hundreds. He slipped out his sword and, looking into the eyes of the other fighter, sliced the cutting edge straight through the other’s neck, severing the head from the body.
The body didn’t dissolve into dust as the Legion always did when they fell in battle. It began to liquefy into a noxious sludge that had the Primary looking to Raphael. “You must end this, sire,” he said as Elena landed beside Raphael.
Raphael torched the dead Legion fighter with angelfire . . . but parts of the corpse yet moved in the aftermath.
“Hell.” Elena touched his arm . . . and a lick of wildfire jolted into him even as she gasped. The wildfire tasted of her. Of defiant life.
He used a droplet of what she’d given him to eliminate the last pieces of the corpse before glancing at the Primary. “Do you feel him regenerating?”
The Primary shook his head. “His body was consumed. We are now seven hundred and seventy-six in flesh.”
“I’m sorry.” Elena placed her hand on the Primary’s shoulder, her expression scored with pain. “I know you’ve been together eons.”
Cocking his head to look up at her, the Primary said, “He is not lost. He is part of us. Only his body has been destroyed.”
Raphael had never quite understood the level to which the Legion were enmeshed, but he was glad to hear they hadn’t permanently lost one of their own. “Was he hit by Lijuan’s power?”
“No. He was bitten by one of her angelic fighters.”
“Bitten?” Elena shoved a flyaway strand of hair impatiently behind her ear. “Like a vampire?”
“The angel sank his teeth into the arm.” The Primary indicated his biceps area. “Others have also been bitten but none of mine.”
Raphael took off without warning at the same instant that Elena said, “Raphael! Go!” His flight buffeted Elena and the Primary into flattened positions on the roof, his wings white fire.
He landed on the infirmary balcony in a matter of split seconds, ran inside.
“Sire!” Nisia looked to him with desperate eyes from her position kneeling on a bed. It held brown-haired and blue-eyed Andreja, her wings a slightly darker shade of brown than the rich mahogany of her hair. The tall and muscled angel was twisting and fighting the hands that sought to hold her down for Nisia’s attempts at healing.
Her bare leg was bloody from an injury, but that wasn’t what caught Raphael’s attention. An ugly blackness coughed from Andreja’s mouth, stark against the cream of her skin.
Placing his hand on the angel’s breastbone, Raphael punched in the tiniest possible droplet of the wildfire Elena had given him.
Wildfire hurt Lijuan, was not meant for even old angels.
The tough canvas of Andreja’s fighting tunic disintegrated in a scorched burst where he’d touched her. She screamed, high and agonized, before collapsing. The visible bite mark on the decaying flesh of her arm crackled with wildfire.
That didn’t stop Nisia from putting her hands on the angel. “She’s alive. Laric, finish stitching up your patient, then attend to Andreja’s leg.”
The younger healer nodded, his head bare today. Though he continued to wear a cape over his damaged wings, his hood had fallen off in the chaos of having to deal with so many badly injured patients. It was the first time Raphael had seen the thick, deep auburn of his hair touched by light.
“Watch for the infection and tell me if it returns,” Raphael said, catching a glimpse of stormfire wings in his peripheral vision. “Where are the others who came in with bites?”
There were five in all and he was able to drive the black poison from all of them—at a speed that gave him hope that the wildfire could cause Lijuan significant damage. Andreja was already conscious and sitting upright by the time he reached the last of the bitten.
“Sire,” she rasped after he was done, her voice holding the cadence and rhythm of her long-ago homeland in what was now the far edge of Michaela’s territory. “Inside, the blackness, it eats at the soul. It wants to devour and dominate.”
Laric moved quietly to assist Andreja, kneeling down in front of her so he could begin to work on the open wound on her leg. She looked down at the top of his head, then moved her hand to put her fingers below his chin, tilt up his head.
Wait, hbeebti, he said when he felt Elena stiffen beside him. Andreja is not a cruel angel.
Today, she took in the dark pink scars that ridged the white of Laric’s