It was still dark outside when Jace, his team, and I boarded the train out of Chicago, loaded down with enough gear for twice our numbers. On our way to the station, I’d texted Calli and Bella, but they’d told me that they had already left on the earlier train and would meet me on the Frontier. I wondered if they’d slept at all. Probably not. I hadn’t slept either. Having a god invade your dreams wasn’t exactly the most restful experience.

The train would bring us as far as the Frontier town of Infernal. From there, we’d drive a Legion truck out onto the Field of Tears, the wilderness that lay beyond the town wall.

“Purgatory. Infernal. Abyss. These Frontier towns have such posh names,” commented the female soldier.

“What did you expect?” said Bodybuilder One. “These backwater lands are hardly more civilized than the plains of monsters.”

“You could say the same about the pedigree of citizens they produce,” added Bodybuilder Two.

They all looked at me.

“You know, Frontier towns have the highest crime rate in the world,” said the nimble knife-wielder.

I’d already heard all of this before. More times than I could count, in fact. They weren’t wrong. Of course there was a lot of crime in poor areas. When people were desperate, survival took a front seat to propriety. People like these soldiers—privileged citizens who’d never had to worry about when their next meal would come, about whether they would have somewhere safe and dry to sleep that night—could not possibly understand. Sometimes you had to live it to get it.

I tuned out their hateful comments. They were just trying to annoy me, to get a reaction out of me, but I wasn’t playing along. I was too tired for that kind of nonsense. And, besides, nothing I could say would change their opinion if they were hellbent on hating me.

Here and now, surrounded by these unwilling allies, I’d never felt so alone. I couldn’t help but feel homesick for New York. Things were different there. I knew the Legion soldiers there. Some of them didn’t like me or my methods, of course, but they didn’t try to provoke me or to mock me. Colonel Fireswift must have been telling tales about me to feed all this hate.

I got up and walked to the empty train car next door, in search of a few moments of peaceful rest. I was just dozing off when something tugged at the edges of my senses. I jerked awake to find a god standing over me.

Zarion, God of Faith and Lord of the Pilgrims, was dressed in long robes. His robes bore some resemblance to the humble clothes worn by the Pilgrims, the preachers of the faith, often referred to as the ‘voice of the gods’. This god’s robes were not plain and humble, however; they shimmered green and blue, as though gemstones had been crushed into the fabric. His sandals were gold, his hair paler than mine, and his nose proud.

“Why did Faris visit you last night?” Zarion demanded.

Zarion and Faris were brothers. To say they didn’t get along would have been a major understatement. I had the feeling the only thing keeping the two gods from engaging in open warfare was their fear of Valora, the Queen Goddess who led the gods’ Council.

“Did you make a deal with Faris?” Zarion continued. “Are you helping him conspire against me?”

My head hurt, and it wasn’t only from the lack of sleep. “Why would I do that?”

“Faris voted in Nero’s favor after the trials,” Zarion pointed out. “Clearly, you are in league with him.”

Oh, yes. Clearly. Because there could be no other reason for Faris to visit me. Like, for instance, trying to crack my mind open and steal all my secrets.

“I demand answers,” Zarion said, unimpressed by my silence. “I am Zarion, the God of Faith, Lord of the Pilgrims, and I will be treated with the respect owed to me.”

I grimaced, my sleep once again disturbed by a paranoid god. The gods and their games were getting ridiculous. Zarion was here because of Faris, who had visited me because of Ronan. I wanted to shout at Zarion.

Instead, I just said, “No disrespect intended, my lord.” I even bowed.

Zarion appeared even more incredulous, as though I’d insulted him. But I wasn’t mocking him. For once, I was behaving myself.

“This isn’t over, Leda Pierce. I will be watching you.”

Then Zarion vanished in a huff, his voice continuing to echo in the empty car long after he was gone.

“Join the club,” I grumbled to the dead space where he’d stood a moment ago.

The gods were watching me closely, just as Ronan had said. Fantastic. That would make it harder to find Zane and the Guardians. It would make it harder to work in secret with Nyx and Ronan and to keep Stash’s demigod status a secret.

Stash was Zarion’s son, and the god didn’t have a clue. A family reunion would not go well. Zarion had already tried to murder Stash in his mother’s womb, and the god thought he’d succeeded.

I pushed thoughts of Stash out of my head. All the gods were telepathic. Life would be a lot easier without all these secrets—and all these gods.

I stood up, now completely awake. My latest godly encounter had left my mind agitated. I couldn’t possibly sleep now. So I walked back to the train car where I’d left Jace and his soldiers. He was alone now.

“Where are your minions?” I asked him.

“Preparing for the mission. As you should have been doing. Instead of sleeping.” His lower lip twitched.

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“I could hear you snoring.”

“What you heard was me training.”

“It sounded like a bulldozer was rattling the train car.”

I shrugged. “It was strenuous training.”

A smile flashed across his lips.

“Much better,” I told him.

He gave me a quizzical look.

“All that frowning will give you wrinkles.”

“I’m under a lot of pressure, Leda.”

“From yourself or from your father?”

“Both. I have to live up to my potential.”

“Why? Living up to your potential is so overrated. Slacking off is way more fun.”

Laughter broke through his facade. “You don’t follow that philosophy yourself.”

“Perhaps not,” I admitted. “Can I ask you something?”

“That depends. Will it get me into trouble?”

“No,” I chuckled. “It’s about magic.”

“Fire away.”

“What do you know about magic and counter magic?”

Surprise lit up his face. “How do you know about that?”

“What’s the matter? I know I’m just a thug, but even I know some things.”

Jace frowned. “You shouldn’t listen to my father’s soldiers.”

“They’re your soldiers too, Jace. You could have stopped them.”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Life is complicated.”

“If I’d stepped in, you would have looked weak, like someone in need of protection. And then they would have become even more vicious.”

“Vicious to me or to you, my knight in shining armor?” I smirked at him.

Jace just stopped, as though he didn’t know what to say. “I see. So your plan for winning our little competition is to have General Windstriker murder me in a fit of jealous fury.”

“Nah,” I laughed. “That wouldn’t be fair. I fight my own battles.”

“Then why didn’t you fight your own battle by standing up to my team? You’ve never had a problem standing up for yourself before.”

“Some battles just aren’t worth it. Even if you win, you still lose, you know?”

Jace looked at me for a long time. Finally, he said, “You’ve really grown up in the last year, you know.”

I gave my eyebrows a mischievous wiggle. “Well, not completely. I’m still not above throwing dirt in your face.”

“I’m starting to realize beating you won’t be as easy as I’d thought,” Jace said solemnly.

“As I told you, Firestorm, I fight dirty. This was never going to be easy.”

Jace nodded, looking reflective.

“Magic and counter magic,” I reminded him.

“Right,” he said. “When the gods came to Earth, they brought magic. They created seven casts of supernaturals: vampires, witches, sirens, elementals, shifters, psychics, and fairies. And they created the Legion of Angels, the protectors of Earth, soldiers they bestowed with these powers and more. The best would become angels.”

Jace spoke the words with reverence—and with hope. His greatest wish was to one day become an angel.

“When supernaturals interbreed with humans, their children are usually born with diluted magic. After a few generations, there’s only a hint of magic left. They have the potential but not the magic.”

“Like Drake. He’s always been strong and fast thanks to his magical ancestry.”

Jace nodded. “These sort of people, those with magical potential, make great candidates to join the Legion of Angels. They’re more likely to survive the gods’ Nectar than normal humans are.”

And the Legion brats made the best candidates of them all. ‘Legion brat’ was a term for a person with an angel parent. Rather than an insult, the term was one of high esteem. The brats had claimed the expression as their own, embracing their angelic origins and their magic ancestry.

“Every supernatural group on Earth has a patron god, a deity who was the origin of their magic,” said Jace. “For example, Ronan created the telekinetics, and Meda made the witches. As a rule, magic doesn’t typically mix well with other magic. A shifter can’t also be a witch. A vampire can’t also be an elemental. If you have magic, you have only one kind of magic.”

“Unless you’re a Legion soldier,” I said.

“Our magic works differently. We drink Nectar to absorb the magic into us.”

Or we died. Drinking Nectar was not something to be taken lightly. You trained and trained, and if you were good enough, you built up enough resistance to survive the next sip of Nectar and gain the gods’ next gift.

“Think of a Legion soldier as a blank slate, a canvas of magical potential,” Jace said. “A candidate must be balanced, not have too much or too little potential in any one magical field. That’s why you can’t so easily take a witch or vampire and turn them into a Legion soldier. Every so often, one of them survives, but their mortality rate at the initiation is even worse than a mundane human with no magical ancestry. You need people with mixed magic ancestry and lots of magical potential.”

In other words, the children of angels.

“This is where we get to magic and counter magic. And to how the Legion breeds angels,” Jace told me. “The Legion breeds angels for two qualities: magic balance and magic potential. To create a child with the highest magic potential, you would need to breed two angels together, but those pairings rarely work out.”

I nodded. My friend Nerissa had explained it to me. Like their personalities, angels’ magic was sharp, dominating, and unrelenting. So while a dual angel pairing had magic potential to spare, it was severely lacking on the magic balance component. The magic of two angels didn’t blend well; it clashed. It was like one nonstop explosion of poison and egos. So when the Legion wanted to breed an angel, they paired them with lower level Legion soldiers, someone whose magic was more amenable.

The only exception I knew of was Nero, whose parents were both angels—but that pairing had only worked because his mother had very light magic and his father had a lot of dark magic for an angel. Their magic had obviously found a balance between light and dark.

“The Legion’s breeding methods work, but some angel families have refined them,” Jace told me. “Mine, for instance. We’ve taken the process further.”

I wasn’t surprised. Colonel Fireswift was precisely the kind of angel who would have optimized every possible thing.

“How do you do it?” I asked him.

“Magic is a spectrum.”

Jace drew the magic spectrum on a sheet of paper, eight gifts around a color wheel. It included not only the gods’ seven gifts of magic, but also an eighth, that of telepathy. Telepathy was a special gift, one granted only to angels. The telepaths of Earth didn’t have the gods to thank for their magic; they’d received it from another source, presumably from the original immortals who ruled the realms before the gods and demons. Some of their magic had made it to Earth.

“Over the centuries, my family has bred us so that each generation has more magic potential than the previous ones. Our ultimate goal is to create children whose magic potential covers the entire spectrum.”

“How do you accomplish that?” I asked.

“An angel takes a mate with a specific set of abilities we want to boost in their offspring. These abilities have to be powerful enough not to fade beneath all the magic of an angel, but not so strong that they cancel out the abilities on the opposing end of the spectrum.”

“How’s that working out?”

“Slowly,” he said. “We have managed to boost our magic potential beyond that of any other family, but we are still working on the magic balance. A few weaknesses remain.”

I glanced at the magic color wheel he’d drawn. “Which ones?”

His eyes hardened. “Nice try, but I’m not giving anything away.”

“You’ve already given everything away in your lecture about opposing magic,” I told him. “All I have to do is think about what your strongest abilities are and use that to determine your weaknesses.”

He clenched his jaw.

“Luckily for you, I don’t fight dirty.” I grinned at him.

“Oh, no. Never,” he said drily.

“Come to think of it, I haven’t noticed any weaknesses in you or your father,” I said.

“My father doesn’t stand for any weakness; he annihilates them. And what weaknesses he hasn’t yet been able to destroy in breeding, he destroys in training. He trained me and my sister from birth, and he didn’t hold back. The fact that we were children was no excuse. He bombarded both of us especially hard with our magical weaknesses to build our resistance early on. That’s how he made up for any shortcomings in our magic heritage.”

“Nice.”

Jace shrugged as though it didn’t bother him at all. “Some magic powers still come more easily to us than others. My father is determined to neutralize those weaknesses in breeding. He’s made it his mission in life to create the perfect angel, the perfect soldier. For the sake of our family’s legacy.”

“I didn’t realize the Legion would allow an angel any choice in choosing a spouse.”

“The Legion doesn’t tell you there is choice, but there’s always a choice as long as you’re breeding for magic and not for something as fanciful as love.”

I snorted. “Yeah, because who needs love and happiness when you have duty and power?”

Jace kept talking, so caught up in his explanation that he’d failed to recognize my sarcasm. “There are often multiple spouse choices to choose from within a range of magical compatibility. When that’s the case, the Legion allows an angel to pick. The Legion doesn’t object to old families of magic producing more angels, especially ones with more power across the entire magic spectrum. After all, those angels would be very valuable assets to the Legion.”

As he explained all of this, I couldn’t help but wonder what my and Nero’s chances were. Were we compatible? Would the Legion approve of us as a match? As soon as the thought fluttered through my head, I felt guilty for even pondering it. Whatever the answer was, it didn’t matter. I had to save Zane. That was my purpose in the Legion, my reason for being here. Making magical matches to produce more angels and ensure the Legion’s future was definitely not part of the plan.