Chapter 38

“You’re going to kill me!”

My gasp shears through lungs filled with glass shards as I curl on my side, every muscle spasming uselessly.

Ominous and lethal, Godric towers over me where he threw me to the ground. Without touching me, of course.

Flopping onto my back, I look up into the face I’ve grown addicted to, in spite of all my efforts not to, and pant, “I see…your plan now. You tried to…get me exempted...and failed. You’re now down to…your last option. Killing me...to make me miss…the Imperium Trials.”

The Imperium Trials which are today.

I still can’t believe it has been two months since he first loomed over me like this. Sixty-three days to be exact. A crammed-full-of-events blur that feels like a year, a whole new life. Where he’s concerned, it’s been an exacting, exhausting blur that has taken me to the edge of human endurance and way, way beyond.

And I am only human no matter what that magnificent monster says.

“Get. Up.”

I can’t even shake my head as I croak, “No. Can. Do.”

Next moment, I feel the world tilting beneath me when his expression suddenly brightens.

I go blind for seconds. From the blast of mind-scrambling male beauty and charisma. A brooding or bedeviling Godric is devastation incarnate. A beaming one? Wholesale annihilation.

“You’re over three hours.”

This shocks me enough, I lurch up on my elbows. “No way!”

“Way.” He tosses me a towel, his lips pursing, as if catching himself about to smile is a capital offense.

Yeah, he still has me on that rollercoaster.

It’s a given he remains Death Jr., my drill sergeant. But he keeps having those bouts when he watches me as if nothing else exists, when he forgets to be Angelhole around me. Then he catches himself in the act. Tension builds until he reverts to full Godawful mode, and the leash is back in public.

But his slip-ups have been increasing, until that other Godric who wants to devour me breaks through. I thought I was getting better at withstanding the savagery of his lust-igniting glances, until those progressed to almost-touches. Those leave me scrambled for days.

Rinse and repeat.

If it wasn’t for Sarah, and fearing to leave her alone in this world, I would have climbed and begged him to give in, to take me until he finishes me already.

I sigh as I wipe off the sweat pouring into my eyes. “You’re trying to motivate me for today, right?”

He rumbles a pseudo-chuckle deep in his chest, and I almost faint. With arousal this time. Making it worse, he bends to stick his face closer to mine, letting his mouth-watering scent flood my laboring lungs. Adding another dose of inflammation, he waves a hand in my face. A hand I want to grab, suckle and bite into. A hand I need all over me.

“Do you see me? Do you know who I am? You think I’d exaggerate to make you feel better? I would think that’s a concussion talking if you didn’t execute that last landing perfectly.”

Rubbing my legs together, trying to subdue the molten pounding between them, I glare up at him. “Then you’re being your Angelhole self, giving me false hope so I’d get up, only so you can toss me around some more.”

His gaze follows my movements—against his prodigious will, as I suspect—skittering mini-bolts over my thighs, and cascading magma inside my core. And that’s before I glimpse the daunting bulge that conquers the tightness of his pants, and the camouflage of his Glamor.

Knowing I affect him like he affects me was a delight—at first. Now it only pours gasoline on the fire of my frustration.

Not only because he won’t act on those potentially-catastrophic sensual threats, since I have serious doubts I’d survive that, but because I’m rooming with so many girls. I can’t relieve myself in his honor anymore, except in hurried and literal anti-climaxes. My own inexperience and hang-ups have also been thwarting me. I still balk at visualizing his fully naked body, let alone having it all over and inside mine, doing to me all the wild, wanton things I’m disintegrating for. The unspent desire keeps accumulating, and my condition keeps worsening.

I’m in such bad shape, the mere outline of his arousal has my heart slamming around my chest, and my body primed and screaming for his invasion.

As if giving in at last to its silent pleas, he leans closer, closer, those hands that can sunder mountains flexing and opening, like they’re itching to possess and plunder me. A moan of suffering escapes my lips.

Suddenly, the lightning storm skittering in his eyes subsides, and his Glamor is back in full force, hiding the object of my feverish cravings.

Shaking his head as if coming out of a trance, he straightens, taking his temptation out of reach. He completes his reversion to Angelhole mode as he drawls, “As if I need such elaborate maneuvers to toss you around. You did pass three hours. By six minutes, to be exact.”

I gape up at him, arousal dwindling as his words sink in.

He means it!

The last time I asked about my progress was three weeks ago. Even with my leaps and bounds of improvement, I had barely passed the one-and-a-half-hour mark.

He has escalated pushing my limits to a killer medley of strength training, cardiovascular endurance, flexibility and agility remolding, precision conditioning and pain tolerance. All disciplines are in the service of that grueling, almost-impossible-to-grasp-and perform angelic martial art technique called Melek.

He euphemistically dubbed his torture routine Phase One. Its goal? To make it the whole three hours without reaching failure. Or vomiting. Whichever comes first.

I’ve done both regularly. Usually simultaneously. Yeah, it’s a miracle he doesn’t call me Barf or Puke by now.

Besides that, there’s the almost as taxing daily battles as disembodied forces in the Mindscape. I still don’t fully know what happens after he sucks my consciousness in there, but I’m now aware it’s happening, and retain some memories after I exit, especially of that thing inside me.

When I first told him, he called it massive progress. My happy dance was very undignified. I’ve been yearning for any at all in that department.

Though I’ve been getting stronger than I ever thought possible, as he pledged—not during the routine itself, when I feel I’m dying a thousand painful deaths—I thought I would surely die before I completed his impossible three hours in one go.

But I did it! I’m six minutes past his target! The girl who just weeks ago couldn’t complete one push up. From the knees. Today I gave him the twenty he demanded that first time, in perfect form, plus twenty more. In under a minute.

“You’re officially ready for Phase Two,” he purrs, sounding too pleased with himself.

I would have loved to smack the smugness off that mouth, by hand, then by lips.

Phase Two. Ugh.

Just the idea that he has worse in store for me makes me flop back in a boneless heap. “Couldn’t you let me bask in my achievement for one more minute?”

He consults that Nephilim-grade wearable of his. “You’ve been basking for four.”

“I’ve been trying not to die,” I groan. “And I think I deserve some kind of reward, before you toss me over an even higher cliff.”

His lips twitch as if fighting a harder-to-resist smile. “Phase Two is your reward.”

“With rewards like these, who needs punishment?”

But though I’m whining, I grin up at him like a lunatic. I’m fully recuperated already. Not to mention those amazing endorphins I never thought I could produce are flooding my body. And it’s all thanks to that beautiful slave driver.

He stares down at me, at my lips, as if transfixed, then his eyes start emitting that hypnotic, heart-stopping emerald. What I’ve only ever seen in response to me.

Early on, I realized the lava and obsidian lightning are shock and awe techniques, when he wants to scare someone shitless. I now see the difference when they’re a spontaneous reaction. They’re even scarier then.

But even without those light shows, I’ve come to decipher the dizzying range of his eyes’ expressions, when I first thought they could only spew arrogance and violence.

Now there’s something new in them. Not exasperation or resignation or provocation. It’s not cold command or searing lust, either. It’s more like…

No, I don’t want to give it a name. I won’t. I’m probably wrong anyway.

When I finally rise to my feet, he documents how I do it, in the no-hands method he taught me through so much sweat, and some literal tears. He says in Phase Two I’ll master that elastic-rebound one he does, what should be impossible with his mass and height. The first time he demonstrated it, I burst out that I hate him. He shouldn’t be this agile, as well as everything else.

At least I learned the handless method. He inclines his head at me in silent approval. The approval I’ve come to crave. To need.

The now-familiar electricity of gratification races through me. It shoots to my fingers, making them ache to stab into the luxury of his mane, drag him down by it, bring those lush lips down to mine, wrap those steel hips in my legs, and grind my aching core against that…

Down, girl.

With a glance that says he realizes my condition, he walks away to the Arena’s exit.

As I follow him, I know what he’s doing, too. Putting distance between us. So as not to encourage the Abomination-Who-Shouldn’t-Exist’s intensifying crush.

There. I admitted it. Beyond the mind-scrambling lust, I have a crush on him. As massive and overpowering as he is.

Not that it should be a big deal. I wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t crush on him. The whole female student body shares my condition, and a percentage of the male one, too. Those who don’t swoon at his mention or approach, hero-worship him. It’s a unanimous state for any being with brain waves.

All his haughtiness and heartlessness aside—what everyone thinks he has every right to, and worship him more for it—the guy is irresistible.

The worst part? This crush isn’t hate-fueled anymore.

Though I still loathe him with the old ferocity at times, he’s been giving me less reasons to hate his guts. And many reasons to salivate like Pavlov’s dog when I even think of him. Since this is almost all the time, we are talking a lot of drool.

Problem is, it’s not only that he’s gorgeous and powerful beyond measure, and his attraction is on par with a planet’s gravity. Those things are givens. But I’ve been discovering other things that appeal to me terribly. Even the terrible parts.

Like he’s been probing and investigating me, I’ve been observing and researching him. The latter by interrogating Lorcan, then expanding on his tidbits at the Metatron Library.

Thathas been no mean feat, since it sprawls over six buildings, and all volumes are in angelic script. As freshmen, we’re now allowed there for only two hours, twice a week. We can’t check out books, and that auto-translate feature is unreliable. When it works, context and nuance are mostly jumbled or missing.

I still gleaned some juicy info on Godric. Like that he graduated five years ago. His class was the fifteenth since the Academy reopened after the Accords were signed.

I also learned the first Nephilim cadets after the reopening were born in the decades after the Apocalypse started—long before it came to earth. How long ago that was, those who know, aren’t telling. Which means Godric might or might not be as young as he looks. I choose to believe he’s late twenties.

If not, at least he isn’t a few thousand years old. I hope. That’s how old some of the Nephilim in existence are. They are the ones Celestial Academy was built for millennia ago. But from all I gathered, their relationship to both their parents’ races has always been—problematic.

Yet it was when they didn’t side with Heaven during the Apocalypse that the angels realized they were a lost cause.

Thinking they’ve learned their lesson in raising half-angels, they decided to start fresh, and sired a new generation. Their goal: to make their new offspring warriors the likes of which existence has never seen.

From Godric’s example, they’re succeeding spectacularly.

The story goes that after the Apocalypse fizzled out, and the angels came to Earth to stay, they rounded up their new offspring, and brought them to the Academy to start their training.

Which brings me to some of the terrible things I learned about Godric. Not things he did—though those were many and varied—but what was done to him.

Turns out the Nephilim are taken from their mothers, and raised by the Cultores, a sect of angel worshippers. This happens when they are six to ten years of age, when their powers start to manifest. Though their full extent develops later in life like Astaroth explained, what manifests this early is formidable enough, mere humans can’t withstand it, let alone help Nephilim children handle it. This still means they have some sort of childhood, before being drafted into the life of a soldier in the Army of Heaven.

Not so Godric.

As the first archangelic Nephilim, Godric’s powers manifested at birth. The Cultores tookhim then.

It almost made me hurl, reading about the methods those fanatics use to teach the Nephilim to recognize and control their powers. Some are beyond horrific. And that’s when the children have been prepared for them all their lives, and have far lesser powers.

I can’t even imagine what they did to Godric to control his superior powers, and what he suffered from infancy until he was old enough to understand why they were torturing him.

This explained a lot of his angelholeness, and how he’s become an expert torturer himself.

But what really stirred my empathy was discovering we have far more in common than our leashes. I don’t remember my mother, didn’t have a childhood, and was as abused.

He is also as unique as I allegedly am. He is the first of his kind, and the most powerful nephilim in history even as a baby. He is what prompted the other archangels to follow Azrael’s example and sire more Nephilim. But there hasn’t been another like Godric since.

That I can attest to.

Now I fall into step with him, post-exercise, Godric-induced energy and euphoria surging through me.

I whoop and skip.

His sideways glance flash turquoise in the overcast morning light, singeing me. “Glad to see you so enthusiastic about the next phase in your training.”

I flail my hands above my head in mock-panic. “Earth is tilting on its axis! It’ll spin out of orbit and hurtle into the sun! Godric’s glad!”

His lips twitch, and his eyes even crinkle. These slips in control—intoxicate me.

“Figure of speech. No real gladness implied or included.” As I grin wider at him, he purse-pouts those bitable lips, his way of pretending I don’t amuse him. “But the world must be heading for something cataclysmic if you’re calling me Godric. What happened to Godawful and Angelhole?”

I snicker. “Oh, they’re right here, and bulldozing me into their next torture program, before I catch my breath from their first one.”

“If this is you out of breath, if you’re ever in it, my ears might fall off.”

“Ha-ha! Who knew? You rolled off the archangelic assembly line with a humor software installed. But not with a timing one. You should have laid off the announcement until I deal with these Trials. Y’know, one affliction at a time?”

His expression reverts to his default grimness, making me realize how lighthearted it has been. “And now I failed to exempt you, our only hope is the method I taught you in the Mindscape.”

He’s referring to using that white ring that manifests in response to the encroachment of his power. He has guided me into making it flare with what looks and feels like fire. He hopes it would convince the forces conducting the assessment that my supposed Grace has an Elemental component.

Doubt and worry creep down my spine. I think I’ve mastered that trick, but… “What if I can’t replicate it outside the Mindscape? Can you intervene like you did in the Divining?”

“Not this time.”

“What happens if I can’t do it?”

“Then that anomaly inside you might be discovered.”

“Now it’s an anomaly! The Abomination that keeps on giving.” I exhale in resignation. “Any idea what happens if it is?”

“Nothing good.”

“Yeah, I got that, from the thousand times you told me. But you never really explained why this ‘anomaly’ is such a terrible thing you have to hide at any cost.”

He slows down to brood down at me, and I feel him struggling not to reach for me. As always, my every nerve screams for his touch, and blood rushes to bombard my skin, just to be closer to him. And as always, his hands fist, crushing the urge.

Looking away and ahead, he resumes his speed, voice dipping into gravelly depths. “At first, I thought exposure of your Angel Essence collecting ability would have terrible and widespread repercussions. But this thing inside you—I think it has the potential to tamper with the very balance of existence.”

My mouth drops open. “Please—tell me you’re being a drama queen again!”

He shrugs. “Better dramatic than sorry at this point.”

I guess he’s right about that. I’m already a glorified prisoner because I can collect tiny amounts of Angel Essence. I don’t want to find out what would happen to me, to Sarah, if it’s discovered I can do something else that’s unprecedented, and far more catastrophic.

I sigh. “No idea what ‘it’ is yet?”

His lips thin, yet look so sensuous, so—edible. And what a time to drool over them. Seems not even impending disaster can douse the hormonal wildfire he arouses.

I sigh again as he exhales. “I still only have theories.”

“Any of them good? Better than the others, at least?”

“All equally bad.”

“Whoa. Way to fill me with optimism as I head into my second potentially fatal probing since you dragged me into your world.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I believe this is one thing you appreciate about me.”

My hands itch to run over his expansive chest, to bunch in his sweatshirt and jerk him down so I can whisper in his ear, “Oh, I appreciate loads of things about you. Let me strip you naked and show you how I appreciate the Hell and Heaven out of each and every one…”

But we aren’t at the smutty confessions and demonstrations stage yet. Heh—who am I kidding? We will never be.

Since this will remain a feverish fantasy I’d better keep to myself, out loud I say, “Let’s assume I fail to keep it a secret, and the Trials expose me. What then?”

“Only one hope would remain.” When he doesn’t elaborate, I spin my hands in a hurrying gesture. He exhales again. “That I’d manage to redirect everyone to another conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“That you have a rare Grace manifestation, one that hasn’t been seen for millennia.”

“And that’s better than one of your bad theories?”

“Anything is better than those.”

“And you still won’t share any of them?”

“When I know for sure, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Will I?”

His fraught silence answers me loud and clear.

This super-secret-agent of Heaven shared what he did with me, because he needed me to understand the gravity of the situation, and to train me into not exposing myself. He won’t share anything I don’t need to know unless forced to, by some catastrophe of equal weight.

So I ask something else he may answer. “If there’s this anomaly inside me, how come I can only sense it in your virtual reality arena? Or when I’m spacing out or hallucinating? Why do I barely hang on to its very memory when I’m in my right mind and in the real world?”

“First, there’s nothing virtual about the Mindscape. It’s just another plane of existence. Second, whatever this thing is, it eludes your conscious mind because it’s still dormant.”

“Dormant! You’re telling me all these—encounters, not to mention all these efforts and worries, are about something that’s actually asleep?”

His jaw muscles bunch as he gives a tight nod. “Yes, and we can only sense and interact with it in the Mindscape or your subconscious, where I believe it’s still—dreaming. I have no idea what will happen when it awakens.”

I frown, my thought processes tangling. “But isn’t that what our Mindscape escapades are all about? You’re trying to awaken it?”

He glares at me as if I just told him I killed his pet. Yeah, he has one. And I hear it’s a panther. I plan to see it, and pet it, if it’s the last thing I do.

“Absolutely not,” he bites off. “Exactly the opposite. I’m trying to make you recognize it, and gain control of it, while it still slumbers.”

“But if it’s so ultimately dangerous, why are you probing it? Aren’t you risking waking it up yourself?”

“I think it will wake up sooner or later, no matter what I do or don’t do. If it awakens when you’re not ready…”

The helplessness in his shrug, that being of almost unlimited power, makes a shudder rattle through me like a freight train.

I’m sorry I asked. Every time I do, his answers only make things worse.

If he’s right, I have a literal sleeping monster inside me that we can poke awake at any moment. One I’m supposed to tame and keep in check.

Hoping it remains slumbering forever, I have to ask something else. “You said you don’t know if it’s connected to my Angel Essence extraction power, but it has to be, right? There can’t be two inexplicable things within the same puny human, can there be?” When he opens his mouth, I know he’s going to give me another inconclusive answer, so I rush to add, “Just give me a theory. Your worst one.”

He says nothing until we reach Fem’s main doors, where he’s been leaving me after our sessions for weeks now. He now allows me to shower and dress before heading to breakfast.

As he turns and walks away, I sigh, resigned to another dead end in my understanding of what’s going on with me.

Just as I settle for ogling his heavenly behind, he suddenly stops, swings back to me.

“You want my worst theory, White?” he grits, obsidian lightning bleeding from his crimson flaming eyes. The scary, involuntary kind. “It’s that yes, your power is connected, is a symptom of that thing’s existence within you. And that from the first time you saw and collected Angel Essence, it stirred in its slumber. And that everything I do to guard against it, will only accelerate its awakening. That you might be a cosmic nuclear weapon—and I’ll be the one who arms it.”