Battle Angel (Immortal City 3)

For the past two days she’d been plagued by a recurring nightmare interrupting her sleep like clockwork throughout the night. She kept seeing the same, unblinking visage. Of death. On the blasphemous face of a Dark One on the 101 freeway, just like the one she’d saved the Vespa girl from. In the nightmare, the demon would emerge unscathed from a crater, its body shimmering black smoke and fire, and stare right at Maddy.

Then, instead of flying off, the demon would slowly stride toward her. With terror coursing through her veins even in sleep, Dream Maddy would try to escape. Her now-trained wings would pump once, then twice—and nothing. Her feet were somehow stuck to the ground. She couldn’t take off. In desperation she would try to run. But her feet merely became even more glued to the earth, until her legs wouldn’t move. She was paralyzed. Then the sky would grow dark, far darker than it had been on the day of the first attack.

The nightmare demon would take its time as it walked toward her, its terrible gnarled limbs swinging with confidence. Its horns towered over its hideous face, and spikes rippled along its back as it loped. Its black-red eyes would flicker, and it was as if the demon felt a distinct pleasure as it came closer.

Dream Maddy’s skin would then grow hotter and hotter as the Dark Angel drew itself closer. So hot it felt as if Maddy’s skin were somehow melting from inside. And still the demon came.

Was it smiling now?

The bloodred orb of its eye would draw closer and closer until it seemed to encompass Maddy’s entire field of vision. The sensation was unendurable as she would struggle, to no avail, to escape.

The Dark One would then lean down, closer and closer, and open its dread mouth. In her dream, Maddy knew then that she was going to die. The demon’s stinking, sulfurous breath blistered her skin as it hissed her name.

“Maddy . . .”

At the end of the nightmare, Maddy would always open her mouth to scream, but no sound would come out. It was too late.

The dream was always the same, and always so much more vivid than any normal nightmare. This dream had the ultrareal quality she felt whenever she focused on someone’s frequency or had one of her unbidden premonitions. It was a fevered hallucination in her slumbering brain, but somehow more real than reality itself. It never failed to shake her to her very core.

Pulling herself together, Maddy looked out the window and saw it was still pitch-dark outside, in the small hours of the night. The cold sweat had already begun to evaporate and her fast breathing had calmed down, but there was no chance she’d get back to sleep for a while. Stepping out of bed, Maddy shivered and pulled her oversize T-shirt down closer to her knees as she searched for her pajama pants. She slipped them on, went to the window, and slowly opened the curtains.

There was the Angel City sign. It had been such an important marker for her during her childhood, giving her something to rail against while everyone else venerated the Angels. Then, when she met Jacks and later discovered her own half-Angel heritage, it took on two completely new meanings.

Now the sign was cloaked in darkness. Power was scarce in the Immortal City right now, and on war footing it made no sense to light the sign. As she drew her arms around her chest to keep warm, Maddy thought of how people across the city could no longer look to the hill and its gleaming beacon to orient themselves, or to give them a signpost, something to hope, dream, and wish on. Instead it was a void, reminding the entire city of how bleak their situation was becoming.

The sign was dark, and the Angels were silent.

Maddy’s gaze crossed over the neighborhoods below the phantom sign, which had also been plunged into eerie darkness. The power had failed again in the night, and she walked now to her

bedside lamp and to test the switch. Nothing.

The Immortal City was now entirely dark, its flashy lights and beaming billboards of perfect Angels having receded into the shadows. Residents in the city moved quickly back and forth between darkened homes, fearfully looking up at the sky for the next demon attack, and Humvee units, spread way too thin, patrolled the streets to prevent looting and to help those in need.

The severity and quickness of the first wave of the demon attack two days earlier took most everyone by utter surprise. But now they knew what the demons were capable of, and they knew more were coming. Many more, an untold number. Each one capable of causing unimaginable havoc and bloodshed equal to a major natural disaster.

The city staggered under the constant threat of demons. Evacuation routes had been totally destroyed, the supplies had all but stopped coming in, and the demons kept waging random terrorist attacks. But the worst part was the waiting: Why wouldn’t the demons just get it over with?

Maddy walked in darkness to her desk and found the candle and matches she always kept ready. With a spark against the rough strip along the box, the match head flared and lit. She brought the flame to the wick of the candle, hot wax drips falling onto the desk as it caught. The flickering flame cast her face in a warm yellow-orange, the corners of the room still lingering in darkness.

The city would wake to another morning under siege. At this point they were waiting, helpless, for the next demon assault. Any plans the city had ever made for emergencies proved to be worse than useless under the stress of a demon invasion, and instructions that looked good on paper turned to chaos and panic as soon as an actual emergency occurred. And now those who remained barricaded themselves behind boarded-up windows. They stayed inside, rationing food and water, waiting for the inevitable main strike from the demon army just lying off the coast.

The demons knew what they were doing, in the most terrible way—they were trying to crush Angel City’s spirit before they even fully invaded.

Maddy sighed and tried not to brood. The night was still long. No rays of dawn cut through the darkness outside.

But it had been two days, and she still hadn’t heard from Tom. A brief message had arrived via navy messenger that he was alive after the first wave, and she knew the navy had been fighting isolated battles near the sinkhole itself these past few days, but communications were spotty. And she still couldn’t focus on his frequency.

To top everything off, Maddy felt so useless just sitting here in Angel City. She’d never been trained for battle of any kind. But was she really just supposed to wait for the next full attack and hope she managed to grab onto a frequency of someone to save? Then she thought of Tom out there, willing to risk his life every day. . . .

And then sometimes she would think of Jackson. Stupid, silly stuff, like the way he’d tickle her when they argued about something to get her to laugh. And then, just like that, a sea of sadness would wash over her, and she’d have to go do something else, anything else, before she got sucked down too deep. Having to worry about Tom was hard enough; to sit and ponder Jacks every day was too much for her heart to handle.

Maddy lay back down on her bed, but it seemed hopeless that sleep would come. She turned over on her side and scanned her bookshelf for something to read.

• • •

She woke up curled on the couch. Early morning light streamed in through the window. It couldn’t have been later than 6:30. Mercifully, she’d fallen asleep reading in the living room after going downstairs. The flashlight she’d used to light her book had fallen to the floor, and the novel was open, facedown on her chest.

The old cream-colored phone was ringing. Groggy from sleep, Maddy had to reach and stumble to even find it where it was stuck under a stack of magazines on the lowest shelf of the side table by the couch. Because of cell phones, which had stopped working after the first assault, she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d heard the landline ring.