If there was any bright side to the apocalyptic catastrophe that had befallen New York, it was that the Infernal’s attack had stalled. The Brooklyn Bridge was destroyed behind her, and Beelzebub’s Infernal Generals didn’t seem keen on advancing closer to the beast that had just crawled out of the river. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t any fighting.

Ava tucked her wings in and dropped a few feet. The axe sang as it passed over her head, but it was quickly drowned out by the screams of the Infernal as she cleanly chopped off its legs just below the hip. Even though the creature’s wings were still operable, it still dropped to its death out of shock and blood loss.

She flared her wings to stop her own descent, pivoted with a powerful flap that sent a gust of air to knock her next attacker off course, and used her core muscles to snap the edge of her other wing around. She’d been steadily funneling power into her wings since before the battle began, so the white feathers were stronger than steel and hit like a sledgehammer. The Infernal trying to sneak up behind her took the blow right to the temple and dropped to the ground, but was dead long before he hit it.

“Bart, report!” she had a moment to breathe.

“We’re finishing the cleanup now.” Bart replied, his voice traveling through the æther so it seemed he was standing right next to her. It was an effective, uncrackable form of communication in battle; an angel radio that was hardwired into their very existence by God.

“I need you to shift north east when you’re finished. Leave a small force to cover our flank, but bring everyone else. Stage at Seward Park off East Broadway, I can’t tell yet if they’ll counter across the Manhattan or Williamsburg Bridge, but that’ll put the majority of troops in the best position to respond. We’ll set up phase lines when you arrive.” She cut the ætherial line and rotated to get a clear view of the battlefield.

The beast was still advancing toward Central Park, which had gone suspiciously quiet over the last few minutes, but the three-hundred-foot tall creature more than made up for it. It’s hundred plus foot tail snaked out behind it as it advanced and whipped back and forth. The same tail that had taken down the Brooklyn Bridge smacked into apartments, skyscrapers, and anything else that stood in its way. Large chunks of buildings went flying as more crumbled in its wake. Thankfully, Midtown had largely been evacuated after the fight in Central Park started, but she still sensed humans dying by the dozens in the beast’s advance.

“Ava!” The call came in over angel radio. The urgency in the tone was something she’d rarely heard from her commanding officer. “Our priority now is evacuation,” Michael ordered.

The sudden change of mission started Ava. “Sir, we’ve got them pushed back. We could…”

“We can’t do anything with a leviathan here,” the stress was palpable in the statement. “You need to get the Mayor out now. Get his aides if you can, but the Mayor has priority. He’s important.”

The last word held subtext that Michael wasn’t willing to relay, but Ava got the gist. Humanity talked about God’s Plan and the concept of predestination at length. As an angel, one would think Ava had more insight into the matter, but that wasn’t true. She didn’t know any better than Joe Schmo down at the local deli if God had planned everything out already, and was just watching it play out. Archangel’s like Michael seemed to be a little more in the loop, but Ava was sure the big guy kept a lot of things to himself; especially after the Rebellion.

Whatever the truth was, Ava had sat next to, and been comforted, by her Father. She didn’t believe everything was already prechosen. She believed people had free will to act as they pleased, and those actions led to the karmic cycle that deposited a soul in Heaven, Hell, or reincarnated it back onto Earth. However, she knew her Father well enough to know he didn’t leave things completely up to chance. He had ringers in the mix; wise old souls that had spent lifetimes gathering knowledge, experience, and a better sense of their fellow man. Although the souls couldn’t actively tap into their past life experiences, something one could call wisdom tended to leak through into their current form of existence. God liked to make sure those people were looked over so they could move Eden toward the paradise he believed it could be one day. Apparently, one of those people was the mayor of New York City.

Ava didn’t know much about politics aside from the basics. She’d seen systems rise and fall for centuries, so one didn’t hold any more meaning to her than another, but she’d heard good things about the current mayor. He was a staunch moderate; a pillar of strength that modern Americans could relate to across both parties, especially in a climate of where political extremes caught all the headlines. If Ava had to wager a guess, she believed her father had big plans for the man. With a little luck, and Divine influence, maybe those plans were presidential.

At the moment, all those big plans were ‘what ifs’ if she didn’t get him out of the city and away from whatever had Michael so nervous. “Roger that,” she didn’t argue. “Bart, finish staging the troops and then hand over command to another Dominion. I need you to rally on me with a squad of your best.”

“Roger that.” She noticed Bart didn’t contradict her as much as she’d done to Michael. That begged some self-reflection at a different time.

It took a few heartbeats for her to cross the space between where she’d been viewing the battlefield to City Hall, which was a stone’s throw from the now-defunct Brooklyn Bridge. Bart met her there a few seconds later with eight guardians who looked like they’d seen better days. Their armor was scratched, dented, chipped, and covered in blood.

Ava shook her head before summoning a little of her power to clean up the guardians, Bart, and herself. Their armor was still scratched, dented, and chipped, but they didn’t look like they’d just come from a slaughter.

“We’re extracting the mayor and anyone else if necessary, but the mayor is priority.” She relayed Michael’s instructions, and heads nodded all around her. “We need to go in soft.” Everyone understood that.

The small group began to shrink down to normal human-size and went insubstantial to avoid drawing attention from the enemy. None had penetrated all the way to City Hall, but complacency tended to get people killed, and Ava had seen enough death today.

New York’s City Hall was palatial and had been around since 1812. It was a long time for a human building, but not a lot for an angel. It sat across the street from the headquarters of the NYPD, so it was one of the first buildings to be locked down and secured once the attack began. Over a hundred officers stood guard around the building and helped direct people toward safety. They all carried rifles or shotguns with pistols on their hips. The NYPD had broken out the heavy artillery for today, but Ava knew it wouldn’t nearly be enough.

The squad of angels descended past snipers on the rooftop calling out enemy positions. They didn’t really differentiate between Ava’s guardians and the invading Infernal, and she couldn’t blame them for that. All they saw were giant mythological creatures attacking their city. To them, everything was a threat until it wasn’t. The squad passed effortlessly down through the roof, through empty council chambers, and to the main floor. More police in tactical gear were trying to get people to safety, but others were standing guard.

“There is an emergency operations center in the basement,” Bart informed. “It was installed after nine-eleven so they could manage all the city’s resources and communicate with federal authorities if another terrorist attack, or other emergency, happened again.”

“I’d call this an emergency.” Ava walked forward, past the two burly officers guarding a door that lead downstairs. The whole squad passed between the guards unseen.

A staircase led down to another set of guarded doors, that lead to a hallway with a third set of guards and some legitimate security doors. These ones looked like they required biometric access, and the guards probably didn’t have it, but Ava didn’t need it. She passed right through the steel vault-like barrier, and came face to face with a different type of guard. A single guardian angel stood alertly on the inside of the door. That confirmed Ava’s theory about the mayor’s importance. A person didn’t get assigned a personal guardian unless her Father had big plans for them.

The guardian stood by the shoulder of the man at the center of the organized chaos in the room. Banks of computer screens lined the walls and were manned by the men and women of the NYPD’s cyber division. Their fingers flew over the keyboards as they dispatched the leader’s orders to thirty-thousand officers deployed across the city.

“We can’t put anything in the monster’s path, Mr. Mayor.” A big man in a suit, with a NYPD, and American flag pin, wasn’t going to budge on whatever the mayor wanted. Judging by the frequency senior cops came up to him, Ava was guessing he was the Police Commissioner.

“We can’t abandon those people.” The mayor gazed at the biggest screen in the room, which seemed to be distant drone footage of the leviathan’s advance. “We can’t get a better picture?” It was clear the mayor was trying to keep the frustration out of his voice.

“The creature is throwing off electromagnetic interference.” The police commissioner shrugged when the mayor raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m not the scientist; I’m just telling you what they told me.”

“And the angels in the park?” The mayor asked, shifting to another picture of Michael, Gabriel, Beelzebub, and Lucifer in Central Park. The latest addition was new to Ava, and explained some of the stress in Michael’s voice.

Ava cringed, but focused back on her mission.

“Sir,” another suited man, handsome, but nowhere near as broad as the commissioner spoke up. “I can’t stress enough that you shouldn’t be calling those giants in the park angels. The official terminology is Unidentified Giant, or UG. Calling them angels is going to offend the religious and atheist vote. One because they don’t believe in them, and the other because they won’t believe they could be doing these horrible things.”

Ava couldn’t stop a grin from forming.

She phased back into reality along with the rest of her squad, which had spread out across the room. It took about two heartbeats for the mayor and his advisors to realize they weren’t alone, and then the screaming started.

The commissioner whipped out an old six shooter with surprising agility for someone with so much white in his hair, but his booming voice still held the authority of a man who’d faced down rioters in the seventies and eighties. “Drop the fucking gu…sword!” he corrected himself quickly as he leveled his pistol at Ava. He correctly assumed, but her position in the center of the squad, that she was the leader.

“Nobody move.” She communicated to her squad on the ætherial bandwidth the humans couldn’t hear. She let the humans scream themselves hoarse.

They understood the amount of unknowns in the situation and didn’t want to escalate. Ava just wanted them to cool down a notch so they didn’t accidentally open fire and hit the mayor with a ricochet. After about thirty seconds of yelling things started to settle down, and confusion took over. That was Ava’s cue. She slowly reached up to her helmet and removed it. Putting a recognizable face in front of the humans would help deescalate the situation.

A few male eyes widened when they saw her beautiful, yet very human, face behind the armor. At their core, the men and women in this room were wired to protect others. They weren’t going to open fire on a woman, even if she was wearing armor, had wings, and was carrying a sword.

“Mayor Poole.” Ava smiled and nodded to the man. “My name is Ava. I am an angel of God, and I am here to keep you safe.”