Chapter 32

“What exactly are the Imperium Trials?”

Godric doesn’t look up from placing what he called Seraphic Crystals around me.

I start to ask again when a massive yawn interrupts me, almost dislocating my jaws. It’s not yet evening and I’m ready to drop into a coma. No wonder, after the night, and day, I had.

Sore, physically and mentally, I basically slept through every class. At the end of the last one, his summons woke me up.

Okay, so it was his tug on the leash. He removed it as soon as I saw him at the main doors, but I still wished I could strangle him with it.

And the pathetically funny thing? Cara’s glare was explicit with her wish to strangle me. For the privilege of being literally jerked around by him. I wanted to tell her I’d serve him to her if I could. Sliced and sizzling like a fajita.

I was the one who fumed as I followed him for what felt like miles across campus, to the far end of Jegudiel House.

According to the articles he kept sending me—that pinged and made me more of a spectacle until I read them and got a hundred percent on their quizzes—Jegudiel is the archangel patron of those in positions of responsibility.

My Nephilim Nemesis, the one “responsible” for me, led me below the imposing edifice, to an underground cave right out of an evil cult movie.

As we descended down, down, down to a vault that brought to mind human sacrificial rituals, I really wished I had powers. If I did, I would have singed his celestial butt and escaped.

But since I knew I was safe with him as long as I was valuable, and I’m powerless anyway, here I am. In the middle of the heptagon he drew around me in what I can only describe as angelic lasers.

When he finally speaks, it’s not to answer me, as usual. “This Mindscape session will test your psychic affinities.”

“Isn’t that what the Imperium Trials are for?”

“This has nothing in common with the Trials.”

“So are the Trials more like the Divining?”

“No.”

“So what do they entail? How can we prepare for them? Why did Astaroth say we can’t? Where are they going to be? In the Imperium Maze I saw on the map?”

“Maybe I should change your name to What, How, Why, and Where, along with Wen.”

“Hardy-har-har.” But I do grin at him. There’s progress here. He’s no longer glacially or volcanically exasperated at my constant questions, is almost resigned. I am the drip of water on his rock.

Before that image leads to more involving wetness, hardness, me and him, I pelt him with another barrage. “What happens if I don’t have any affinities? Like I didn’t have any muscles or aerobic fitness? What if I don’t have any ‘core power’ or ‘specific Grace’ like Astaroth said? Am I even actually Angel-Graced? Is that where my Angel Essence recycling ability comes from?”

For answer, he stalks towards me, cutting through the lasers with his body. I have a feeling anyone else would have passed through them as the aforementioned fajita.

“Hold out your hands, palms up.”

This close, his aura is like a cascade of sultry night, sifting with that dark velvet voice of his through every nook and cranny of my nervous system.

Sighing in pleasure in spite of myself, I comply.

He starts gesturing over my open palms, and more of this angelic tapestry starts to form over them in a sphere of hypnosis.

Watching the forming patterns intently, I continue throwing questions at him, hoping one will strike off an answer. “If you find I have no psychic affinities, you can’t strengthen them like you promised to hone my non-existent physical abilities, right? An affinity can’t be strengthened if it doesn’t exist, can it...?”

The world falls out beneath me. Disappears around me.

It never existed. And I—I never was.

Nothing exists but him. His eyes. His breath. The prod of his mind. The pulse of his power. The pleasure of his being. He’s everywhere. Everything.

Then, among the infinite cosmos of Godric, another presence begins to twinkle, like a distant, almost invisible star. It blinks faintly, dazedly, before it flares in alarm, retreats, disoriented, daunted.

But his compulsion is patient, drawing it out of hiding, coaxing it closer. It floats nearer, shy and uncertain at first. But it gets bolder with every realm it traverses in answer to his temptation, growing bigger, brighter, bolder.

And all the time, it remembers. That it hungers. For everything. But most of all, it craves the vastness of his burning darkness, the inevitability of his endless endings.

The moment it touches them, it howls in reality-sundering rapture, expanding into a white-hot ring of infinity. Eternal tentacles of greed explode out of its nonexistent core, seeking to consume everything in its path. Nothing would ever stop it again. Nothing.

But him—him it won’t devour. Him it wants. Wants to assimilate.

It besieges him, beseeches him. Come to me, it cajoles and coos. It swells in triumph and exultation as he reaches back.

Then it hesitates. There’s something else here, witnessing its need, learning its secrets.

Before it can decipher it, he sinks his power in its fabric, and it shrieks in realms-razing fury.

It’s another betrayal! He only means to subdue it, to starve it!

It convulses around him, attempting to contain him, to incapacitate him. But it has been buried in eons of suspension, eons when he had free rein.

His power is unbound and boundless as it surrounds the ring of its being, suffocates it, compacting it into a pinpoint. A pinpoint that shudders with the force of a dying galaxy for an eternity, for a breath, before it blinks out.

* * *

Snapshots spark in the darkness as I fade back into consciousness.

They’re of Godric holding that orb of angelic energy over my palms, as I bombarded him with questions.

I remember nothing afterward. I feel nothing, too. It’s as if my every inch, my every cell is bound by intangible, enervating threads.

I lie at the bottom of sensory deprivation, no longer even sure I have a body.

Is this part of the assessment he’s conducting? Is this how being in this Mindscape he mentioned feels? Or did something go wrong?

Did—did he paralyze me?

The suspicion detonates inside me and I try desperately to move.

“Don’t struggle.”

How does he know I’m struggling, when I can’t even twitch the muscles I no longer feel?

But hearing his voice somehow soothes me. Between one heartbeat and the next, I’m no longer afraid.

Then slowly, curiosity replaces everything else.

What’s he doing? Is he doing something? Or is he waiting? Waiting for what?

Suddenly, something streaks through my nerves, like a blaze eating gasoline towards the tank. Once it hits it, my senses reignite in a wildfire.

As the conflagrations dies down, I remain still until I’m sure I can feel every part of my body again, and that nothing is missing.

Then I open my eyes.

Godric is looming over me, and I’m lying on some altar.

Where did this come from? Are we still in the crypt? What exactly did he do while I was out?

Should I be more worried that I’m spread before him like a sacrifice, or because I’m not worried about it?

“What happened?” I croak as I struggle up to my elbows.

“I tested you.”

When no elaboration comes, I prod, “And? What are my affinities?” Again, nothing. “Do I have any?”

His eyes flare emerald in the dimness. “No.”

I exhale. “So I’m really Nothing like you said.”

“Nothing wasn’t an insult.”

“Heh. Could have fooled me. But it’s what makes me an Abomination in your opinion, isn’t it?”

“Neither was that an insult.”

I blink up at the leashed intensity in his voice, and my gaze unwillingly snags over his tense body and face. Unbidden, images of him half-naked, bearing down on me and pushing my legs further apart with his, cascade like a honeyed wave over my nerves, pooling hot and wet between…

Focus, moron. Find out more.

I exhale again, purging the hypnotic, erotic images. “What were they, then?”

“They were the only way I could describe you. But I now realize neither description was accurate. I…” He pauses, as if words elude him, then his frown darkens. “I think you shouldn’t exist.”

I lurch to a sitting position, feeling as if he backhanded me. “Whoa, dude! Now this has to be an insult. Or is it a threat? Even a decision?”

“It’s none of those things.”

“That you’re being this serious means it’s something even worse.” His grimness only deepens, sending my heartbeats stampeding. “Actually, give me back Nothing and Abomination. Shouldn’t Exist is far more disturbing.”

“And this when you have no idea of the possible implications.”

“And you do?”

“I can only hazard guesses at this time.”

“That’s still about that ridiculous idea that I might be one of the most dangerous things to ever exist?”

“Actually, that was only on account of your ability to see and collect Angel Essence, and depended on the potential to weaponize it. Which remains to be seen.” He grips his nape, the movement laden with frustration. “Now I believe I was being overdramatic.”

I toss my hands at him. “Yes! Thank you! About time you admitted what a drama queen you are!”

“I’m not being one now. This…” He tosses back a gesture, one that encompasses me. “…is something else entirely. But it’s connected. Maybe even the root of your impossible ability. Maybe…”

He stops, shakes his head.

What did he see during that test that disturbed him so much?

Something is flitting at the edge of my memory. Reminding me of that wide-awake trance, when I hallucinated there was something inside me that could take him on. It ended up losing, because even in wish-fulfillment, I didn’t know how to wield power.

These images and sensations that elude me feel similar. Like it involves him and another conflict we had. But it feels different at the same time, because of some other presence that…that what?

I don’t know. Can’t remember.

But he does, and it disturbs him that he doesn’t know what it was, either.

So is it something new within me? Or only newly “activated”? By the Divining? I did feel it changed me. Even if that fast-healing side effect is already gone. And I feel the same as I always did. Weak, achy, limited. A.k.a. puny human.

I look down at the deep paper cut I got during our first Angel Grace 101 class—and find it gone. What the…?

So the healing activated again? Like this thing that I—and now he—sensed? Can these changes within me only be detected under specific conditions, all involving him? Is he some sort of catalyst to me? Is that another effect of the compatibility I suspected before? If it really exists? And if it does, why, and what would it lead to?

I have to stop this, or really change my name to Questions. Ones I won’t get any answers to. Not from him. The one time he isn’t being an angelhole, he has none.

My luck really sucks.

I let out a shuddering exhalation. “Man—I’d rather be in mortal danger in demon-infested territory. I knew what to expect there, had a plan, a way out. Now I’m trapped among you magnificent monsters, and every time you come near me something worse happens. None of this would have happened, and you wouldn’t have such an Abomination That Shouldn’t Exist on your hands, if you just left me alone.”

His eyes grow heavy-lidded and ten times more hard-hitting. If he wanted to, I bet this guy can make me climax just by looking at me.

Even now, with him dismayed, and me agitated, my core flutters as he rumbles quietly, “Believe me, I wish I could have. But neither of us had a choice in this matter. The moment you collected your first batch of Angel Essence, this course we’re on was set. And there’s no escape for either of us.”

“Sound a bit more ominous, why don’t you?”

He gives a mirthless huff, his gaze growing even more troubled.

That I’m the reason he is at such a loss stuns me. But it also excites me, I must admit. Stupid, I know, but there it is. It’s a thrill that I continue to make Godric the Great feel things nothing and no one ever did. Terrible things all, granted, but still.

I’m a pioneer here.

I sigh. “The archangels know about this Nothing/Abomination/Shouldn’t Exist business, right?”

He shakes his head. “They only know what I told them. About what happened at the Divining.”

“Will you tell me what happened? You told me this much. Just tell me the rest.”

As I think he’ll ignore me again, he exhales. “I told them you were going to be pulled to the Darkness.”

“But this isn’t what happened! I—”

“I know what happened,” he cuts off my objection harshly. “Neither the Light nor the Darkness could claim you.”

“You mean they tried to pull me apart. That must be how people die in that Divining!”

He shakes his head again. “Those who die are not pulled apart, they’re swatted by each side until they expire.”

“And you monsters just stand there and let them die!”

“The Angel-Graced or Demon-Blighted who don’t attend the Divining die anyway, only after much suffering, to themselves and everyone they come in contact with.”

“So you consider watching them die in that ritual a mercy, huh?”

“If you’re talking about me, I never personally attended a Divining. But, yes, it is a mercy of sorts. Anyway, those who die do so because they’re rejected by both Light and Darkness. But you…” He pauses again as his eyes sweep me, glowing with yet another brand of heat, one that ignites something new inside me. “They fought over you. That was another unprecedented occurrence. I had to keep it a secret from everyone, including Lorcan and the archangels, until I figured out how or why it happened myself.”

“How could you keep it a secret when everyone saw it happen?”

A shrug of one prodigious shoulder. “Everyone only saw the usual vacillating between Light and Darkness, until a side chose you.”

Another use of his Glamor powers, no doubt. That’s why the Tribunal looked so bored. They didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Not that you made it easy covering it up. Your cacophony was so loud, even I couldn’t mute you. Bloody hell, I could barely lower your volume.” He shakes a finger in his ear with a grimace. “You probably gave me hearing damage—when I thought that was another impossibility.”

“Oh, did my screaming in the agony I thought would last forever hurt your pretty immortal ears, you poor Death Spawn?” We all but bare our teeth at each other before I mutter, “So, when you told Lorcan no one could know about what happened, you…”

“Wasn’t talking about what really happened,” he finishes for me. “He already suspected something, so I told him one truth. I told the archangels the same thing to—neutralize them…for now.”

I so want to know what he means by that. But I go for the more urgent question. “And what is that truth you told them?”

“That since we need you, and I had to claim you for Celestial Academy, I intervened, and pushed you to the Light.”

“So it was you!” I exclaim. “And that’s what you’d kill anyone to keep hidden forever? Why is that such a big deal?”

His scowl seems directed at himself more than me for a change as he bites off, “Because I tampered with the Divining, and falsified its results for you. If anyone else even suspects what I did, it would be a matter of time before it gets back to the Tribunal.”

“And? I got the impression that you have more power than they do.”

“I do. But that’s not the issue. What I did was a massive violation of the very balance of this reality. Not to mention the Armistice Accords. With tolerance between the Celestial and Infernal Courts at its most precarious since their signing after Zinimar’s murder, exposure of such a breach could lead to their severance. And if this happens, the Apocalypse will resume.”