Something Wicked 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)

16: Letting him go

The smooth slide of the Demon's fingers into my brain tissue was almost comforting. So close to death, I gave up my usual struggle against the Demon's will, letting it invade my tired mind like a million white-hot needles.

It took control of my limbs without so much as a tussle with me, then dragged me into a jerky climb into the warehouse's scorching rafters. Up, up, up. The Demon wouldn't lose its servant to the Marine Corps, or to fire.

Blistering hot embers singed my beard and burnt trails through the red fabric of my hoodie as I sprang between girders and stairs. The Demon guided my every footfall across the cavernous roof space of the warehouse, taking me away from the attackers below. I slid on slimy white tracks of molten rubber; my sneakers were melting onto super-heated girders, yet the Demon dragged me onward.

My skin riddled with burns, my lungs tarred with smoke, exhaustion tightened its noose around my neck. I couldn't climb anymore.

Why would Alcor be the target of an American military assault? We had no projects in America. Why hadn't her intelligence team known about the ambush? Perhaps they had known. Of course, there were innumerable projects of hers that I didn't know about. I was her lowly servant, after all.

All my men were dead, some engulfed in whirling flames, some suffocated under a blanket of smoke. Hany, Atif, Rashid. The entire team.

Despair overcame me. I crawled across roof beams into ever-thickening clouds of acrid smoke, wondering how much longer I'd be able to evade the last of the Marines below. Uniformed men dragged bodies out between the warehouse's charred beams. Not much longer.

For the first time in my life I contemplated turning myself in to avoid the same fate as my best men. Better that the Marines took me than let myself succumb to flames, or suffer a lingering death at her hand for losing our warehouse and our men. The Demon's grip on my tired mind wavered.

Smoking beams began to crash down from the roof, exposing the burning warehouse to the starry Jeddah sky. A whoosh of embers, and the midnight breeze fanned the flames, sending orange snakes' tongues licking up the rafters.

Was the Demon trying to kill me? Had she instructed the Demon to end me by flame, a fitting punishment for failing my men?

I tumbled down to ground level and threw myself along a meandering path through broken machinery and smoking rubble outside the warehouse. No Marines were within the perimeter fence that separated the warehouse from the forested hinterland beyond Jeddah.

A short run-up, a few excruciating handfuls of barbed wire, and I launched myself over the fence and into the stunted bushes that led forestward. With luck I could still make it to one of our hideouts in the city before the Marines caught me.

Desperate to nurse my wounds, I begged the Demon to let me go. But the frozen needles gripped harder at my mind; the Demon had found a victim.

In the gloom beyond the fence stood a figure. Silhouetted by a waning moon, a slim man crept toward me.

Not a Marine, not a fellow Alcor brother, his face was shadowed in the forest's murk. But I could tell from his serene grace as he closed the distance between us that I was staring at an angel.

The Demon knew it too. Its bloodlust peaking, it dragged my tendons and shoved my bones, eager for an angel to slaughter.

I didn't need to see his face; the angel's beauty shone out of him like summer sunlight, forcing the Demon's icy fingers from my mind.

"Red Demon." His voice was gentle, deeper than I'd expected from such a slender man. "The Marines have you surrounded. Give yourself up. You're making this harder for yourself."