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The best way for me to get past any angels flitting around during the uproar caused by Naamah’s distractions was to look boringly normal for anyone seeing me from a distance. If I looked like just another angel come to check out what was going on and offer to help, no one would think to stop me and ask questions. All the weapons strapped to me were cleverly worked into my fighting gear and most of them half-hidden; that way I didn’t look too armed compared to others.
So, here was hoping that Naamah’s illusion was good enough to disguise what I looked like from a distance so that no one would remember seeing me there.
I took a running start off the sharp drop of the outcropping, beating my wings to catch the draft, and then I was up in the air, streaking through the sky toward the plume of smoke rising up from the heart of Raphael’s estate.
The closer I got, the more the sound of yells and screams reached my ears. God, it was pure chaos. It was like someone had stirred an ant colony, the only difference being that the ants could actually get shit done even without direct orders from their queen bee.
These angels here were completely overwhelmed. It was obvious none of them were used to making decisions on their own, to seeing the big picture and independently knowing what was needed to sort out the mess. They all seemed to rely on receiving orders from above…which weren’t coming.
I didn’t know how Naamah had done it, but she’d somehow orchestrated a moment when pretty much every seraph and cherub in Raphael’s direct employ had been physically inside the palace, and that was when the detonators had been triggered.
Now the rest of the hierarchy—thrones and everyone below—ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling to get everything under control.
And there was much, much out of control.
The unicorns had been let loose. And not only that, but they’d been provoked into a rage as well. Currently, they were storming all over the compound, skewering angels left and right.
Someone had also spilled buckets of what appeared to be slime all over the courtyards, slippery enough to lay flat quite a few angels who’d stepped on it unawares. And for those who’d had their wings out at the time, the slime had gotten caught in the feathers and now rendered the angels incapable of flying.
And then there were the glitter bombs. They kept going off long after all the other explosives had detonated, causing even more chaos and confusion. Not to mention they painted dozens of angels in pink sparkles while they were screaming and yelling.
But the coup de grâce of Naamah’s plan—besides razing Raphael’s palace—was the destruction of the other soul stables on the compound. Much like the archangel’s residence, these buildings had gone down in mighty blasts of explosives.
None of the souls inside would have been harmed by the fire or the blasts, since their spirit forms couldn’t be destroyed by anything other than angel or demon magic or Heaven- or Hell-forged blades, but the destruction of the soul stable meant that all of their afterlife projections suddenly came to a stop, plunging the souls into the reality of their existence in Heaven. As a result, thousands of souls were now roaming, confused, around the compound, no longer bound to their room in the destroyed soul stable.
And every single one of them would have to be retrieved and secured.
I felt a pinch of regret for disrupting these innocent souls’ eternal peace like that, but in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t hurt them. They had a long, long time ahead of them filled with contentment and happiness and bliss. In their immortal afterlife, this was just an ephemeral moment, barely more than a second compared to the length of their heavenly respite, but for Azazel, this distraction was vital.
Messing with the souls was not just about forcing the angels to gather them all up again; it also interrupted the entire power network for Raphael’s compound. Everything that relied on the electricity generated by the souls’ happiness would break down, which added another element of chaos.
As I flew over the estate, I could see the scattered blips of souls moving out from under the rubble of the other soul stables, and panicked angels trying to round them up. Some of these angels had probably never handled a soul before and didn’t even know what to do.
It was such perfect chaos.
To my left, the huge smoking ruins of Raphael’s palace rose from the ground like a haunting, half-rotted skeleton of some ancient beast. Angels flew and ran around the rubble, shouting orders, crying for help. One angel was just about to haul a heavy stone slab away when a unicorn stabbed him in the back.
I winced and beat my wings harder to veer right toward the one soul stable that remained standing—the one with Azazel in it.
The two guards in front of the building were gone, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. This would make it all a bit easier. They’d probably been drawn off by the chaos and destruction, as Naamah had hoped they might be.
That left the guards inside, unless they, too, had joined the efforts to get the situation under control. Only one way to find out.
Checking the perimeter, I landed in front of the door. One more look around—no one seemed to have noticed me, everyone too focused on damage control—and then I grasped the small dart pistol from my belt, held it at the ready, and slipped inside.
I’d practiced this in my new rooms while waiting for Naamah’s call, using the privilege of privacy to see how well I could aim at what distance, and as it had turned out, I was better at this than at targeting my own powers to hit something. At a few feet, I could confidently say the dart would go where I wanted it to.
Which meant the guard on watch at the bottom of the stairs received a surprise dart in the face the second I rounded the corner. He jerked back, grabbed the dart, and pulled it out, his wide eyes tracking to me, his other hand going for his sword—but it was already too late.
I could see the moment the substance I’d shot him with hit his bloodstream and fucked up his system. His eyes glazed over, his hand groping for his sword missed the handle, and he swayed, his shoulder hitting the wall.
I didn’t waste a second and charged him. Pulling one of the many daggers strapped to my body, I stabbed him straight in the heart—made easy by his slowed reaction. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped down, out like a light.
I left the dagger in his chest to make sure he wouldn’t wake up, and then I hurried upstairs, already putting the next dart into the pistol.
Amrit was the sole substance with any effect on an angel’s or a demon’s system, though in its standard form, it was only as strong as heavy liquor was for humans. Naamah, however, had been quite busy these past few years, tinkering with ways to distill amrit into something stronger. She’d succeeded in creating a concentrated form of it that would affect an angel’s body and mind the same way as if they’d consumed several bottles of amrit in one sitting, which basically made them super drunk.
It didn’t knock them out, nor was it quite like a narcotic, but it worked to put an angel into a state of heavy inebriation within seconds, with all the negatives that came with it—double vision, loss of fine motor skills, slowed response time, inability to judge distances correctly, lack of coordination, the whole nine yards. Which gave me the edge I needed to get close enough to my opponents to stab them in the heart and render them unconscious.
