by Debra Dunbar
This was bad. Even I knew this was bad. There were so many of them it would take them no time before they overwhelmed us. The Lows were beginning to retreat, squealing and crying as slices opened up across their skin.
“Together, together.” For once the fuckers heard me and obeyed. The warmongers positioned themselves back-to-back with the greed demons, forcing the angels to the outside of our ring once more. Once we were close, everyone spun about so the only opening we had was the one in front of us. As a ring we fought, and prevailed. For now. Those flashes of light were closing in and I was worried.
But the little Low who’d gone down at my feet was up. He’d managed to repair any major injuries, and was now only dealing with superficial cuts and wounds. The bad news was that the angels were doing the same. The dwarven weapons were good, but they didn’t have the same damage to the spirit being that my sword could inflict—or that an energy attack could. The only problem with energy attack was we had a limited amount—only what we could store within ourselves. As demons, that was usually quite a bit, but most of my army were Lows. They’d only have a few blasts at most, while those approaching angels probably were carrying an arsenal of more deadly blasts than anyone in my little band of demons could summon up.
Except me that is. And maybe that war demon, Hammer.
Fuck. Where the fuck was Hammer? He’d headed out on his own and not come back. Had the stupid idiot gone and gotten himself killed?
I hear a roar that ended in a scream and felt my gut twist. Yeah, he was stupid, and he reminded me of that bully of a foster-brother from my childhood, but he was still under my command. Sort of. Regardless, as my demon, he was my responsibility. No demon left behind and all that shit.
“Fill in,” I told the Lows behind me. “I need to go rescue Hammer.”
As soon as I left the protective circle, I realized I was in trouble. My sword was doing a good job of taking care of the angels in front of me, and unlike the dwarven weapons, whoever the Iblis weapon cut stayed down. It was the rear I couldn’t cover. I found myself spinning around, madly swinging in hopes that my whirling dervish routine would keep the angels from landing a decent blow on me.
A streak of light came from the right and I jerked my sword around just in time to block it, feeling my arm go slightly numb at the impact. There was another, and another. I blocked them with a display of swordsmanship that came out of nowhere. Unfortunately my focus on the energy attacks left me open for the angels around me to poke and cut me with whatever swords and knives they were using. I bled, my spirit-self stung with the wounds. And I couldn’t do anything about it, since I was busy addressing the far more lethal balls of light coming my way.
And then I saw it, a sword that blazed of golden light and sliced through the rebel angels like they were tissue paper. Even the mist retreated before him, my angel, my fierce, powerful asshole of an angel. I redoubled my effort, absorbing energy attacks and spinning around again.
“Cockroach!”
I’d never been so glad to hear him, to see him, in my life.
“Cockroach, what are you doing? Get your army forward and stop playing around. We need you.”
Okay, so that wasn’t the passionate greeting I’d hoped for.
“I’ve lost one of my warmongers,” I shouted, deflecting another energy blast and sending it into an attacking angel. He fell to the ground and I stared in surprise. Huh. Guess I needed to start using the sword as a bat. That was pretty fucking effective.
“He’s back with us, where you’re supposed to be,” Gregory snapped. “Took a while for him to realize we’re not the enemy, but he’s with the program now. Good fighter. Not too bright and a bit of an arrogant jerk, but a good fighter. I’m sure he’d be even better with the rest of his army there.”
Man, he was pissy when he fought. Talk about an arrogant jerk. “I’m working on it. Give me a fucking moment here.”
Shit. I now needed to make my way back to my little group and try to urge them forward in formation, so as to lose as few of them as possible while we made our way to the other side of the battle. If Gregory had wanted us there, why hadn’t he made pasty-face angel bring us to that side? Or had he expected us to blast through the center of the rebel army like a bullet train? Hated to tell the guy, but we weren’t that good.
I turned to yell at him some more, and saw he was gone, fighting his way back through the angels. Fucker couldn’t even wait for me? Couldn’t come back and help me corral my little army and safely move them forward?
I guess chivalry had no place on the battlefield. I needed to level-up and put my ass in gear. And come to the realization that some of my Lows, imps and greed demons, heck even some of my warmongers might die in this battle.
What had happened to me? When had I started to care about people, or demons, dying? I even worried about that asshole, Hammer. But this fight was bigger than any of us—bigger than me. Gregory needed to win or the future of the angels, of the humans, of those decent elves like the ones who’d been camped in my field would be bleak. Even the future of the demons, who deserved more than a slow downward evolutionary slide in Hel. We all deserved more. And for that I needed to do more.
I commanded my sword into a shotgun. It resisted, clearly preferring its original shape while in Aaru, but I persisted and for once it eventually obeyed me.
A shotgun. A perfect weapon for close-range as well as midrange, and with this particular magical artifact, the perfect weapon for long-range too. It didn’t miss. It scattered deadly shot in a wide enough arc to clear a pathway. And I was willing to bet that just like the demons and elves in Hel, the angels had never encountered something like this.
They hadn’t. The first blast took down an entire row of angels, two of whom dissolved into a pile of sand. And now those who hadn’t panicked earlier at the sight of my sword, did so. I kept blasting, spinning around every other shot to unload on the angels behind me and to my sides. I loved this fucking weapon—loved how it never needed reloading, and how the piles of sand around my feet were increasing in number.
I could see my little army in front of me, only a few rows of angels stood between us. I shot once more, hoping that no stray bits went past the angels to hit my own demons.
“Follow me,” I shouted. They stared at me, big-eyed. Then I unloaded the shotgun to the right, blowing away three angels and heard my demons cheer.
Knowing my army was behind me, I led, shooting my way through the rebel army, the warmongers and Lows ensuring my back was protected. I saw light ahead. I saw the flash of a sword. And I knew we were near. We were so near.
We weren’t. The closer we got to the front lines of the fight, the more intense the fighting became. The angels here were absorbing the shotgun blasts, or batting them away like I’d done with the energy blasts. They closed in on me, separating me once more from my demons. I heard the screams of my Lows and willed my shotgun back into a sword.
Here the sword seemed to be the better weapon. If only I could use it with any degree of skill. I was cut off from my army, cut off from Gregory’s army. And where the fuck were my imps?
A beam of light glanced off my sword and cut through my shoulder. My spirit-self blistered with pain. Another blow sliced across the top of my head, burning off hair and skin. I redoubled my efforts, feeling a thread of panic that threatened to overwhelm me. When was Gregory going to do his exile act? Had the tide turned far enough that the rebels would fall from Aaru? I got the feeling we were teetering on the edge of failure, that Gregory’s army was outnumbered, outgunned and all that. We weren’t going to win. We were going to lose, and he needed to do his expulsion thing right now before we all died.
“Now! Now!” I screamed. Blood blurred my vision and I swung my sword blindly, hoping I was hitting the rebel angels and not Gregory’s. My foot hit something and I looked down, recognizing the stubby legs and scaled skin of Scream. Poor guy. He’d never get his deep dish pizza.
A blast caught the edge of my ar
m and the Iblis sword tumbled away only to vanish and reappear in my other hand. My spirit-self felt the sharp pain of a stab wound and I spun, feeling my sword slide through an angel.
What the fuck was taking Gregory so long? Angels should be dropping from heaven like that ’80s song the male strippers still danced to. I looked and saw what appeared to be a mosh-pit of angels, their forms like white streaks of light, lit up from the energy blasts they were launching. I saw the flash of a sword and realized they were concentrating on Gregory, attacking him with the majority of their forces. Made sense. Take down the leader and the others would fall apart.
Except we wouldn’t fall apart. We’d go into a berserker rage like no angel had ever seen before. Me especially. In fact, I felt pretty close to one now.
I pushed my way toward him, swinging my sword before me to clear my path. It was as if none of the angels paid attention to me, as if they were all focused on one and only one objective. I saw his sword again, saw it jerk to the side, then saw it no more.
I shrieked, the blood once again stinging my eyes. And in my blindness I saw them—hundreds of angels piled on top of one another, every one of them stabbing, slicing, and exploding blasts of energy. And I knew very well who was at the bottom of that pile.
“Gregory!” My voice was hoarse, raw. “Michael! Asshole!”
Nothing. Nothing beyond the pile of angels raining down what would surely be death on my beloved. The frustration, the fear, the grief boiled up inside me and everything became a blur. I couldn’t reach him. I could slice every angel in front of me and I’d never reach him in time. He was lost, gone. Forever.
Every bit of energy that I’d stored inside myself came roaring to the surface. I’d taken out an island with less than this. And I honestly didn’t give a fuck what happened to these angels, or anyone else in Aaru.
All the rage and fear inside me burst outward as I slammed my sword blade-down into the misty floor of Aaru. And then I exploded.
It wasn’t like the time before on Oak Island when I’d let all my energy go in a blast that took out the entire island, an angel and several humans. That time my physical form had been destroyed and my spirit self began to shred as I’d had no energy left to form a corporeal form. Here I didn’t need a form. None of the angels did. The blast just knocked everyone aside.
And then it stopped. Everything stopped. Angels in mid-tumble. Energy motionless. With a rush of air, it all reversed, angels flying back into the mosh-pit of violence, the circle of my energy racing back toward me, into the hilt of my sword and down through the blade.
That’s when the pain hit. Screaming hit my ears like a physical blow, as if every angel in Aaru felt the same ripping apart that I did. Burning cold seared me, ripping at my spirit-self, my wings. I held on to the sword with all my might, trying to yank it from the mist. It wouldn’t budge, and the wind that had stirred up when I first released my energy was now swirling around me, around my sword like a vortex.
The screaming. Would everyone just stop screaming? My hands slid off the sword and I felt myself tumbling, tossed around through the air. My screams joined the rest, only stopping when I slammed into something hard, feeling my body bounce across rock and dirt. A wing crumpled painfully as I rolled, and I gasped, trying to breathe air into my bruised lungs.
Dirt. I was face-down on hard rocky dirt. And I had a physical body. But no sword. Panicked, I scrambled to my feet. Where was Aaru? Where were the angels and my demons? Most importantly, where was Gregory?
Chapter 28
I spun about, blowing the dirt out of my nose and trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened. Where was my army? Where were they? Panic turned to relief and I saw bodies scattered around me—not dead bodies but stunned bodies with the breath knocked out of them. I counted twenty-five Lows, the three greed demons, three warmongers. I’d seen Scream’s dead body in Aaru, but even accounting for him, I was missing Hammer, five Lows and all three of my imps. Were they dead? Or…somewhere else?
Angels—at least a dozen of them in the near vicinity of where I stood flopped around like their limbs and spine had turned into overcooked pasta. And in the middle of them sprawled my very own asshole—my big, burly angel with his dark-red curls and somewhat torn clothing. Gregory shook his head and sat up, looking around him in shock.
Gabriel rose to his knees a few feet away, spitting and mending what were clearly broken bones and dislocated joints. If they were here, Rafi and my other demons had to be nearby. And if the rebels were as incapacitated as these other angels, at least they’d be easy to kill.
Gabriel was apparently not as stunned as the rest because I saw him jump to his feet, and in the midst of fixing his own injuries, slug Gregory in the face.
Fight! Fight! I was so excited that I momentarily forgot about the battle, my army, my missing Iblis sword and watched as Gabriel punched his brother once more, this time square in the nose.
Huh. It was usually me hitting Gregory, not his restrained younger brother. I stood up and watched with interest as the elder angel returned the blow and the pair began to wrestle in the muck.
“This would be a whole lot more titillating if you two were naked,” I called out.
They ignored me and continued to beat the crap out of each other. I was surprised to see that they were well matched, even though I’d always thought of Gabriel as the weakling of the siblings. Maybe Gregory was too exhausted from battling the pile-up of angels on top of him to take his brother down with one blow. Or maybe he was too angry to focus properly. He did have some serious anger management issues, although in the past it was usually me on the other end of his temper. Or it could be that he was out of practice. I couldn’t recall the last time he’d tried to rip my head off or shake me to bits. Yeah. That was probably it. I’d need to remember to irritate him more often. Couldn’t have my sweetie getting soft and flabby.
“Left and low, Asshole! He’s wide open.”
Both angels swung left and low, obviously not sure which asshole I was referring to. Only one of them was open, though, and Gabriel flew backward to skid across a particularly smelly patch of mud. Or not mud. Yeah, I was pretty sure it was cow shit the angel had just landed in.
“What have you done?” Gabriel thundered, flinging brown goo from his hands. “You acted too early. You stupid, overgrown, pompous, buffoon. Why didn’t you wait?”
Gregory halted, a puzzled look on his face. “I didn’t… I didn’t do it. I was waiting. It wasn’t me.”
Slowly the pair turned to look my way.
“What?”
“Not her,” Gabriel sputtered, standing up from the cow shit and wiping his hands on his pants. “She might be the Iblis but she’s just an imp and she’s not even a thousand years old. She doesn’t have the power to do that.”
Gregory’s expression was a weird combination of shock and anger. “Oak Island? Remember Oak Island? She certainly does have the power to do that, regardless of her age. I’ve seen how much energy she can hold. That along with the Iblis weapon…”
“What?” I repeated.
What did I do now? I’d planned to blow up as many of the angels on top of Gregory as possible, taking myself out in the process. Perhaps these things worked differently in Aaru than they did in Hel. Wasn’t my fault. It’s not like I grew up there, or had been there more than a few times for incarceration. How the fuck was I supposed to know that blowing myself up would do…whatever it was I’d done.
“You were the one,” Gabriel snarled, taking a step toward me. “You did the exile.”
“Uh, no I didn’t.” How the fuck could I do the exile? “I thought only Gregory’s sword did that sort of thing.”
“The sword of the Iblis is the mirror image to mine,” Gregory explained. He too took a step toward me, just as menacing as the one Gabriel had taken. “One for Order, one for Chaos.”
I tried to look as innocent and helpless as was possible for an imp who’d just done…I don’t know, something horribl
e probably. “Well the fucking thing didn’t come with instructions. How am I supposed to know that? And I’m sorry, but if exiling angels from Aaru is as simple as shoving your sword in the ground and blowing yourself up, then you all have a serious design flaw going on here. There needed to be some kind of magical incantation or something. That way nobody could push the red-distructo button by accident. Not my fault. Totally not my fault.”
“Two swords.” Gregory took another step toward me. “Two in all of creation. It takes one of those two swords. It takes sufficient power level. And it takes intent.”
I seriously doubted the intent thing. I mean, I didn’t…oh, I did. I was screaming for Gregory to do the thing, wishing with all my might that the rebel angels would just fall from the sky. Maybe it kinda-sorta was my fault, just a little bit.
“Um, so exactly what did I do? Because I wanted to blow up the angels attacking you. I wanted all the rebels to leave. That’s what I wanted. Good intentions, and all that.”
“You exiled us all from Aaru,” Gabe snarled. “All. Not just the rebels, all of us. Every single angel is now locked out of Aaru. Forever.”
I gasped. That wasn’t what I wanted. I’d wanted Gregory to reclaim his home, not lose it forever.
“You stupid, ignorant, worthless cockroach,” Gabriel shouted, inches from my face.
No one called me Cockroach but Gregory. No one. “It was the only thing I could do,” I snapped back. “The rebels had us. We were losing. The way I see it, if my beloved angel can’t have Aaru, then no one can.”
Gabriel punched me, the blow hitting my jaw and rocking my face to the side. “We weren’t losing. That setback was temporary. There was no way I would lose Aaru to a bunch of whiny, unbalanced purists.”