Chapter 40

“Each dorm room denizens—stand in your own line.”

Azazel’s snarled order reverberates the air around us, a pressure that barely stops short of rupturing my eardrums. Everyone around seems to suffer the same discomfort.

“Now!”

This shakes the ground below us like an earthquake. But at least he didn’t blow us off our feet, or our flesh off our bones.

As every five scramble into a line, Azazel roars, “Horizontally, imbeciles!”

This time it takes the crowd longer to figure out what he meant, then to form his demanded configuration.

After each quintet is standing close together, shifting on nervous feet, Azazel flicks a hand at Astaroth.

The princely demon, who seems to be his errand boy at times, comes forward to the podium.

Opening a massive ledger, Astaroth starts speaking at once, “Welcome to the Imperium Trials, cadets. Each five of you will...”

“You, maggots—explain yourselves.”

At Azazel’s vicious interruption, a wave of horror sweeps through the hall, as each group fears he’s addressing them. Then I realize where he’s pointing.

At us.

I instinctively put myself in front of Sarah as he snarls, “Where is your fifth, maggots?”

I feel Sarah move behind me. Unable to let her respond, giving him a bullseye for his displeasure, I step forward.

“Sh-she’s not here.”

I hate that I stuttered, but only hope it appeases him.

“Is she dead?” Azazel rumbles, looking like the supernatural dictator that he is today, with hair pulled back and his Pax Vis boss elaborate costume. “That’s the only reason I’ll accept for her tardiness.”

“I-I don’t think she’s coming.”

“You don’t think or you know?”

I cast a frantic glance at Aela, hoping she’d say something. She’s staring ahead, as if she doesn’t deem to look at me—or at Azazel. She must consider us both beneath her regard.

But there’s something else in her vibe. It’s—fear?

Fan-fallen-angel-tastic! Azazel scares even our resident archangelspawn, and I went and made myself the center of his attention.

But it was either Sarah or me. And I’m already in it. If I fall silent now, it would incur his wrath. Being inconclusive would also bring it down on me. And anyone standing next to me.

Since I’m already trapped, I shrug. “I just think it makes sense she isn’t here. She’s a demon, and the Imperium Trials decide what kind of Grace we have and all. She must have thought they have nothing to do with her.”

Azazel barrels into Astaroth, shoving him violently away from the podium. He snatches the ledger up, tears through the pages until he stabs a finger down one and roars, “Bring me the demoness Jinnifer, daughter of Lilith—now.”

A couple of his Pax Vis angels shoot into the air at once. They zoom above us, their massive wings creating a powerful draft that knocks us into each other, and dishevels every head on their way out of the Assembly Hall.

As the crowd buzzes and shuffles, one thing percolates in my mind.

Daughter of Lilith? The Lilith? Mother of all demons? Now that’s a tiny bit of info she left out. It makes it even more amazing that I’m still breathing now.

“Silence.”

Azazel’s growl plunges the hall into abrupt muteness. Anyone standing outside would think it’s empty, not packed with over two thousand newly-adult Nephilim and Angel-Graced.

We stand, barely breathing, until the two angels return with Jinny. Each has an iron grip on an arm as she walks among them, head held high, glaring ahead at the reason she’s been dragged in here so unceremoniously.

The angels leave her in front of the stage where Azazel towers, and retreat.

Azazel inclines his head at her. “So you absented yourself from the Trials. Without permission.”

“I thought...” Jinny starts.

Azazel cuts her off, voice like a scythe. “For daring to think when you were given a directive, I will make an example of you. Come here.”

She lowers her gaze to where he points beneath him, then lifts her chin, higher this time. “I won’t. And you can’t make me. You’re an angel, and you’re all about free will. So suck it.”

“Seems you were never educated in the ways of the Fallen, hellspawn. Let me rectify the gap in your knowledge.”

He waves and suddenly Jinny is somersaulting in the air with a yell of shock and rage.

Sarah bolts forward with a whimper of dismay. I shove her behind me again, almost missing the moment Azazel flicks his hands, and slams Jinny down at his feet with a thud that cracks the floor beneath them.

Jinny’s cry of pain is brought to an abrupt, wheezing end when Azazel stomps his heavy boot down on her chest. Anyone else would have been a splattered mess of flesh and bones beneath him now.

What follows is a scene right out of a horror movie.

That’s where the two creatures who morph right in front of us belong.

Crimson flames burst from Jinny’s eyes as her face turns pitch black. Her mouth expands to double its size as she screeches in that nerve-wrenching polyphonic voice, this time an ear-splitting whistle entwined with a bass rumble right from the bottom of Hell.

Her pearly teeth elongate into three-inch fangs and start dripping something like tar. Her red nails turn into finger-long claws as she struggles with the foot crushing her ribcage.

But it’s to no avail. Maybe if this were a fair fight, if she’s been prepared for the attack, she’d have a chance. But in that disadvantaged position, she’s no match for whatever Azazel has turned into. Something that will echo its horror in my every waking and sleeping moment till the day I die.

Quadruple his original size—or maybe this is his original size—his wings are masses of flaming soot that emit billowing clouds of smoke, making us all tear up and choke in hacking coughs. His face has lost its skin, becoming red flesh pocked with fiery black pits. His teeth have also elongated and multiplied inside a mouth that could easily fit a basket-ball, a dozen inches-long, razor-sharp rows, like those of an alien shark.

But it’s his eyes that almost make me piss myself in terror. Gaping black voids with horizontal, glowing-white slashes of pure evil in their depths.

Worst of all, he is laughing.

The more horrified he feels he makes us, the more she struggles and screeches, the harder he laughs. His guffaws sounds like a thousand serrated knives scraping along a blackboard lined with broken glass and sandpaper. I think it might shred our very souls.

The sickening sound of steel bones fracturing has bile rising to my eyes as he crushes his foot harder down on Jinny’s chest. Her writhing form begins to glow, as if she’s going to ignite and explode at any moment. Sarah must have suspected the same thing, as her weeping becomes shearing sobs that rattle my own bones. But it is the sight of Jinny’s tears turning to steam in her burning eyes that finally shatters my paralysis.

I grab Aela’s arm, shaking it with my violent tremors. “Do something! He’s killing her.”

She glares down at my clawing hands before removing them calmly. “She’s a demon. We kill her kind every day.”

I pounce on her arm again, when I’ve so far avoided even breathing in her vicinity. “But she’s here as a cadet. She’s alone among hundreds of you and she trusted you not to harm her.”

She scowls down at me. “And no one tried to do so. She’s now paying for her transgression.”

“Not showing up for a test, because of a perfectly logical misunderstanding, is now a transgression punishable by agonizing death?”

“Azazel is the Tribune of the Pax Vis. It’s at his discretion how he chooses to end what he considers disruptive behavior. She flaunted the Academy’s rules, and he would never let other cadets think they can survive that.”

“She didn’t know she was flaunting the Academy’s rules!” Though I don’t know if she did or not. She just can’t be executed for it!

“Again, she’s a demon. They exist for corruption and mayhem. They are the scourge of existence. She is the scourge of your existence. I heard her threatening you today. Why do you even care if she dies? You should be applauding Azazel for ridding you of her.”

“I do want to get rid of her, but not this way!”

Aela shakes me off, harder this time. “Well, it’s not up to you, is it?”

“But it can be up to you. You’re an archangel’s daughter, you have powers, influence. If you intervene…”

“Why should I intervene on a demon’s behalf?”

Her return to calmness makes me see red, and I lose all discretion, slamming my palms into her chest. “Because it’s the right thing to do! What he’s doing to her—it’s—it’s just evil. If you go along with it, it makes you party to his vile treachery and cowardice. It makes you worse than the demons you despise so much! Much worse!”

A gurgling sound issues from the stage, an unmistakable sound of impending death. Jinny’s.

Still cackling, Azazel slashes his hand and a sickle of angelic energy zooms towards her face.

For the suffocating eternity of a heartbeat, I think he’d lop off her head.

What he does feels somehow crueler.

He shears off her horns.

Her blood-curdling scream quakes through me. But it’s the sound the severed horns make as they clatter to the stage, even masked by the cacophony of his merriment, that turns my stomach. And that’s before I see the stumps that remain.

The moment I realize they’re bleeding from their severed ends down her forehead and into her eyes, something snaps inside me.

“Jinny!” Sarah shrieks as she tears out of my restraining grip and explodes into a run.

I pounce on her, rabidly dragging her and tossing her back at the line of cadets who haven’t moved an inch since this macabre execution began. I barely see her landing in Aela’s startled arms before I run to the stage myself.

Nothing exists in my mind anymore but the horror of watching Jinny’s amazing glow sputtering, her immortal life-force leaving her body under that brute’s boot. There’s no more thought or logic or even self-preservation in my mind as I somehow jump up on stage, and barrel into Azazel’s gigantic form.

At the negligible impact of my body, his hellish wings unfold to their full span with a snap that almost breaks me, body and mind. He looks down at me with those pits of horror, and the sound he makes—it’s as if the heavens themselves are enraged.

Terror, so vast and primal roars to the forefront of my instincts. It bombards me with the urge to prostrate myself, to await my own execution in abject surrender.

But as I fall off him like a dead bug, something—else, deeper, older, ancient—scorches through the terror, surging within me like lava. It sees the fallen angel’s Essence storming around him and it knows. It can seize it, use it.

I don’t know how, but I’m back on my feet, something bottomless and unstoppable gnawing at me as I raise my hands to that tantalizing energy.

As it funnels toward me, coating not only my hands, or arms, but my whole torso, I barely register Azazel raising a massive hand tipped in blade-like claws. Some awareness screams that when this blow descends, it would do to me what his sickle did to Jinny’s horns. It would hack me to pieces, just not as cleanly.

The thing inside me shouts back, silencing it, roaring for me to get all his Essence.

Suddenly, something pulls me back so hard, I fly off the stage, and slam to the ground feet below.

Among the agony and disorientation, I realize many things at once.

The leash saved me from being shredded to gory bits. Godric’s brutal tug on it. Around my waist, not neck. A tug like that would have broken it. He lassoed me away at the last moment.

Before I can move even my eyes to look for him, Azazel is descending on me. The beat of his nightmarish wings grinds me into the ground with a body-sized fist of strangulating smoke and fiery ice.

He won’t be stopped from ending me. Then he would finish Jinny. I haven’t only failed to stop him, I managed to provoke him into killing me along with her.

I turn my head. Not wanting to see the moment he squashes me into a gory puddle. Wanting to get a last glimpse of Sarah.

I only see a heart-stopping sight. Godric shooting toward me, his eyes crackling with blood-red lightning, every inch of him encased in black fire.

Before I can even blink, he’s inches above me. Ramming into Azazel in midair.

The collision detonates like a bomb. A burst of blinding fury amalgamating with searing evil, razing out in a shockwave that engulfs me, unravels me.

Everything disappears, ends.