Broken Wings: Genesis (31 page)

That wasn’t going to happen if I
could help it. I didn’t really stop to think about my motives. There were too
many to really take the time to consider. I couldn’t let Abaddon destroy Ke. I
flung my hand toward Abaddon with instinctive precision. The huge, oily form of
darkness was thrown back toward the Gate.

His focus came back to me with
furious intensity. I must have changed his mind about the threat assessment he
had gone through. But his attention was no longer on Ke. It was for me alone.
It was common for me to be flippant at this stage of a fight. I loved to throw
in a little sarcasm to piss the other guy off, and to encourage confidence in
myself I wasn’t really feeling at the moment. It wasn’t there this time. I was
on my own without sarcastic wit, without any really back up, or even any clue
as to what I was doing.

The warmth of Marduk’s amulet
heated to greater levels at my chest. It suddenly dawned on me that the object
had been given to me in the dreamscape. I had never even realized it had come
with me from out of that realm and into the physical realm. The thought of the
power behind that bit of work caught me so off-guard I almost missed the start
of Abaddon’s first rush in my direction.

My reaction was instantaneous,
although I’m not sure I can claim total credit. Both of my arms came up at the
same time with power flaring at my hands. He was flung backward from me,
landing to coalesce into more solid form at the foot of the Gate. Energy flared
from the amulet, a violet energy with interweaving colors of the rainbow mixed
in to strengthen and solidify the force that surrounded me.

My surprise was overwhelming, but
I didn’t have time to contemplate the source. Abaddon’s scream of outrage
filled the chamber. It wasn’t a noise to be heard by human ears, but it
vibrated anger and hatred that resonated within me, bringing to life my own
deep, dark feelings.

I was always the type to keep my
emotions under tight wraps. Everything that had happened within the last couple
of weeks had opened me to feelings I had never dealt with before. The feelings
of my inner darkness being exposed had me really thrown. I’d never realized my
capacity for such dark emotions. As a human, I had recognized the potential,
but never imagined the primal energy this brought to the surface.

The big problem was that the
feeling of it nauseated me and I lost control of the energy I was holding. It
wasn’t for long, but it was time enough for Abaddon to make his move. He
swooped in toward me with full force while I was at my most vulnerable. Before
I could bring my energy up to stop him, I was launched across the room with the
impact of his form against mine. I hit the far wall halfway up the height and
slid down the surface to land in a dazed heap on the floor.

Stars exploded in my head and a
brief image of the Angelic observatory flashed through my mind, the planets
swirling around me in the misty fog of unaware pain. Okay,
that
had
hurt. The breath was knocked out of me, and I was fighting for consciousness.
There were definite disadvantages to fighting on the physical plane. I couldn’t
seem to rally to force as quickly as I did when I fought on the dreamscape.
This was not pain I could ignore and jump right back up again.

The medallion heated up on my
chest and brought me back to awareness, feeding me a surge of energy. I dawned
on me that the medallion had come from the dreamscape and was helping to fight
the fight on the physical. What was so different between the two realms? They
were both just as real as the perceptions you allowed. I knew the dreamscape
was insubstantial, yet I fought in it the same way I fought in the physical. I
just needed a little carry over in my thoughts. The medallion was that carry
over, my reminder.

Abaddon surged toward me again.
The time for thinking was over. It was time for action. Instead of thrusting
him backward, I met him head on, force to force. We both fell back against the
connection. I wanted to smile. Good. He had felt that. I tried to ignore the
part where I had felt it, too––like running headfirst into a brick wall, but
you do what you have to do.

The game was on. Abaddon and I met
again and again, pushing, slamming, pounding, and battering each other with
energy. I was getting tired, but he was, too. How can you tell what strength a
big ball of yuck had left to him? Maybe it was only wishful thinking, but I’d
take whatever I could get. He slammed me back against the far wall more times
than I could count. I wonder if he was keeping track of how many times I pushed
him back toward the gate? I doubted it. There was nothing but the essence of
pure rage coming from him. You didn’t think clearly with that kind of raw
emotion funneling through you.

Then again, he wasn’t human. Maybe
he was beyond the blind spot that emotion brought. Me? I was hitting the zone
of heightened awareness that comes from a struggle of life or death. There are
no emotions attached to the zone, it just is. It wasn’t a matter of kill or be
killed, it was a matter of fighting for survival. The only thing was that in
this case, I wasn’t just fighting for my survival. I was fighting for the
survival of the existence of everything I knew and had ever known.

At some point Abaddon seemed to
get beyond blind rage. He sat in front of the Gate, gathering his forces,
waiting, maybe thinking. I gathered the power to me, not wanting to wait. I
don’t think I had the luxury of giving myself time, because I couldn’t give him
time to think things through. I flung everything I had at him, striking for
what I felt was the heart of the dark form that hovered at the front of the
Gate. This time I wasn’t going for the push. I was going for the kill. But how
do you kill something that isn’t in physical form?

It did work on one level. Instead
of the kill shot I was looking for, I dispersed the form he did have through
the room. It was like an explosion of smoke, shadowing the room in blackness.
While Abaddon worked to coalesce back into a more solid shape, I pulled in the
power again, drawing on every resource I could latch onto.

It finally dawned on me what the
rainbow lines of color were that ran through my violet energy. The immortals
had tied their own essence into that of the amulet, allowing me to draw on
their power. But I knew it wasn’t enough. I was fighting against time. Abaddon
was coming back together too quickly. I reached out above me, for the strength
that had buffered me earlier, the strength at the core of humanity that was
fighting its own struggle overhead, unaware of the battle that raged below
their feet, not realizing the true fight was below the surface of everything
they were already being put through on the level of reality that was in front
of their faces.

My body flooded with light. It was
like the dream, when Ithane became a creature of pure energy, of white-violet
power. But it was different. The power that flooded me was not only my own, it
was the light of everything and everyone around me I could connect into––the
humans struggling overhead, the immortals sitting God only knew where, feeding
me everything they had, maybe even the Angels. I couldn’t tell where it all
came from, I only knew it was there, flowing into me, filling me and spilling
into reserves I never knew existed.

Abaddon must have felt the sheer
power of what I was holding, of what I was becoming. He hesitated, back to full
form. I could feel him probing, and I could feel the frustration that surged
through him at the moment he became aware that he couldn’t win against the
force I had called into play.

I kept drawing the power, weaving
it into form, ready to blanket him and send him back to the pit for another
couple of millennia. I forgot the number one rule in a fight like this––a
cornered animal makes for a more dangerous and unpredictable fight. Just as
Ithane had done before me, I drew in the one last line of energy needed to
complete the weave and lock Abaddon back into the Abyss from where he had just
come. I pulled Ke’s energy to life to create the final part of the barrier.

That caught Abaddon’s attention,
drawing it away from me. Hefinally realized he had been attacking the wrong
opponent. I had been distracting him the entire time away from the one thing he
should have destroyed first––Ke. Triumph rolled through the room on top of the
other feelings surging from him. He lunged toward Ke, ready to finish what he
had begun upon his emergence from the pit.

Ke sat up straight, accepting what
he knew now to be inevitable. I had locked him into human form, and he would
die as one of those he sought to save. But that wasn’t in my plan. I threw the
energy I had woven away from me like a net, sending it hurtling across the open
space of the room.

To be honest, I couldn’t really
tell you what my intention was at that point. My actions were based on pure
instinct. The energy net struck Ke, encasing him in a protective shield.
Abaddon bounced off the protective force. But he was ready to go again, with no
hesitation in his actions. He lunged at Ke, ready to break through the barrier,
as he had broken the weaves of the Gate. Without thought, I tied the energy off
and pulled back to gather more. Ke was safe behind the barrier. Abaddon bounced
off again, this time with a howl of outrage. He had felt the lock go into
place. He knew the feeling of it––that lock had held him bound for thousands of
years. Without the key, he would never open it. For the time being, Abaddon was
stopped from destroying Ke.

My own energy was gathering again,
and Abaddon evaluated the situation with quick, decisive action. He lunged at
me before the power could be called to full force, and broke the new web I was
trying to build. But it was only a distraction. The humming filled the air
again, and while Abaddon stood over me, battering against whatever defenses I
could call into play, the Gate filled with shadows, all emerging from the place
of darkness that had held them for so long.

I couldn’t hold against them all.
But that wasn’t what was planned. There was only a slight hesitation before the
Gate, and then the shadows surged outward, away from me, away from the Gate.
They headed toward the tunnel leading to the surface. There was nothing I could
do to stop them. I was holding off Abaddon’s attacks. Maybe I wasn’t losing,
but I sure wasn’t winning.

As the last of the shadows cleared
the Gate, I felt a definite surge of hatred flung in my direction. The last
shadow was headed my way. I drew on whatever reserves I could find to shield
myself from the two creatures of pure darkness. I closed my eyes against the
impact, ready to feel the hurt. It never came.

I opened my eyes slowly, peering
out to see what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a movement.
Abaddon and the other shadow were headed to the surface. I jumped to my feet,
ready to run after them, but an explosion pulled me off balance. Smoke and
rubble choked the air around me as the tunnel collapsed behind their passage. I
was cut off from them with no way to follow. I also had no way to leave.

The fight was over. I had no idea
whether I had won or lost. I was still alive, but I wasn’t sure whether or not
that was a good thing. I was drained, tired beyond anything I had ever
experienced. As the dust settled in the room, I sank to the floor.

I looked over at Ke, who was
floating in the air, suspended by a web of rainbow color. He looked as though
he was sleeping, resting behind the protective barrier I had created. How had I
done it? I have no clue. Nothing made sense to me right now. I let the numbness
take over my thoughts and closed my eyes against the pain creeping back into my
physical awareness.

When you are locked away inside of
darkness, time can pass so slow as to be barely noticeable. I hadn’t tried to
leave the underground room yet. This was the first bit of downtime that I’d had
and I was choosing to spend it in a little wallowing. From my perspective, I
had earned it.

Wallowing is not something I’m
good at. But accepting that the blame for whatever happens next in humanity’s
cycle is my fault, well, you can’t help but throw yourself into a few endless
rounds of self-doubt and worry about whether you did the right thing. Should I
have stopped Ke? It wasn’t in me to be a killer. I’ve destroyed demons in the
past, but it wasn’t the same thing. Maybe if he had been in full Angelic form I
might have been able to, but not while he was locked away in Sarge’s
body––another bad on my part.

The question I was really trying
get the core answer for had to do with figuring out why I had turned my back on
him instead of finishing him off. Was it because he was in Sarge’s body? I
wanted to put the whole of the blame on ethical dilemma, but to be honest, I
wasn’t sure it was the true reason.

Was it because I had fallen in
love with him? That was an option I didn’t want to explore. What person in
their right mind would want to admit they had chosen the existence of one
person over all of humanity? Maybe some serious romantics might buy it, up
until the time they were vaporized into nothingness, but it didn’t sit right
with me.

The only other real option left
was that I knew what he was going to do and turned my back on him to allow it
to happen without me changing my mind. Of course, there could be some small
part of me trying to reason that by turning my back, it wasn’t my fault. Years
of fighting had taught me that unless you
knew
the battle was over, you
didn’t turn your back to walk away. Not only had I not finished Ke off, I had
left him sitting directly in front of the one place he shouldn’t have been––not
if I had been serious about stopping him from releasing Abaddon and the hordes
from the pit.

I looked up at Ke, wrapped in his
cocoon of rainbow light. I wondered if he could feel inside of there, if he was
aware of what happened around him, or if he was in some sort of deep sleep.
Testing the web holding, I poked at it with my finger. It was solid, and yet it
had a little give to it. He didn’t move. I tried peering past the fuzzy colors
blocking him from full view. Was he even breathing?