Cadence Lightbringer has everything. The prestige and power that comes with being the Angel of Storm Castle. Her archangel husband and soulmate, Damiel Dragonsire, Master Interrogator in the Legion of Angels. And their son Nero, a miracle of magic, the first and only child of two angels.
But the Legion's mission to exterminate dark magic brings trouble to Cadence's door. What begins as a mission to apprehend a rogue angel escalates into a hunt for ancient relics that will turn her life upside down-and shake the very foundation of the Earth and every other world in the domains of heaven and hell.
The games of gods play out upon the backbones of mortals.
Leda Pierce has come a long way since she left her home on the frontier of civilization one year ago to join the Legion of Angels. She is a soldier in the gods' army, has crossed swords with demons, and shares an apartment with her angel lover in New York.
Every day brings Leda closer to becoming an angel herself-until a promotion ceremony goes horribly wrong, leaving her powers in magical limbo. Worse yet, the gods have taken over her training at Crystal Falls. Leda's failed magic and the gods' impossible challenges are the least of her worries, however. Someone is using the challenges to expose people's most-guarded secrets, and the skeletons in Leda's closet would mean her execution.
Cadence Lightbringer, daughter of an archangel, has trained from birth to one day drink the Nectar of the gods and ascend to the angels' ranks. She's always been the perfect soldier. She's always known exactly where her life is headed.
Until she is assigned to a mission with Damiel Dragonsire, Master Interrogator of the Legion of Angels.
Powerful, paranoid, and brutally intelligent, Damiel has built up a reputation for hunting down each and every traitor hiding within the Legion's ranks. And his latest suspect is Cadence. Convinced she is not the perfect soldier everyone believes her to be, he will stop at nothing to expose her.
Cadence Lightbringer, daughter of a legendary archangel, has always known her gods-endowed magic comes with a price. As an angel in the Legion of Angels, she lives where the Legion commands her to live, trains how the Legion tells her to train, and marries whom the Legion instructs her to marry.
Somehow it all sounded simpler in her head.
When Cadence is ordered to marry the enigmatic angel Damiel Dragonsire, a man she hardly knows, her whole perfect, predictable life is turned upside down. The wedding, however, is cut short by a dark threat that throws Cadence and Damiel into a world of magic as ancient and deadly as the original Immortals, powerful deities who once ruled the entire known universe.
The old saying is true. Knowledge really is power, especially when angels and gods play the game.
The original Immortals, masters of magic, once reigned over every world in the known universe-until they suddenly vanished. The gods and demons have been fighting over the remains of their fractured empire ever since.
Millennia later, new angel Leda, a soldier in the gods' army, is recuperating from her transformation. Her recovery is cut short, however, when a curse strikes New York City, a spell targeted directly at the Legion of Angels. Even as the Legion's soldiers succumb to wrath, jealousy, and fear, the beasts on the plains of monsters are growing in numbers and power. And the longer Leda and her archangel lover Nero investigate these phenomena, the closer they come to the ancient secret that destroyed the Immortals-and that now threatens to tear the Earth apart.
In the immortal war between gods and demons, one woman's past holds the key to humanity's future.
One year after joining the Legion of Angels in New York City, Leda Pierce returns home to visit her family in Purgatory, a rough and rugged frontier town that borders the plains of monsters. Leda's family reunion is cut short, however, when her little sisters are captured by supernatural mercenaries.
Together with her angel lover Nero, she sets out to save them. Besieged by monsters, assailed by powerful foes, Leda knows this rescue mission won't be easy. What she doesn't expect is that it will bring her face-to-face with the secrets of her buried past.
Next to the powers of heaven and hell, we are nothing.
'So this was just one gigantic, cosmic war between light and dark magic. And we were only a small part of it, a tiny dot in the gods' empire. It was no wonder that they saw us as insignificant.'
Tested by the gods, Leda and her angelic mate Nero venture into the City of Ashes, a fallen fortress in the Western Wilderness where nightmarish monsters reign supreme and an ancient secret is buried. To survive the Gods' Trials, they will have to save the city-and they will have to do it without their magic.
Their victory, however, comes at a heavy price. And the secret they uncover will upset the balance of power between Earth and heaven.
Leda's quest to gain the magic she needs to save her brother leads her to the castle of the Dragons, home of four soldiers in the Legion of Angels with extraordinary powers over the elements. If she makes it through their training, she might just survive her next sip of the gods' Nectar and level up her magic. But the gods' gifts of magic come at a price. Leda can already feel the Nectar changing her, making her less human-and so is her budding romance with the angel Nero. Sip by sip, kiss by kiss, the change is taking hold of her. As if that's not enough, Leda finds herself once again caught between the armies of heaven and hell-and tempted by a darkness that threatens to consume the Earth.
"A month ago, I watched in horror as six of my fellow initiates died after sipping the Nectar of the gods, a heavenly drink that either grants you magical powers or kills you. I can't believe I'm coming back for seconds." Leda Pierce has survived the gods' first test and gained entry into the Legion of Angels, but the fight is far from over. Someone is poisoning the supernaturals of New York. Suspecting witches, the Legion sends in Leda to investigate. To save the city, she will need magic she doesn't have-and gaining that magic might just kill her. Now her survival depends on accepting help from the darkly seductive angel Nero, but that help comes with a price she cannot afford to pay.
When gods and demons clash, mortals bleed. Leda Pierce's latest mission brings her back to her hometown at the edge of the Frontier. But things have taken a turn for the worse in the six months since she left home to join the Legion of Angels in New York City. Crime lords now rule over the town, and the beasts' numbers are exploding just beyond the great magic wall that separates humanity from the plains of monsters. Together with the fiercely seductive angel Nero, Leda guides a group of pilgrims across the monster-infested expanse to the ruins of the final battle between gods and demons. What begins as a pilgrimage, however, soon turns into a treasure hunt for an ancient weapon that could tip the balance of power between heaven and hell-and spirals into an intrigue that pits Leda and Nero against a rogue member of the Legion, a legendary angel as powerful as he is black-hearted.
Leda Pierce is working as a paranormal bounty hunter on the Frontier, the dividing line between human civilization and the plains of monsters. Life is simple and the pay modest, but at least she has her family. That is, until a vampire hunt goes wrong and her brother goes missing, captured by the dark angels of hell. With no magical powers of her own and no way to find him, Leda's only option is to go to New York and join the Legion of Angels, an elite unit of supernatural soldiers with powers gifted to them by the gods themselves. If she can survive long enough to make it up the ranks, she will gain the magic she needs to find her brother. But Leda soon finds herself on the wrong side of a conspiracy that will shake up the supernatural world-and at the mercy of a fiercely powerful and tempting angel.
