Both her eyes were swollen and blackened. Her body was brusied and broken. She tried, so hard, to will strength into her limbs, and found them unresponsive. Blood trickled past her lips like a steaming, scarlet drizzle of poisonous rain that dribbled down to the floor like cherry syrup. With effort, she strained her head back to the children, still crumpled up and piled against the escape door, scrambling and clawing like lemmings trying to escape a burning building. They were far from escaping...and she knew she couldn't take much more.

Gloating over her apparent victory, Cyn leaned in and whispered to her defeated prey on charnel breath. "I'm going to cripple you, slut, and then I'm going to make you watch them die. One at a time, screaming. Then maybe, if you beg pretty, I might kill you. Think you can sell the tape of that?"

Some things, Brittany thought in that instant, are worth whatever the cost. Some things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for. She had sworn to herself that there was nothing worth killing for, though. Nothing worth staining yourself that badly, that irrevocably. There were always alternatives, she'd swear. Always another way. Always.

She felt like she was dying. Maybe she was. That wasn't important, or even particularly troubling, to her surprise. Her own life, while precious to her, wasn't worth anything, in the grand scheme of things. Each one of us is here for an instant, the blink of an eye, and are forever haunted by the ghosts of those who would never have a chance to know life at all, the unborn shades of poets greater than Yeats, bards greater than Shakespeare...and heroes greater than she.

The lives of a twenty children, on the other hand. If she died, so would all of them, one by one. And all she had to do to stop it... All she had to do... All...

Her head raised slightly, blood and tears flowing from her face, the narrow blue slits of her eyes staring up behind swollen, purpled lids. She coughed, and spattered the demon with blood, who smiled back with all the satisfied glee of a Roman Centurion being flecked with the lifeblood of Christ. Brittany grimaced up her would-be murderer, and with a hoarse, barely-audible rasp of her throat, managed to whisper back, simply, plainly, "No. You will not."

The blonde's body shot forth, shoulder first, with a velocity that nearly broke the sound barrier. Brittany felt her left collar bone crack from the impact, which sent Cyn tumbling back to the front of the bus, head-over-ass, landing in rumpled heap at the front console of the vehicle. The green of her eyes instantly flashed up in furious panic, her teeth gritted in rage, but it was already too late. Bloodied and beaten, Brittany was upon her, her hands pulsing and rippling with transluscent light, nearly so bright as to be blinding. With broken wings, Brittany pulled back with one fist, finding its mark squarely on Cyn's jaw, followed immediately by another, to the cheek. Then another. Then another. Then another. Each punch felt like a thunderclap, bone and tissue shredding and cracking in their wake. Cyn tried to move, tried to act, but the avenging angel's icy blue eyes captivated her, entranced her with a hatred so pure and true, so hard she couldn't force herself to look away.

The last thing she felt was the icy chill of panic, the seizure of senses that accompanies the stark terror of being on the receiving end of predation.

A single ragged whisper followed Brittany into unconsciouness, forced impossibly through a broken throat and shattered jaw, pure malignant hate riding one final breath to touch her. "Knew you... had it... in you... Brit. Welcome ... to the ... club."

And then nothing.

Brittany collapsed forward, hands shaking and bleeding, upright on her knees, her body finally at rest, locked in a parody of embrace with the girl whose life clung to her knuckles in wet, ragged chunks.

"Not one more", she thought to herself before everything went black, and she knew it was true.