God's Gone AWOL

[12] Lucifer's Sacrifice

"Good. You're doing good, Atticus," Bentley told him. "Keep fighting it,"

Atticus trembled above her. Although the rush of magic and memories was enough for him to regain consciousness at first, it couldn't keep the surging tides at bay. Wave after wave overcame him as he desperately struggled to keep his head above the surface. White light continued to flicker over his golden eyes, relentless in its quest to overtake him once again.

Seizing the opportunity, Bentley flipped Atticus over so he was pressed into the rocks. Then a set of red cords shot out of her fluttering white sleeve, wrapping tightly around his wrists to keep him pinned down while he struggled. If they were in any other sort of situation, he would be incredibly annoyed by this action of hers. However desperate times called for desperate measures. He didn't resist.

—He didn't resist. But the leashed-up version of himself was hardly as logical. As soon as his eyes flashed white again, Atticus tugged against the bindings, and dissolved them in an instant. He had done what regular Atticus lacked the power to do, and had broken free in a manner of seconds.

With a look of uncharacteristic fury, he hurled a fireball directly at Bentley's face. She only had to tilt her head slightly to escape the blow, and it sailed past her ear without causing a hint of damage. Her unkept hair was blown about as the hostile energy whizzed past. But she never once took her eyes off Atticus' face.

"Halo Head," she said clearly.

The familiar nickname was enough to pull the angel back up to the surface briefly.

"Bentley," he said, "I don't know if I—"

But he lost his hold once again.

As an angel, Atticus had never experienced the feeling of drowning before. Suffocation always was more of an emotional experience than a physical one. But now as the endless waves of energy pressed down on his mind, stinging the hollows of his eyes and crushing his chest as his limbs refused to obey his commands, he now understood precisely what it meant to drown. —To completely and utterly drown.

Experiencing a pain as unbearable as this, Atticus was willing to dig his eyes out if that would lift the spell. And maybe that would have worked if he had thought about it earlier. However, he knew that the power of the Leash had long since spread to the rest of his body as well. There was no way out of this situation. He was truly trapped like a prisoner in a torture chamber.

Every time he lost control, he watched from a distance as his robotic body turned against Bentley. He was helpless to stop himself as he hurled spell after spell in her direction. It was only when he managed to break through the surface that he could pull away. But it was still a losing battle, and he spent more and more time beneath the control of the late Camael.

"Bentley," he begged, "Please help me,"

.
The wall of purple smoke had become a velvet curtain, and Lucifer was the great performer in the spotlight before it. Standing atop his ashy stage, he faced his audience of a thousand or so angels with a smile on his face. Not a single trace of fear was in his eye as he gazed at them. He had performed live in stadiums with far more people than this, after all. An angry mob of all-powerful biblical angels was nothing compared to a crowd of sobbing LGBTQ+ human teenagers.

"Who are you?" Uriah was the first to step forward. "—What are you?"

Lucy just shrugged.

"Judging by the way you asked that, I think you might have already figured it out,"

Since that chaotic day on the hillside, rumors had already broken loose among angelic kind. Hushed whispers of an unusual sort of demon were now passing within the halls of Heaven. Stories had spread: of someone who could evaporate entire armies and reduce them to nothing more than butterflies. Now, on top of Bentley's misleading speech earlier, many of the soldiers were overcome with doubt as to this person's identity.