Chapter 35 Charlie
I’m still stumbling between emotions, reality, Hell, and Earth. Injustice, pain, hatred, and grief cloud everything I feel, but seeing Suriel above my father … My laughing, thrashing father with one eye rotting …
I step forward.
“He’s still my father, Suriel. Stop!” I order, power radiating out from me likes arcs of pure, punishing sunshine - the molten kind that incinerates.
The wind around us dies. Everything stays utterly still, as if waiting for my permission to move, to breathe, to merely exist. Something in me begs to release all the power boiling under my skin, the pressure so intense that I feel like my skin is stretching, ripping away from muscle and bone just to try to contain it.
Suriel watches me, his eyes not wavering. There’s something so tired, so determined, yet so … understanding in them. “I’m sorry, my dove… but he ends the world.”
“The world? The world! What in this fucked up world is worth saving?! Anyone alive is possessed or broken or insane! What did the world ever do to deserve being saved! Why is it worth it?!” I demand. “I have …”
I don’t know what I have. A father who calls me a ruined bitch and a battery?
An angel that lies to me, protects me, makes me believe in love only to show me how violent love is by planning to murder me?
A broken brain that’s struggling to put the pieces together when every edge is sharp and painful?
“It exists. It was made to be loved, imperfect, flawed, confused, but it deserves forgiveness. It deserves unconditional affection … just like you,” Suriel says.
I open my mouth, but Suriel turns and uses strength he shouldn’t have after everything to push my father over the edge. Lucifer screams, curses, snarling words I can’t make sense of. He doesn’t once call out for me. He simply screams at God and demands retribution.
The world holds its breath, expecting the fallout. It’s horrible. Too … patient. Too quiet. My father is dead.
Everything I’ve ever been sure of is shredded and the whole fucking world is silent!?
I scream, clutching my chest as something rips away from me. I don’t have a word for it, can’t place it. I simply dissolve into inky blackness. Something so violent, sadistic, agonized that there isn’t a word for it in any language I’ve heard. The air sucks from my lungs to follow my father down.
It doesn’t matter.
We’re all alone and death sounds like a fucking miracle. The whole world must be cleansed. Not with a flood, not with fire, but with outrage, with vengeance, with me.
Something festers between my fingers as I move them against one another. One curls and screams erupt. Bones crunch around me, I smell burnt feathers and flesh together. It’s almost decadent.
Another finger curls and demons squawk, whine, writhe, then burst like jelly in a vacuum.
They all deserve a painful death. The demons didn’t do anything.
They’re all bystanders. They’re all guilty.
I’ll remake it all. Take what works, gut what doesn’t.
Gut it all. No one can hurt me. No one can leave me.
No one can ruin me if there’s no one left.
If the garden is mine to coax back to life.
Fuck them all. Break them all. Ashes to ashes.
Ashes make good fertilizer.