by Dante King
The carnage was impressive—but it wasn’t getting us any closer to Maddie.
The angel ducked and dived through a hail of lightning bolts, barely avoiding singing herself with each salvo. Judyth and her lieutenants had stopped shelling the battlefield with the projectiles—having noticed Maddie on their flank, they’d focused all their attention on bringing down a member of my harem.
I was pretty sure I knew why.
The bond that connected me to my girls could also be used against us. If one of us fell, we’d all feel it—like a hole opening up and swallowing us. Forget hurting our morale—it might actually take us out of the fight.
Grabbing hold of my mental connections, I passed out orders like a general. Christina and Mareth led the heaviest concentration of Infernal Academy brats through the opposite flank, trying their best to distract Judyth from Maddie. Angels died by the dozens, but still the Headmistress of the Celestial Academy refused to change tactics. She wanted Maddie. She wanted the student who’d come to her school with the best of intentions, learned how it truly operated and rejected it in favor of me.
She wanted us to hurt.
I was close now—close enough to see Maddie soar between two lightning bolts toward Myles Featherfinger.
“Come over here and fight like a man!” my girlfriend howled, wielding a golden spear she’d taken off another angelic lieutenant.
“Oh, Madeleine,” Myles groaned, dodging out of the way. He’d given up entirely on tossing lightning bolts—this was far too personal for that. “You were supposed to be the spot of darkness within our institution that makes the light shine all the brighter! You were not supposed to let the darkness consume you! You were never meant to consort with demons!”
“Have you seen the bitch you work for?” Maddie asked, swinging again and again, forcing Myles to backstep. “She’s the demon, Myles! And what about Queen Titania!”
“Once we are in control,” Myles said, “peace will reign in all the realms. Lucifer’s rule over Hell will finally be ended—”
Maddie shifted the spear to her opposite hand and socked Myles in the jaw.
“What if I don’t want him to be defeated!?” Maddie roared, smirking down the angel. “That man is practically my father-in-law, Myles! What kind of wife wants her father-in-law to get hurt?”
Myles rose into the sky, wiping his bleeding mouth with the back of his hand. “You are deluded, dear sister,” the angel said sadly. “The fact that you call yourself this monster’s wife only confirms it. The Lord of Hell has no wives—he has slaves and concubines. He has meat!”
“You wanna be treated like meat!?” Maddie laughed, stabbing at Myles with a two-handed grip. “Try working as a fucking waitress!”
The tip of her spear sank into Myles’s shoulder, and the angel screamed. “Now, Judyth!”
Shit.
All the while Myles had been lifting himself further and further into the sky, he’d been removing himself from the battlefield. Lifting into Judyth’s range. Only now did I realize all of her lieutenants lay clustered around her, lightning bolts held in their angelic fists.
“No no no,” I growled, beating my wings with all my might. “Stop—”
The angels struck. Not at Maddie, who was already reacting—but at Myles.
Myles Featherfinger grabbed Maddie’s spear with both hands—and thrust it deeper into the wound.
The tip of the spear erupted from the other side of his shoulder, blood and gore pouring down the sleek metal. The angel looked skyward, a peaceful expression cutting through the pain as he gazed upward toward his creator. For an instant, suspended in the air, he looked content.
Then a dozen lightning bolts blew him apart.
The eruption hit him and traveled down the length of the spear. If Maddie had managed to let go a few moments earlier, she could have avoided it—but the moment the current infiltrated her, she was stuck. Her muscles seized up as a tidal wave of electric power coursed through her, shocking her to the bone and then some.
Smoke poured from her wings. The pain flared through the bond, and suddenly every member of my harem was bent double and screaming. Exactly as Judyth wanted.
“Kill them!” Judyth screamed, gesturing for her lieutenants to charge forward. “Take them down while they’re weak!”
Maddie screamed as she tried her damnedest to let go of the spear. Myles body smoked and twitched on the other end, kicking spasmodically as what was left of the angel ignited from the inside out. He looked like a hot dog that had been left in a microwave all day—burnt to a bloody crisp, barely recognizable as a person at all.
Together, he and Maddie tumbled out of the clear blue sky.
My vision blurred from the pain as she fell end over end, unable to extract herself from the spear. Maddie’s back arched like a bow as she was electrocuted, smoke pouring from her open mouth as she screamed and screamed. The pain went on and on, disabling my harem completely.
We were sitting ducks before Judyth’s shock squad. Exactly as she wanted.
Then, suddenly, the pain stopped.
“I’ve got her, Master!” a manically cheerful voice tittered, amplified to a billion decibels. “Performing medical attention now! I will give you updates as I stabilize her…”
It was Godfrey. The hover tank fought its way to the front while we’d been battle Judyth’s lightning squad, coming from behind to mount a sneak attack. The big gun on the top fired a round with pinpoint accuracy, ripping the spear in half and sending Myles to the ground in a heap of ashes. I looked up just in time to see the vehicle’s retracting doors close over Maddie, an oxygen mask and several IV’s full of potions already hooking themselves up to her.
The pain began to ebb—but not quickly enough. “Godfrey!” I roared, trying to shake off the debilitating effects of Judyth’s mental attack. “Give her a painkiller now! Otherwise Judyth’s going to kill us all!”
Too late. An angel landed in front of me. He carried a golden spear that could have been a twin to Maddie’s, and he looked like he knew how to use it. I didn’t recognize the man’s face—he could have been any one of a hundred lieutenants on call within the Celestial Academy. No doubt we’d crossed paths in the hall, but we’d never spoken a word.
“Sorry about this,” the angel muttered, lifting the spear as I struggled to rise. “But things will be easier once this is over. Once we’re all on the same page—”
The angel was gone.
I closed my eyes, waiting for the killing blow to rain down on my head. Only for a shield to slam into me, knocking me to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
A figure slammed into the line of lieutenants, moving so fast it looked like a blur. Something black flashed from inside, dealing death wherever it went. It moved like a shadow—a living shadow. With glowing red eyes.
“Oh shit,” I grunted, raising myself to a sitting position. “He’s here.”
Holofernes, the Angel of Vengeance, had reached the battlefield.
Chapter 23
If anyone on the Infernal side of the battle thought the arrival of Holofernes was a good thing, they were wrong. Dead wrong.
The Angel of Vengeance looked even worse than he had the day Godfrey and Mareth had torn him off my body with the rail gun. The black scrawl within his stony skin had spread like mold, covering every inch of his body until his gray marble skin looked black. His glowing red eyes were two coals in the insane visage of his face. He’d picked up a shield from somewhere, or maybe he’d simply formed it out of sheer will—a big black one with a u-shaped cut in the top to let him see over the rim.
The Angel dove into the front lines and killed. The black sword swung again and again, even blurrier than he was. Everywhere it touched, death spread. That blade no longer even pretended to be something terrestrial—it slashed through angelic weapons like they were made of tissue paper, severing necks and spearing hearts. Holofernes moved like this battle was a video game and he’d set it on Very Easy—even the toughest o
f opponents couldn’t stand for more than a moment or two against him.
He killed three of Judyth’s lieutenants before they even knew he was there. If he’d kept on clearing house, I would’ve been thrilled, but he pivoted from there and slammed into a mass of Infernal Academy demons, cutting them down like wheat before the scythe. Demon girls and boys screamed as the black blade slashed through them, leaving piles of gore and severed body parts before the Angel of Vengeance’s advance.
Somehow, in the chaos of the battle, I found Lilith. The Headmistress of the Infernal Academy looked shaken to the depths of her soul by the combination of Maddie’s pain and the wholesale slaughter of her students.
“Dear Satan,” she whispered, the words falling like ashes from her lips. “It’s a massacre.”
There was a weird shimmer around Holofernes’s blade. It was as if the sword was no longer a sword at all—just a hole in existence. It cut through any armor or blade as if it wasn’t there at all, killing indiscriminately. Ravaged by the insanity of his treatment in the Fae Realm, the Angel of Vengeance could no longer distinguish between friend or foe. He killed, and killed, and killed.
And yet, I’d seen those red eyes dim. I knew there was something of the angel still within that empty shell. Something that burned with hatred for Judyth Dominia.
A sense of eerie calm stole over me.
“Keep an eye on things,” I told Lilith, stepping away from her. “Make sure Judyth and her goon squad don’t pepper me full of lightning bolts.”
She saw what I was about to do.
“Luke, don’t,” the Headmistress begged, grabbing at my shoulder. “It’s suicide! Look at what he’s doing to them—”
“I made a mistake,” I said, turning around and looking Lilith in the eye. “I never should have left Holofernes behind in the first place. I didn’t like the Angel of Vengeance—hell, I might have wanted to kill him myself—but I should have known better than to let Judyth spring her trap.” I nodded. “Now I’ve got a chance to fix all that.”
Before Lilith could stop me, I took wing. For a few moments, I felt almost at peace above the battlefield, as Judyth and her cadre had landed and hidden themselves near the back of their force the moment Holofernes took the field. No demons or angels fluttered through the sky. I had the whole place to myself.
I landed a few yards ahead of the insane angel. A demon girl cowered on the ground, having been thrown there by a bash attack from Holofernes’s shield. With a start, I realized I recognized her—it was the sleek, sexy demon who’d flashed me from her dorm room window the first time I’d gone to the Infernal dormitories.
She stared up at me with the look of someone who knows they’re about to die, begging me for help. I jumped over her in a single bound and lifted my pitchfork, praying that Lucifer’s own weapon was strong enough to parry that ethereal blade.
“Holofernes, it’s me,” I said, standing firm. “It’s Luke—”
No pause. The Angel of Vengeance struck, doing his best to bat me out of the way like a minor annoyance. The black blade slashed at my face, and I lifted the triple tines of the pitchfork to block it. I flinched as that beam of pure darkness soared toward me and let out a little cry of triumph as it stopped against the pitchfork.
Holofernes seemed surprised.
The Angel of Vengeance forgot his defeated prey entirely, turning to me. He moved slowly at first, sizing me up as if he’d never seen me before. Possibly inside his mind, he was seeing me for the very first time.
“It’s Luke Bell,” I said, clutching the pitchfork with both fists. One of my hands was nearly numb from blocking the blow. “From the Infernal Realm.”
He was on me in an instant. The blade came at me again and again, moving through a series of vertical and horizontal slashes that left me dizzy. I blocked a strike at my face with the tines, then twisted to catch his downstroke with the hilt of Lucifer’s obsidian pitchfork. The combined force of both nearly shook the weapon from my hands—Holofernes was just that powerful.
Yet he clearly hadn’t fought my like in a while. The Angel of Vengeance looked a bit upset that I was still standing, that I hadn’t taken five seconds to kill like everyone else he’d come up against today. That I was fighting back.
“Judyth Dominia,” I said evenly, reciting the name that had nearly broken Holofernes free during our last fight. “The Headmistress of the Celestial Academy. The bitch who betrayed you…”
More attacks. This time Holofernes threw a new trick into the mix—he swung out twice, smacking his sword against the side of my pitchfork with an almost casual air, then twisted and smashed his shield against me like a berserker’s bash. The impact rattled my bones and knocked me off my feet.
As I shot back up, using my wings to evade Holofernes’s stab, I noticed the battle had quieted around us. Angels, demons, Seelie and Unseelie Fae—all of them forgot their bloody combat to watch the heir of Lucifer duel the Angel of Vengeance. I almost fancied I could hear demons throwing down wagers.
I wouldn’t have bet on me, that’s for sure. Holofernes was disgustingly fast: the angel moved with the kind of quickness one normally must sacrifice all their momentum and power in order to achieve. But he hit like a fucking Mack truck all the same.
Fire flew from my fingertips as I thrust a fist into the Angel of Vengeance’s face, forcing him backward. Caught off-balance, Holofernes stumbled, and I tried to follow up on it with a slash at his ankles—but it was like trying to cut through a tree with a butter knife. As powerful as Lucifer’s pitchfork was, it pinged off Holofernes’s leg like a pebble, leaving hardly a scratch.
Holofernes didn’t stay idle for long. The Angel of Vengeance let out an ear-splitting roar and lifted his black sword. The sky darkened as flames the color of ink erupted across the blade, filled with that same strange negative shimmer that surrounded Lilith’s anti-halo. I felt no heat from that blade as Holofernes swung it at me—only cold. A dreadful, deep cold like death itself.
The panic made me sloppy. Holofernes faked to my left, then swung his shield to the right like someone playing frisbee in the park. The thick stone slab smacked me in the shin and I saw stars. The world swayed as I went down on one knee; Holofernes lifted his sword with both hands and swung down as hard as he could, like a hammer seeking a nail. I rolled to the side just in time, the flaming blade missing me by inches. The crowd ooohed with shock; several angels began to cheer. I’ve got to do something different if I’m going to win this, I thought, glancing at the crowd. I could see each of my harem girls gathered around, having fought or shoved their way through the army to be at my side. Though they spoke not a word, I could hear them cheering me on in their hearts. I could quite literally feel it.
That bond gave me an idea.
Holofernes struck out at me as he’d done a dozen times before—and this time, rather than dodge, I bent my head toward my right shoulder like I was trying to work a crick out of my neck. Where I’d been a moment ago was now a writhing mass of tentacles, each connected to the same spot my wings came from.
The sword cut through them—but to my surprise, it didn’t cut without resistance. Each tentacle had to snap first, resisting the cut like a thick cord of rope. As I bucked to the side, backing in a circle around the Angel of Vengeance, more and more of these tentacles erupted from my shoulders.
The old me would never have been able to hold this much power. I had enough tentacles to fuck every single one of my harem girls in all their holes at the same time—then, with a roar, enough to fuck the entire army all at once. They looked less like an extension of me than the main event, with my body just a strange appendage to the writhing ball.
Holofernes looked up at the thick carpet of tentacles I’d summoned and tossed his shield away. He swung as the great writhing mass landed on him, wrapping around his arms and legs. The black sword cut through dozens of the tendrils, hundreds of them, but for every one Holofernes slashed a dozen came in its place to bind him.
I was more
than a Beast. I was the Hydra—and Holofernes couldn’t contain me.
I stepped through an ocean of writhing black, meeting the Angel of Vengeance head-to-head. He kept on fighting, trying to break free, even as everything below his neck wriggled with dozens upon dozens of tentacles. Some of my demon girls looked like they wanted me to grab them too; angels retched, on the verge of vomiting.
Alright, Luke, I told myself. Time to win friends and influence demons.
It felt like a lifetime ago I’d turned all the patrons of a simple diner into my best friends. Freeing the Angel of Vengeance from Titania’s control felt like a Herculean task in comparison.
“Your name is Holofernes,” I said, gripping the Angel tighter with my tentacles. He was dangerously close to being free—I had to redouble my efforts to pin him to the ground. “You are the Angel of Vengeance. I don’t have anything but my own conspiracy theories to back this up, but I have a strong suspicion you’re the Angel the Almighty sent to bar the entrance to the Garden of Eden after he kicked Adam and Eve out. You know, ‘cause of the whole flaming sword thing and all.”
Holofernes didn’t say anything—but his struggles decreased. Those big red eyes focused on me, like miniature infernos.
“You don’t like me very much,” I said, not having to lie. “Shit, I don’t really like you, either. Neither of us are ever going to be best friends, I don’t think. But if you take a look around, Holofernes, I think you’ll notice that things have gotten seriously out of whack with Heaven and Hell. Like, ‘End of Days’, my man.”
Holofernes blinked. I was getting through to him.
“You’re sick,” I told the Angel of Vengeance. “You’re sick because your boss left you here in this place to die, and she let a very bad person drive you insane. But you’re better now, right? You are well, Holofernes. You’re not sick anymore. You’re the fucking Angel of Vengeance…”
That’s when I realized—Holofernes wasn’t looking at me. The Angel had eyes on Lucifer’s pitchfork.
“What, this thing?” I laughed. “Don’t worry about it.”