Raven sat on the wind and cast her senses outwards. Her soul-self emerged, rapidly expanding and thinning into invisibility as she encompassed the majority of the city. Her wings were folded around her, leathery pinions taking the place of her cloak. Her head remained uncovered, the long braid she had recently put her hair into dangling down her back. Her stillness was only marred by her eternally questing tail, sinuously writhing about, languid placidity belying its alertness.

This was a risk, she knew. Zarach was seemingly sensitive to her energies, or at least had been before her time in Jon's mindscape. With her senses spread out so far, she could feel every citizen of Jump. Fear was predominant, a delicious sensation that Raven likened to a pleasant aroma. She accepted this as she had come to accept everything else about herself.

She was also keeping track of her vermin servitors. They spread through the city, unseen and pervasive. They alerted her to a thousand different sensations and situations throughout the city, acting as her eyes and ears while her soul-self trawled the emotional landscape. Both drew her attention to the undead.

It was something she had never felt before. The fear and determination of the police and citizenry was somewhat familiar, although at an intensity that she rarely experienced. What put her more on edge was the hunger of the zombies. Until now, she hadn't known that it was possible for something to feel hunger so intensely that it became an emotion. It was ravenous, unnatural, and insatiable. Just behind the hunger she sensed great evil, darkness so blasphemous that even her own rigidly controlled emotions lurched.

A sigh. Sadly, she would have to leave the zombies to the police and her team. There was bigger, more dangerous prey that she was hunting now. A sudden, quick tug at her empathic senses led her to Zarach. Her lips pulled back in a shallow smile, and her four eyes opened, gleaming a soft garnet.

"Found you."

Raven put her feet back on the ground and stretched. Her wings washed to white and her leotard took on the same color. While she wasn't embarrassed by her nudity, there were certain rules in society. Besides, she was something of a role-model in the community, and the prohibition against nudity was one of many that she'd need to become reacquainted with.

Still, she had another aspect that needed to be represented now. A belt formed around her waist, similar to the one she wore on her old uniform. Now, however, instead of rubies the gem settings were filled with a triquetra formed of emerald, gold, and beryl.

Valkyrie. She rolled the name across her mind, teasing and testing it. It was about time that she followed tradition and took an identity. More of a title, really, given that a goddess had bestowed it upon her. It was very suitable as a nom de guerre.

With a sliver of empathy latched onto Zarach, Valkyrie jumped into the air, flapped her wings, and shot off towards her prey.

Zarach looked over the city fitfully. The girl had eluded him, and he was impressed. He tasted of the energies throughout the city and smirked to himself. The zombies were doing their work and distracting the local law enforcement. He could even tell that the Titans had dispersed, their unique energy signatures splitting up and spreading apart. There was a strong demonic signature near a construction site a few miles off, but he figured that a zombie had managed to escape its entrapment and he ignored it.

This nearly proved his undoing.

A flash of instinct had Zarach diving out of the sky before he fully realized what he was doing. A white streak tore through the space he had occupied just a moment ago, the wind of its passing flipping him upside down for a moment. When he recovered, he stared in disbelief.

This was not the same girl he had been taunting, yet at the same time it was. Her energy signature was orders of magnitude above where she was just a few minutes ago. More confusingly, there was a trace of divine energy that flickered and crackled along the edges of her demonic aura. The only conclusion that he could come to had him smiling. His senses were deadened by the mortal body he was forced to inhabit, so he ignored the impossibility of divine and demonic energies coexisting. The strengthened aura, sharpened horns, and her tetroptic glare guided him to a hilarious conclusion.

"You have fallen!" he crowed with laughter.

Valkyrie replied with a vicious snarl and a whip of her tail. The battle was joined.

The thrill of combat intoxicated her, a hereditary yearning that she had always dampened being allowed full sway. She kept her mind just behind her instincts, shrouding her sapience behind a wall of rage, determination, and lust. It was important to her plan that Zarach continue to underestimate her, and she was glad that his ego had fallen again for this same trick.

Like with the star-clawed demon in Jon's mindscape, Valkyrie's fight was part combat and part mating dance. The attacks were much fiercer, claws and talons drawing blood from them both. Her tail gave her the advantage of reach but his greater strength was making up for it. When they closed, her prehensile tongue would flick forward and taste of his blood. When they parted, he would lick his fingers, tasting her own.

This heady sensation was something new to Valkyrie, but she did not mind it. What were traitorous demonic instincts before were now as comfortable as her old cloak. She did not have anything but hatred and vengeance in her soul for Zarach, but she had a greater amount of affection for the man whose body he wore. She teased him. A pinch here, a brush there, a shallow slice along the inside of his thigh, Valkyrie was a natural mistress of demonic seduction. Her partner was stoked to higher realms of aggression and lust, his energy leaking beyond his mortal frame and enveloping him in a corona of hellfire. She maintained a chilling energy about her, her soul-self wrapped tight and dense around her, cold as the void between stars.

She began to enact stage two of her plan.

The dance between them tipped into Zarach's favor. Valkyrie dodged and weaved, slipping away from Zarach every time he lunged. He pursued, bringing even more heat to his aura. The conflicting energies merged, a zephyrous breath being held for a lingering moment. Valkyrie ducked one final time and placed herself in the center of the downward spiral they had formed. Her visage flickered for just a moment, and Zarach had a half-instant of shocked comprehension as she launched a ball of frozen shadow directly upward.

Then, Zarach's world was consumed in agony.

A swirling column of black ice and hellfire whipped the winds into cyclonic fury. At the base of the funnel, Valkyrie poured more energy into the maelstrom. Zarach was hidden from view, save a glimpse now and then as his attempts to escape brought him closer to the edge. Each time, however, the winds drew him back towards the center, pummeling him mercilessly.

Eventually, Valkyrie allowed the conflagration to die out. Hopefully she had weakened Zarach sufficiently without damaging Jon. As the last tongues of fire dissipated, she spotted a body falling towards the rooftops below. Wary of treachery, yet concerned for the well-being of her-

(mate)

-friend, she flew towards the plummeting body. Quickly, she realized that she would be unable to reach him in time, and a desperate screech tore itself from her throat as she poured as much power into her flight as she could.

"Too late, too late!" she screamed within her mind. "No, please! Jon, NO!"

From the periphery of her vision, out of the now clear sky, a green bullet streaked towards the falling man. Right before impact, the small green blur grew into an emerald pterosaur, its claws grasping the falling body with mighty wings spread wide to bleed momentum.

They all reached the roof of a warehouse at roughly the same time, Beast Boy landing mere seconds before Valkyrie. As he morphed back to his human form she landed in a quadrupedal crouch, absently cleaning her face and horns with her tongue. After a moment of shocked silence, Beast Boy inched towards her.

"Uh... Raven? You in there?"

She quirked her head to the side before realization came. She stood from her crouch and allowed her wings to cloak the rents in her leotard, allowed her tail to relax from its scorpion whip position. She maintained her current form, however. If her-

(pack)

-friends were going to accept her, they needed to be given a chance.

She took a deep breath and matched his gaze with her four fiery eyes. "It's me, Beast Boy. I'm back."