Stash didn’t look at the witch’s body. He was trying to distance himself, his emotions—to block them off so that they didn’t get in the way. That was the angel in him shining through.

“Will any of them remember anything?” he asked her.

“When your magic broke off onto them, their conscious minds were clouded,” she replied, sheathing her dagger. “I have wiped away what few memories they have of the experience. It is better this way. For them. And most especially for you.”

I tried to fathom how much magic it required to wipe so many minds. Hundreds of minds at once. It was no wonder Nyx had been able to fool us all—even the angels—with her disguise. Every time I forgot what she was, something like this happened to beat the reminder into me. Nyx wasn’t just an angel. She was a demigod.

And so was Stash, I reminded myself again. Now that his magic was unlocked, he was just like Nyx.

Nyx looked at me, amusement dancing in her eyes. “Well, not quite like me,” she responded to my thoughts. “He still needs to learn to control his magic.”

“And what of the infected people who are not here, those at the Legion?” I asked.

“They are back to normal as well.”

I pulled out my phone and dialed.

“What are you doing?” Harker asked me.

“Calling Nerissa.”

Nyx chuckled. It was the sound of purring kittens and magic rainbows—the kind with pots of gold waiting at the end. “By all means, don’t take my word for it.”

Nerissa answered the phone.

“What’s the situation?” I asked her.

“Everyone infected just fell unconscious. What did you do?”

“We found a cure. When they wake up, they’ll be fine.”

She whistled across the phone line. “Your ability to perform miracles never ceases to amaze me.”

“I can’t take the credit this time. We have the First Angel to thank.”

“The First Angel?”

“I’ll tell you all about it later,” I said. Then I hung up.

“You can’t tell her everything,” Nyx told me as I put my phone away. She pressed the button on her watch that summoned the airship.

“Why is that?” I asked her.

“We’ll discuss that shortly.” She looked up at airship hovering above us. “First, let’s load up these sleeping beauties.”

With four angels, the loading of the airship went fast. When the hundreds of sleeping supernaturals were on board, we took off. The airship dropped us off near to an abandoned building on the Black Plains. As it flew back to New York to deliver Nyx’s ‘sleeping beauties’ to the Legion office, the First Angel motioned for Nero, Harker, Stash, and me to follow her into an old building.

We were standing inside that building now, waiting for her to tell us why she’d brought us here. It looked like an old farm house. The wooden walls were dark, decaying. The support beams were rotting from the water that gushed through the house. I wasn’t sure if the builders had built this house on top of a waterfall, or if the waterfall had come later. I did know that the water was slowly but surely tearing the house apart.

“Why are we here?” I asked Nyx, my voice a little nasal. I had to hold my breath to not gag on the moldy stench.

“I needed a place deep inside the wild lands, away from spies.”

“Whose spies?” I asked. “Gods or demons?”

Nyx smiled. “Yes.”

She typed a message into her phone. A moment later, two men in black cloaks led five sirens into the room.

The sirens were beautiful. There were four women and one man—all with long silver hair, braided back from their faces. All with eyes that shone like sapphires and skin that shimmered like crushed diamonds. They looked exactly how I’d always imagined unicorns in human form to be.

The sirens wore headbands adorned with gems that matched their necklaces, bracelets, and ankle jewelry. Strings of gemstones were woven into their bright and colorful clothes too. And into the sandals on their feet.

Nyx waved to the cloaked men, a silent gesture to execute the beautiful sirens, to end this just as she had killed Constantine Wildman on the battlefield. The men in black moved quickly, their blades slashing like lightning. The sirens dropped all at once to the ground, dead.

“What are you doing?” Stash asked, horror shining in his eyes as they panned across the beautiful corpses on the ground.

“The same thing I did back on the battlefield: keeping your secret,” she told him. “Besides the people in this room, the sirens were the last living souls who knew what you truly are.”

“What will happen if someone finds out what I am?” he asked.

“One step at a time.”

I looked closely at Nyx’s two henchmen for the first time, the men the First Angel was trusting with Stash’s secret. The two men looked unremarkable, plain. They had the sort of faces that blended into a crowd, that thousands of men just like them had. Each one was a stock model henchman, the kind you ordered out of a catalogue. Someone you weren’t supposed to spare a second glance—or remember after the fact.

And yet there was something else about them. Something familiar. Nyx’s revelation had reminded me that things weren’t always as they appeared.

I squinted at them, trying to figure out who they really were. They weren’t just henchman cookie cutouts. They were more than that.

Nyx looked from me to her two henchman, a smile curling her lips. “Very good, Pandora.”

She nodded at the men in black. Their disguises melted away, revealing Ronan and Damiel.

25 Angels, Gods, and Demigods

Nero stared at his father in shock. “What are you doing here?”

“Did you really think I wouldn’t notice the return of one of my angels? Especially one as colorful as Damiel.” Nyx made a sound that was almost a giggle. “It’s adorable that you think I’m so gullible, Nero.”

“How long have you known?” he said with false calmness. Through our bond, I could feel his unrest.

“Since right after your glorious escapade in the Lost City,” she said. “After I left Leda’s house, Damiel came to me in secret with news of the sirens sleeping in the City of Ashes. He also told me rumors of another demigod, one whose true identity was hidden away by an immortal amulet that belonged to the sirens.”

“Did you know it was Stash?” I asked Damiel.

“No. I had no idea who it was. For all I knew, it could have been you.”

“Me?”

He shrugged, a gesture so casual for an angel. “A demigod orphaned twenty years ago. It seemed to fit. And you have to admit that you are unusual.”

Nyx’s blue eyes met mine. “Indeed, she is.”

“All I knew was the sirens trapped in the City of Ashes were the key,” Damiel said.

“Damiel also brought me rumors of a god who wanted to see those sirens released, wanted to have the demigod exposed—and create controversy and strife for the other gods,” said Nyx.

What a shocker. “Which god?” I asked.

“When you two broke the seal in the City of Ashes, you released the sirens,” Ronan told me and Nero. “One of the gods wanted them released, wanted this whole thing to blow up. But until Nero’s evaluation after the trials, we didn’t know which god it was.”

“It was Faris.”

I turned in surprise at Harker’s voice.

“Faris wanted the sirens released,” he continued. “And sirens aren’t the only thing that got loose. Much, much more was trapped in that vault. Including ghosts.”

Ghosts. That was another name for telepaths, who were so highly valued for their magic that the gods hunted them all down and ‘invited’ them to come work for them.

Nero had once told me that unlike every other supernatural on Earth, telepaths’ powers weren’t born from the gods’ magic. They’d been here first, before the gods and demons had come to the Earth. And because of that, they possessed some telepathic abilities that were even beyond the gods’ powers. In fact, the ghosts were why the gods and demons had come to Earth in the first place. The armies of light and dark magic had fought over telepaths on many other worlds—so much so that there were hardly any ghosts left.