She didn’t know, so she let him do it, and as an experiment she allowed the pain in. His thumb burst her eye and she shrieked. Her body convulsed and she twisted in mid-air. Vile’s momentum carried him onwards, but Darquesse didn’t care about him – all she cared about was the extraordinary pain she was experiencing. Her hands were covering her face, feeling the blood and the jelly leak down her cheek. She realised she was still screaming, screaming and roaring and crying, turning in circles in the air. When the pain was too much, she shut it off, and calmly pressed the remains of her eye back into its socket. An interesting experiment.

She opened her good eye, saw Vile coming for her. His shoulder slammed into her belly, his arm encircled her, and they hurtled downwards. She blinked. The vision in her bad eye turned from nothing to blurry to perfect. Better than her right eye, in fact. To compensate, she sharpened that eye as well, and then returned her attention to her current predicament. She tried to look down at what they were flying towards but the wind was blowing her hair in the way. She wrapped her legs around Vile’s waist, grabbed him where she could, and flipped, so that now she was the pilot forcing him down. And now that her hair was out of the way, she could see what they were heading towards. O’Connell Street, in the middle of Dublin.

“Oh,” she said, and then they crashed.

Chapter 59 - Hero and Villain

Chapter 59
Hero and Villain

arquesse lay there in the broken road, looking up at the suddenly starless sky in the last few moments of life, and she managed a shaky laugh. Her body was smashed. Her lungs were burst and her heart wasn’t beating. Her limbs were twisted, her spine was pulverised, her head was cracked open. She could feel her brain starting to swell, so that was the first thing she healed. She wouldn’t be able to do much thinking without her brain.

It was somewhere between four and five on a Monday morning. She healed her spine and raised her head, looked around. No civilians were standing there, staring with open mouths. Pity. She’d have liked to have seen their faces when she stood up after a fall like that.

Lord Vile lay a few feet away. He wasn’t moving.

Darquesse repaired her internal organs, restarted her heart and drew air into her newly re-formed lungs. Next came her limbs. Her bones made cracking sounds as they realigned and knitted back together. She reached behind her head, made sure her hair didn’t get trapped in the fissure that healed in her skull. Her ruptured skin closed over. A lot of her blood covered the ground, so she made more, and stood up.