FIGHT BLOGFEST_PREY FOR ME_GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude

Ever try saying "No" to a fallen angel?

Ghost of Samuel Clemens here saying I didn't have it in me to do it.

Here is Roland's entry (with the fallen angel's thumbprints attached)

for J.C. Martins' FIGHT BLOGFEST.

http://jc-martin.com/fighterwriter/2010/08/17/fight-fight-fight-blogfest/comment-page-1/#comment-271

It is the year 1936.

The battle is within the Hindenburg as it sails around the towering statue,

Christ The Redeemer, in the skies of Rio de Janeiro.

The fallen angel from Roland's WORD PAINT and FAIRY TALE blogfest entries

is fighting her double she created from her own glamour in a crisis.

Now her daemon is on a murderous rampage. It is up to the fallen angel to end the

madness before the daemon attempts suicide by exploding the Hidenburg :



I reached out with my mind and bent the patterns of time/space to my will.

The world blurred, the deck changed shape beneath my boots, and I stumbled as I now stood outside the cabin door leading to the enormous chamber of hydrogen gas bags.

I instinctively looked to the right, the side of my body without a heart.

There, at the far end of the hallway, was my daemon. She felt my eyes on her and whirled about, actually hissing at me, her knife springing up.

I bit the insides of my cheek and bent space again.

She leapt back in shock as I appeared right beside her, slashing with my own knife. With a fluid grace, she leapt onto the railing of the stairs leading down to the engineers' catwalk.

I leapt onto the opposite railing. We slid down, our knives slashing, blocking, and darting as we surfed down the metal banisters.

Down we sped, our daggers clicking and sparking down into the darkness.

My daemon was giggling, having the time of her life. Why not? One of the damn sparks from our knives was sure to ignite the hydrogen and blow us both to hell.

We reached the bottom of the stairs and the end of the railings.

We leapt straight at one another. We were too evenly matched. We blocked each other's thrust as we passed each other.

On a wicked whim, I stretched out my neck and kissed her full of the lips. She spat in my face.

"I always wanted to do that," I laughed. "But I kept getting lipstick all over the mirror."

Then, we hit the catwalk in a roll and bounced up into the metal struts that crisscrossed above us in an upside-down triangled jungle gym.

She swung out her long legs to slam me in the chest.

But that was what I would have done, so I had swung lower, patting her hard on the butt as I slid underneath her in a sweep.

She sailed over the catwalk onto the metal struts on the other side of the pathway. Damn her.

While I had been trying to rattle her, she had been setting herself up into the exact spot she had wanted :

right over the huge silver gasbag full of deadly hydrogen.

She did a little flip and dived straight down towards it,

her black knife stabbing out. I called up the Power within me and bent time to appear right under her, on top of the gasbag.

I blocked her knife. She rasped like a stabbed lion. She reached out with her left hand, grabbing a girder for support.

I straddled the gasbag, a boot on a strut on either side of it.

We thrust and parried in a flurry of movement that my eyes couldn't even follow.

"It doesn't have to be this way," I panted.

"Why the hell not?," eerily came my own voice at me from my daemon.

"I made you, fool. I can make the hunger go away. I promise."

"Idiot! Can you make the emptiness go away, too? If you can't stand being you, why did you think I could?"

As our knives sparked against one another, I cursed myself. The engineers who worked here even wore felt boots to keep even the smallest sparks from happening.

And here we were making like sparklers right above enough hydrogen to blow us clear out of the sky.

"I'll kill us yet," she screamed, and with a wild swing,

dived through the wires and netting that held the uppermost gasbags and out through the silver fabric that covered the zeppelin's frame.

The lunatic. She was going for the engine car. Instinctively, I started to jump to the right of the jagged hole she had made.

Then, at the last second, I dived through the silver skin to the left of the hole. The rough fabric scratched my face and tugged at my shoulders.

A mighty blast of cold winds smashed into me as I flew out of the Hidenburg.

I flailed out with my left hand and grabbed onto the fluttering fabric, whipping myself tight to the zeppellin's side.

My glamour had been waiting on the right side, knife held high to skewer me. Seeing me come out an unexpected way, she howled in rage.

"Bitch!"

Dropping down to the wide, sprawling tail-wing, I yelled over the terrible winds,

"That's Queen Bitch to you."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the huge granite face of Jesus.

Hell, we were still circling that damn staute. The two of us had to be making some spectacle of ourselves to any straying unfallen angels.

The two of us :

edging around each other on the Hindenburg's elevator flap, under a fifty foot swastika, in front of an open-armed, stony faced Jesus.

It was the stuff of a Wagner opera, complete with two suicidal valkyries. But you first, daemon.

The forty mile an hour winds making a wheat-gold halo of her hair, my daemon shrieked, "You can't win."

Then, she struck. I leapt right at her, parrying her attack, giving her another kiss.

She hit the flap in a skiddering roll, popped to her feet, and wheeled around to face me.

She wiped her mouth as if my lips were diseased.


We danced about each other, diving in thrusts of knives and claws in a flurry of blocked attacks.

The terrible winds threatened to blow us off the wing at any moment.

The water sparkling beneath us, the city moving slow around us, the remote stony face of Jesus regarding us.

They all blurred as only the features of my daemon stood out in sharp detail as if burned into my mind.

A shredded piece of tarp flew from the hole straight into my left eye. My daemon took advantage of my shock and leapt up onto the side of the Hindenburg.

Then, like a scurrying monkey, she clawed her way up the side. I jumped up after her. But she had too much of a headstart.

I would have to bend space to reach her. But for a second I would be off-balanced and vulnerable. And in that second, I would be dead.

She scrambled to the top seconds ahead of me. She spun about atop the sloped, silver surface. She raised both hands into the air and screamed.

"Top of the world, Ma. Top of the world!"

She suddenly glared at the giant granite face of Jesus. "What the hell are you looking at?"

And in that split second of inattention, I bent space and appeared before her. I flung both arms around her in a crushing embrace. She bit at me. And I planted a third kiss on her.

But before I did, I whispered in the tongue of my race, "Come home."

Inside my mind, my daemon screamed, 'Not this way. Not this way!'

I had run out of time to talk sense to her. Like I had said, I had given her being. I could take it back. And I did.

I drew her into me in the breath of a kiss, a long kiss good night.

She shivered in my arms, then I heard a faint mental wail : 'No! Not sucked up like a drink. I'm alive, a somebody, a ----"

And then, she was gone, and I whispered, " -- a memory."

I stood alone on top of the Hindenburg, the winds nearly blowing me off. The remote, staring eyes of the granite Jesus stabbed into me.

Staggering at the impact of the winds, I snarled at Him.

"What are you looking at? I wish the hell you'd tell me because I do not know."

The words bled from me. "I do not know."

And so did I, last of the Sidhe, slip past the stony, open-armed grasp of Christ the Redeemer.

***