Forsaken Angel

by J F Cain

  There is justice for everyone, after all, he thought to himself.

  Still in his blood-soaked armor, Abaddon appeared in the mansion’s study, where loneliness awaited him, patient and certain of her power. It was here that he had spent endless tortured hours the first time that the Source had taken Aranes from him, and it was here that he would spend the same cruel hours again. This was his own personal place of torture.

  He glanced around him. In the moonlight that shone through the glass doors, everything seemed familiar, even unhappiness, which had once haunted this room like an invisible living entity and had vanished with Aranes’ arrival. But it had now returned, all-powerful and ready to lay claim to what it was owed.

  Abaddon dropped into the armchair and rested his elbows on his knees. Waves of pain and anger shook his soul. He put his head in his hands and pressed hard, as if trying to stop the madness that was taking devious possession of his mind.

  He had known that he would lose Aranes. He had had the feeling for quite some time that there was some terrible disaster lying in wait for him. That corrosive intuition had made him very cautious, but he still hadn’t been able to prevent the worst from happening. The improbable, the final illusion he had held on to, had been shattered, as inevitably happens to illusions.

  While lost in his black thoughts, he sensed the vibrations that announced the arrival of a dark presence. With a calmness that even he found strange, he lowered his hands and waited for the hated visitor. Lucifer appeared beside him filled with a sense of gratification, since he had predicted what the Source would do from the very start. Suppressing a triumphant smile, he looked down at the back of his rival’s head and rested his hand on his shoulder consolingly, pretending to truly sympathize.

  Abaddon didn’t react, as he would have at any other time, he just proudly lifted his head. His expression was harsh, his eyes blank, as if something had died inside him. The Dark Lord’s presence reminded him that he had some accounts to settle with the ethereal world’s highest entities. So he would settle them; besides, he had nothing left to lose.

  He had already lost it all; the Source had taken it from him. But he would do everything in his power to get back what belonged to him. Everything …

  END OF BOOK III