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If asked, Naamah would state that I’d been with her the entire time, and without further concrete proof of her involvement, or mine, for that matter, the authorities would likely not dare to question the veracity of her statement. If they were confronted with undeniable proof of her complicity, that would be one thing—they’d have to act. But if she vouched for me, and there was no evidence to contradict her claim, they wouldn’t risk upsetting the balance on suspicion alone.
So, here we were, flying out to a remote place in Dahariel’s territory, near the border to Raphael’s personal lands, and since there were no patrols between a subordinate angel’s domain and the territory of their direct superior, no one saw us cross over from Derdekea’s territory to Dahariel’s. Just like no one would notice me flying over into Raphael’s domain.
We landed on a tree-covered outcropping from which we could see far into the plains leading to the archangel’s personal estate.
“All right,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, my heart hammering madly despite the flight not having been that long. This was it. We were really doing this. I was really doing this. Eek. “Now we wait?”
“Now we wait,” Naamah repeated with a nod.
The minutes ticking by did nothing to calm my racing pulse or soothe my nerves. If anything, it made me all the more anxious, this quiet wait before all hell would break loose.
“And you’re sure we’ll know when it’s time?” I asked Naamah.
“Oh, yes.” She nodded, her gaze on the horizon in the direction of Raphael’s estate. “There’s no way to miss it.”
A distant boom followed on the heels of her words.
I whipped my head around to stare toward the source of that explosion just as another rocked the air. And another. And another.
Several huge blasts in close succession, and the next instant, a thunderous eruption shot a pillar of fire into the sky. Smoke billowed out from the explosion, visible all the way to where we stood—even though we were still a few minutes’ flight from Raphael’s estate.
“I didn’t quite believe you,” I whispered with my wide eyes glued to the fire-and-smoke-tinged horizon. “But you really did it, didn’t you? You razed his entire palace?”
Naamah flipped a nonexistent speck of dirt from her shoulder. “I’m this close to being offended that you’d doubt my resolve.”
I shook my head. “Are you sure they won’t be able to trace this back to you?”
“Don’t worry. I covered my tracks. This is one of the reasons it took years to set this up, Zoe.” Her beautiful eyes were hard when she met my gaze. “The kind of network necessary to pull strings in the background via multiple points of contact, with each of them on a need-to-know basis, none of them able to implicate me as the source, and with all traces leading to a dead end eventually, can’t be built within a few weeks. No, my dear, I am safe. And I did my best to make sure you are, too, even when you have to go in there directly.”
Her eyes tracked back to the horizon, where, distantly, I could make out many small shapes in the air, some swirling, circling, some moving in from the surrounding area.
Angels, all in an uproar, confused, alarmed, coming to help.
Raphael and the upper echelon of his command would have been in the palace when the bombs went off, and they’d currently be out of commission until they could dig themselves out of the rubble, or were dug out. They wouldn’t have died, as being caught in an explosion of regular fire wouldn’t kill an angel. The chances of the head being severed were rather slim—it actually took a precise cut with a Heaven- or Hell-forged blade, or a very determined opponent ripping the head off—and we could heal from pretty much anything else.
It was possible they’d lost a limb here and there, or were crushed badly, but they’d live.
I wouldn’t be able to say the same for Azazel once they’d be finished torturing him for information, and that thought—that they would condone his death without batting an eye—was what made me steel my heart and grit my teeth against any misplaced empathy for the angels caught in the havoc.
Distantly, more explosions rocked the sky, though much smaller than the first ones. More distractions, created specifically to draw the majority of angels there and make sure they were occupied with trying to calm the chaos and rectify the damage. Given that many angels of the higher command structure were likely out of commission, there’d be an added level of confusion and disorganization, with the lower-ranking angels looking to their superiors for instructions, only to find that quite a few of them were unable to give orders.
Add to that the other places where Naamah’s carefully pulled strings had unleashed havoc, and Raphael’s entire personal compound was in a state of unrelenting madness.
“It’s time,” Naamah said quietly beside me. “You’re good to go.” Turning to me, she clasped my forearm, giving me a warrior’s send-off. “Hellspeed.”
I grasped her forearm in turn and nodded once, my stomach in knots. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
And with that, I stepped back, patted myself down one more time to make sure everything was in place—I was decked out in more weapons than I’d ever worn before—and took a deep breath, trusting that the illusion Naamah had worked on me would hold long enough.
At a quick glance, I’d appear as a dark blonde, my facial features unremarkable but clearly different from my natural face. If someone only saw me in passing, or from a distance, they’d believe the illusion. Should I get too close to anyone, however, it would be obvious that there was a glamour on me.
But the plan was for me to not get too close to anyone to notice.
This kind of magic was similar to what Azazel used for his wings, though the change he made was easier because he actually carried that look inside him—he was indeed part angel, so it wasn’t a stretch to turn his wings completely white, and the same was true for making them appear entirely black.
It was harder to change appearances to something that wasn’t part of one’s internal makeup, and for some reason, changing one’s face seemed to prove the most difficult and was the easiest illusion to be spotted by others. Which was why it wasn’t often used for subterfuge, as it just wouldn’t hold up under closer scrutiny.
But for me, there really wasn’t much of a choice of another way to disguise my identity. If I flew over there with a ski mask over my face, it would most definitely arouse suspicion in anyone who saw me in passing. Angels didn’t exactly wander around hiding their faces, and if they did, that was cause for concern and investigation.
