Teeth bared, he swung his sword toward her neck.

Instinct took over. Ducking, she slammed a blade into his gut, then ran straight through to slam into Hiraz, taking them both off the roof.

It had been a purposeful action and she managed to slow their descent, though the vampire’s weight was more than she could handle. When they made a bruising but survivable landing on the balcony a couple of stories down, Hiraz ran back inside the building without a word. She knew what he was planning—to go up a set of internal fire escape stairs and come up behind the attackers.

Elena had the same idea. Rising up into the air, she went to rejoin the fight, coming at Lijuan’s troops from the back—but it was too late. Another swarm of troops was heading their way. Fuck! She didn’t have the mental ability to tell their people to withdraw and they had to withdraw. They couldn’t win this one, not with so many fighters coming at them. It would be a slaughter.

Raphael was involved in heavy combat against multiple squadrons and at least five of Lijuan’s generals. Elijah was down with a wounded wing that would take a couple of hours minimum to heal.

Wiping the sweat and blood off her face with her forearm, she looked desperately around—and spotted Galen. Raphael’s weapons-master was on the leading edge of the fighters on the roof. He moved like lightning, his red hair sweat damp and two swords dancing in his hands as if they weighed nothing when she knew they were heavy as hell.

Dropping down beside him, she took on an assailant and yelled, “Massive incoming force! We have to retreat!”

Galen was a warrior, and the light of battle glinted in his pale—almost translucent—green eyes, but he was also a highly intelligent angel. Slicing off the heads of the two angels he’d been fighting, then finishing off the one she’d taken on, he followed her gaze to where the new squadrons were heading their way.

Opening his mouth, he issued a command in a voice that carried across the entire rooftop—she’d known he could do that, had heard him do the same in the Refuge. Then, he’d been yelling at a group of recalcitrant children to fall in line. Though the kids had obeyed at once, they hadn’t looked the least scared; most had been grinning while trying hard to maintain correct wing posture.

The sight had gone a long way toward making Elena understand how kind, soft-hearted Jessamy could’ve fallen in love with this barbarian angel.

“Fall back!” he ordered. “Begin defensive maneuver alpha!”

Elena continued to fight beside Galen as the rest of their people fell back behind them; she swapped out her knife blades for a long blade another retreating fighter slapped into her hand. Her own had been lost in another skirmish earlier that day.

Everyone had their assigned tasks in this maneuver and hers was to hold the line and buy their people time. The vampires and two other guild hunters on the roof would be flown to the next nearest safe position by the angels who were strong enough, but before the guild hunters went, they’d lay a little trap for Lijuan’s troops.

Gadriel, wing damaged and stomach bleeding, was suddenly in front of her again. Her eyes burned as she swung the deadly sharp blade of her weapon across his neck, separating head from body. Gadriel had died in China. This was nothing but Lijuan abusing an honorable warrior’s corpse. She would remember him as he’d once been, not as this monstrosity.

“Run! You will all run in the end!” yelled one of Lijuan’s squadron leaders as he landed on the roof, his face bloody and his eyes hot with battle fury—he had normal hazel eyes, which meant he’d chosen this, chosen to walk with Lijuan. “We will own you!”

Elena lodged a knife in the back of his throat the next time he opened his big mouth. She and Galen were falling off the edge of the roof even as he gurgled and struggled to remove the weapon. The two of them made a hasty retreat, following the rest of their people. A number of Lijuan’s warriors flew after them, but Jason dropped out of the sky to score black lightning across the space, cutting them in half and driving back others who would’ve followed.

As with all of Raphael’s Seven, he was tired and worn, but he would fight to the very end.

The boom came seconds later, the explosives planted on the roof by Rose, one of the Guild’s demolition experts, going off with such violence that the resulting collapse sucked in a number of angels who’d been attempting to fly off. Dust and stone flew into the air, tiny pieces of shrapnel hitting the back of Elena’s neck and getting caught in the energy of her wings before being spit out.

She made a hard landing, the vibration going through her entire body. The first thing she did was look around to see if Hiraz had made it out from inside the building. There. The vampire sat slumped against a wall, his eyes on the collapsing building across from them. His expression was bleak, the look shared by many of the others around him.

Elena understood why. They were losing.

This wasn’t the first of their buildings that had fallen to Lijuan’s people. Elijah was wounded. Raphael was exhausted. The Seven were reaching the edge of their endurance. Dmitri had taken to the battlefield with his sword a deadly menace in an effort to give the others a break, but the enemy was just too big in number.

And Lijuan was yet to rise again.

Another enemy squadron rose into the air behind the dust of the collapse, heading right for them, and the battle was on again.

62

Raphael felt the explosive force ripple through the air, and knew his people had detonated another building. They weren’t destroying every building as they retreated. Some had been left whole but stuffed with explosives—in the hope that Lijuan’s people would settle in and the delayed detonation would take out hundreds of them at once.

But with every boom of sound, every call to retreat, Lijuan’s grip around the city tightened. All his people were fighting to their limit—he could ask nothing more from them. Elijah’s predatory cats were stalking the enemy throughout the city and his birds of prey fought in unnatural squadrons formed by Eli’s knowledge of tactics.

Deacon and his repair team had left their workshop to wipe out a surge of reborn in an unexpected corner of the city. Janvier and Ashwini had flooded an enemy weapons cache with seawater and made it appear an accident, while Holly had managed to taunt and lead a couple of reborn right into an uninfected section of Lijuan’s army. Demarco and the other snipers had stealthily blown off the heads of more than one senior member of Lijuan’s forces, timing their assassinations to get lost in the mass of battle injuries.

Dmitri had mowed down an entire squadron that’d had the misfortune to land on the rooftop where he was fighting, his weapons a blur. Naasir was deep in enemy territory and had successfully fouled the enemy’s main water supply by rerouting sewerage into it. Venom had beheaded reborn after reborn, his clothing stained with blood. Galen hadn’t stopped fighting since his arrival. Aodhan, Jason, and Illium had forgotten sleep.

His Legion had fallen again and again only to rise back and fight with unflinching courage, but even they couldn’t make up for the massive disparity in numbers.

Lijuan’s forces had begun to pincer the city in their grip, the battle now being fought on two major fronts.

He deflected a hail of obsidian from one of her generals, struck back with angelfire. The general collapsed his wings and dropped out from under the electric blue ball. It smashed into two other fighters beyond him; they died without having a chance to scream.

Another bolt arrowed toward him, but Raphael didn’t duck. If he did, that bolt would hit a mass of his own people. Instead, he went to deflect the power with angelfire . . . when something about the energy coming toward him had him responding with wildfire instead. His instincts had understood what his mind took a moment to process: this obsidian had a piercingly lovely starlight shimmer.

The two powers collided in a crash of light and sound that echoed through his head. Lijuan is awake! Drop drop drop!

He sent out a pulse of wildfire in a three hundred and sixty degree circle only seconds later. Enemy fighters died in a single breath, and the air rippled bare meters from him. He pulsed more wildfire in that direction. Lijuan shimmered and came into focus, and despite the amount of wildfire he’d expended, she didn’t appear wounded.

The hail of return fire she sent toward him was vicious.

Elijah had rejoined the battle only minutes earlier, was fresher than Raphael, but the other archangel stayed back. Raphael knew the action went against every bone in Elijah’s body, but they had agreed to this. Raphael and his city couldn’t afford to lose their only archangelic backup. Elijah had to keep his distance from Lijuan—as with Antonicus, he had no defenses against her particular brand of death.

Elijah’s voice in his mind. I will take care of her generals.

Silver-green fire erupted around Raphael.

Your city is falling. The cold words held a taste he could only describe as death, the screams of the lost Lijuan’s terrible symphony. Surrender now and I will cause you only a modicum of pain when I absorb you.

Raphael took no pleasure in being proven right in his supposition that Lijuan didn’t intend to kill him and Elijah outright. As powerful as she was now, how much more powerful would she become once she fed on two archangels?

He warned Eli of her intent even as he directed a pinpoint strike of wildfire to her heart.

Deflecting it with a wave of her hand that shot the shards of starlight obsidian in every direction, she smiled. So, you choose pain. So be it.

One of the shards hit him on the shoulder and spun him around. Using the motion instead of fighting it, he shot back a wide arc of wildlfire. Lijuan couldn’t avoid it, as he hadn’t been able to avoid her strike. The wildfire hit her around the solar plexus, causing her body to bow inward and her skin to glow from within.

But she held her ground, as he held his.

He could feel her poison working its way through the bones of his shoulder, but the wildfire in his body was fighting against the virulence. That wouldn’t last much longer, not if they kept battling at this level. If he ran out of wildfire, that was it.

Crossbow bolts thumped into Lijuan’s shoulder. She turned and swiped out a hand. “Know your place!” Suyin flew back to slam into the side of a building, her wings crumpling and red streaking the moonlight of her hair, but she’d bought Raphael precious time.