That’s my fucking girl.
Thorn’s eyes widened, rage and madness swirling to the surface as the impossible blowlanded. As a mortal weapon actually injured an Angel.
My sword cleaved part of the joint between feathers and flesh. And a gleam of silver light sparked as Angelblood coated steel.
Goldblood—gold now that the Angels’ Spirits were reunited with their bodies.
“Holy blasphemous Spirits,” I exhaled over the burn in my arms.
Thorn wailed, and I fell. Plummeted to the sand below.
And it was so fucking worth it to see him bleed.
Chapter Forty
Ophelia
“TOLEK!”I screeched as his weight left Sapphire’s back behind me and my pegasus dipped. Gold Angelblood spilled through the air, my light crackling with my terror. The stormy skies illuminated with each explosion, puffs of gray clouds becoming gold-streaked shadows around our winged forms. An image torn from a book of legends.
“Catch him!” I screamed to Sapphire, pulling my feet onto her back and pushing upright.
My own wings flared, narrowly dodging another poisonous black arrow. The sand loomed thirty feet below—I wasn’t strong enough for this height, but I didn’t give an Angel’s feathers. I leapt off my pegasus’s back and beat, beat, beat as she fell away. As she plunged after Tolek.
Thorn raced toward him as I glided down, my wings catching the Angel’s wind to soften my fall.
Sand scraped my knees and the heels of my palms as I stumbled to the dunes, boots struggling to find purchase.
I sprang to my feet, willing light to heal the small cuts. The gorgons closed in. Still in their human forms, they formed a wall, isolating me from Sapphire and Tolek. Stormy clouds pressedaround us, obscuring my warrior horse and the man I loved entirely.
My heart leapt into my throat at the crushing familiarity, exactly like the theater when the Angels had separated me from my friends. When they handed me over to a vicious god to be used.
But I had escaped that tainted place, and I would not return.
Two of the ethereally beautiful women held their bows aloft, arrows aimed at my heart. I avoided the one who was partially shifted, staying out of reach and not meeting her eyes to avoid the poison in both blood and stare.
“What is a poor little seraph to do?” one taunted, a sheet of black hair drifting around her dainty frame. She was shorter than I was, but she radiated wicked power. Red-rimmed eyes studied me with sheer joy.
“All alone out here. None of her kind to help,” another said, releasing an arrow. I dropped my wing, and the piercing point only ruffled my feathers. The red-headed shooter growled.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m alone,” I argued, leaning forward on my toes, ready to spring at them. Angellight crackled in my palms, up my arms, the colors of all seven Angels whirling and melding beneath an overpowering white gold that wasmine. “There is a reason Echnid wants me much more desperately than he wants you. I don’t know if it’s only this.” A whip of light struck the sand at their feet. “Or if it’s something else. Whatever it is, he wants you to give him an army, but me? I am more valuable to him than the six of you combined.”
Grimaces smeared across their beautiful faces, ranging from rage to distaste to repulsion. And the seraph inside of me rose, wanting, no,needingto defend against this natural enemy.
The four gorgons who hadn’t spoken fanned out around us, either out of arrows or never having had them in the first place. I didn’t turn to track them, but I noted every shift of thesand beneath their bare feet. Every slither of a gown across the ground.
Spirits, I didn’t even have a sword—hadn’t replaced Starfire since Ritalia melted her. I had a number of small daggers strapped to me that I’d borrowed from Erista’s family’s trove. That was it in terms of steel. But…
My palms warmed.
Beyond blades, I wasn’t defenseless.
Before they could react, I coiled a whip of Angellight in one hand and latched it around the throat of the nearest gorgon, the small one. It tightened and tightened as I willed it, the control as razor-sharp and masterful as if I was slicing her skin open with Starfire.
In my other hand, I pictured that blade, and I honed my magic as Damien had taught me all those weeks in Damenal. Willed the light to take solid form, to become a freshly whetted edge and hilt and grip. To mold to my palm as only one other weapon had in my life.
And in my hand, buzzing with the might of all the slain seraphs, my light forged a sword to end a thousand enemies.
With a grunt, I tugged the gorgon by her neck. She stumbled forward, breath faltering, and I jammed the sword of seraph power into her chest.
