Tempie was already manifesting some powers. On that first night I’d found her, after she’d hit me, she kissed the spot and healed it. She had also laid the smack down on that jerk vampire, Finn, the other day.
If she didn’t need to be bound to me to display some of the powers of a Destroyer, maybe she didn’t need Kathan, either. Maybe being with him had just enlightened her as to what the powers were, then she had begun using them.
In knowledge, power.
I closed my eyes and felt around my body, making a mental inventory. For this experiment to work, I needed an observable starting point. I found the missing strip of skin on the inside of my leg. It was still weeping blood. Kind of a big booboo to start with. The bite mark on my chest would probably take less effort, but minor healing would produce minor results, and minor results were harder to track.
I laid my palm flat on the bloody spot. The exposed tissue stung from the salt on my skin, but I didn’t move my hand. I wasn’t sure how to begin. How did you heal something? How did you do anything Destroyer-y?
Maybe you had to be kissing it? I tried, but couldn’t bend right to get my lips to the wound.
That would be ridiculous anyway. I was sitting alone in a pitch black isolation cell with no one but the blood to see me and I still felt stupid for trying. You would think that major bodily harm and humiliation would make a person a little less self-conscious, but I guess I was stuck with that particular character trait for life. However short that life might be.
Speaking of which, I should probably speed things up a bit. There was no telling how long I would be left alone this time or how much of that alone-time I had already wasted.
I took another deep breath, trying to hold off the panic, but my heart stuttered inside my ribcage at the thought of the foot soldiers coming back. My hand trembled until I had to take it off of the wound because I was doing more damage than I was magically fixing.
It wasn’t magic, though, it was something else. Will, maybe? Tempie had wanted me to feel better, so she’d kissed the bruise on my cheek and healed it. But I already wanted to feel better. Who wouldn’t want the thigh they’d just had flensed to feel better?
Somebody who didn’t think they deserved to feel better. Somebody who didn’t have a purpose fueling their will to feel better.
I had a purpose—destroy the fallen angels who had done this to me. Pay them back for laughing as if watching my body violated and ripped apart was the height of entertainment. Get my sister away from Kathan and pay him back for everything he’d done to her.
It didn’t matter whether I deserved to feel better or not, if I was better in every sense of the word—not just cuts and bruises healed, but stronger, more powerful, greater—then I could destroy them.
I drew on all the anger and hatred and bitterness at the things they’d done to me. That helpless rage from being held down and hurt and laughed at and made into a thing, not me, not a person, not someone who could help them fight the God who had misused them and the rest of the world, but a means to an end, some kind of dumb animal they had to break so she would follow them around and do what they told her to do. I poured all of that into the wound and all over myself.
The river of blood swirled around my arms and legs and face, making little ripples and whorls where my power disturbed it. Warmth poured across my skin, soothing away the aches and pains.
I smoothed my hand across the untorn flesh on the inside of my thigh, then over the place where the ridged bite mark on my chest had been. I slid my tongue over my newly unbroken teeth and pursed bloody but scabless lips together.
“Now we’re cooking with gasoline.” I laughed. Some giddy part of my brain thought that Kathan would’ve cringed if he could’ve seen the levels of hell that self-satisfied smirk held for him and his legions. “Desty Blaine McCormick, ladies and gentlemen—the Destroyer, the Godkiller, and now available in limited edition Fallen Angel Killer.”
Tough
By the time my body was awake enough to blink, Clarion and I were in the driveway of the Dark Mansion. I couldn’t move my arms, but something deep down in my gut was reaching out like a ghost-hand toward the mansion’s busted down front doors, screaming, Get Desty! Leave me there to burn—I don’t care—just get Desty out!
My fingers twitched. I tried making a fist. Pins and needles prickled in my fingers. If I could keep going like that, I might be able to get moving in time to watch one of Lonely’s TBG-7s turn the Dark Mansion into a pressure cooker with Desty inside. I tried to work my hand faster.
In the parking lot, Clarion ducked behind an armored Hummer with shot-out tires and rolled me off his shoulders. “Wave one is falling back. Send in the crows.”
“Got it.”
Somebody whistled, then the sound of flapping took off from every direction. Black flashes passed over the lighter blackish-orange of the sky. Somewhere outside my field of vision, something was burning.
I put everything I had into moving my fingers. This time, I
