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“Two angels have been dead for a whole month, and we haven’t heard a thing. Now, I’m admittedly a newbie angel, but I’m pretty sure my remedial angel training books were pretty clear that angels’ deaths were a rather public affair. A grand funeral with many odes to their excellence and achievements, and so on.”

Nyx’s lips drew together, very thin. “Generally, yes.”

“You covered it up,” I realized. “You covered up their deaths.”

Nero and Harker looked at Nyx in surprise—and with a fair share of annoyance. Maybe even a little hostility. None of us here had been big fans of Spellsmiter or Silvertongue, but they’d been angels. And angels’ deaths weren’t simply swept under the rug like this. It was disrespectful.

Nyx gritted her teeth. “It was necessary. Humanity is agitated right now. The Legion is agitated. Between the threat of the Guardians, goddesses going mad, supernaturals killing one another, monsters breaching the gates, and all other sorts of hellish apocalypses happening right now. We can’t afford for humans to lose even more faith in the Legion. If we can’t protect ourselves, our own angels, then how can we protect the people of Earth?”

Nyx was right. Humanity’s faith in the Legion was dangling by a thread.

And when the First Angel of the Legion of Angels started referring to the apocalypse in the plural, you knew you were in really deep shit.

“Their deaths must be acknowledged,” I said.

“They will be,” Nyx assured me. “But first we have other problems on our hands. Spellsmiter and Silvertongue weren’t the only ones killed. They had a team of twenty highly-trained Vanguard soldiers with them.”

This was just getting better and better.

“Those twenty soldiers’ bodies were found at the reappeared ruins too, weren’t they?” I said.

“Not just found. Displayed. I told you the bodies of Spellsmiter and Silvertongue were at the center of the ruins. And the twenty dead Vanguard soldiers were positioned in a ring around them, like the rays of some kind of perverse black sun.”

I shuddered at the image.

“There’s more,” Nyx said.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more of this.

“At around the same time, we found similar scenes like this all over the world. Dead witches. Dead vampires. Dead elementals. Dead shifters and fairies, dead psychics and sirens. And a group of dead ghosts we hadn’t even known existed.”

“How did you ever keep this all secret from the public?” Nero clenched his jaw. “And from the rest of us?”

“With a lot of difficulty and even more magic,” Nyx said.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. So much death.

“There’s more,” said Damiel.

My arms were folded across my chest; my hands gripped my upper arms, like they were holding on for dear life. I didn’t want to hear more. I really didn’t want to know.

“These multiple massacres happened on many worlds, all around the same time,” Damiel said.

“The massacres were coordinated?” Nero’s voice was so level, so cold, just like it was whenever he shut off his emotions.

“It appears so,” Nyx said.

I dared to open my eyes. My heart was racing, pounding. “How many people died?”

Nyx shook her head. “We don’t have an exact number, but it was in the thousands.”

“Who did this?” I could hardly speak, could barely say the words.

“We don’t know,” Nyx told me.

I sighed. The weight of the universe, of all those deaths, seemed to press me down into the ground.

“But we do have a lead,” she added.