He walked with her across the gym hall, stopping at the door to call back to me, “Get moving. Captain Somerset is expecting you in Hall Four in half an hour.”
Then he turned and followed the First Angel out of the room.
2
Infinite Impossibilities
After Nero and the First Angel left the gym hall, I hurried down the corridor to Demeter, the Legion’s canteen. I grabbed a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and orange juice, then joined my friends Ivy and Drake at our usual table. They looked fresh and awake this morning; they must have gotten to the coffee before it had run out. It always ran out before I got here. Every single morning. The cynic in me was convinced Nero purposely kept me in training until the morning coffee was gone. The angel believed any weakness—even a minor one like caffeine dependence—was a mortal failing in a soldier of the Legion. I’d noticed it had been getting easier to wake up since I’d ditched the morning coffee, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. I wasn’t even going to think it in case he managed to tune into my thoughts again.
“I saved a donut for you,” Ivy said, her long, red hair bouncing off her shoulders as she turned her head to look up at me.
“Thanks,” I replied, sitting down opposite her and Drake.
Ivy had the body of a supermodel, but she’d put on more muscle in the past two months. Drake had the wide shoulders and build of a football player—which he’d been before joining the Legion. But his smile was so good-natured, so friendly. If I hadn’t seen him tear werewolves apart with his bare hands, I’d have had a hard time believing he could ever get angry. But as soon as Ivy had been in danger, he’d broken through those werewolves, no fear in him, only rage—like a switch had been flipped inside of his brain.
The two of them looked so beautiful together, even though they weren’t actually together. They were both wearing the standard Legion workout suits just like I was. But they hadn’t been training since five in the morning, so their clothes were unwrinkled and clean. And they didn’t smell like sweat and angel.
Ivy’s gaze panned down my body. “Early morning?” she asked, a smile spreading her mouth.
“Too early. Like every morning.” I took a bite out of the donut. A jolt of energy shook my body. Whoa. “Did I mention I’m not a morning person?”
Drake laughed. “Only every single morning.”
I sighed, finishing up the donut. Whatever magic was in it, I wanted more. “What I wouldn’t give for a long bath.”
I shared a dorm room with five people. We had one shower. And no bathtub.
I rolled back my neck, stretching out the stiffness in it. “A long bath and a massage.” I sighed.
Ivy smirked at me. “Why don’t you ask Colonel Sexy Pants for a massage?” That was her name for Nero. “I bet he’d oblige,” she added with a mischievous twinkle in her brown eyes.
I poked the eggs on my plate. “He was too busy throwing me across the gym to listen to requests for a massage.”
“You two sure have been spending a lot of time together,” she said. “People are talking. Especially the brats.”
The Legion brats were people with an angel parent, and there were six of them in our initiation class. Their bloodline ensured they had more magic in them than most people, and they’d been trained from birth to join the Legion like their parents before them. They also had the egos to go with their esteemed pedigree.
“What do the brats say?” I asked.
“That you’re failing combat training and had to take remedial classes,” Drake said.
“But they’re just jealous they don’t have a sexy angel training them one-on-one,” Ivy added quickly.
“Training with an angel is not all it’s cracked up to be, you know,” I told them. “I wasn’t kidding about that bath and massage. I feel like my body has been put through a meat grinder.”
“Didn’t he heal you?” Ivy asked.
“No, he got distracted.”
She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I’ll bet.”
“No, not like that. The First Angel walked into our training session.” I spread raspberry marmalade across my toast. “I wonder what she’s doing here.”
“She’s here to investigate the supernaturals in New York in the aftermath of what happened last month,” said Ivy. “Her team is rounding up vampires, witches, and shifters all over the city and interrogating them, trying to figure out how much of a foothold into this world the demons have gotten. They believe the demons are still recruiting for their army.”
“How can you possibly know about this?”
“I chatted with Captain Horn and Lieutenant Bradshaw on the way to breakfast this morning, and they told me,” she said, as though it were perfectly normal for two officers of the Legion to openly share information like that. Then again, people were always telling Ivy things. It was astounding how much she could get out of someone just by smiling at them. “The First Angel thinks the demons’ influence on Earth is stronger than we thought. And she believes that even though the Legion took out the operation at Sweet Dreams, this is far from over.”
Ivy’s smile faded during that last sentence. Her mother had been the one behind recruiting people for the demon’s army, the act of a desperate woman dying of cancer. In exchange for the demons making her immortal, she’d made a deal with them to set up this operation. She hadn’t told Ivy about any of this. Ivy had found out the hard way. After the battle at the Sweet Dreams bakery, I’d had to be the one to tell my friend that her mother was dead.