Free Devil May Care by Pippa DaCosta

mean Damien? Adrenalin sparked off all number of instinctual fight or flight reactions. My element finally came, rolling out of the dark void inside me like a backdraft devouring the insides of a building. In one great heave of chaotic energy, fire burst over my skin and ignited the two men flanking me. Their screams fuelled my fury.
    Carol-Anne recoiled. The air quivered with heat and vaporized her liquid sheen. Her gray skin tightened around her bones like shrink wrap. Steam bellowed between us. All of my demon came then. She thundered toward me, a heaving malevolent darkness bursting from obscurity to expand every cell in my human body with her hunger. The pressure of her rising up severed my grip on reality. She evicted my humanity with one backhanded mental blow. My conscious thoughts fell back. It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did; she tore through me with no regard for my sanity. It was wrong. We were one and the same, but she came at me—through me—as though I was the enemy.
    My one ruined wing burst from my back and stretched outward to butt up against the van roof. My demon embraced my body with flames, superimposing her smoldering flesh over mine, blurring the lines between my normal appearance and hers. She devoured the fragility of my body, driving steel rods of power through my body.
    I swung my glare toward the wide-eyed Carol-Anne as the tape over my mouth melted away. I could kill her. The demon in me, she wanted it. Death. Destruction. Chaos. But it wouldn’t stop there. She wanted them all dead. Everyone. Everything. I felt her summon warmth from the buildings around us and the earth below us. If I didn’t rein her in, she’d call it all, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could stop her from using it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.
    I sprang from the back of the van and slammed into Carol-Anne, knocking her back against the other van. She wailed as flames burned across her skin. Torrential rain began to pound us from above. It fizzled and hissed against my sweltering flesh.
    I wrapped my hand around her throat and squeezed. My wing stretched high behind me, funneling the fire skyward. “Take. Me. To. Jerry.” I snapped each word through clenched teeth while desperately clinging on to the one tiny thread of control I had left.
    She nodded.
    I released her and stumbled away. Burn them. Burn it all.
    My whole life, I’d walked a line; it’s called control. Sometimes, it was obscured by so much emotional debris, I could barely see it, but it was always there. If you understand that chaos, by its very definition, is uncontrollable, then you’ll realize the line was everything to me. If I stepped off, just for a second, the lure of chaos would sink its claws in, and I’d be free. Chaos desires freedom. It abhors control. I couldn’t afford to let it win.
    I splayed both hands on the roof of the nearest car. Fire flowed through me, cascading down my arms and into the metal. The roof buckled, sagged, and melted. Once the interior caught, fire roared from the windows and licked higher. I let it all go, let it wash through me, out of me. It was that or swallow the energy back into myself, and given the state of my demon, I wasn’t sure she’d let me live through that.
    Only when I’d spent the chaos and the car was fully ablaze, could I regain some measure of composure. I very delicately packed my demon away, back inside her mental box. Regaining control felt like clinging to the edge of a cliff. A crazy urge to let go came over me, that same crazy voice that sometimes wondered what it would be like to drive a car off a cliff or jump from a tall building. You know the trip only ends one way, but it might just be worth it. The voice, her voice, my voice, it wanted me to let go.
    By the time my demon retreated from my skin and the flames around me died, I’d stepped away from the blaze and was ready to collapse from exertion. Carol-Anne watched me closely. Back in her woman-suit, she brushed a spec of