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Weapons are waiting for us at the entrance to the courtyard. I sling a couple of lightweight javelins across my back. While I prefer my natural weaponry, the occasional distance weapon comes in handy.
I buried these feelings, this surge of adrenaline with rage on its heels, the ghost of fear flitting around the corners of my mind. That cold focus cutting through it all, a beam of clarity leading me through the battle. I file into the crowd, meticulously putting everything else aside. Sophia. My mother. My worries. My earthly business. My arguments with Abaddon and Diana—even my issues with my father. One by one, every thought is shut away until the only point of focus in the whole of my being is victory.
Cephalus stands on a podium at the opposite side of the courtyard. Behind him, a satellite image of Death Valley hangs on the wall, blown up to a massive size. We used to just draw the maps by hand.Nice upgrade.Maybe it’ll minimize the number of idiots who transport themselves to the wrong spot.
“To battle!” Cephalus cries.
“To battle!” The crowd echoes.
“To victory!” Cephalus shouts.
“To victory!” Comes the echo.
“To Death Valley! Hah!”
With a resoundinghah, the courtyard vanishes in a thousand puffs of smoke. The all-too-familiar feeling of falling up in an elevator crashes over me, weighing on my shoulders and knees, pressing on a point between my eyes. The pressure explodes with a crack like thunder. The smoke clears, revealing a broad expanse of cracked, white sand crawling across the baking valley to the jagged, barren mountains.
We’re a thousand demons, and yet, against the wild landscape, we seem small in number and vulnerable in position. We seem to be the first battalion to arrive, but something isn’t right. There’s an energy here, a sense of anticipation.
It’s an ambush.
“Turn out!” I shout, but my words are swallowed by the weaponized blasts of angelic horns. Soundwaves crush our army into a tight circle, corralling us, pinning most of us uselessly in the middle as angels materialize around the perimeter. Fenriz and I are pushed together back-to-back. Words are useless with the horns blowing. I shove my left shoulder back and yank my right forward.
He moves with me automatically, the years of warfare coming back to him as easily as they returned to me, pivoting his own body to shove me outward. I grab the next closest man and turn him outward, gesturing for him to do the same to the man on his other side. As the seconds tick past, I keep expecting the horns to stop. Blood is trickling from more than one ear already, and even angels breathe.
But the horns keep sounding, and the angels are marching closer. We’re struggling to compensate for the auditory onslaught and the multidirectional attack simultaneously. These soldiers aren’t accustomed to thinking on their feet, not like this. Once engaged in combat, sure. That’s what they’re trained for: to follow their leader, who follows their leader, who follows the king. The angels haven’t just changed the rules. They’ve turned them inside out.
The pressure of sound leaves me, although the sound still rings all around. I catch myself before I can pitch forward and meet the eyes of the angel directly in front of me, just a few yards ahead now. He’s breathing, filling his lungs for another blast. I’m an idiot. Of course that’s how they’re keeping it going. I jerk a javelin off my back as the angel raises the trumpet to his lips, and let it fly with all my strength. It strikes true, just beneath the angel’s helmet, sinking into his unprotected eye. His horn never makes another sound.
I break forward, bellowing a war cry as the angels scramble to fill the gap. The pattern is broken, and with it the hold they had over our battalion. They try to keep it going for just a little too long, devoted to their strategy, gambling on their own ability to compensate, but my little disruption was enough to reveal the weakness. Every angel who pauses to breathe becomes a target, and every downed angel compromises the integrity of the corral.
Fenriz is running by my side, and we reach the place where the angel fell just as the neighboring angels do. The angel’s horns burn my skin as I rip them from our downed foe’s hands, and the searing pain makes me grimace as the angels around us draw their swords. Standing back to back, Fenriz and I ready ourselves to attack.
“Switchblind!”Fenriz shouts. Before the word is fully out of his mouth, my tail is in motion. The angel opposite Fenriz gets the serrated edge of my tail across his nose, while the angel opposite me gets Fenriz’s four barbs corkscrewing into his eyes. The angels scream and slash with their swords, meeting nothing but air as Fenriz and I split, dancing around our enemies. A well-placed strike from each of us guides our blinded foes into position, and with their next violent, outraged blow, they cut each other down.
Chaos has exploded across the battlefield. The angels have finally abandoned their initial strategy, but they have another trick up their sleeves. Demons fight in packs and pairs; like wolves and lions, we prefer to divide and conquer, to overwhelm each enemy in an unstoppable tide. We’ve fought like this for as long as I can remember, and longer. It’s inherent, habitual, instinctive.
And it’s predictable.
An angel stands apart from the group, a tempting target. The nearest pack takes the bait without a second thought and charges the angel as a single unit, blind to all else. Angels move around behind them in a horseshoe, too far away to take them out—until the targeted angel blows his horn. The pack flies backward into the waiting blades of the other angels.
A flash of heavenly steel cuts across my vision and I’m locked into my own battle once more, with the screams of dying demons flashing in my ears. Fenriz is no longer by my side. I relieve the angel of his sword, ignoring the scalding pain of heaven on my hellish palms, and strike the angel’s head from his shoulders with his own weapon.
Cursing, I toss the sword aside and flick the charred flesh from my hands. I spot Fenriz a few yards away, pressed tightly into a three-demon whirlwind of teeth, tails, and claws. All around, I see angels pulling the same bait and switch stunt over and over again. Our numbers are quickly dwindling, and nobody is paying any damned attention to the angels’ strategy.
It’s happening again, right in front of me. A lone angel limps away from battle, exaggerating his injury to draw the horde.
It’s working.
A leaderless pack, feral in the midst of the chaos, tumbles after the wounded angel. Other angels sweep into position behind them, but it’s not going to go the same way this time.
The world blurs past as I race through my attack. There’s a small opening between the bottom of their helmets and the armor draping across their shoulders, narrow as the tip of my talons. Blood spills, bones split, and tendons rip as I fly past the first. By the time his loosened head succumbs to gravity, I’m already slicing into the second angel, then the third. Halfway through. I spare a glance at the “wounded” angel. His hand is on his horn, but he’s biding his time. The demons are closing quickly.
Fourth angel down. By now the bodies of their fellows are clearly visible in the gap between the attacking pack and the rest of the battle. Shouts of rage, fury, and confusion get lost in the chaos. When I reach angel number five, he’s turning to face me, sword in hand. He isn’t quite fast enough, and I’m onto my next target before his body and head split up for good.
I’ve got momentum, and a lot of it. I’m expecting the final angel to swing at me and adjust my attack accordingly. It registers in slow motion that he hasn’t drawn his sword. A beat later, the tingle of powerful heavenly magic makes my ears ring. My arm is cocked, my talons outstretched, I’m past the point of no return—
Then I see it. The pillar of white fire burning inside the angel, leaking from his eyes, his mouth, his nose. He’s turned himself into a bomb. Slashing his throat will detonate him, killing not only the both of us, but this entire quadrant. All of these realizations pile one on top of the other as I reach him, no time to turn away, no time to even pull my talons, and no point in doing so. A punch at this velocity will have the same effect.
