Aquifas flinched as if he’d been struck.
“Erased! No longer living. No coming back. Wiped from existence!” The words were formed with molten fury but spoken in a near-whisper.
Despite still holding a grudge for the general’s treatment of her and Puck, she couldn’t help but feel sympathy for his plight. He’d endured one horror only to have it compounded with this news.
“We did not know, sir.” Aquifas’s head dropped until his chin grazed his chest plate.
“Well, you do now, General. My question to you is why did you not take up the role of leadership, as is befitting your title, and order a retreat?”
That snapped up the general’s head. “Sir, we are soldiers. We do as we are ordered. We do not falter. We do not fail.”
“I believe this debacle counts as an utter failure, General!” Lucifer’s voice held the icy fire of steel.
Puck spoke into her mind, “Remind me to not piss off the Archangel of Light... ever. I do not want on his bad side.”
Diana agreed wholeheartedly, but still, she sympathized.
“Gentlemen.”
Was that her own voice speaking so clear and calm? It didn’t coincide with the trembling that racked her body.
Everyone’s attention snapped to her, but no one spoke.
“What has been done is now passed. We cannot rectify what happened to those poor souls. But we can do something about those that remain”—she took care to make eye contact with everyone circled around them—“and we can hunt down who or what is responsible to make them pay. Whether that be with imprisonment or death, I entrust you to decide how to mete out justice. And if there are survivors, we cannot save them by fighting amongst ourselves. We will need to be a united front, or we may as well throw up our arms in surrender right now.” Diana’s eyes locked on Lucifer. “And I, for one, refuse to admit defeat. I will not allow these deaths to be swept aside without retribution.”
A low murmur of what she hoped was agreement rose from the angel soldiers around her. Lucifer bowed his head in her direction. Aquifas’s face registered disbelief.
In her head, Puck’s words echoed in warning, “You are dealing with things and monsters you can never understand. This is no typical hunt for a stag or boar. Even tracking down and conquering a titan will be easier—and far safer—than messing with something that can slaughter angels. You wanted adventure. But this... this is a suicide mission, if I’ve ever seen one.”
He was right. Puck usually was. And still, that didn’t stop her next words.
“Take me to where the first angels were stationed before they went missing.”
Chapter 18
On the Trail of a Killer
They’d hiked for hours. With the dense brush and other obstacles crowding both on the ground and in the sky, the pedestrian method had been the only viable option for getting from one place to another, especially when stealth was essential.
No one had spoken since Diana had ordered the general to bring her to the essential scene of the crime. At first, Aquifas had opened his miserable mouth to object, but with one side glance at his superior, his lips had slammed shut and not opened again. Lucifer appreciated the silence. If the general had uttered another word, there was little doubt that he’d impale the man on his own sword.
He’d never liked Aquifas, and the sight of the angel’s sword at Diana’s neck had only intensified that. The soldier had been slow to rise to the position of general over the centuries. It wasn’t that he was incompetent, it was that he held mortal lifeforms in low regard; the same applied to any immortals who were not descended from the heavens. That was a big mistake when it came to impressing the Creator.
He’d earned his position after an upheaval on Kalama when the population had turned on their own, slaughtering innocents for the single crime of being born to the wrong political class. The Creator had given the order to intervene—something he abhorred. The Angel of Death, along with fifty legions of angels, had lain waste to the perpetrators and all their descendants. It had been a bloodbath, but Aquifas had shown true leadership when confronted with saving a single child being used as a human shield. That had convinced the archangel Uriel to promote him. Then Uriel had the audacity to transfer him to Lucifer’s legions within a decade.
And why in the blazes did the general and the rest of the soldiers keep cutting their eyes to stare at him like he’d grown a second head or something?
No, he might have avoided ripping Aquifas’s limbs from his body and yanking out his still beating heart, but it was still a possibility. The infraction could not be ignored, but Diana was right... They had bigger issues to focus on.
How she could be calm about what happened surprised him. Most goddesses he knew would’ve taken immense pleasure in finding the perfect torture for anyone who dared to threaten a hair on their precious heads. He’d learned early on that the lesser deities preferred eternal torment to a death sentence. And he’d heard Diana was not above doing the same. Somehow, that didn’t lessen his admiration for her.
Diana came to an abrupt halt. Puck slammed into her backside.
“What is that?” She pointed to the right, at an area that seemed lighter gray than everything else around them, almost white.
“Another portal to an entire different world. There are several located here to places both within this solar system and some that are billions of years away.” One of the soldiers with curly red hair flowing from his helmet approached her to point out another gateway just a little to the left of the one she’d noticed. “I can’t recall the names of each place, but I think that one goes to a forming planet in a new galaxy. It’s nothing but water and erupting volcanoes spewing ash into the sky.”
Diana walked closer to the portal and peered into it. “So, if I step over, I could be in a different part of the universe within no time?” She then turned to another one. “And the same with this one?”
