There’s no need to break their will.”

“Thoughts can be masked, or even manipulated with sufficient practice. Using Siren’s Song is the fastest, most reliable way to accomplish our mission and save the world.”

“But at what cost?”

“I am quite experienced in the art of interrogation, Cadence. Everyone I question here will recover.”

“I wasn’t just talking about the cost to the people you interrogate, Damiel. I was talking about the cost to you. I meant what it does to you—how it changes you—to break so many people.”

“As I said, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep this world safe.”

A knock on the door interrupted whatever I might have said to him, and Damiel waved in the next person on his very-long, meticulously-sorted interrogation list.

4

Angel on a Pedestal

I sat