I looked at Nyx, squinting my eyes. “Where is Basanti?”

“At Storm Castle. She never left.”

The realization of what Nyx’s words meant hit me. “It was you all this time?”

Her red lips spread into a smile. “Yes.”

That explained why news of Storm Castle was so hush-hush right now. No people were allowed in or out without Nyx’s permission. It wasn’t just the usual secrecy that surrounded the rebuilding of a Legion stronghold. Nyx was protecting her deception, so no one on the outside knew Basanti was still there.

Nyx had been pretending to be her all this time, and I hadn’t even guessed it. I’d thought my magic of Shifter’s Shadow was strong, that I could see though magic illusions. I’d thought I knew what I was doing. I had gotten used to this so quickly, to depending on my magic, for things to come to me just like that. I’d taken it all for granted.

But I wasn’t powerful, and I didn’t know a thing—not compared to the First Angel, a demigod. Compared to Nyx’s magic and might, I was nothing.

I had to admit it was a pretty massive blow to my ego. I hadn’t realized how much my early success at the Legion had all gone to my head. Well, there was nothing like an experience like this one to bring my feet back down to the ground.

Harker and Nero were staring at Nyx. From the looks on their faces, this revelation was a blow to their egos too. The two angels hadn’t realized it was Nyx either.

“Why are you here?” I asked her.

Nyx chuckled. “Blunt as always, I see.” Now that the illusion of her shifting spell had faded, her charisma had returned. And her magic. Her long, black hair swirled in the air around her, flowing like it was underwater. “I’ve been keeping an eye on my newest angel. And on my newest archangel.”

Harker and Nero both did their best to not look offended—Harker for being watched, Nero for being watched while he watched Harker.

“And then this mess gets dumped onto our plates.” She turned her eyes, eyes as blue as the deep ocean, on Stash. “Fascinating. It seems I am not unique after all.”

She truly looked fascinated rather than annoyed. It was behavior so unlike an angel, but, then again, Nyx was in a class all her own.

“Are you going to kill Stash?” I asked her.

As First Angel of the Legion, it was her duty to uphold the gods’ laws and keep the Earth safe. Stash’s army was a challenge to both.

“Of course not,” she said. “A demigod is too rare to waste.”

That was Nyx: practical to the core.

“But we really must put an end to this revolution.” She waved her hand to indicate the supernatural army. “They are drawing far too much attention to your existence.”

“The gods have been walking all over us for centuries,” Stash countered. “The Earth is not their playground. It is our home. Ours.”

There was power in that word. It rippled through the air, shaking me from the inside.

“That’s the influx of magic speaking,” Nyx told him calmly, apparently unaffected by his power. Or maybe she was just really good at hiding it. “All of us with divine blood tend to get territorial. The gods are not to blame for what happened to you and to all these people. It was the sirens’ revenge. And the witches’ greed.”

“The gods created the situation,” he replied, his jaw clenched hard. “And one god is very much involved, the one who impregnated my mother, the one who killed her. That god is the reason I am here.”

She gave her hand a dismissive wave. “It makes no sense to blame the reason you are alive. I will help you learn to control your power, Stash. And, when you’ve had a chance to see things more clearly, to find your father. But you really must put an end to this revolution. We must cure these people.”

Stash’s eyes panned across his army. “I can’t. I can’t cure them,” he admitted. “I don’t know how. I only just now learned to control them. If I could have controlled them all along, I would have stopped them from killing people.” He shot me an apologetic look. “From killing those Legion soldiers.”

“I know you would have stopped them,” I told him. “You are a good person, like I said.”

Stash gave me a half-smile. “The jury is still out on that, sweetness.”

“I will help you cure them. We’ll do it together.” Nyx extended her hand to him.

Stash took it.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

Stash looked at her, his face hard.

“You’re going to have to trust someone. And believe it or not, I know what you’re going through.” Magic sparked in her eyes.

“How can you possibly know what I’m going through?” he demanded. “You were born an angel. You always knew who you were, what you were.”

“That’s not entirely true. For a time, I was lost.”

“Lost?”

“It’s a long story. A story for another time.” Her tone was hard, leaving no room for argument. “Now close your eyes.”

He obeyed.

“See the magic that connects you to them. You are at the center of a web of magic that starts with you, reaching out,” she said, her voice dreamy, almost soothing. “When the spell locking your magic broke, something happened. Your magic—fragile, volatile from being bottled up for so long—exploded out of you. Pieces of it grafted onto them, changing them.” She looked at Constantine Wildman, who was kneeling at her feet. “There is no spell that can give you the powers of other supernaturals,” she told the witch. “Nothing but Nectar or Venom can do that. You all have these powers because a piece of Stash’s magic is in you.”

The witch blinked. His mind was clearly somewhere else.

Nyx walked behind Stash, setting her hands on his shoulders. “That piece of magic in them will eventually kill them because their bodies are rejecting it. They can’t handle it. Though, admittedly, most of them will go mad long before that point. So, you see, your army will be dead before it can challenge anyone.”

Stash swallowed hard, his face etched with guilt. “How do we help them?”

“You need to draw those pieces of your magic out of them, like shrapnel from a wound. Draw them out, absorbing them back into yourself. Then their minds and magic will be back to normal. And your magic will be whole once more. Feel those parts of you in them, draw them into you.” She nodded. “Good. Nice and slow.”

I didn’t see anything. Fireworks weren’t exploding overhead. I didn’t even see any tiny magic sparkles pulsing. But I felt…something. Like thousands of invisible fireflies were flying around us—not seen but felt.

The infected supernaturals began dropping to the ground—dozens at a time, peppered throughout the crowd. After the last people fell, Stash sighed in relief, as though an enormous load had been lifted from him.

Nyx peeled her hands off his shoulders and circled back around to face him. “It is done. When they awake, they will be back to normal.” Then, in a flash of movement, she grabbed Constantine Wildman by his crushed-velvet jacket and quickly slit his throat with a black dagger. “All but one.” She tossed the dead witch’s body to the ground.

The angels didn’t blink. I didn’t either. I was too busy gaping at Nyx in shock. I knew why the First Angel had done it. Constantine Wildman had created this problem by trying to gain magic his witches couldn’t have, magic by forbidden means. Nyx’s response was swift. Merciless. That was the gods’ justice, the Legion’s justice. Nyx might have her moments of humanity, but she was still the First Angel.

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.