Even if the contents of My Lady Moon's mind hadn't been scrambled and estranged, she still would not have seen me graze the steeple of the church just off to her left.
But Ashmodai saw me. Though he was not my concern, as of yet.
I circled the pitched roof then landed at the top of the brass cross and squatted. I perched there, wings spread wide at my side, feathers combing the cool night breeze. As I watched My Lady Moon make her way through the park, I fought to control the burning in my veins. Though temporarily satiated by Isis's savage death, the pain was still excruciating. I needed to feed. The longer I went without an ingestion of fear-laced corpuscles, pain-spiked plasma lipids, the more intolerable the burning in my veins became. This was my curse. It had been passed down to me from my father's seed.
When Lady Luna's machine roared to life, I twisted at the torso and cut my wings back. Then I lunged, nose-diving toward an awaiting Ashmodai, The Destroyer.
Of course, I saw it coming. After centuries of fighting him, I knew Ashmodai's tactics. I expected it, even.
From the center of the palm of his hand leaked a light. It swirled into the shape of a ball and hovered just above his flesh. But this was no ordinary light. This was the very essence from which he came. It was a ball of a thousand lightning strikes, packed with the equivalent electrical punch.
And now it was whirling straight for me.
I could have avoided it, but I needed its pain to soothe me. Midway in my decent, it struck me in the chest. A sizzling, not-of-this-earth jolt of heat sent me flying backward. My spine crashed into the nearest tree. My shoulders followed then folded around it. The trunk rippled and cracked against the force of my body then split in two halves. By the time the top half of the tree had fallen to the forest floor, I had recovered. As I straightened, shook off my wings and pierced Ashmodai with my eyes, tendrils of popping, spitting light exited the flesh of my chest just as painfully as it had entered.
And it was wonderful. My own pain was comforting. Slightly satiating.
There were only two things capable of easing my discomfort in this realm, my pain or someone else's. This was what I needed. Pain. Pure and unadulterated pain.
Grinning, anger pulsing through me, I spread my wings high above my head while feathers swept the dry foliage at my feet. It was The Battle Stance, the world-old invitation to war.
"When will you learn, Old One?" Ashmodai said. "You cannot defeat me." He stood there, not at all intimidated. Looking just as powerful as he had the last time I stood before him this way.
"No, I cannot. Just as you cannot defeat me. Until the Armageddon, that is. But it is the attempt I find rejuvenating. That is, of course, once I am able to convince you to lay down your arms and fight me like a man," I said.
"We are not men, Bane." Ashmodai's calm was fuel for my anger. I wanted, needed, to provoke him. The lust for the unleashing of my rage burned in me like fire, boiling my already hot blood.
"But we can be torn," I growled. "We can be broken." I clenched my fingers into fists, entrapping the searing heat in the palms of my hands, letting it build by the seconds. "We. Can. Bleed. Like men!" I roared, throwing the heat from my palms to the ground at my feet. The balls of fire caused the earth around me to tremble with fear. Fire splattered in the darkness from the crater-like holes in the ground then dissipated with popping, snapping resistance.
"I will not fight you, Bane," Ashmodai said. "It is not time."
"Lay down your arms, and fight me! Now is the time. Now!"
"You have been discovering emotions denied you by your father, Bane. Luna has captured your heart. It is this that angers you. Anger is far more familiar to you, far more comfortable than are these newfound emotions, Bane."
The fool was smiling. That ugly kindness of his was glowing like the light Lady Luna adored in Isabelle. The very light that made Ashmodai what he is. Or what he used to be.
"You love her. All the anger, violence and pain in the world cannot take that away, Bane."
"No! No, you fool," I seethed, as if the power of my voice alone would be enough to alter these facts. Heat prickled my pores. Sparks of fire lapped at my skin, circling me with the comfort of flames. "She is my possession! That is all. The only emotions I am capable of are the ones gifted to me by my father. Hate. Anger. Pain! You should know this better than anyone," I said, accusingly.
But something was wrong.
Ashmodai was right.
And this made me angrier than I already was.
"You can leave him, you know, your father. You can turn your back on him and you can accept and experience emotions far greater than the ones you speak of. You do not need to follow Lucifer. You can be with Luna. She is capable of showing you many beautiful things. The pain can go away, Bane. But, I must warn you. If you turn your back on your father, you best be willing to fight, because Lucifer will not make it easy for you to follow his adversary."
"You think My Lady Moon can accomplish what you have failed to succeed at for hundreds of years? Is that your pathetic desire? You hope that she will convince me to worship your god? Impossible! She loves her own god. I am her god. That is, until I divest myself from The Coven's wards. Yes, Ashmodai, I do know how to accomplish this."
For the first time ever, I had the pleasure of seeing something other than calm and kindness in Ashmodai's eyes. I witnessed shock. And it made me smile victoriously.
"Awe, you thought we'd never know, did you? Well, you were partially right. My brothers do not know. But I do. I cannot let them steal the pleasure of what is to come. Strong the Lanchesters are, indeed. But Barron grows weak. At any given moment, I can coheres him into taking his own life. Then all that will remain of the Lanchester bloodline is Luna. I will play first. I will introduce her to the unique euphoria of pain. Then Luna will die, Ashmodai. And I. Will. Be free!"
"You do not wish to do this, Bane," Ashmodai looked quite shaken, and it pleased me to have this power over him. It pleased me almost as much as did the look in Luna's eyes when my fingers squeezed the air from her throat. Oh, yes, the Hylander was right. Luna was an anomaly. There was no greater satiation than her fear combined with her fight. Ashmodai's discomfort came second to that.
"You are linked by blood, you and her. For seventeen years you have been connected to her. You were there within her when she crashed her tricycle and skinned her knee. You were there on her first day of school. You were there each and every time she endured her father's abuse. She brought you with her. You followed her, eagerly. And you burned with an uncontrollable rage, for all you could do was watch, as her life unfolded before your eyes. She rendered you helpless. And helplessly in love. Who you are and who she has made you become are, indeed, two separate entities, Bane. But the one can be severed from the other. You can shed yourself of your demons, Bane. You can turn your back on your father and become his adversary's warrior."
"Being tied to Luna's blood is what feeds the animal in me. She has fed me for so long." I ground the words through clenched teeth. What Ashmodai was saying was preposterous. And it angered me to the point that every pore in my body spat fire.
But, again, Ashmodai was right. For seventeen years, I watched through My Lady Moon's eyes and I had fallen in love.
"Your feelings have become one with hers. It has become difficult for you to decipher the separation. Whose belongs to whom? You leak into her as she leaks into you."
Bleeding through me. Like blood. Lifeblood.
"That would be an ignominy to my kind, if that were so, Ashmodai. I would not dare disgrace my father in such a way. I am the son of the most evil creation in this world, the son of a cherubim once anointed authority over primitive creation. I am the son of the prince of power over the air, king to a host of demons. A son of Lucifer does not love! Now fight me, Ashmodai. Fight me and make your god proud, as you once did when you were his Avenging Angel. Fight, or I will appease my hunger elsewhere!" I demanded. And, of course, he obeyed. Ashmodai's weak spot was the very mention of his fall
from grace.
Slower than my patience had agreed with, Ashmodai unbuttoned his cloak. It fell, rumpled, to the ground. His cloud-white wings unfurled, stretching high above his head, while feathers brushed the earth at his feet.
The Battle Stance.
Faster than any mortal could begin to imagine, I closed the distance between him and I. With the force of my solid three hundred and ninety-pound body, I punched him in the side of the head, holding him by the shoulder so that he would not sail backward and away from me. Ashmodai's arm, like pliable steel, wrapped around my torso. With one thrust of his wings he sent us backward and into the tree behind me. It cracked in the center on impact. The animal in me drove my teeth into his shoulder. I bit down hard, wagging my head until flesh ripped away from his bone.
Salt! How could have I forgotten?
The salt of the earth burned my tongue, boiling and sizzling and blistering my mouth. I spat out a chunk of Ashmodai's flesh, as his fingers encircled my throat.
Eye to eye, we grinned at one another.
No matter how kind this angel professed himself to be, he enjoyed the fight just as much as, if not more than, I did, for he once was, after all, The Prince of the Avengers of Evil.
And he was, as well, a long-time favored competitor of mine.
I sent a powerful blow to Ashmodai's head and then another one to his face. I wrapped him in one of my arms in a bone-crushing embrace. Ribs gave-way to my strength, shifting and moving beneath my arm, as I took to the sky. Above the tree tops, near the brass cross, Ashmodai and I separated. He threw a punch, landing it in my upper right cheek, sending me backward. I tucked my wings into my side and went into a backward spiral across the sky. Then I cut my wings, at just the right moment, and righted myself in the sky again.
But only to be instantly plowed by the oncoming angel.
Ashmodai and I were hurled through the air. Black and white feathers rained to the earth below.
With strengths and strategies nearly equally matched, Ashmodai and I fought until the first slivers of light from the sun shone across the eastern horizon, until he and I were broken and bleeding. We fought, not like angels, but like men.
With wings.
****
Chapter Forty-Three
Izzy