Chapter Text
Angelic blood had touched hell’s soil. That, in itself, didn’t mean anything. Angel blood was the same as demon blood to her. But this was different.
This was different because it was her blood. Her body.
She watched from the shadows as the overlord cut the angel’s head from its body. It was an act of self-defense. Nobody could claim otherwise. But nobody else saw. Only her. Watching. Always watching. Every year watching as the things heaven had made of her body came down to hell to purge the sinful. Her body. Her blood. Seeping into the soil.
The overlord fled with her daughters.
Eve crept closer.
She had no body. It had been taken from her. Sliced and diced and repurposed. She was a shadow, and she hovered near her repurposed body. The headless angel, with its horned and stitched-mouth mask.
For long moments, she crouched over it, while all around her the slaughter reigned. The other executioner angels, who were also her body, flew overhead, cutting down sinners in their wake. But this one…
She reached out a disembodied hand. Her shadow tendrils wrapped around the fallen exorcist. As soon as they touched, she felt acutely the part of her it had once been. The exact part of her they had taken when they’d sliced her up into hundreds of pieces.
And with a thought, a desire, the physical body before her began to melt. It merged with her shadow, and for the first time in eons, she felt a measure of herself. This small part of her, returned to its rightful place. The part of her heaven had taken.
Heaven had taken all of her to make Adam’s army.
She lifted her face to the red sky. Watched the shadows swooping by overhead like carrion birds. That was what she did. She watched. Always watching.
But now that angel blood had been spilled, maybe she could do more.
***
It was announced on every television in the Pride Ring: the exterminations had been pushed up. Heaven’s forces would be returning in six months. No mention of the slain exorcist, but Eve knew that was the reason for the change of plan. Adam would not be happy that someone had broken one of his toys. And he would not suffer a single soul in hell challenging his authority.
Six months. Six months and the pieces of Eve’s body flooded back into hell, ready and eager to destroy the princess’s hotel.
Eve watched, knowing the princess’s secret.
She watched as the exorcists fell to their own blades at the sinners’ hands.
She watched, and when no one was watching her, she crept among the fallen bodies. More of Adam’s broken toys for her to collect.
She made quick work of those she could, before the cannibals could get to them. She did not have enough presence to chase them away yet. So she slid from one body to the next, absorbing the missing parts of herself where she could. Feeling stronger and stronger and more substantial with each one she managed to grab hold of.
There was a flash of light, and she became momentarily distracted, looking to the sky to see Lucifer and his child throwing Adam into the dirt. She supposed she should feel something about that. But she didn’t.
And when she turned her attention back to her own body, she found a cannibal had reached her target first and was tearing into it with razor teeth. Eve felt her physical hackles rise. She let out a hiss.
The cannibal raised its head. Eyeless sockets stared at her. Seeing her. Not understanding what she was.
Eve lashed out.
Her talons met the cannibal’s throat. Blood poured from the wound, and the creature slumped forward, gurgling as it died.
Eve stood over its body, staring at her hand.
Her hand that had caused damage.
Real damage.
She was regaining her body.
With every bit of herself she absorbed, she was gaining her presence back.
No longer a shadow, but something that belonged to the world. Something that could interact with it.
Across the battlefield, a cry went up. “Retreat!” And the living exorcists took to the sky.
Adam was not with them.
There was only one reason he would not.
Eve supposed she should feel something about that. And she did. She just wasn’t sure what.
A tear trickled down her cheek. A real tear. The first she had shed in eons. The first one she had been able to shed.
She quickly wiped at her eye. “Fucker,” she muttered, and went back to the task of picking up the pieces of herself where she could.
***
She expected the exorcists to return right away, once they had regrouped in heaven. But they never did.
Someone else came back instead.
She watched the sinner take form from the hellish dirt and take his first gasping breath as a newly made denizen of Pride. She wondered if it mirrored his first birth, which she had not been around to see. But she recognized him anyway. Her dearest husband, scrabbling on hands and knees, golden wings turned to tattered black leather, the horns of his mask made manifest on his body.
“Adam.”
His head whipped towards her, and she ducked behind the nearest pile of rubble. The remains of the old hotel. He blinked and shook his head and continued pulling himself to his feet. He hadn’t seen her.
But he had heard her.
She had that much presence now.
The bodies she had fed on were returning her to her full strength.
And her husband, who had died, had returned. No longer an angel, but a sinner.
She threw back her head and laughed. The first laugh she had managed in eons. It echoed out across the desolate landscape, and Adam jerked around.
“Who’s there?”
“No one,” Eve whispered. “No one…yet.”
She slipped back into the shadows to leave him to fend for himself. Turnabout was fair play, after all.
***
It soon became clear the exorcists would not be returning. She wanted them to. She wanted to see their bodies fall in droves. She wanted to devour them. She was so much stronger after the last battle. She hungered to have her body back. As much of it as she could.
She tracked down the cannibals who had managed to eat parts of her, and using her new strength, she tore those parts of herself back. Ripped them straight from sinners’ bodies that had suddenly become very weak to her. Oh, they would reform, in the way that sinners did. Her talons were hardly holy weapons. But the fact that she could tear them, tear back what had been taken from her…she reveled in it.
After the cannibals, there was one bit of her left in hell that needed reclaiming.
Well...one easy bit, at least.
The gaudy tower in downtown Pentagram City was trivially easy to sneak into when you were still a mostly insubstantial shadow. She sniffed around until she found the head of the decapitated exorcist, still on display where the social media overlord had mounted it on the wall.
The first angel successfully killed, and the one who had set the wheels of this thing spinning.
The head was just so much flesh left on a skull, but every last bit counted. And Eve was determined to reclaim every last bit of herself that she could.
And it was here, infiltrating the overlord trio’s tower, that she learned they meant to wage war on heaven. She had to actually stifle her laugh this time. Patently suicidal. And yet, it was exactly what she wished for. Yes, war. A threat to cause heaven to send the exorcists down again. Let their blood rain from the sky.
Eve would drink every last drop.
***
War never came.
So close, so tantalizingly close. The TV overlord had managed a single shot on heaven, and even though it had done more damage to hell with the recoil, it was more than any soul, sinner or otherwise, had ever managed before. Ever.
Heaven would have to retaliate now. They would have to send their army down. The cannon would kill many of them. Eve crouched, watching eagerly from the shadows. Let them die. Let them all die. Let heaven and hell run with blood. She would pick out the bits of herself in the aftermath and bathe her newly whole body in all of it.
And yet at the moment where it seemed the point of no return had been crossed… Yes, of course. Vox had been subdued, taken down by his own “partners,” the very people he doubtless thought he could trust. Eve knew a thing or two about that.
She clenched her fists. No, no, no!
A flicker of hope. Adam’s lieutenant, his favored bit of Eve, giving the princess a withering glare, glancing from her to the unmanned cannon. Eve saw the moment the idea came into her little angel head, the widening of the un-X’d eye on her mask, the curling of her stitched mouth into a sadistic grin. Eve saw it before anyone else did.
The lieutenant broke from her handlers’ side, pushing past Abel and the little seraphim. Positioning herself at the cannon’s helm. The manic glee on her face as she swung it around and fired. A vicious barrage of seraphic light tore through the city, incinerating everything in its path. Souls evaporated in an instant. The lieutenant’s mad cackling mingling with the collapsing of buildings and screams of the wretched.
Eve wanted her to succeed. More than anything. She wanted this angry little exorcist, whose arm she had scavenged from the rubble and eaten, to succeed in her plan to tip the scales of war.
“Lute, stop!” The princess, running for the cannon, unable to draw near as its deadly beam danced wildly about. “Didn’t you hear Carmilla? If you overheat the cannon, it’ll blow and take out half of hell with it. Including you!”
“I don’t care!” The lieutenant grinned, but Eve heard the despair in her voice, the tears she was hiding behind her mask. “I don’t care! If it means taking you all out with me, then so be it!”
Her attention drawn to the princess, she did not see the princess’s exorcist girlfriend swooping in from behind. Narrowly missing the cannon’s laser by a feather’s breadth, she tackled the lieutenant. Crashed the both of them into the ground, where they thrashed around.
Not in time for it to do any good.
“Shut it down!” the princess’s girlfriend cried, even as the machine began to shudder and smoke.
The lieutenant let out a triumphant laugh, although her mask had been knocked loose and she did, indeed, have tears trailing down her face. “I want you to know,” she said. “I want you to die knowing you failed. Your precious princess is going to die because of you!”
Eve watched, resigned. Would the blast kill her? Did she have enough of a body to kill? It hardly mattered. With hell destroyed, there would be little reason for the exorcists to return. Perhaps heaven would send them to pick over the pieces of what was left? That was her only hope now. Her only hope of being made whole…
The seraphim started it. Started to form the protective barrier around the weapon. But she was wounded. She could not summon the power to match Lucifer’s, let alone overpower it. Not until the princess offered hers as well. And then the overlords. One by one joining their hellish power to seal the barrier. Divine and profane energies mixing together.
Eve watched with a detached sort of fascination. The detonation, when it came, rocked the ground beneath their feet, but it remained contained. Pentagram City, and Pride, was left standing. Damaged, but standing.
Eve watched with even more detachment as the redeemed sinner broadcast his message to hell. She did not care about redemption or damnation or any of it. It meant nothing to her. Except…except now there was a potential bridge between heaven and hell. A bridge she might be able to use to get her body back.
All was not lost after all.
***
How many sinners did Adam’s lieutenant manage to fell in her rampage? Not nearly enough, judging by her enraged howls as she was stripped of her halo and cast out of heaven. Eve found her rage laughable. This angel didn’t know what rage was. She thought she had been wronged? She didn’t know the meaning of the word.
Eve watched her. While the princess celebrated, Eve watched the lieutenant flee into the depths of the city, howling with rage and tears of anguish. Eve watched and wondered…did the exorcists need to be dead for her to reabsorb them?
But just as she was about to see, see if she could harm an angel the same way she’d harmed the cannibals, a voice called out, “Danger Tits?”
Little Lute’s head shot up, eyes wide and shot with gold from crying. She clenched her golden arm and turned towards the voice from the shadows. “Who’s there?” She squared her shoulders, ready to fight. After everything, still ready to fight. “Don’t fuck with me! I’ll fuck you up. You hear? I am a holy warrior and I—”
“Shit, calm down, Lute.”
Her eyebrows shot up and her mouth fell open as the figure emerged from the alleyway. Larger than life, as always. Despite his changed form, Lute knew him right away, just as Eve had. And she stood, staring at him in shock for a long moment.
Adam made a show of looking around and then threw his arms wide. “Shit, fuck. Say something, Lute.”
“A...Adam?”
Now she looked around, eyes darting from side to side. Searching for something.
Her voice was tiny when she spoke next.
“You’re…”
She never finished, taking a hasty step back from him and clenching her fists again.
“What sort of trick is this?”
Adam’s shoulders slumped. “A really fucking bad one,” he grumbled.
She circled him like a wary beast, wings flared, eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. Her lip curled as she visibly fought to push down the hope threatening to show on her face. Adam let out an aggravated, “Hey!” when her hand shot out and gave his shoulder a rough shove.
But Lute only looked at him in amazement. “You’re real.” She touched him again, more gently. “You’re really here.”
“Yeah, don’t ask me—”
He was cut off as she threw herself at him, burying her face into him, talons sinking into the fabric of his tattered robe. “You’re real.” Her voice was muffled by his chest. “Oh God, if I’m losing my mind, I don’t want to be sane anymore.”
“Shit, you really are a crazy bitch.” Adam folded his arms and leathery wings around her, rested his cheek on the crown of her halo-less head. “I missed you too, tits.”
Eve’s stomach roiled. Yes, of course that was how it was. She had been made as Lilith’s replacement, and was just as easily replaced herself. A broken tool to be taken apart and used for parts for better tools.
She wanted to take her body back then and there, but her nerve failed. Watching them embrace like that, like they had any right. Like their pain was so special when they had spent so long reveling in the pain of others. As if their mockery of love wasn’t built on her stolen body. She turned away in disgust, fleeing back into the shadows before she could find out if she was corporeal enough to vomit yet.