Angel Virus [ONC 2022]

Chapter 10. Fight the Virus.

My impression of that moment was that the beast's hand inexplicably detached and bounced away into the sparse crowd of customers, trailing purple-black blood. Only after that did Father Brown appear at my elbow, cocking an antique sword upward for another swing.

The room brightened with sunlike radiance from somewhere behind the defrocked priest. With a footwork worthy of a fencer, he lunged. The tip of his sword pierced the devil's broad chest with a staccato butcher's chop noise. "Ha!" cried Father Brent.

As the impaled hulk stood transfixed, the monster holding Resa captive hesitated, yellow eyes roving left and right. People around us began to gasp and a couple of screams rang out.

The source of the sunbeams brushed past me on the side opposite Father Brent. It was Trixie, but surrounded by an envelope of golden light. Her voice vibrated as if amplified. "Let her go, uglypuss."

The yellow eyes of Father Brent's target dimmed. Brent ripped his sword free with a spatter of acidic liquid, and the creature fell on its face.

Resa's captor backed up, with Trixie, Brent, and I pressing forward.

With a squeal, the devil threw Resa at us. I stepped to intercept her wheeling body as the creature spun and ran.

Resa thwacked into me, and I upset a table. We both landed on the floor and I nearly passed out again from the pain in my shoulder.

The fleeing devil began to smoke under Trixie's radiance. It vaulted the booth where Resa and I sat and crashed through the window. Father Brent aimed a slash at it, but it was too fast. Brent cut only the tabletop.

Trixie seemed to trip as she ran, and dove forward. A cry of concern burst from me, but I was premature. With arms to her sides, she powered through the window, unfettered, it seemed, by gravity. And it wasn't some trick of my eyes, portions of her radiant light spread like wings.

The fleeing aberration dropped out of sight, with Trixie hovering over it. She seemed to explode in a final burst of light. All the blechths around me moaned or squealed in terror or pain. When I recovered from the flash, her light had faded. As she stood over the smoking remains of her quarry she caught my eye and her lips twitched a saucy smirk.

Meanwhile, Resa trembled in my arms. She and I struggled to sit. The pain from my shoulder could not be borne much longer, and Resa whimpered, "My ribs. I think they're cracked."

Something inside me cracked, too, at those words.

But that inner peace I had absorbed from the living otherscape of Photropolis carried me along as if I were a milkweed seed floating on summery breezes, and my lips once again formed words that surprised me, at least halfway. "May I touch?"

Our eyes met, and I saw trust in hers.

"Yes, all right."

Perhaps my earlier straining toward sensing the mundane helped, but as my left hand (my right being immobile) approached her torso, I could sense the pain. Also swirling around my thoughts were Father Brown's words about the powers of meditation and how I should find mind-over-matter natural. But the final inspiration surely must have been my sense of justice. I was outraged at this wrong, and I wished to make it right.

"Be well," I whispered.

Barely, my hand rested on her ribs, and my eyes closed. I sensed, ever more clearly, broken bone and bleeding marrow. No, I thought. This way, not that.

Her body responded. Like Trixie's legs, or my jaw, rightness flooded in. Her ribs knit, her marrow calmed, and her pain receded.

My fluttered open, and hers were right there, inches away. I snatched my hand away and heat suffused my face, hugely.