She’d never rescued an angel, before. Never seen one. Never drunk that dark red wine that she would never drink again…at the village dance she wasn’t supposed to go to.

But she had seen it! Had stared, soaked to the skin in the freezing summer storm; gazing up at dark clouds as the bright angel fought for its life against the attack of the orange demon, with its sickly glow.

She scanned the heavens as she waited, dripping at the door of the disused church within which she had placed his injured body, carried and dragged across muddy furrows from the place of battle over the old coppice. The dark sky was still swirling, malevolent with hate. Her eyes would not focus, half-blind with the angel’s brightness. Perhaps the demon had been injured, too? But she knew he was still up there… still waiting.

“He will come back for me,” the angel had said, before she laid him down in the old straw. “Get as far from here as you can!”

She had clutched the old key to her sodden breasts as she stroked his brow, creased with pain. “They will have to get past me,” she whispered, knowing how feeble it sounded. “I will lock you in.”

Despite the pain, he was smiling. He gazed into her crying eyes, then, and whispered back, “Then, perhaps there is a way…”. But he would say no more and fell into a deep stillness, looking beyond her, beyond the stone walls… beyond the world, but touching the key in her hand.

Now, standing with her back to the renewed storm, she turned the key in the old lock, shuddering with fear at what lay behind her, trembling that she was locking herself out of the protective walls within which her bright one rested. She looked down one last time at the key – then gasped. As her fumbling fingers withdrew it, the lock changed shape, becoming, first a black, then a glowing heart.

“Love versus evil, then,” she whispered, wiping tears and snot from her young skin, turning to face her death. Around her the air was suddenly bright – as bright as the angel had been. She realised she was holding up the key as a weapon.

But, as the ground fell away and she soared, sleek and deadly, into the black sky, she knew two things: that her sister, Mary Jane would never call her dull, again; and that it was no longer a key she held…

Written for Sue Vincent’s #WritePhoto