Archangel’s Legion (Guild Hunter #6)(95)
Author: Nalini Singh

Gunfire erupted from her left, the other hunter careful not to hit her as he took over. Screaming a battle cry, she shot out a heavy spray of her own, then, instead of going over where they wanted her to go over, ran right through the enemy. “Keep shooting!” she said, her own guns pumping fire.

Her boots pounded over crushed and bloodied feathers as she shot her way past the startled angels still standing, the air full of bullets she couldn’t totally avoid. One caught her a glancing blow on her arm, the other dug a fiery groove across her cheek, but she reached her target without any real injury, going over the opposite side of the building from where she’d been herded. The enemy turned to follow her en masse, which hopefully meant the others on the roof would be all right.

“This is my city, you bastards.” Managing to get her guns strapped down in midair as a result of hours of practice doing the same, she swept down a wide avenue, the wind whipping off the blood trickling down her cheek. “Let’s play hide-and-seek.”

As the battle raged overhead and buildings shuddered after being hit by stray bolts of power, the city as a whole began to go progressively darker. She’d seen this before, during the fight with Uram, and knew it was because Raphael and Lijuan were both sucking power from the electricity grid, batteries, anything that could supply them with the energy they used to supercharge their strikes.

The darkness was her friend. Teeth bared, she led the enemy angels in and out of streets, through buildings she knew had accessways wide enough for flight, under the High Line and between certain widely spaced trees in Central Park. They were fast, the ones on her trail, but they didn’t know Manhattan.

Of course, she couldn’t keep this up forever. Naasir, you f**king smart predator, she thought as her wings began to tire, it’s showtime. She’d managed to make a short cell phone call halfway through her darting flight, and, as instructed, now led her pursuers into a narrow gap between two high-rises.

It dead-ended at the back of another building.

Reaching the end, she spun around, wings spread. The leader of the pack, his left eye a pulpy mess where a bullet had hit him, grinned . . . and ran right into the steel net that snapped into place in front of the speeding squadron. The ones at the back tried to fly up to avoid the net, but it fell from above, too—courtesy of a certain blue-winged angel—before a net sprung up behind them.

Trapped, the enemy fighters tried to land, but their wings were too fouled up in the net and with each other. Falling hard to the asphalt, they dragged the nets down with them—nets that, she saw with a wince, had cut lines into their flesh and wings, the edges razored. “I love you right now, Naasir, but you have a scary, scary mind.”

She flew up and out before the enemy figured out how to escape the trap. “I need to get to the Tower!” she yelled to Illium—since it was obvious Lijuan had put a target on her back, she was now a liability to the shooting teams.

“I’ll take you in!”

“What about Lijuan’s generals?” If he’d broken off that engagement to help her, he had to get back to it—those generals had serious firepower.

Illium’s grin was satisfied. “I and my brothers in arms earned our power! Lijuan trusts no one with real power! Her generals are puppets—and right now, the Sire is holding all her attention!”

“As long as Lijuan lives, Xi will continue to gain power. Without her, his body wouldn’t be able to hold what it does.”

Illium had told her that at the Refuge, in reference to one of Lijuan’s generals, but she hadn’t realized the male was this closely linked to his archangel. But there was no more time to think about that—the two of them had reached the battle zone.

They had to go in shooting, Illium faster with a crossbow than she’d realized, given his preference for using a sword. Halfway through, Tasha appeared out of the mass of wings to flank her other side as Lijuan’s men and women deliberately blocked Elena’s path to the Tower. Much as Elena would’ve liked to nurture her dislike for Tasha, the other woman had fought with brilliant fury in the battles, as she did now.

Grabbing her guns, Elena took aim at the enemy. “Get the f**k out of my way!”

Their wings shredded, Lijuan’s fighters crashed to the streets and buildings. Illium and Tasha rejoined the fight as soon as Elena landed safely on the Tower roof. Frustrated at having been grounded, she ran inside and to the Tower “aerie,” a small nest directly above the war room and connected to it by an internal staircase. It had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view, as well as windows that could be shoved up.

Dmitri stood in the center of the aerie, running everything from his supreme vantage point.

Elena didn’t bother to exchange pleasantries with the vampire. Having grabbed ammunition from the stash just outside, she slammed herself into place in front of one of the windows, pushed it up, and started pulverizing any enemy fighter who came too close. There weren’t too many, the defenders managing to hold them from the Tower, while Raphael kept Lijuan occupied above.

As Elena watched, Raphael’s wildfire just scraped the side of Lijuan’s face, ripping off a chunk of her cheek. Screaming that awful scream that made Elena grit her teeth, the older archangel retaliated with a fury of jagged black that Raphael couldn’t completely avoid. Horrified, Elena watched as he took a bad hit on one wing, the ugliness of Lijuan’s power an oily black that began to crawl over the white-gold as it had done during the battle in Amanat, the blackness infiltrating his very cells.

It shouldn’t have affected him that badly—not with the wildfire awake inside him, its ferocity an antidote to Lijuan’s ugliness. But he was tired, had just fought nonstop with Lijuan for God knew how long after the trip to destroy the weapons carriers, and he’d been using the wildfire against the other archangel since the fighting began. In Amanat, he’d only been able to create it for a tiny period of time, the power new. It might have developed in the interim, but it was still new.

Skin chilling, she realized he had no more in him.

42

Already moving, Elena didn’t stop to question the instinct that drove her to put down her gun, leave the aerie, and run to take off from a nearby balcony as Raphael spiraled down from above, his wing mutilated by the black.

Archangel!

Get inside, Elena!

Hell, no. Having instinctively calculated the speed of his descent, she slammed into him, wrapping her arms around his torso. “Use it!” she said, her left arm beginning to pulse with stabbing pains, though nothing touched her skin. “Use me!”