Free Battle Angel by Scott Speer

before she was lost.
    With a holler, Maddy leaned forward. Her wings rocketed out of her back faster than they ever had, creating a huge
whoosh
and ripping two surprisingly clean holes in the back of her shirt. Before they’d even reached their full span, Maddy took two big pumps and began rocketing west, soaring over buildings and swaying palms. In only a handful of seconds, Maddy shot north, skimming over the 101 freeway in the Cahuenga Pass up into the Angel City Hills, which was lined with lush trees on both sides. The freeway was almost empty, except for a few cars that had used the chaos to evade the checkpoints and were frantically fleeing the city.
    Clenching her jaw, Maddy streamlined herself as much as she could and tried to put on speed. She had only seconds. Any miscalculation would be fatal.
    In her peripheral vision she saw it: the Dark Angel. Careening toward the exact spot she was zeroed in on, streams of dark smoke pouring off its back as it flew at top speed.
    Maddy dropped toward the freeway with a final burst of energy. Below, the concrete and painted white lines blurred with the speed.
    Then, in one horrible, single instant, the demon tucked itself into a ball with nonchalant flexibility and violently smashed down to the freeway, just to the left of Maddy, who had almost reached the road. She had nearly gotten to her target—a young woman on a Vespa riding on the access road right next to the freeway who would never have known what hit her if it hadn’t been for Maddy. At the exact moment the demon touched down, the middle of the freeway exploded in a fury of concrete and flame, and Maddy used everything she had to concentrate on one point and one point only.
    And she screamed.
    Suddenly everything—the flames and concrete and demon and girl and Vespa and smoke—
froze
. The demon was still wreaking havoc on the freeway, halfway into making a gigantic crater, but it was frozen there, in all its evilness, its limbs curled up against its body like a cannonball, flames leaping off its back in one cold, solid fan. The lethal slabs of concrete and countless particles of dust that had just shot up from the freeway were now suspended in midair.
    Maddy had frozen time. Though it had been infinitely more difficult than the first time, when she’d made a save with the jet and Jeffrey Rosenberg over the Pacific. But now, to her astonishment, she could feel that the Dark Angel was somehow
battling her effort
. She tried to ignore it and zeroed in on the save.
    Hurtling right toward Vespa Girl was a huge Volkswagen-sized chunk of concrete. The tendrils of the girl’s brunette hair were flying back from under her helmet and frozen in position. A strange look of unknown fear was frozen on her face, but experience told Maddy that the girl’s inner survival instincts were telling her something was wrong. Still, she had no clue she was about to be crushed to death.
    Maddy calculated. She would have a second, maybe one and a half, to make the save before the time freeze spun out of her control.
    With every milligram of concentration she had, Maddy shot down as the time freeze began to collapse in on itself. The Dark Angel fought strongly against her power, but with a final push, just as time was about to tick back on and the concrete mass was starting to budge from its hold, Maddy violently scooped the girl off the back of the Vespa.
    She put everything she had into pulling the girl up, but she wasn’t quite fast enough to totally get away.
    The concrete hurled itself sideways, catching the back of Maddy’s left Converse sneaker as she flew up with the girl in her arms, and smashed the Vespa into a thousand pieces of Italian metal and plastic. The slight impact to her foot sent Maddy spinning as she flew, and she tried to shield the girl as they whirled in the air and tumbled to the ground in a heap.
    Maddy tried to cover both herself and the girl with her wings as a shower of dust and fine bits of concrete from