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I woke to chaos, and writhing in pain. I struggled to breathe as if the bullet had ricocheted throughout my insides, damaging every organ I had.
Rosa? No longer angelic. She now resembled a furious divinity, crouched over me in a protective manner. Previously delicate muscles now rippled as if she were a bodybuilder.
Holy shit! What kind of fucking angel is she?
With her nightgown hiked up, she was seething, snarling, and exposing wicked teeth, facing where a rain of bullets were coming from. Impossibly, all shots at us were missing her, as if her body were invisible.
“Onus!” yelled my brother as he ran to us, firing his gun toward the two men who were responsible for my bullet wound, and were now trying to finish me off.
Still thinking like a man, I wanted to pull Rosa to the ground to shelter her, but sheer agony in my back had me unable to breathe much less rescue a damsel not in need of my shortcomings. “Ah, fuck! It hurts! Babe! Get fucking down!”
It was eerie as fuck to see the tremendous amount of my blood seeping into the dirt of the ground around us.
Time was no longer standing still, nor were my bodily fluids.
Abruptly, Rosa let out a high-pitched scream that made me think of a screeching demon. Eyes a red blaze, she looked to my brother who was kneeling next to us, still shooting at our attackers. Faster than any human could move, she snatched my brother’s gun then aimed. She fired two perfect shots. Holes in their heads, the men dropped to the ground, never to move again, yet Rosa hadn’t even changed her squatted stance.
Handing the gun back to a stunned Piercer, she continued to screech that horrid shrill sound in his face. Her anger toward him seemed to have nothing to do with the war we presently were in while roaring, “Find the light, or die by blazing guns!”
Piercer’s face was a mask of horror. His gun fight had ended, yet some crazed, red-eyed woman was screaming a curse in his face.
I could only observe as her vengeance turned to me. Evilly unhinged, Rosa growled down, “Keep your vows, or pay.”
Flabbergasted at the sight of her and throbbing in pain, I was at her mercy when she grabbed my hand, opened her mouth, then ran a sharp tooth down the center of my palm. I didn’t have the time nor the guts to react before she suddenly did the same to her own palm.
Eyes still raging red, she snarled, “Now as I live, you live,” before clamping her bloodied palm to mine.
What the fuck was my last thought before my body seized, arching from the tip of my head all the way to my heels.
Rosa wasn’t surprised by my reaction in the slightest. Still holding my hand, she simply stood, allowing room for my body to react to whatever she had done to it.
Teeth jammed shut, I was imprisoned in this position. The only parts of me that could move were my lungs and my eyeballs.
“Onus!” roared Piercer by my side, scared and bewildered at what he was seeing.
“Shh! You fool!” scolded Rosa from behind him. “People are coming.”
There is nothing like watching people walk and talk around you, clueless that you are right in front of them. Absolutely mind-blowing. And to be trapped in an awkward arch while it was happening was like watching a horror movie I couldn’t turn off.
The only relief found was Rosa’s thumb caressing the top of my hand in a comforting manner. Other than that, with some sort of foreign energy racing throughout me, my body no longer felt like my own. I no longer felt … human.
In fact, as people walked away, discussing how they had heard gunfire yet saw no proof of it—including the dead bodies she’d also made invisible–and deciding they weren’t going to bother the local sheriff because it was probably just the Johnson twins hunting squirrels, my body slowly lowered to the ground without me telling it to.
Mystified by what I just witnessed, and understanding Rosa was more powerful than I had imagined, I asked myself, What have I done? Who had I trusted.
Whatever the answer was, I knew I would never be the same.
Once it was only the three of us again, I heard a faint, “Onus?” from Rosa, who was now shockingly pale and with drooping eyes.
Concerned, I reached for her, “Rosa—” right before she collapsed on top of me, out cold.
It seemed that whatever she had plagued me with had impacted my angel, too.
THREE
FREE TO RISE
