He slashes, and blood splatters.
Not red blood, but blue.
The eerie man’s cut his own side open.
“What in Nine Hells are you doing?” I snarl.
The Director ignores me, smiling urbanely at Daral instead, ignoring the blood, the panting eerie man. “Highwind is not totally devoid of its own treasures. But elkiocyte particles are notoriously hard to store and transport. Metal, glass, poly—nothing worked, until we hit upon using a host organism. Come on, you.” The last was directed at Grip, and punctuated by a jab in the head.
Grip plunges his hand into his own wound. He pulls it out, smeared in his own blood, holding what looks to be a bag-shaped organ. Veins and arteries, leaking fluid, trail from it. It sizzles as the air touches it.
The soldiers holding me are slack-jawed. I hear someone retching behind me.
“Careful!” The Director grabs another instrument from his case, a scoop with a telescoping handle. He holds it out under Grip’s shaking hand. “In here, there’s a good chap.”
The organ falls into the scoop; the Director removes the prongs from Grip’s head. The eerie men collapses into a heap. Dead, poor bastard.
“What’s that?” My spiders are on alert. I swear I feel their microscopic legs pin-pricking along my nerves.
The Director gestures, and four men bring out a frosted metal canister held in a cubical framework. Mist billows from its open top.
The Director uses a long sharp stick to puncture the organ in the scoop. He tips the scoop, and a thin reddish-brown liquid dribbles into the canister.
An acrid black smoke rises as the substances combine.
“Stop it!” I throw myself toward him. Soldiers hold me back. I snarl, get my right arm free long enough to throw a punch to one’s gut, another’s jaw.
Several more soldiers pile on me. My body’s shaking, my vision’s blurry. I’m driven to my knees.
“Daral!” I yell.
Daral’s standing there, eyes wide, looking shaken.
We both feel it, the wrongness of that black liquid, threatening to bubble over the canister.
“Demon sap,” breathes Daral. “How’d you—“
The Director smirks. “We figured out how to separate it into manageable substances, then reconstitute—”
“You idiot.” The liquid in the vial’s roiling as it warms up.
“That’s what they all say,” says the Director, sadly. “But I’m going to prove them wrong.” He turns back to the pit and the tube within. “Angel craft, eh? Let’s see how effective this demon sap is against it.”
“You’re going to blow this whole place up if you bring the two into contact,” I warn. I’m straining to get up, my spiders furiously working to increase my strength. I feel something akin to transformation happening within me.
It’s too little, too late.
The Director’s not listening to me. He puts on safety goggles and big shiny gloves, heaves the canister out of its framework.
I’m still struggling. “Like that’s going to protect you, fool!” He’s not listening, getting ready to toss demon sap onto angel craft.
We’re all going to die because of one man’s stupidity.
One last heave, and I’m free. I lunge for the Director, but someone’s ahead of me. Daral, moving fast. He cries out, “Now!” and shapes slither out of the shadows.
Suddenly I’m swathed in black veils, scratchy against my skin. Cloaks?
I see the Director reach toward the angel glass, see Daral hurtle into him.
For an instant, I think he’s made it, but then the explosion comes.
It’s soundless, this wash of bright light. I would’ve been instantly blinded if my spiders, quicker than I, hadn’t shuttered my eyes.
Cloaks evaporate as the waves of light engulf us. Without them, even my strengthened skin wouldn’t have stood against the impact. Men sag and collapse all around me. The floor shakes with tremors. I hunch, eyes screwed tight, weird lights flickering against the darkness of my eyelids, cloaks peeling off me in layers.
It’s over in moments.
Three heartbeats and everyone else is dead.
I rise slowly, creakily, as if emerging from water. The air is heavy on my shoulders, and the after-images slowly fade. There’s rubble everywhere, the noise of the rockfall having been masked by the silent explosion.
Darkness creeps back in. Within it, the banish lights flicker.
Something like ghosts swirl in the black of the walls.
I avert my gaze and, shading my eyes, look down at the pit.
The angel wings still shimmer in place, but the glass around them is gone. Two bodies sprawl at the bottom of the pit.
Daral and the Director. A shadow lays next to them. It rises into a column, crudely fashioned into the shape of a woman.
“Cloud,” I say, saddened.
Her mouth moves. I think I hear, “… change her back…”
And then she, too, is gone.
I leap into the pit, strengthened feet sinking into the soil, and bend over Daral. His face is blistered and blackened, almost unrecognizable. He peers at me out of swollen eyes. “Ka—to?” he whispers out of a lipless mouth.
I fight down my nausea. He doesn’t deserve to see that. “I’m here.” I want to tell him to rest, save his breath, but that won’t help. Let him get out what’s on his chest before he departs this world.
He wheezes, each breath a painful scouring of the lungs. “… only he can reverse… get him to… her…” Blood bubbles from his mouth; his body goes limp.
He’s gone.
Cloud also said “her”. Were they both talking about Flutter?
A few feet away, the Doctor stirs, fingers curling, chest rising in a small breath.
Curse him. Aside from a tattered hem and singed hair, he’s unscathed.
I grab the Director’s white collar with my metal hand and haul him to his feet. Behind his spectacles, his eyes are wide and fearful and very blue. His feet scuff at the ground as I twist the fabric, bring him to eye-level.
“Many good people are dead because of you. I don’t know if we’ll live through this, but your meddling with things of demons and angels ends here.”
The Director’s glance flickers sideways. At the angel wings.
I can’t
