Chapter 41

I’m suspended in nothingness.

I only know that when something fractures it, starts to exist.

It’s an image. Of Godric’s murderous face, twisted in loathing and wrath.

Then more images pour through the crack, in rapid-fire sequence. Replaying his clash with Azazel.

The unimaginable violence and brutality of those celestial beings, colliding a hairbreadth above me, razes through me again. There’s no way I could have survived their climactic conflict.

So was I collateral damage? Is this nothingness death?

It feels exactly like that thing that exists within me. It is.

So maybe it isn’t as dangerous as Godric thinks, is just something that activates when I’m in danger? Maybe it always thought Godric wanted to hurt me during our Mindscape sessions? If it works on a physical as well as a metaphysical level, maybe it activated to save me from the fallout of those monsters’ fight? If so, does being inside it now means it succeeded? Or is my body destroyed somewhere, and this is only my consciousness floating within it?

To get answers, to see if I’m still alive, I have to exit its confines. Even if I somehow know it wouldn’t want to let me go.

It doesn’t. I almost tear my mind apart, peeling it away from its greedy grasp—only to find myself plummeting.

I land on something flat and hard with a chest-emptying oomph.

“Wen!”

My eyes open to find Sarah swooping down on me, eyes stricken and streaming tears.

I’m crumpled on pristine marble, beside a bed draped in stark white, in a vast, sterile space. It’s a ward, in Raphael Sanatorium, and I’m wearing something like a hospital gown. On a bed to my right, in the same gown, Jinny lies unmoving.

Apart from a slight swelling and her cut off horns, her face looks the same as it always has. She seems so young and innocent.

But she doesn’t seem to be breathing!

A burst of alarm has me staggering up to my feet. Sarah almost knocks me off them when she drags me into a fierce hug.

“I was so scared you wouldn’t wake up, too!”

“She’s...?” A lump rises in my throat, cutting off my question.

Sarah shakes her head, sobbing harder, hugging me tighter. “In a coma. Healer Althea said her injuries are beyond any healer’s abilities, might even be beyond Raphael’s. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever wake up.”

“That evil turd!” I hiss. “I wish I had time to suck all of his Essence.”

Sarah blinks up at me, her tears slowing down. “What do you mean?”

I blink back at her, unable to understand her question for a moment, before I remember.

She doesn’t know about the Angel Essence business. All she knows is what we both did before coming here. That my so-called power is akin to soaking up angel lingering sweat.

But whatever it is, Godric’s training has expanded it, like he predicted. When I saw Azazel’s Essence, it was still connected to him. Until that point, I’ve only seen Essence after it was expended. If he wasn’t about to fillet me, I felt I would have been able to draw it from him.

Now I wonder what would have happened if I did. Would it have caused him the angelic equivalent of dehydration? I really would have loved to put him in a coma, too.

Before I can think of an answer, Sarah hugs me again, whispering tremulously, “He would have killed her if you didn’t intervene.”

“Yeah, right.” I huff. “After I stood there until he almost did.”

She pulls away to gape at me. “No one even thought of doing anything, but you put yourself in mortal danger for her—when you don’t even like her.”

“Don’t even like her” is a gross euphemism of how much I dislike and resent, not to mention fear this girl. So why am I so cut up over seeing her this way?

It has to be what I told Aela. About how much I hate treachery and power abuse. This was so unjustified and dishonorable it still makes my blood boil.

“You forget I stopped you from running to her rescue,” I say, stepping away to approach Jinny’s inert form.

Sarah clings to my hand as her tears thicken again. “All I was going to do was try to pull her from underneath his foot. You attacked him!”

“And a whole lot of good that did. I’m not in the morgue now, in a body bag in several assorted pieces, only because of...” The memory detonates in my mind all over again. “Godric! That bastard!”

Sarah blinks up at me. “You’re angry at him? But he saved you!”

“He sure as hell took his sweet time doing it.” I stab a finger towards Jinny. “And he didn’t save her!”

She shakes her head. “If you saw what happened after he clashed with Azazel, you might understand why he was reluctant to interfere.”

A fist suddenly forms over my heart. “What happened?”

Her face crumples, as if remembering it hurts. “It was horrible, Wen. I couldn’t bear to look at the nightmarish forms Azazel kept morphing into. Those Pax Vis angels who’re always trailing after him joined the fight, and it became three to one. Azazel withdrew when Godric drew some kind of flaming sword out of thin air. But more angels kept pouring in, until there were two dozen—or more. The radiation of power bombarding Godric was—unbearable. I felt it would liquefy my insides. Then I saw nothing more as everyone stampeded out of the hall and swept me along. But since they didn’t bring him here, I-I don’t even know if Godric even survived…”

The fist around my heart convulses, and blood empties from my head. Everything around me swings in a violent vortex. I almost keel over Jinny before Sarah grabs me.

“Lie down, Wen, please!” Sarah sobs as she tries to drag me away to the bed I fell off. “I’ll go get Healer Althea!”

Forcing down the nausea until the world stops spinning, I struggle to straighten, to pull myself away from her rabid grasp. “No—no, I’m fine. I have to go.”

Then I’m running, blind to everything but finding my way out. Finding Godric.

He has to have survived. All this power and uniqueness can’t possibly be snuffed. Not in such a pointless flare up of violence. Not over me. Not at all.

He can’t be dead.

The very possibility expands inside me with something uncontainable, brimming with rage and desperation. It shrieks for release so it would...

Everything jogs in my brain the moment I run out of the building, the ground quaking beneath my feet. Like it did many time before.

My eyes burn as I raise them, praying to whatever rules this universe that I’m right.

The sight filling my blurred vision has my heart kicking so brutally, I almost bursts.

Godric.

He’s landed in front of me, his impact rocking my world, in every way.

The urge to sock him for intervening so late, and the need to make sure he’s real, and whole, clash together as powerfully as he did with Azazel.

I end up doing both. I punch him in the abdomen, then throw myself at him.

“You’re alive!” I pant, painful moisture blossoming in my eyes as I mash my face into his expansive chest.

He goes rigid under my onslaught, chest heaving under my cheek as erratically as mine. For heart-thundering moments, his hands hover over me, and I think he’ll put his arms around me.

He only holds them off me as he steps away, forcing me to relinquish my grip on his jacket.

His gaze crackles with a new deadliness as it sweeps me in my hospital gown. It’s as if he, too, is looking for injuries. Was he rushing here to check up on me? And is that relief I see in his eyes, now he saw for himself I’m okay?

Next moment, he brings my wishful thinking crashing on my head.

His gaze falls disgustedly to the stain my tears left over his shirt, before hardening with disdain as they rise to mine. “And you had a suspicion I might not be alive, why?”

I wipe my tears angrily, kicking myself for the uncharacteristic meltdown, and over him of all people. “Because Sarah told me Azazel and the angels ganged up on you, that’s why! But you’re not even injured!”

“I was.”

“How?”

“I healed.”

“Yeah, point out the obvious, why don’t you? You know that’s not what I meant.”

He jerks one shoulder dismissively. “You overestimate the eloquence of your single-word question.”

“Or your intelligence!”

“I prefer to engage it in more worthwhile endeavors than deciphering your incessant questions. Also, reading minds, especially ones as shifty and mercurial as yours, is not one of my powers.”

“Now I wish you were injured bad enough to need a prolonged recovery. A concussion might have made you less of an angelhole for longer!”

“Ah, you’re wondering how my injuries were minor enough that I already healed completely.”

“You knew this is what I meant. Admit it.”

He only relinquishes my incensed gaze to roam my face.

If what I feel is any indication, I must be blotched with emotion, and swollen from the ordeal. And he seems to be examining my every pore, and disapproving of his findings.

Yeah, way to remind me of my flimsy humanity.

I don’t know why, but looking disheveled and distorted, when he is so immaculate, hurts. I always knew the unbridgeable gap between us, but now it suddenly makes me want to weep.

I swallow the tears when I notice his gaze fixed on the side of my neck, and his eyes…they’re inky and bottomless, a universe of nightmares. If it’s ever unleashed, if he is…

I can’t even finish this thought.

I suddenly realize what he’s staring at when I register the sharp pain across my neck. My hand flies to it, only to feel a healing slash across my Mark. It’s probably due to my own accelerated healing that I didn’t bleed out.

Is this why he’s so incensed? That I risked myself and could have died?

But I somehow feel his wrath isn’t directed at me. So is it at Azazel, for almost killing me? Himself, for hanging back until he almost did?

His eyes empty of all expression, leaving me wondering if I imagined what I saw there. He’s really good at making me suspect my senses and judgement.

“I admit nothing,” he finally says.

I throw my hands up in frustration. “Do you have to be the biggest angelhole in the cosmos, all the time? Dude, can’t you take a day off? So again, how? Sarah said a horde of angels attacked you, or is she wrong?”

“A host.”

I blink up at him. “What?”

“It’s called a host of angels.”

“Thank you for the English language lesson, or is it literature?” I roll my eyes. “That’s your takeaway from my question?”

If I can trust my senses where he’s concerned, I’d say he’s fighting a smile as he sighs. “Do you realize every single thing you said to me was a question? But I have one of my own. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you surprised I didn’t sustain worse injuries?”

“Because of the aforementioned host? Unless there weren’t as many as Sarah thought?”

“There were. The whole Pax Vis First Legion, the highest-ranking soldiers in his Fallen Cadre. They’re four dozen.”

“Then it couldn’t have been an all-out fight as she thought.”

“Oh, it was. As you Americans say, as all get out.” His expression twists in such delicious condescension, his British accent deepening. “But the day these ‘chicken wings’, as you once so eloquently put it, can best me, is the day I turn in my ‘archangelspawn’ badge.”

“You really beat all of them?” I gape at him. I already knew he’s much more powerful than a regular angel. But all of them? Could even an archangel hold his own against a battalion of angels?

We’re talking immeasurable power here.

He exhales, the sound laden with frustration. “Not as cleanly as I would have liked.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I had to cut off an angel’s wings before his brothers backed off.”

I frown. “So what? They will grow back.”

“Wings are the only things an angel can’t grow back.”

Oh. Oh.

I have no idea how huge an offense this is in their celestial circles. But since it’s irreversible, I suspect it’s probably unforgivable.

“But if you had to do it, it means you had no other option?”

From his pitch-black frown, I know I’m right.

“Azazel’s Fallen Cadre are fanatics,” he finally says. “They would do literally anything at their master’s merest whim, let alone to avenge blasphemy against him. Azazel withdrew from the fray and let them gang up on me, not only because he knew I could vanquish him, but because I’d already lost, no matter what I did from that point onward.”

“Lost? But you just said you beat them all!”

Volcanic exasperation fills his gaze, as he grips the back of his neck, that move he makes when he’d like to punch a hole in the universe.

“Attacking him to save you, was the highest form of sacrilege to his Cadre. I compounded my unforgivable sin when I shielded you, so our fight wouldn’t disintegrate you, then flung you out of our range. I cheated their master, and them, from executing you for daring to lay a hand on him.”

So this is how I survived? Not because of whatever is inside me?

That makes far more sense. That he contained me in some forcefield so their clash didn’t turn me to ash. And he must have tossed me far enough, still enclosed it in, until the battle was over, and the healers came to collect me.

How did I even think that thing inside me protected me, when it’s still sleeping, and in another plane of existence? It couldn’t have protected my corporeal body in this one.

I lurch out of my musings to Godric saying, “…and they weren’t going to stop until I was vanquished, or they were all dead. Since I wasn’t going to stand there and let them kill me, and didn’t want to kill them all, my only remaining option was something angels consider a fate far worse than death.” His scowl suddenly sears me. This fury is all mine. “Now I have a bigger mess on my hands than that of attacking one of the Elite Fallen. For a human. And depriving him and his Cadre from their rightful retribution. I took an angel’s wings, and in our world that is a crime no celestial has ever perpetrated against another, not outside a heavenly court. And it’s all because of you. Because you’re insane.”

Guilt threatens to crumple me—until those last two words. “Me? I’m insane? I’m not the one who decided to crush someone to death, while cackling like a maniacal monstrosity from some B-rated horror movie!”

“A demon.”

I frown. “What?”

“Not ‘someone.’ A demon. It would have been good riddance.”

This time I punch him in the head. He taught me how not to break my bones punching something as hard as him.

From the way his eyes widen in disbelief, no one has ever dared box his ears before. Probably not even in the heat of battle. Another first for that Divine Dickwad, courtesy of the Abomination-Who-Shouldn’t-Exist.

His eyes now narrow, but I’m not intimidated in the least.

I yell at him as I land another punch to his chin. “I knew it! You monster! You didn’t intervene earlier because you agreed to what Azazel was doing! You would have stood by as he drove his boot into her chest and pureed her organs!”

This time, I use a Melek technique he drove me beyond endurance to perfect, intending to take him down. But I took him by surprise with the first blow. He let me have the second one. This one, he effortlessly parries, making me stumble with the unopposed momentum.

I catch myself and go after him again, and he raises an imperative hand. It makes me angrier that it almost stops me. Almost. I punch him in the other ear.

“I wasn’t standing by, since I wasn’t even in the Academy,” he grits, eyes blazing emerald. “I only came back when I felt you in danger.”

I pull back from my latest attempt to rearrange his face, hand going to my neck. “How? You didn’t have your leash on me.”

Something like bewilderment enters his eyes as his hand rises to his chest, where his tattoo is, before it evaporates, to be replaced by suspicion. One that clearly unsettles and enrages him.

Is it true, then? What I’ve been feeling? That there’s some kind of connection between us, independent of the two-way leash? And it has something to do with that rune that appeared within his tattoo? I didn’t imagine it? Did it appear because of me? And it now links us?

Was it through this inexplicable, and fiercely unwanted link, that he felt my danger? Did it also compel him to intervene, against his better judgement? Or did he come to my rescue only because he has to preserve his test subject?

Not that it matters. One fact remains. His intervention saved my life—again. And Jinny’s. And it came at a steep cost to him.

I hate being this hugely indebted to him, even if he did it for self-serving reasons. This time, it wasn’t him who put me in danger, so his motives don’t cancel my debt. I have to find some way to repay him.

But until I do, I’ll keep telling him what I think of him. “Whatever your reasons for intervening, and whatever it cost you, you’re even worse than your cousin. Yeah, Aela expressed the same prejudiced shit as we watched Azazel grind Jinny into mincemeat. You’ve all been deluding yourselves to what you really are. But never fear, I’m here to tell you the truth. You’re all a cowardly, dishonorable lot! You’re the bad guys here, God-wretch!”

By now I’m wondering why he’s standing there taking my blows and insults and accusations. He’s put me “in my place” for far less before.

As I also wonder if I see hesitation or doubt on his face, it becomes as hard as his voice. “We’ll see if you’ll continue to hold that opinion when the demon you’re defending so fiercely eats your organs while you’re still alive to repay your kindness.”

The horrifying images he paints sound like something the girl who threatened to melt my face off would do. But they still clash with those of her being indulgent and considerate, almost loving, with Sarah.

I shake my head. “She’s not all bad. And from what I’ve seen today, she’s probably better than any of you!”

Our gazes clash as we face off in silence that strains and seethes.

He’s the one who looks away first. A flash consumes his wings as he turns on his heels. “Follow me. I have to test you, see if I can find something I can report as grounds for exempting you from the Trials.”

I rush to catch up with his ridiculously long stride. “The Trials are still on?”

“Of course. They’ve been rescheduled for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? But everyone must be too shaken after what they witnessed today, probably injured from the fallout of your fight. Why not give us more time to recover?”

“It’s actually inexplicable that they gave you that long. I thought they’d resume the Trials as soon as my showdown with the angels was over. It’s why I hoped that your crazy stunt, what ended with you lying unconscious in the Sanatorium, would provide an excuse for you to miss them. But, for some reason I can’t fathom, they decided to postpone till tomorrow. I guess it was too much to hope something good would come out of this disaster.”

“Apart from being disappointed you couldn’t use said disaster to your own ends, you think they shouldn’t have postponed at all? That giving us till tomorrow was some kind of extraordinary kindness?”

“Inexplicable kindness—if it was that.”

“You don’t consider the cadets’ physical and psychological states reason for postponement?”

“Of course not. On one hand, the Trials have never been postponed, and I didn’t even think they could be. On the other, if the cadets can’t handle sustaining non-lethal injuries, and witnessing a minor conflict…”

“Minor!” I exclaim. “That was a full-blown horror movie come to life.”

He flicks me a dismissing glance. “It was indeed minor in this world they now belong to. If they can’t handle it, I don’t foresee them surviving long in this war.”

“What war? You mean the cold Eternal Battle between Heaven and Hell? Or is there something more coming?”

His incredible eyes pan down to me for a moment too long. He seems to be debating his answer, before he nods. My mouth dries to cinders.

Then he makes it even worse when he says, “But because of you, I started an internal war that might consume us all, long before the real one begins. And both of us are at the center of it all.”