Night wind sang in discordant harmony across wings of ebony leather, the sound echoing the darkness of Diana Diamond’s thoughts as her feet touched down on the tiles of her penthouse terrace.
Be thou the most perfect version of thyself.
Coming from the Balmorrigan she’d raised to do her bidding, the curse had been simple but effective, which only added more fuel to Diana’s rage. She stalked the space between the sliding doors and the terrace railing, threw her head back, and wailed in fury, the sound pressing viciously against the inside of her skull.
Lexi Balefire had ruined everything.
Everything.
Hooked talons scrabbled against the frame of the sliding doors. The glass reflected pure evil in an ugly, bird-like form. Seeing herself, Diana screamed until her throat went raw, the pitch of her cry rising until the glass bowed inward, webbed, and burst in a glittering rain.
One greasy feather fluttered loose, caught on the wind, spun twice, and sailed over the balcony railing as Diana walked over broken glass, slunk inside to stand facing the empty space between two paintings on her bedroom wall.
A space that stayed empty even after she knocked over a lamp while trying to complete a complicated gesture with her left wing. Her blood pressure hit red-line levels when the portal to her secret room failed to appear, but she held off on another sonic scream. Breaking the invisible mirror probably wouldn’t be the wisest thing to do, and she had at least that much control of herself.
Drat Athena and her inferior glamour charms. The box said the spell would render her earthly belongings invisible to others, not to their owner.
All Diana wanted was to get to the place she’d built with blood, sweat, and magic—the place where she could be her truest self. Only in her secret lair, among the trophies of her successes, might she find the strength to slough off the Balmorrigan’s curse and take back her true form.
Unless he’d been right, and she was destined to remain in this foul condition forever.
She tried again to make the portal appear but only managed to clear everything off the top of the dresser. Her frustrated cry sounded like the garbled squawk of an annoyed, evil chicken, which, when you looked closely, was what Diana had become. It was probably a good thing no one was around to point out the resemblance.
Despite what she’d thought was a foolproof plan to rid herself of Lexi Balefire once and for all, Diana hadn’t had a good day, and it didn’t look like it would be getting better anytime soon.
She waved her arms again and again, but her newly-sprouted wings couldn’t manage the proper gesture to complete the incantation. The resulting tantrum ended with bed linens shredded by talons bloody from the trip over broken glass, the dresser overturned, drawers emptied out, contents flung into corners, and the heel of a designer shoe jammed into the wall next to where the portal should have appeared.
Chest heaving, Diana paused to consider her options.
Being locked out of her sacred space would have been enough to make her wring her hands in despair—if she was the hand-wringing type and if she actually had hands. Neither of those being the case, she cast about for a solution to the problem, and that was when she noticed the bloody sheets.
Of course; blood carried power.
Diana lifted a clawed foot, wobbled a little to keep her balance, and, as gently as she could in her present state, pressed the appendage against the wall.
When the expected failed to occur, she stifled another shriek of fury and realized her wounds had sealed over. Rage-filled, Diana purposefully returned to the wrecked patio doors and ground her feet into the shattered glass.
Dark red prints marked her path back to the bedroom, where she planted herself firmly and swiped bloody power across the empty space. The mirror portal appeared. Diana crowed in triumph. Literally.
Tentatively, she stuck the tip of a wing through the portal, crowed again when she saw the feathers melt and morph into human fingertips.
Victory. The blood of mighty goddesses ran in her veins, gave her power such as had not been seen in this lowly place. Nothing in the mortal world of pain and fear could touch her, she thought. Nothing.
She gathered herself to step through the portal. Caught up in the sensation of her body changing, Diana made it halfway through the opening before heat and light slammed into her back, whipped away the remaining feathers, pulled her deck of cards from her, and tossed her through the doorway as if she weighed nothing.
Red, gold, and seething, lightning webbed the sunlit sky over the town of Port Harbor, crackling as it descended like fury. Precisely-aimed heat burned the moisture out of the air, leaving an ozone-scented smear as the bolt sought the life it had been charged to take.
Once, then twice, it struck with laser precision and a thunder of power.
Once, then twice, it failed to take that life before retreating to fruitlessly quest elsewhere.
Some fortunate sod captured the whole thing on video when the top floor of a ritzy apartment building in the newly-renovated industrial sector simply disappeared as if wiped away by the finger of an angry god. The news outlets paid him a small fortune for the footage.
There was no video to profit from when a second strike took out a downtown office building, leaving not so much as a scratch on the church next door. A choking cloud of brick dust and heat hovered over those two sections of the city as people screamed and ran for cover.
The office building, the newscaster reported, had been empty, the former tenant having vacated mere days before. When pressed, an officer on the scene at the Harrington Arms apartment building shook his head and said no, no human remains had yet been found.
“She was home.” Wearing the pale face and wide eyes of one who had survived a cataclysmic event, the middle-aged woman who’d lived in the apartment below insisted, “I know she was because I heard her stomping around on those hardwood floors right before it happened.”
“The search for conclusive proof of death continues as authorities try to make sense of this senseless event,” the reporter said at the end of the segment.
Inside her sanctuary, Diana Diamond paced like a wild thing, screaming and ranting as she watched her mirror to the outer world go dark. Lank hair hung over a face gone feral. It might have interested her to know she’d succeeded in ridding herself of a portion of her humanity.
Whether that success was a step toward gaining access to Olympus was a question Diana would have to consider when not ridden by the fury of being thwarted and hunted.
But not until Lexi Balefire got what she deserved.
