Erin Evans: The Adversary

The Brimstone Angel willed herself nearer and reached out to touch the edge of the protection-it sizzled as she brushed against it, again, and she curled her essence tighter. The dead shouldn’t feel such pain.

What officious god had laid that magic, barging in where they didn’t belong? She still didn’t know, no one seemed to know, and not for the first time, she wondered if it were Asmodeus’s doing, if the god of sin had simply changed his tactics more than she’d thought possible. What other deity would waste a miracle on tieflings?

One who knew to ward against Bryseis Kakistos, she thought, still smarting from the protection’s effects, and that suggested Asmodeus too. Who else knew what she was capable of now? But the Brimstone Angel had felt that sting before: this was divine magic from a much more beneficent source.

She drifted close enough to Farideh to feel the protection’s crackling, close enough to see the young woman’s eyes twitch and shiver beneath her lids as the ghost’s presence drew nightmares up out of the well of her mind. How much had that divine source steered the tiefling as she grew? How much was it reining her in? She had been born-both of them had been, damn it all-to resurrect Bryseis Kakistos. Yet the ghost had watched as Farideh had nearly killed herself a dozen times over trying to right a wrong that was none of her doing and gained her little for the effort.

Such stupidity must fall along the sire’s line, she thought. But stupid or wise, there was no escaping the fact she needed to get past that protection in order to gather the rest of her soul.

And if she wanted to defeat Asmodeus, she needed a body.

There was time still. If Asmodeus could be patient, then so could Bryseis Kakistos.