it back on track. We must expel these foreign invaders.”
He shot a psychic blast at me. I dodged. The blast smashed into the ceiling, and a storm of stone chunks rained down on me.
I couldn’t fly past them, nor could I hope to destroy every piece.
Damiel cast a magic ceiling, a protective umbrella of psychic strands, over me. The stone chunks smashed against it, but none made it through his spell.
Colonel Spellstorm blasted Damiel, disrupting his umbrella spell. The broken ceiling pieces froze in the air. The rogue angel grinned, then all the stones shot toward Damiel. Like a meteor shower, they slammed him against the wall. Damiel’s hand reached out and caught the lip of the nearest balcony. He pulled himself up.
Colonel Spellstorm flew toward him, magic firing. He tried to blast Damiel off the balcony—and, when that didn’t work, he tried to blast the balcony out from under him.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Damiel isn’t your enemy.”
“He will hunt me to the ends of the Earth.”
Damiel glared at him, blood and sweat trickling down his face. “Yes, I will.”
Colonel Spellstorm closed in for the kill.
I launched myself at the rogue angel, grabbing him with one hand, holding him back. He struggled to free himself. He was still moving toward Damiel. My hand tightened on the Diamond Tear. I pierced his back with the dagger’s blade.
It was an immortal weapon, and I’d dealt a critical hit. A pale, deathly sheen slid over Colonel Spellstorm’s body.
“Cadence Lightbringer, you have doomed the Earth,” he said through bloodstained lips.
And then he died. His wings stopped beating, and he dropped out of the air. His body was dead before it hit the ground.
I set down on the balcony next to Damiel, my heart heavy.
Damiel met my eyes. I didn’t have to say anything. He knew.
“You had to do it,” he told me.
I looked from the dagger in my hand, to the dead angel’s body far below on the ground. Then I looked at Damiel, and for the first time, I saw the damage to his body. Half of his wing feathers were gone, completely burnt away.
I gaped at him in horror.
He threw his ruined wings a casual look. “They will regrow.”
His face did not betray any pain, yet he must have been in agony. Yes, we angels were tough, but the power of heightened senses was a double-edged sword. It meant we felt things stronger than others did. And that included pain. That was one reason we were trained so hard. We had to make ourselves tough. We had to learn to push through anything and everything, no matter how much it hurt.
“Let me heal you.” I reached toward him.
He sidestepped me. “Not this time, Princess. This is an injury only time will heal.”
“But I can speed up the healing process.”
“Don’t waste your magic. You will need your strength.”
“The battle is over, Damiel,” I pointed out.
“Is it? I’m not so sure.”
“Colonel Spellstorm is dead. I killed him.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“I know.”
“Spellstorm was going to kill us both and then unleash hell on Earth,” Damiel reminded me.
“I know.”
Saying it didn’t make me feel any better. I’d been taught that angels were holy, their lives sacred. That to kill one was to reject the gods who’d endowed them with heavenly gifts of magic. That to kill one was to weaken the Earth and place all its people into grave danger.
It was hard to move past those lessons.
“You swapped the daggers,” I said to Damiel, trying to ignore my own guilt. It was illogical, but by killing an angel, I felt like I had doomed the Earth. “You weren’t fooled by Colonel Spellstorm.”
“Of course I suspected Colonel Spellstorm. I suspect everyone. So as a precaution, I swapped the daggers with fake ones and hid the real ones.”
So when Colonel Spellstorm thought he was stealing our daggers, he was in reality stealing the fakes. And leaving other fakes in their place.
“This is it,” I said, swallowing a relieved sigh. “It’s over. The mission is over.”
“For now. But there will be other traitors.”
With that pessimistic message delivered, Damiel stepped off the balcony and dropped to the ground. His wings might have been out of order, but he was not helpless. Before Legion soldiers gained their wings, we learned to jump.
I jumped down after him. I didn’t feel like flaunting my wings in front of him, not when his beautiful feathers looked like they’d been put through a blender.
“Wait.” Damiel set his arm in front of me. “We