Chapter Eighteen

She lifted a sidearm on her way through the lines, all the guys with rifles wore handguns as well, and she’d need one.  Half their sniper positions had already been taken down, they were far too outnumbered, and most of their shifters were protecting the ones with rifles taking down the warlocks.

It was a damned warzone, and despite herself she felt the excitement flush through her body as her adrenaline started to pump through her body.  She felt a thrill and a stab of fear, as she realized Jacob was right there with her on her crazy mission to face a damned angel that used to be a ruler in heaven, and that was now one in hell.  A principality of wrath, and the son of Satan.

She must’ve been crazy, because she had a predatory smile on her face as her whole body rippled.  Strong gray armored skin covered her, as leathery wings burst from her back.  She hoped no one shoot at her.

Asmodai turned to her when she got within two hundred feet, and then derisively and angrily laughed in her face.

She fired her whole clip at his face as he charged, but he dodged every damned bullet, even as he avoided the bullets raining down from the sky.  The AC-130 was a good idea, but it wasn’t enough to take out Asmodai.  It was playing hell on the demons rushing out of the gate however, blowing their bodies into pieces and sending them straight back to hell.  Some few had escaped that fate and made it to the crowd, some of those were shooting hellfire at the shifters, and still others escaped to move into the city to start burning it down.

There was nothing she could do about those for the moment, and she hoped the normal police would be able to stop them from burning the whole damned city to ashes.

Over half the humans were dead now, but on the good side about a quarter of them had escaped and were fleeing the area.  It was horrible, but it was what it was.  She estimated the rest of the humans didn’t have long, that would add up to about seventy-five hundred dead, meaning an equal number of demons summoned.  Only about a quarter of the warlocks had been put down so far, which would lessen the number of demons as the ones they summoned were sent back.

She reloaded the weapon on the run, and launched a spear of compulsion at Asmodai, which might’ve been the stupidest thing she’d ever done. 

Asmodai locked onto that connection, and he started to feed on her lifeforce at an alarming rate, from a distance.  She cut off that connection quickly, but she’d been weakened by the attack.  In her defense, she’d no idea that was even possible, but in hindsight she should have known, after all she could feed from a distance too, she’d just never done it.

She lunged at him with a knife in her left hand, and Asmodai gave her a look of contempt.  She was just inches away from his body with the knife, when he was suddenly holding his sword, and her hand went flying away with the knife still in it.

Shit!  She was completely outclassed.

She opened fire with the gun, while she shifted herself a new hand and stopped the bleeding.  Again, he seemed to dodge every bullet with ease, never mind she was firing from point blank range.

Jacob’s gun started to fire as well, as the AC-130 walked their rounds toward him from the other direction, limiting Asmodai’s dodging options, and that’s when Asmodai was hit with a sniper’s bullet right to the chest. 

Asmodai growled, “Bitch!” and lunged forward and grabbed her around the neck faster than she could track.

Her arms and wings went around him, and with a thought she shifted an impossibly long tail and wrapped it around them both tightly.  She watched his eyes widen with shock and disbelief at her getting closer to him, rather than try to escape the crushing grip of his hand.

She smirked, and managed to gasp out in a wheezing voice, “Dodge this, asshole.”

She shoved the gun tightly under his chin, and she started to empty the clip into his brain pan.

She gasped, as she felt his sword slice off a wing, and then run her through the side, but ignored it as she continued to fire into his head.  Her gun clicked as she ran out of bullets, and Asmodai looked messed up, with a hole blown out of the top of his head, but the bastard was still standing and his body was shaking as his arm fell to the side and pulled the sword out of her body.

She shifted to heal herself, and restore her wing, and was shocked to see his body regenerating.

His chin healed before her eyes, and the huge hole at the top of his head started to close.

Jacob jumped up, and he jammed a dagger’s blade into the top of Asmodai’s head.

Still Asmodai healed, although it’d slowed him for a split second, and she wondered what it would take to end this bastard.  Clearly though, Asmodai wasn’t able to think, or surely he’d have teleported away by then.

“Shit, this is a terribly stupid idea, but I’m all out of the insanely bad ideas.”

She launched a harpoon of pity at the demon, it was the best she could do as far as not negative emotion when it came to Asmodai, and then pulled deeply as her mind dug into his and started to feed.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back at the horrific ecstasy that flooded her body and mind as she took in the immortal life force of an angel, not a human or being of this mortal plane.  It had to be a bad idea, but it was all she had, if she could drain him, his body would stop regenerating and he’d be banished to hell.

At least, that was her theory.

Jacob said, “Lily!  What are you doing?”

Her thoughts flinched away, as all she could think was having the best meal of her life.  She felt no guilt, he was an enemy, and it was her last choice in weapons, but they had to stop Asmodai, she couldn’t let him escape again.

Power, strength, and vitality flooded her body, and it never seemed to end as she drank down the demon’s angelic life force.  She’d never felt so strong, as her body and mind were flooded by pleasure.  Not sexual pleasure, but the pleasure of feeding.

Her eyes were closed, but she realized she must have been glowing with the rush of energy flooding her body, because she could see the bright light through her eyelids.  It felt completely timeless, as she slowly drained the seemingly endless amount of life energy in a huge overwhelming torrent of power as she pulled it inside herself, but part of her understood it had been less than ten seconds since she’d started.

Then the torrent ended, and she landed on her feet as Asmodai’s lifeless husk fell to the Earth.

She smiled, and then shrugged, at Jacob’s look of fascination and horror, mixed with not a small amount of love, lust, and worry.  She looked down at herself, and was slightly bemused by her glowing skin, and her leathery wings were now wings of glowing white feathers.  Bemused instead of losing her mind, perhaps because she was still flush with power, and kind of drunk on it in the moment.

She was also happy to note her blouse was still more or less in one piece, and protecting her modesty, outside of the two long rips in the back of it to accommodate her wings.

She reached out her hand, and the sword shot off the ground and into her hand.

She laughed mystified delight, as it started to glow with deep azure fire, and said, “I’ll be right back, my love.”

Before he could even open his mouth to ask the obvious question, she was already deep in the crowd of humans with three severed heads of warlocks left in her wake.  She attacked with deep conviction, and peace in her heart, as her enemies fell to her blade without even seeing her coming.  The warlocks were all dead in the first ten seconds, and twenty seconds after that she’d struck down the last of the soul eaters in the area.

She also sensed the handful of demons that escaped the area had already been taken down, with a price of human blood.  Her aura exploded outward, and the human survivors calmed like a tempestuous sea falling placid after a storm.  They moved off in a calm manner after that, no longer trampling other humans in their panic to escape.

The demons were still rushing through the gate.  She stood watch as the AC-130 took them out as soon as their feet touched the soil of the Earth, and any that managed to evade the deadly gun ship fell to her magic, to death spells, before making it twenty feet.

The portal snapped shut, and her wings faded and shrunk back into her body in that same moment.  She managed to sheath her sword, not even remembering taking the sheath for it, before her eyes rolled back into her head and she passed out.