by JP Epperson
Colton nodded.
I knew they were right. The demons wanted my rage to consume me, and we weren’t getting out of this room until they saw that it had. I grabbed one of each of their hands and I let go of all my control—let go of all my fear. For the first time ever, I felt completely free and it felt so good. My head flew back with a rush. It was a high unlike anything I had ever felt before. I wanted to do something reckless. I never wanted to be in control again. I was liberated. I felt a physical change come over me.
“How do you feel, Beauty?” Colton asked. “Your eyes are different, almost like there is glow behind them.” It was like an out-of-body experience. I felt my head turn, snakelike, toward his direction. He didn’t take a step back, but his eyes did widen. Nicholai stepped around me, watching me. I had the sudden urge to strike him down and without a moment’s hesitation, my fists were suddenly filled with fire. Something woke inside of me then, something distant. I felt slightly disoriented and I was confused about what I was doing. I felt more animal than angel. They must have seen the struggle within me because Nicholai took one slow step backward and Colton slowly placed his palms in the air.
“Belleeza,” Nich said. “Do not fear your rage. It is a part of you—not a curse but a gift. It is your gift. Remember who the enemy is. Remember who did this to them.” He threw his right hand out and gestured toward the memory of our loved ones, who were at that moment being tortured by those they trusted.
We looked just in time to see Lori’s flayed body revealing her viscera to the world. She turned her head weakly to Colton. “I love you, sweet Lori,” Colton whispered softly, with tears pouring down his face.
Her eyes went wide as Jove’s hand gripped her still-beating heart. Tears fell freely down her face as she whispered back to him. “I love you too, Colt—” and then Jove crushed her heart in his hand.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Both the Colton from the memory and the Colton standing beside me cried out with anguish-filled screams. There was no one that would not recognize that sound for what it was. Sloan disappeared from the memory, and I knew that was the moment she changed her appearance to create a diversion so Jove could finish his work. The past versions of Nicholai and me came barreling down the stairs only moments later.
Somehow, Nicholai and I remained still and watched Lori’s death play out. If not for his hand in mine, I don’t think I could have retained my composure. On the outside, I knew I looked mostly like myself. On the inside, I felt vastly different. I thought I had reached the peak of my rage, but it seemed to grow with the image of Lori’s broken body and Colton’s visible pain. I’d thought there was a lake of rage inside me, but now I could feel that it was an ocean. There was no end to it. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew I wasn’t right. Perhaps I was no angel. Maybe I’d been fooling myself all these years, because there was nothing angel-like about the thoughts and feelings inside my head.
I wanted to kill, to maim, and to bleed everyone and anyone in sight, even Colton and Nicholai. The rage within me blamed them for Lori’s death too. I was a monster. Everyone needed to die. I would become death to all.
“I feel the change in you, Belleeza. Your eyes are glowing. They’re chartreuse with a ring of red fire around them,” Colton said. I could hear the sadness in his words. I was falling—higher-level angels often undergo a change in their eyes when they fall. I supposed the prophecy was true after all. I wasn’t surprised; deep down, I’d known all along that I was a broken angel, but knowing that didn’t stop it from breaking what was left of my heart.
“Do not be so sad, Colton. Maybe there is hope for us yet. Now we’ll both be demons . . . ” My words were laced with menace.
“Remember why we are here, Belleeza,” Nich said.
“Remember who your enemy is!” Colton added.
Their voices did ground me. I was still not in control, but now there were different faces I wanted to strike down. I was still consumed with so much rage, but Colton and Nich aimed me like a weapon. That was exactly what I needed them to do. I needed them to be my focus. With Colton and Nicholai there, I was safe enough to lose control, and I knew no matter how far gone I was, I would never hurt them. Most importantly, they would protect me from myself, even if that meant taking me out so I didn’t become full-on demon . . . So I embraced my dark side.
The room around us vanished, and I knew we were permitted to move forward because I was headed down the path of darkness they wanted me to be on. The door we came through was behind us. There were three more doors. One to the right, one just in front of us, and another to the left. I felt like I was seeing things differently with my new demon eyes.
“Which door should we take?” Nicholai wondered aloud.
“The left,” I answered. My voice even sounded different, forced. Like speaking no longer came naturally to me.
“How do you know?”
“Can you not see it?” There was a glow around the door; it was lit up as though awaiting our arrival. Though my judgement seemed a bit cloudy, I had a bad feeling about this.
“I see nothing,” he said.
“I think this is where I leave you. I believe this door is only meant for me alone.”
A part of me knew that should bother me, but the rest of me didn’t care. The rage coursed within me like adrenaline. I wanted to move forward and nothing was going to stop me. There was a little voice in the back of my head trying to warn me about something, but I couldn’t hear it over the ocean thrashing inside me.
“Like hell,” Colton answered. He reached for me, but I swung the door open and stepped over the threshold. They made to follow me but couldn’t. There was some kind of invisible barrier.
They searched frantically for a way to break through the barrier. Fear was seeping into their eyes like poison. “We can’t save you from here, Beauty. You don’t have to do this, come back through the doorway,” Nicholai pleaded.
We all knew the doorway had sealed as soon as I walked through it. None of us would be coming or going through it now.
Colton’s hands were against the invisible cage wall. He was distraught. His need to save me was nearly tangible. I thought that perhaps love would weaken my rage, but it only fed it more. It enraged me to see someone I loved in pain. I placed my hands against his. Our fingers seemed to touch but we couldn’t feel one another.
“No one can save me now, my beloved.” I kissed my fingertips and brought them to his lips. The more I accepted both sides of me, the more like myself I felt. I was still consumed with rage, but I was working with it instead of against it. It had a target. I had a target. “It’s too late for me now.” I turned away from him and walked onward in the dark.
The door started to close of its own accord. “You’re wrong, Belleeza. Come back to me,” Colton cried out.
“I’ll find a way to keep my promise to you,” Nich shouted. “We will not fail you!”
The last thing I heard was their shouting.
The dark room started to change as the previous one did. Suddenly, I was in the living room of one of my old apartments. A younger Colton stood angrily with his arms in the air. “I don’t know what you want from me!” he shouted.
A younger version of myself was screaming as she followed him around, “I want you to talk to me. Let me back in. I know you, and I know you’re keeping something from me!”
“Just forget it,” the young Colton said. “I give up.”
The younger me was silently crying and pleading with him. “Just talk to me, Colton, we can figure it out together.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” he shouted just before he vanished. I watched as the younger me fell to her knees and cried into her hands. Suddenly, I was the younger me again and the emotions were all too real. I felt the pain all over again. The confusion, the hurt, the anger, the embarrassment; it felt fresh again like an open wound.
The room shifted, and this time I was in our bedroom. It was a different day. “What a
re you doing?” he asked. “Are you serious right now?”
We had been fighting so much I was trying to put an end to it by lightening the mood. I had bought some flashy lingerie from one of the human shops and there I stood, posed by the closet doorframe. “What does it look like I’m doing?” I snapped at him.
He looked up and for a moment I could see the arousal in his eyes, but it was gone as quickly as it appeared. “Not right now, I have to get back to my case.” He had started taking solo cases. I’d thought at first someone was trying to separate us, but Evangelina told me he had requested it.
Once again, I became the younger version of myself, and I found myself standing in lingerie utterly humiliated. Humiliation was the one emotion I had no idea how to handle. I could turn my fear and my anger into something usable, but humiliation was just too much to bear. My pride just couldn’t take it. I became enraged as I stood there nearly nude and unwanted. I felt my eyes start to grow brighter and then I felt something I hadn’t felt before. My entire body seemed to glow from within. Like my blood turned to fire. I thought I must be crazy, but then I saw that the symbols on my armband were glowing like red hot embers. If my rage continued to grow, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I started spitting fire like a dragon. My body was on fire, but I knew it was only on the inside. My ocean of cold hate just changed into an endless fire of rage.
The room shifted and the young Colton was sitting in silence on the patio. The younger me was sitting next to him. They were both staring off into the distance, neither of them really seeing the sunset in front of them.
“I followed you,” the young me whispered. That dreaded humiliation hit me again as I heard how broken I sounded.
“I know,” young Colton answered.
“Why do you keep lying to me? You could have told me where you were going. I wouldn’t have minded. I never have before. We used to go to that bar together all the time,” the young me went on.
“I don’t know why. I just do,” he said. His voice was quiet and I could hear the pain in it, just like I did back then, but it did me no good because for all my trying, he never let me in.
“You don’t love me anymore,” the young me said so quietly I wasn’t sure if she said it or I thought it.
“I can’t do this,” he said, as he stormed off.
I was getting so angry reliving those days. Suddenly, I was sitting in that chair, watching in disbelief as the only one I ever loved again walked out on me. I felt so weak. I felt so human. I hated it. I wanted to disappear, but I couldn’t. I was trapped in that memory. Even though it happened so many years before, I couldn’t make myself let go of those feelings of betrayal. How could he hurt me like that and just walk away again and again?
The scene shifted and we were yelling. I threw a vase against the wall behind him and he punched the wall. “Don’t you even care anymore? You are breaking my heart,” I shouted.
“I don’t care,” he shouted back. “I’m done, that’s it. I’m done!” And then he vanished.
“Don’t do this to me,” I cried, collapsing on the sofa in defeat.
Suddenly it was the older me on the couch with my hands covering my mouth as I cried out, “Why are you doing this to me?”
Scene after scene unfolded leaving me feeling more broken than ever before. I felt like I was inching toward a cliff, but I didn’t know what would happen if I got too close. I felt a small spark of lightness inside of me. It seemed to be trying to tell me not to lose myself; that there was a reason behind the things Colton was saying. I watched as tear after tear fell from my young eyes. Logically, I knew now that it had something to do with Lori’s death, but that didn’t soothe my anger. Rather, the thought of Lori pushed me over the cliff, as suddenly I threw my head back and a scream that sounded like nothing I ever heard before came pouring out of my throat.
The memories faded and my palms went slack. Suddenly, fire came pouring from them as I tried to destroy those old broken memories of my past. My light ability was no more—it had evolved into a fire that scorched me from the inside. I threw out bolts of it, lighting up the sparse furniture. The more I destroyed the room around me, the less the fire within me seemed to burn. I destroyed everything. Even one of the doors was no more. I turned and saw Colton and Nicholai still trapped behind the visible barrier and trying to get to me . . .
But there was no more Belleeza.
There was only The Terrible Beauty and terrible I was.
They watched me burn down the next door with a gift I’d never had before. My light always felt like fire to me, and I always thought of it as fire, but I was so wrong. My light was deadly and warm but this? This was pure fire, and it burned bright.
“Belleeza!” Colton slammed his fist on the doorframe. “Belleeza, I know you’re still in there. You are stronger than this. You’re stronger than them.”
“You’re stronger than all of us,” Nicholai said pleadingly but he and I both knew I was a lost cause.
I turned and walked through the next door.
This room was different than the last two. It was reminiscent of a dungeon. Candles lit the way down the dark corridor. I started walking down the illuminated path. Whatever lay at the end of the corridor I could not see, because the lights were too dim, but whatever it was it was waking up something inside me. The darkness fighting to take over me dissipated just enough for me to understand that I didn’t like this one bit. I heart was pounding. My skin was crawling and I had chills along my neck. I hoped it would be one of Hell’s beasts or something, but I knew that would have been too easy. This last test was meant to be my undoing. The final straw to turn me into full-on demon. I wanted to stop, to go back . . . but back to what?
Back to Colton.
It was too late, though. I was already falling.
I pressed on and increased my speed to a normal walking pace. As I neared the end, what I was seeing became clearer and I ran as fast as my ability would allow me. I almost felt like I was flying as my feet went faster than they ever had before until I crashed into an invisible wall. My head busted against the barrier and my blood fell freely. I was pretty sure I had a couple of broken ribs, maybe worse, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, because when I looked up, I saw Evangelina—but I could barely recognize her. She was nude and shackled and they had pinned her arms down with knives. A flashback of Lori and Colton hit me like a sledgehammer and I fought to control my breathing. Blood fell, dripping down Evangelina’s arms and legs. She was tortured to the point just before death. Her breathing was diminished to nearly nothing.
They had left her face alone. It was completely untouched, not even a scratch in sight. Her long strawberry-blonde hair was soaked. Her ringlets dripped around her, the water mixing with blood and turning to a soft shade of pink. They had kept her barely alive for me to see her. There was an empty bucket next to her, and I knew she must have passed out from the pain so they woke her up to see me. They wanted me to see her and know there was nothing I could do about whatever happened to her next.
She couldn’t even lift her head. Her eyes moved and caught mine, but that was the most she could do. I forced myself to look down and see what they had done to her. I held off as long as I could. Her body was unrecognizable. They had used her like a whipping boy. Her body was open flesh but deeper, much deeper than skin deep.
I knew this is what I must have looked like when she rescued me. I recognized Big Jack’s handiwork. “Evangelina, Evangelina!” I screamed. I lost it trying to get to her. I would not lose her as I lost Lori—just moments too late. I would not let them do this to me again. I used all my strength, hammering and kicking at the invisible door. I tried my sword, daggers, explosives; I tried everything and nothing worked. Finally, the rage overtook me in a way that it had not done before. All the weapons fell from my hands. I looked down at my hands and picked my head up. My eyes opened slowly and I knew I must have looked like I felt . . . like a demon. I could feel the ring of fire around my pupils. I op
ened my palms and not only did the fire pour from them, but it blazed from my entire body. I was fire. I was death. I was demon.
“And now we see you as you are meant to be.” A voice echoed throughout the dungeon. It was an ever-changing voice. I couldn’t pinpoint an accent, a tone, pitch. It kept changing. It was indescribable and though it made all the hairs on my neck and arms stand up, it didn’t sound scary as one would expect Satan to sound. Yet the fear I felt made me want to curl up into a ball. If I hadn’t been too scared to move, I’m sure I would have accidentally put out the fire blazing around me. I turned in search of the one belonging to that voice, but he was nowhere in sight.
“I am everywhere.” The voice answered my unspoken thoughts. “I am the darkness lurking around you. I am the darkness within you. You are home, Belleeza. This is where you were always meant to be. I have always known you would come to us, as you have also known it.”
“Lies,” I hissed, regaining my composure.
“I do not speak lies. You lie to yourself, young one. Let us see you in all your glory as you were meant to be. Show me your wings.”
There was a command in his voice and I could feel my wings trying to force their way into this realm. My eyes went wide. He meant to rip off my wings. I started panicking. I was frantically searching for a way to fight his command. To stop my wings from coming to me. It hurt. My God, it hurt so bad. I felt they were ripping my skin open.
“I do not relish in tearing wings from the backs of our kind.” His voice sounded angry now. “That is your precious angels. That is how they try to break us if we do not conform. We should not be forced to hide our true selves for the sake of the humans.” When he spoke again, his voice sounded as it did before. There was no anger. “Stop fighting it, Belleeza. It doesn’t have to hurt. Will them to you. They are a natural part of you. If you call them to you, they will come.”