Page 63 of Angel's Smoke

But that wasn’t enough. He needed to test the theory.

As if no time had passed at all, Iron stretched out his hands to call forth his mace and ax. Both shimmered into being and settled at once into his battle grip. Then his wings responded. Pearlescent energy blazed between his shoulder blades, stretching out far and wide. The feathers were no longer iron, as they’d been in the mortal realm. Instead, they pulsed with the primal celestial light and power of the Empyrean.

“It worked. It fucking worked.” Iron tested his power and found it to fit and function as well as if it had never left him. It was beautiful, stunning. He was about to drop to his knees in praise of it all when a subtle warmth kissed the back of his neck.

Behind him, the Empyrean’s gates shone with a brightness to rival the sun. Tall, gleaming beams of celestial fire encased each rung of the gates as they shot northward into the mist above. The flames glowed a crackling fierce electric blue and snapped and hissed as they arced between the supports in both vertical and horizontal fashions, locking all of the Empyrean behind a mesh of celestial magic.

Thesentinels’magic. The same fury that, with the help of the celestial mages long ago, Iron and his brothers had unleashed from outside the gates to enact the Sealing.

The wonder of it all was a thick thing in Iron’s throat. “It held. All this time, it held. Thank the mages.” It had all been worth it. The battles, the bleeding, the terrible losses, and the innumerable number of souls saved.

It had fucking worked.

But his joy was short-lived. A heavy presence thickened the air around him. The flames licking at the gates pulled away slightly from their posts, aiming their ardor at something emerging from the fog.

Iron turned and froze. A dark figure cut a path through the mists, followed by waves and waves of bald soldiers. There were so many, stretching on toward an end Iron wasn’t sure existed. The closer they got, the easier they were to identify. Innumerable numbers of gold bands stretched tightly across throats winked menacingly in the light of the fire at Iron’s back. Single bands, double, triple. There were so many of them, all signifying the different classes of charmers who served Cyro. The beings looked nothing like the versions he’d fought over the long years, with their black tactical gear and reinforced artillery common among their mortal presence. Instead, they lined up, bare-chested and bold, muscles, magic, and gold and teal tattoos on full display for whatever they had in store—not for him, he realized with horror.

For the Empyrean.

“I’m so glad you’ve come to join me, and by the looks of it, you’ve finally managed to connect the dots of what we’ve come to do here today.” Cyro stood before his minions in all his arrogant glory, though the formalwear he normally favored had been replaced with a type of shadowy battle skin, one that draped him in plates of ashen bone with wisps of white smoke clinging to his frame. A lone fang-like object hung from his neck. The full relic of the Empyrean’s gates that Iron’s shard had been severed from.

Iron had zero interest in whatever dark magic the bastard had coated himself in, only how to cut the head off the snake. “You look like the goddamn anemic Michelin Man, bringing all that third-rate garbage behind you up here to me.”

“I had a feeling it would be you. The one to crack the code, I mean. Chrome is too hotheaded, Rhode is too damaged—sorry about that—and Tungsten fancies himself too much of a leader to realize when he’s being led around. Of all the sentinels, though, you were the one I was never quite able to figure out. Until recently, that is. Tell me, do you think it’s a coincidence that, of all your brothers, you were the one I expected to finally meet this day?”

“I expect you to eat my shit.” Iron’s body erupted into flames. He crouched low, preparing to lunge.

The bastard smiled at him, flashing far more fang than Iron was used to seeing from the showboating asshole. A warning singed the hairs at the back of Iron’s neck. “How was Anna before you left her? Was she well?”

Cyro stepped fully out of the landscape’s mist. Iron squinted at the weapon the demon ruler held in his hand. Something long and pale, no bigger than Iron’s ax. Then Cyro tossed it to the ground between them.

Iron’s fury blazed a rage in his core.

It was no weapon. There was a wet stump of flesh and bone on one end. Five delicate fingers on the other. A shining symbol painted on the underside of a wrist that spoke to him and him alone.Daegan.

Breath punched from his lungs, but he forced himself to look closer.Reallylook. He could not be wrong in this.

And then his world collapsed. Pale purple nail polish, the exact color of the glasses he’d given Anna, dotted each fingernail. He’d painted them himself after she’d rummaged through her polish collection, proudly plucking the perfect color from the bin. She’d asked him to paint every finger and toe so that they’d match her new glasses, and he’d done so gladly, perfectly content to deny her nothing.

A beastly cry erupted out of him, scattering the encompassing mist outward in undulating waves. Green shields were thrown up in response, barricading the charmers from the blast of his fiery anguish and what else might carry on its heels.

The dark magic beating off those things pricked his nose and thickened the tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. It was the same vile magic that had snuffed out his angel fire the last time he’d encountered them.

But now there were many. Too many.

His heart ached, bled, was fucking ripped open across the mist and depleted of all usefulness and meaning.

Anna.HisAnna. Her copper-spun hair and sunlit smile, her laugh, her kind heart, and her terrible taste in junk food. Her fuckingchild. They were all gone.

Because he’d wanted to chase a dream he had no business believing could be real.

Iron wailed harder, louder, until his fire pushed out farther beyond the reach of his weapons, just past the edge of his rage.

Cyro’s cruel smile widened, and he kicked at Anna’s arm, sending it flying into the mist. “That’s it, brute. Show me your belly. Let me see those wounds bleed.” The relic at Cyro’s throat taunted him further. Bone weapons coated in black magic leaped into the bastard’s hands.

Iron sprinted toward the demon ruler, ax and mace swinging, power pumping, fire seething.

He’d take down Cyro and every one of those fuckers in a blaze of the Empyrean’s might.

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