Daimon, DANIELLE BOLGER [read my book .txt] 📗

awkward position before thunderously colliding with the ground.

I cried out with renewed agony a split second before he turned back around, and planted a heavy fist to my tormented side. I rolled away just as he hit me, and spat a large pool of blood.

I was ravaged; so frail that I could barely move my limbs, but, this time, it was not nerve damage causing my phlegmatic behavior. It was my lack of energy. I was drained so completely that my wounds, once again, were not healing in a timely manner. I needed a human heart to recover, and the thought turned my gaze back towards the clearing's entrance.

Alex was laying there, motionless, no doubt dead, no doubt leaving a perfectly good heart go to waste.

I was suddenly lifted off the ground and tossed over the top of so many pretty black roses. When I landed, my head lolled to the side and I was staring into the closed eyes of another woman.

“Go on, eat it. You need her heart if you want any chance of destroying me.” I could hear the smile as Rose urged me to action.

Alex focused in and out of my vision. She was completely still, but I could feel the warmth emanating from her body. Her scent could just be made out over the suffocating aroma of roses; it was sweet and yet a little spicy. It was enticing, tempting, calling me to claim her heart. It's what she would have wanted, a part of me rationalized. So long as Rose is killed, she would not find her sacrifice made in vain.

I pulled myself back to my wobbly feet, lifted one hand across my smarting torso and moved the other as a stubborn fist out in front of me.

Rose was a blurry white silhouette in the distance. “Stupid, girl.”

He rushed back to me with a pace that, I swore, could have rivaled the speed of light. My body lacked the nimbleness to evade, it lacked the fortitude to block and my mind lacked the emotional stability to even whimper in fear, but I still had a fist, and I still had those swirly photons that swam around me with great zeal. I could do nothing to deflect this next attack, but I still retained strength enough to make my own mark.

He flashed up in front of me, bent arm forward, and fist tight. In the freeze frame of my mind, he was midair, legs tucked back behind him— torso exposed. I saw him unfurl towards me with that haughty fist and a wild grin across his grisly features. He was inches from me and I had yet to make a move.

I may not have had the energy to hold myself with any steadiness on my feet, but I did have energy. It was twinkling all around me, through me, and it burned with a lust for revenge. I closed my eyes again, but this time, I was not hiding from my impending doom, but rather welcoming the fight.

I flared the hot energy into my limbs, using it to control my body in a puppeteer-esque fashion. Glowing bright, my own fist shot out in front of me and collided, with a ground breaking collision, into Rose's outstretched hand. His resistance was incredible, knuckle breaking, so I poured more photons here, pushing against his great might. When he upped his force in response, it almost made me tumble backward, but then I directed more golden fairies to my feet and drove it down hard into the earth to stabilize my position. I wasn't going anywhere.

The ground beneath my feet cracked and my hair tumbled wildly from a powerful breeze created at our combined point of combat. I was clenching my teeth, Rose was clenching his teeth, and for all the incredible power ejected, no one was giving an inch.

I poured more out, but he met and raised me. For a few seconds, dragging on immensely, we kept upping our levels on each other until finally the ground tore from beneath our feet and we were blasted apart with the shockwave of an explosion.

I sailed through the air, somersaulting, and then like a cat, found my feet on my landing. Rose did likewise and watched me speculatively across some ten meters. He leapt back up into the air, as did I, still using my dwindling reserves of photons to command my wasted body. We both rose, climbing slowly, to clear fifty meters in the air. We met, and as we re-entered combat, gravity began to pull us back down.

He shot downward with a heel-kick. I expelled energy from a blocking left forearm and shifted to the right slightly. I snuck inward with a roundhouse kick to his exposed back; he gripped my calf and pushed it down. Pivoting over the top of me, he struck down with a fist. I blocked with the right forearm—expelling yet more sparkling glitter—shifted slightly to the left, snaked my left hand around to his approaching fist, and slipping back inside, swung both legs in an arc to slam the balls of my feet into his abdomen.

As he gasped, I laid a left elbow down to the back of his neck, curled that arm around his head and slammed his skull into my knee. As he came up for air, I gave a quick jab to his beautiful face and crushed his recently healed nose.

He spat blood into my eyes, which distracted me long enough for his left arm to hook back into my still partially deflated skull.

Opening my left, Rose came with a right hook. I ejected a mass of photons with a blocking left arm, but too weak and too late, so that my bone beneath bent and cracked, just shy of a through-and-through fracture.

I groaned, took hold of his shoulder with my right hand, and spent an enormous amount of energy up into the air above, accelerating us downward likely to the point of terminal velocity. We collided thunderously into the ground. Rose lay underneath me in the cratered earth, sprawled, dazed and completely defenseless from the force of the impact.

With a smirk, I tore my hand through his ribcage, ripped into his protective tissues and to a spot a little left of his center. I just managed to claw at his heart before his amethyst knife-edge stare pierced into mine, and his right hand slit into my left forearm, where it squeezed painfully between its two bones.

I roared with pain, and yanked his hand out so fiercely that the momentum broke his elbow. He screamed, but he had survived the round as I released my hold on his heart. He raised his torso up from the ground, swung to his right, then back to his left and followed through to my temple. It was such a fluid, smooth movement that he connected with ease, and I weakly detected the utter potency of photons expensed into the blow as I was launched off him and back into the lagoon.

We dragged ourselves back up to our feet at about the same time, before fixing on the other and assessing the damage levels. My skull, my chest, my left forearm, and my ribs at full circumference, and my internal organs bore the worst of it. Blood oozed from my mouth and nose, but my eyes…I knew those were oozing black. Rose was not unscathed.

He had an open wound to his chest, a crushed nose, and a useless right hand. These injuries were healing far swifter than my own, but it was not instantaneous, and judging by his hunched stature, he was losing steam too.

I smiled, but Rose did not share my enthusiasm.

I flew towards him, across our vast space. I drew out all the remaining glittering pixies and struck a heavy foot down onto him. He blocked this with his left forearm, but there was a discernible snap in the bone as he did so.

He countered with a quick sidekick to my belly, but I sidestepped this, dipped under him, and returned with two deft uppercuts. He came down with his right elbow to my rising skull, which dropped me to the ground, but not before I stabbed a hand through the side of his knee.

He howled and went for a backhand to my face, but I twisted myself around low on the ground and spun a leg under his good one. He lost his balance instantly, but before he could recover himself, I launched myself onto his torso to force him down. While he was helpless in my grasp, I stabbed back into that clotting wound. I found it at once, and, this time, did not hesitate. With the last bit of glitter I maintained, before they all dulled and lost their luster, I ripped Rose’s heart from its beautiful host.

Bereft of his heart, my enemy would surely die now, and I watched him cautiously to ensure this. Though he had a broken, bloodied nose, and dirt upon his face, he transformed back into a bewitching beauty. His soft milky skin and pale blonde hair continued to give him that angelic appearance. Those violet eyes; they were sad, despondent, and so lonely as they twinkled through drooping lids. He did not fight, nor did he moan, or writhe with pain, or protest. He simply held himself still, perfectly composed and perfectly beautiful, even in his death.

He blinked very slowly and drew a thin breath inward, just as his sparkles began to trickle away. I thought that it was his last breath, until he whispered.

“You won,” he stated this with an odd, soft smile. “I never thought...” He coughed; flecks of blood pried from his pink lips. “Never thought, anyone would ever be able to defeat me. You are quite surprising; truly a prodigy.”

I felt something fade from me as well. My dull and languid fairies were shifting from my battered form. Despite winning the battle and achieving my goals, in the end, there was no true victory. A monster like me was always doomed to defeat.

I laid down beside Rose on the grass. As we stared up at the billions of stars in the sky, I held his heart tenderly in my breast.

“I have lived for a long time,” he managed. “At first, I hated myself for what I had become, and for all the human lives I took just so I could sustain life. I was lonely…so I made others. They all became my servants, never friends—never really family. So I killed them and tried again, and again. Every time I was lonelier than ever. Then I finally decided it was time to die.”

I gasped as I turned side on to view him. He was more immaculate than ever, draped in a curtain of abandoning glitter.

“I wanted to rip out my own heart, but each time my hand trembled and refused to break the flesh. It was like a reflex that stopped my body from performing self-harm. I could not commit suicide, and I could not refrain from defending myself when attacked. I told my followers to kill me if they truly loved me, but when I pushed this, they ripped out their own hearts and offered it up to me, before fading away. How cruel it was to see my children die willingly when all I wanted was death for myself. That's where you come in, Jane Kirra; a child who would murder their father.”

“I see,” I murmured, as I turned back to the stars. I inhaled the deep perfume of the roses. It may have been due to my dwindling senses, but their aroma became rather comforting then. “That was why you killed my friend—why you took Sandra—you had to make me hate you so that I would kill you.”

“Like your father.”

So many pretty flecks swirled above me that I was not sure which were stars and which were parts of our dying spirits. In a way, it did not matter; the sight was too resplendent to care what aroused it.

“Do you still wish to live, Jane?”

It took me some time to answer. I did not like monsters; they always terrified me as a child, and because fear was a weak emotion, I wished them all to die. I was a monster, a murderer, and this was not of a transformation of the last few days. This occurred years ago. I always knew I deserved death. Perhaps, that was why I ran into the face of it so willingly, but fought it at every turn. There was so much I still wanted out of life: repentance for my father by doing what I could to save the city from violence; friendship from people like Sandra and Zach; to return selfless love; and forgiveness from a brother. There was so much I still wanted. I did not deserve them, and most of these I would never have had a chance of attaining, but it did not stop my petty little heart thumping a little harder at the possibilities. Even a monster can want life's precious gifts. Without them, it may as well be dead.

Rose's heart continued to beat weakly in my hands.

“Yes,” I answered finally, with a voice devoid of emotion. “I