Page 167

Even now, a team of gods from Heaven’s Army was closing in on the telepath’s position. His mind tricks would only keep them at bay for so long. They would capture him.

Of course Ava couldn’t possibly allow that. She had far more important plans for the telepath, plans that superseded those from the God of Heaven’s Army.

A powerful spell repelled all demons from Earth, keeping them out. Ava could not go there, nor could her demonic soldiers in Hell’s Army. But she had other means to make her will be done.

Faris’s soldiers were almost upon the telepath.

Then they just stopped. The soldiers were frozen, their eyes locked on to the dozen bewitching men and women who’d just slunk out of the shadows and planted themselves in front of them. Ava’s dark sirens.

Faris’s soldiers didn’t move. They didn’t even lift a hand to defend themselves as the dark sirens killed them with their own swords.

Further down the street, just the person Ava knew would be here was kneeling down beside the injured telepath, who’d collapsed against a building.

“You’re injured,” the woman said. Her name was Cora.

The telepath could barely keep his eyes open.

“I’m going to heal you now. Just hold on.” She opened up a kit of premixed potions.

Cora was a good friend of Callista Pierce. And the telepath, well, he was the one Ava had chosen to father one of Leda’s protectors.

Faris would eventually find the telepath, but it was of no consequence. Ava would have already gotten what she needed from him. She just had to make sure that when Faris’s soldiers did come again, that they didn’t take the telepath alive. She was not about to allow Faris to add the most powerful telepath in the known universe to his Orchestra. She would, however, soon be adding the telepath’s child to her own collection.

Ava could already see her dark sirens closing in on the two unsuspecting lovers. They had no idea that magic would make them fall in love—or at least think they were in love long enough for them to conceive a child. One day, the child’s mother, pursued by relentless enemies, would have no choice but to leave him with her friend Callista Pierce.

Ava waved her hand over her gazing ball to turn it off. “Yes.” She fingered the tiny magical charms attached to her bracelet. “This will all work out perfectly.”

* * *

“I’ve done as you asked,”Inali said to Ava. “Callista Pierce has found the five children.”

Ava nodded. “Indeed. Your work, like your sisters’, is stellar.”

Inali reached toward her. “Now let us go.”

The demon sidestepped her. “No.”

“We know what you’ve done.” Anger took root in Inali’s voice. “You took samples from Indira and Rosette. You combined those samples with other samples taken from two human males in your custody. And with those, you made two babies: a phoenix and a djinn.”

“Of course I used human males as fathers,” Ava said. “I didn’t want another kind of magic to get in the way of the girls expressing their mother’s powerful magic.”

“In each case, you managed to isolate and magnify phoenix or djinn magic, so it was as though both parents had either phoenix or djinn magic.” Magic rippled across Inali’s body, like a flag caught in the wind; she was very angry, and she was doing a very terrible job of hiding it. “The fathers were used merely for physical traits, not magic.”

“One of my more brilliant ideas, I must say,” Ava said smugly. She stopped short of literally patting herself on the back—but only barely. “The girls would be of no use to me with diluted magic. I don’t need a weak phoenix and a weak djinn. I need a phoenix and a djinn as powerful as their mothers.”

“You put the babies in a surrogate mother,” Inali hissed. “Twins growing in her womb.”

“You’re making this all sound much easier than it was,” Ava said flippantly. “It was no simple task. It was a triumph of magic, the culmination of centuries of planning.”

A vicious smile twisted Inali’s lips. “You like to make people believe you are infallible, and yet the surrogate mother was kidnapped by human warlords. They killed her shortly after the babies were born.”

“Inconsequential.” Ava gave her hand a dismissive wave. “The surrogate had already served her purpose. And as for the babies, I sent some dark sirens to sabotage the warlords’ base so that the girls could escape. And then you made sure Callista Pierce found them. So it all worked out in the end.”

“Why do you refuse to admit that you aren’t in perfect control?” Inali demanded. “Why can’t you admit that your plans only worked because you got lucky?”

Ava’s eyes hardened. “Careful.”

“You can’t hold us forever,” Inali said defiantly.