Her lungs worked spasmodically, desperately trying to draw in oxygen.

For a few frantic moments as Marcus darted away, just barely escaping that black sword, he tried to reason with the Angel. She didn’t need to attack him, he said. They were on the same side. She had just been in the shit too long and wasn’t thinking right. Before long, he stopped trying. She had been in the shit too long. Way too long by the looks of her. She was supposed to be beautiful; this woman was monstrous. She was a gaunt, twisted version of herself, with crazed eyes and shriveled lips that she held in a perpetual snarl. Her teeth bit the air as she swung at him. Her wings were dark and leathery, lopsided and bat-like. They gave off a stench when they flapped that was almost as bad as the spider-thing’s guts. The worst thing was the baby jutting out of her chest. It hissed and gnashed its toothless mouth. It writhed against the flesh that contained it as if it was trying to break free and attack him itself.

No, whatever the Midnight Angel had been, this creature wasn’t her anymore.

That means one thing, Marcus thought. Kill it. Kill it, he repeated, in that voice that was his and not his inside his head. The voice of the arena, of the fury that had taken him over in proximity to Horrorshow. It was on him again, and he reveled in it.

The next time she landed near him, coming in with her sword slashing at him, he batted away the blow with the leg-hook. The Angel spun away with the deflected force of her attack. Marcus gripped his weapon in imitation of a Japanese swordsman. He could do this. He’d fucking kill her. He kept his tail seething beneath him. He made it a writhing, multicolored, and confusing mass of coils. From above it, he parried each strike of the sword. That just seemed to drive the Angel to greater fury. She screeched and attacked again and again. Her blows were powerful and savage, but also wild and sloppy.

Once, after she’d missed him with a downward strike, he got the hook behind one of her legs. He yanked it back. The point dug into her hamstring and pulled the leg out from under her. She spun in the air, wings flaring, and nearly took off his head. The black blade scorched by so close that his hair caught fire. For a moment he could only fight on, desperately, head on fire and the scent of burning hair and flesh in his nostrils.

He got a moment of reprieve thanks to a creature that looked like a giant, wingless fly. It attacked the Angel, its snout seemingly intent on sucking in the baby. The Angel sliced it in half horizontally, and then vertically just out of rage. The thing fell to the ground, quartered.