Out of the corners of my vision, I see a few Prods move aside and out of Lucian Morningstar’s way. He smiles, and I feel my heart drop. Our numbers are dwindling by the second, Izara and Phoenix are nowhere to be seen, and I know there is no way we can win this.
“And the rest of you?” Lucian asks. “Will you move?”
No.
We don’t. We can’t.
We willnot.
The lines hold firm, and no one moves a muscle.
It brings a frown to the devil’s face. His bicolored eyes, eyes that are so like my mate’s, sweep across all of us. “Fine,” he decides, lifting a hand, palm out. Darkness swirls around his fingers, and crackling energy fills every inch of the air we breathe. “I’ll move you myself.”
And he sends a blast of power straight at our ranks.
The blast is so close to us that we fall back in a heap of heavy limbs. Debris and blood rain around us. With a single lift of his hand, he decimated a third of us. Nuns, Prods, and vampires alike.
I’m pulled back to my feet by urgent hands. An enormous, gaping space is left where our warriors once stood. They fill it again. There is fear coating the air around us. I taste it heavily on my tongue. I feel it down in the depths of my soul.
Still, we don’t move.
He lifts his hand again, and power surges around him. He aims that hand right in our direction. I close my eyes, awaiting the end that never comes.
“Stop!”
The devil drops his hand at his side and looks up. We all do in time to see the shadow of swooping wings pass over us just before an angel drops from the skies and lands perched with perfect grace on top of the statue of Etheria.
Not an angel.
Izara Castillo.
Light pours from her body in a blinding glow. She’s made of light and shadows, an ethereal beauty in the form of magic. Her hair runs like liquid night down her shoulders, tugging against an invisible breeze. Her whole aura is different. Black, leathery wings have changed to become a blinding golden black that appears to be burning. Her bicolored eyes look into her father’s face, as if she can see the cruel, cold heart underneath.
She looks like a fucking angel.
Phoenix sidles discreetly next to us, the incubus staring with pure black eyes at all the enemies he means to kill.
“Daughter, how kind of you to finally show yourself. I missed you.”
Izara doesn’t react to her father’s statement, and that seems to enrage him.
He lifts his hand up and points that swirling power in her direction. “Now I’ll kill you myself.”
And he sends his power hurtling straight at her.
Twenty-Two
Izara
It’s an all-consuming energy that I catch in my hands as easily as if I was capturing a ball. Its darkness in the smallest form of death, and I observe it in the expanse of my open palm before snuffing it out with light.
Surprised gasps ripple through the crowd, but none more priceless than the expression my father wears right now.
“I didn’t understand it at first,” I tell him as if we don’t have an audience. As if it’s just the two of us alone. I’m open and vulnerable, but that vulnerability gives me a strength I never thought possible. “I didn’t understand what it meant to embrace both sides of me.”
My wings stretch and slowly begin to flap, lifting me from the statue of my mother. I hover just above her, and I wonder what the others see. I wonder if there’s anything besides my blood and power that belongs to her.
I don’t think it really matters much anymore.
