Page 42 of Angel's Smoke

Brass leaned down and swiped his fingers along the wood in spots. “Scratches.”

Bronze narrowed his eyes. “New or old?”

“Very fucking new.” Iron curled his fingers into a claw shape and ran them over the grids of pale lines Brass had noticed carved into the wood. There were sets of them, each evenly spaced with five lines. “And they’re sending us a message.”

Iron bit back a curse he didn’t want his brothers hearing. He’d become so goddamn distracted over the past several months that he’d let the very basics of battle float to the floor of his mind. Charmers didn’t move through the mortal realm without leaving signs. Yes, they shifted shape. Yes, they ate, fucked, and fought just like any other human, but certain parts of themselves were always visible, always at the ready.

Their nails. For the mystic conjurers, the magic users, they always kept them long, almost clawlike. It made it easier for them to swipe against an abrasive surface, create a spark, and feed their dark magic into it quickly to ignite their spells. Only the mystics behaved this way. Elite kept their nails trimmed for ease of combat, and apex kept their thumbnails long so they were more adept at fighting and casting.

These were essential details about the enemy ingrained into every sentinel and seraph, and he’d been so fucking focused on Anna that his celestial senses hadn’t even picked out when the assholes were in the goddamn room with her. Sharing her air. Hearing her heartbeat—and the heartbeat of her unborn baby.

Iron burst through the door, his chest heaving to accommodate the flood of fire raging through his frame.

“Around back. Near the lake.” Brass was off and sprinting, with Bronze and Iron fast on his heels. The bar backed up against a pond-turned-manmade-lake that had been carved out a good century ago, serving as a bucolic focal point for Aurora and its wildlife. It also offered great shoreline forested coverage, and Iron had never been more grateful for the camouflage. He was going to light those fuckers up and use their ashes to polish his weapons.

Up ahead, a flash of silver swiped through a catacomb of trees. Iron pushed his legs faster and pointed. “There! Rhode’s engaged!”

Bronze shouted, “I see him!”

The three of them finally penetrated the tree line. Rhode had already shifted into his metallic armor, wings out, twisting and slicing at the mystics like a blender blade. Whatever human forms they’d taken to conceal themselves in the bar had long been shed. Now, their characteristic bald heads and swirling teal and gold tattoos decorated their skin in a fashion that set Iron’s heart pumping, triggering the most brutal facets of his need-to-kill reflex.

“Are they all mystics? I count six!” Brass hollered as he palmed his firearms and started shooting off angel-fire-laced bullets left and right, landing against shields of green electrified magic that the mystics threw up.

Fuck. When the hell had they managed that trick? Angel fire was the one thing charmers had always been susceptible to, and if they’d finally found a way to spell against it . . .

Rhode paused his assault to adjust his grip on his knives. Blue flames arced up the blades to the hilts. “These two are elite. They’re mine.”

They all sank into the familiar ebb and flow of battle. Iron crouched low, summoned his wings wide, and leaped into the air. Two of the mystics paused their readying assault to track him. Good. Iron didn’t waste time with handheld weapons. True, he was more of a blunt-force trauma kind of guy, but his mace and ax weren’t the kinds of things he could conceal easily at a mortal bar. Instead, he punched his power free, sending streaks of fire arcing directly at the targets of bald heads below. One shield went up, snuffing his flames, then the other.

But when the charmers didn’t see any expression of frustration greeting their defense, Iron smiled slowly, letting every ounce of grim glee shine in the shadows of his visage instead.

Bingo.

“You’re cooked, motherfuckers!” Bronze leaped from a nearby tree branch and heaved two fireballs at the first charmer, who still held its shield high, its attention on Iron and expecting more aerial attacks. Fire slammed into the creature’s knees from the side, burning through its kneecaps, cartilage, and bone. Screams shot high into the air as two severed stumps toppled to the ground, crisping to ash in moments while the rest of the body followed suit.

The other mystic lowered its magic shield and sent it hurtling toward Bronze like a glowing electric green discus. The angel threw his wings out and managed to wrap himself within them as the magic hit, throwing him into the air until his back met a tree. He grunted hard and slid to the ground.

Below, Rhode had incinerated one of the elite but was still battling the other. Blood and acid wounds from before he’d shifted streaked down the side of the seraph’s face as he dodged the arc of the charmer’s bone blade. Brass was squaring off with a mystic who had two acid bombs levitating above its upturned palms while muttering some dark incantations. Those projectiles would fly free soon, and none of their metals could withstand magically altered acid attacks for long.

“Burn them all! Now!” Iron punched his fists out in front of him, angling his body like a flaming beacon. He tucked his wings and dove toward the charmer who’d flung its shield at Bronze. Magic struck fire in a sizzling explosion. They both tumbled to the ground in a ball of battling fury. The mystic raked its claws down the size of Iron’s neck, snagging a strained tendon. Iron roared, and his fire sputtered out. He tried to breathe through the pain and call his fire back, but only slight sparks responded. The well of celestial power deep within his core was failing, in desperate need of regeneration this late in the evening.

Fuck!

“I do believe something is wrong with you,” the mystic taunted, smiling through teeth coated in its black blood. Then the thing pitched itself up and over onto Iron’s back, pinning him to the ground while it pressed its contorted magic against the weight of Iron’s wings, crushing him into the snow.

Iron bucked and writhed, but the unnatural heaviness weighing him down only increased with each movement.

“It’ll be over soon. We already got what we came for.” The mystic fired more pulses of dark magic against Iron’s wings, singeing his flight feathers and forcing his mouth and nose farther into the snow.

Around him, the sounds of fighting had begun to die down, replaced by muffled grunts and far too much hissing. Dammit! He couldn’t tell whether they were from acid burns or angel fire incineration.

Iron pulled at his power again, begging, pleading with everything he was and had ever done for it to punch forward.

All he got were the silent reverberations of sorrowful echoes.

He tried to strain his face away from the snow, to see who or what was around. A branch, a rock, a fucking leg that hadn’t incinerated fully yet. Something!

Then he felt it, the pull on his metal. It took Iron half a thought to recognize what it was and where it was coming from, and the other half of his thought to act.

---