1
Heaven's Army
I gazed at my reflection in the mirror stuck to the door of my open locker. “My name is Leda Pandora,” I told it. “Former bounty hunter, the current Angel of Chaos, and Heaven’s Emissary to Hell.”
That last one was a recent title, only a week old. The gods’ ruling council had tasked me with negotiating an alliance—at least a temporary one—with the demons, their sworn enemies. For millennia, gods and demons had been fighting one another in this immortal war, so most people would find my current assignment nothing short of impossible.
I wasn’t most people. As I’d just told myself—and had been telling myself for a week now—I was the Angel of Chaos. I had been cheating my way out of impossible situations since long before I’d had wings, and becoming an angel had only magnified my innate stubbornness.
“I am Leda Pandora,” I reminded myself once more.
“Why does she keep repeating her name?” asked Arabelle, the female soldier behind me. The two of us were the only women on this team.
There were six of us in the locker room right now, but I was the only angel. The other five were gods, soldiers in Heaven’s Army.
“She keeps repeating her name because she’s crazy,” Octavian said as I turned away from my locker to face them. “All angels are.” He slanted a smirk my way.
Octavian was a tall, slim soldier with long, fiery-red hair—and an even fierier disposition. Had he been human, I’d have labeled him impulsive. For a god, he was outright reckless.
“As opposed to the epitome of sanity the gods represent,” I countered, matching Octavian’s smirk.
“Indeed we do.” Peals of laughter rolled off his words. “That’s why we’ve been fighting this immortal war for millennia. And we will continue fighting it forever more.”
“This is hardly a laughing matter,” Devlin chided him. “It is not our duty to question the council’s decisions, only to carry them out.”
Our team leader was serious, professional, and quiet. He only broke his silence when he had to dispense mission-critical material—or scold us for going off-task.
“Relax, boss, we aren’t in a firefight right now,” said Arabelle. “And we’re gods. I’m sure we can gossip and lace up our boots without getting our tongues tied up in our shoelaces.”
“At least some of us can.” Octavian glanced at the soldier seated on the bench opposite him, a man everyone called Punch.
Punch had two heads’ height on me, and he was built like a tank. His dark skin was inked with colorful symbols to commemorate his victories. His gold eyes were alight with explosive fervor. He was the kind of guy you pointed at a problem—any problem—and then you stood back to watch him blast it to bits. I’d seen him tear off a monster’s head with his bare hands, knock over an enemy watchtower, and punch a sizable hole in an airship’s hull.
Right now, Punch was holding a very battered pair of boots in his hands. The sandy soles were torn halfway off, and the laces were burnt black, courtesy of yesterday’s mission, which had pitted us against a very enormous, very ill-tempered desert dragon.
“Here, Punch, take these,” said Patch, the soldier seated to his left side, and passed over a new pair of boots.
The twins Punch and Patch were identical in appearance, right down to their tattoos, and yet they were completely different. Punch was a doer, Patch a thinker. Punch was a frontline fighter, clearing paths for the rest of us and making big messes. Patch kept to the rear; he focused on providing support for the team and cleaning up all those big messes. He always looked out for us all, especially his brother.
“Thanks, bro,” Punch said with a grin and took the boots from Patch. “I forgot my boots got so torn up yesterday.”
It was a testament to Punch’s unwavering, push-forward-and-never-look-back attitude in battle that he hadn’t given a second thought to his destroyed boots, not even the necessity to fix them. It was a good thing Patch had him covered.
Octavian looked down at his own footwear. “I wouldn’t mind some new boots myself.”
“Waiting for you in your locker,” Patch told him. “I already swapped out the regular laces for the thin ones you like.”
Octavian glared at him. “You make it really hard to mock you, you know.”
“I know.” Patch flashed him a bright smile.
Octavian gave him a hearty slap on the back, then glided over to his locker, chuckling all the way.
I panned my gaze across the locker room and my five godly comrades. When Faris had sent me here, to Heaven’s Army, I hadn’t expected this.
I’d met gods before, and they were, unfailingly, arrogant and conniving beings who believed that everyone and everything in the universe existed merely to serve them. The gods didn’t even trust one another; they were often too busy scheming against their allies to effectively fight their enemies.
Or so I’d believed. Until Faris, the God of Heaven’s Army, had sent me here to train with his soldiers.
At first, I’d been annoyed. After all, I was supposed to be playing emissary to the demons right away. But instead of forming an alliance of gods and demons against the Guardians who planned to destroy us all, Faris had stuck me here. I’d come to realize that ‘right away’ meant something entirely different to the gods than it did to me. To Faris, ‘right away’ meant ‘right after you go through basic training with Heaven’s Army’. Because my Legion of Angels training was apparently ‘not nearly enough to prepare you for what you will face on the way to the demons’ council through enemy territory’.
I wasn’t sure who was most offended by Faris’s statement: Nero, my first trainer at the Legion and now my archangel husband; Nyx, the First Angel, who led all the other angels on Earth; or Ronan, the god of Earth’s Army and Lord of the Legion.
My annoyance at Faris’s detour, however, quickly shifted to surprise. The gods I’d met here in Heaven’s Army were nothing like any god I’d ever met before. Arabelle’s irreverence. Octavian’s sarcasm. Devlin’s quiet, almost shy professionalism. Punch’s simple, straightforward motivations. Patch’s motherly manner. I hadn’t encountered any of these traits in the seven gods on the ruling council.
Apparently, the gods were more complicated than I’d thought. My comrades in Heaven’s Army had tons of magic, but they didn’t have any political power. They did not enjoy the prominence that the Seven did. And that made them surprisingly down-to-earth, surprisingly normal. And surprisingly a lot like me.
“If Octavian is finished petting his fancy new boots, might I suggest we get a move on?” Arabelle pulled a leather jacket out of her locker, then shut the door.
“What do we have tonight anyway?” Octavian wondered.
“Babysitting duty,” she told him. “At the Lords’ Gala.”
“Another one? They had a gala just last week. It’s always the same dull lords doing the same dull things. Don’t they ever do anything interesting?” Punch griped.
Patch set his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Maybe monsters will crash the party.”