Lucifer Reborn by Dante King (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

charged forward with a trilling scream, trying to take me down before I could jump into the fight and help Christina.

Bryan pushed more and more mass into his weapon as he ran, turning the thing into a fucking battering ram covered in spikes. If it had hit me, it would’ve been a one-hit KO for sure. But I had no intention of letting it get that far.

Tendrils shot along the ground, forming a thick carpet a few feet in front of me. The rake charged heedlessly through, trusting he had enough momentum to reach my body. He was wrong. The thick veins of darkness wrapped around his ankles, then his knees, pinning him to the ground.

He swung anyway, trying to dislodge himself. The tendrils flexed, stressed almost to the breaking point by the counterweight of the demon’s weapon. Grinning, I lifted both hands—flames dancing on my fingers now—and reached for the masses of darkness at my shoulder.

“Burn,” I commanded the tendrils. They did. The thick coils wrapped around the rake ignited like they’d been soaked in gasoline. Bryan twisted and writhed, struggling feebly to escape their grip. I heard demons gasping, shocked at the cruelty of what I was doing. A clean kill in the arena was one thing, but this? I’d wrapped this man in a cocoon and set it ablaze. A horrible way for man or demon to die.

Finally, the rake crumpled, sinking to the stone and curling up like a bug. Most of the demons were too shocked to cheer, except for Mareth. The succubus screamed like she was on a rollercoaster, thrilled and scared all at once.

Now both Christina and Aztomund were in the air. The fight had just shifted from an even bout to two on one, yet I found myself unable to press the advantage. The scarab demon refused to touch the ground, knowing it would be outnumbered on solid footing. And while Christina was ferocious in a fight, it only took a few moments to see Aztomund clearly had more experience with airborne combat than she did.

“Get down here, you coward!” I roared, trying to taunt the demon. I launched a fireball, sending it high into the air, but accuracy wasn’t my strong suit. It had been easy enough to use my pyromancy to light an object I was touching into flames, but hitting a moving target proved far more difficult than I’d anticipated. When my third shot missed the mark entirely and nearly hit Christina, I knew I had to find some other way to contribute.

Christina twisted in mid-air, flapping frantically beneath the assault of those twin blades. Sensing victory was at hand, the scarab demon put all of his weight into a strike and flung his body forward, trying to knock the blonde right out of the air. His blade missed, but he slammed into her with a great whoop, sending Christina toppling. I gasped as she plummeted, her wings unfurling and catching her fall only inches above the ground.

Smelling blood on the wind, the crowd roared. One voice cut through the pack—Xora’s.

“He’s going to tear her apart,” the rusalka murmured. Her words should have been too soft for me to hear over the screaming crowd, yet it was as if her lips perched right next to my ear. “You’re going to have to watch her die, Luke. Unless you get up there and do something about it!’

I roared with frustration. A sensation like thousands of hot, tiny needles stabbing skin sizzled between my shoulder blades, adding pain to my despair. I couldn’t reach Christina or Aztomund—which meant I was helpless. A weak, pitiful human, unable to save the people I cared about.

There was nothing I could do.

Until, suddenly, there was.

The flesh between my shoulder blades erupted in a gout of blood and gore. Chunks of my back rained over the crowd, spraying the front row with red liquid as two massive wings unfurled from just beneath my neck. They were longer than Christina’s, and heavier than Aztomund’s — more like a bat’s wings than a bird or an insect’s. The kind of thing you’d expect to see on Dracula, or Lucifer himself.

The crowd went utterly silent. Jaws dropped at the sight of my transformation—even Xora looked surprised by what she’d provoked inside of me.

I looked to the left, then the right, taking in my new wings. “Cool,” I said, smirking up at the sky. Christina and Aztomund were locked in combat, with the scarab demon rapidly taking the upper hand. “Let’s see what these babies can do.”

I flew.

Like just about every kid who grew up watching Superman and Goku on TV, I’d wondered what it would feel like to be able to fly. To jump into the air and never come down, to ride the wind like a bird or soar through the wide blue yonder like a jumbo jet. The real thing made all my fantasies feel like just that. Fantasies.

My heart exploded in my chest as wind blew past my face. I ascended rapidly, almost too fast to control, soaring toward the spot where Christina and Aztomund fought. Just hold on a little longer, I thought at Christina, coming up from below. A few more seconds…

I soared into the space between them, tendrils unfurling all around me. Aztomund’s sword came down on a mass of them, cutting through a half-dozen as more wrapped around his scimitar’s hilt. Aztomund’s face filled with disbelief as he fought with my tendrils, more of them seizing his second blade and tossing it back to the blood-soaked earth below. A quick wrench and the other flew free of his hand, missing the plateau entirely and tumbling into the black.

“Nice wings,” Christina purred. A glance over my shoulder confirmed that she was in an even more demonic form than usual. Glistening fangs protruded from her pouty lips, her gorgeous eyes as dark as