Chapter 45

The eerie absence of sound envelops me.

I wish it will spare me hearing Sarah’s agony as she dies. That I’ll remain in the darkness behind my closed lids until I follow. For I do know she’ll die first.

Though Jinny and I are shielding her, those monstrosities will target her first. She’s been the one they wanted from the start. We’re extra food. She’s the main course.

Even now, with death oozing toward us, my mind races with questions.

Why? Why Sarah? What is it about her they crave? It can’t be only fear, since I was terrified at the start, and they didn’t target me.

Theories rattle in my mind, even when they’re futile, even as my last wish is thwarted. The selective sound transmission of this place means I continue to hear Sarah’s sobs of terror, and the others’ moans of pain and depletion.

Suddenly, I want to hear something else. Godric’s voice. Just one last time. Saying my name. What he never said.

But I’d take anything. Even a ”Move your scrawny arse, White” will do.

What I hear is a mighty whoosh, and my lids light up with crimson.

Can it be? He’s come to save me, again?

Jerking with insane hope, my eyes snap open, my heart almost uprooting itself—only to plummet with crushing disappointment.

Not him. Not him.

It’s Aela, her golden wings ablaze. She looks more like a phoenix than a nephilim.

But—what is she doing back here? Come to watch us die?

I raise my head, gulping down a tearing breath. When I release it, I’ll scream all the filth in existence at her. I’ll roar her pathetic, low-life truth. I need to incense this arrogant bitch so she’ll come closer. Then I’ll yank the fucking Essence out of her…

I choke on my breath. Sh-she is coming closer. Swooping down towards me, feet first, fast as a missile. She’s going to…to…

A horrifying, gelatinous crack reverberates like a gunshot in the stillness. The sound slices through my spine. I can’t move, can’t breathe…

Did-did she just…

A creature slams on top of me. From its angle, it’s been looming over Sarah. Its maw is open, pouring liquefying goo over her arms-covered head.

Screeching, I explode up to catch the nightmare-hued sludge before it hits her. This much will eat through my hands. I don’t care. Those things, and Aela, won’t get to her until I’m dead.

But I can’t catch it all. Or any of it. It’s spilling like water through my fingers and drenching Sarah.

Shrieks of rage and futility shred my throat, until I realize—the gunk isn’t burning me. Or Sarah. And that monster—it’s dead. In two pieces. That must be Aela’s doing, the crack I heard. She literally snapped it in half.

I swing my head around, looking for her—and see two dozen more creatures converging on us from every side. Before I can shout a warning, Aela flings out her arms, hurling jagged bolts of golden light.

The creatures explode, pelting us with cold slabs of fetid flesh.

Jinny and Cara echo my nauseated cry. Sarah remains cowering on the ground beneath us, shaking apart with silent sobs.

Aela flies up again, her wings spread wide and emitting a blinding radiance that conquers the pervasive gloom. All the creatures that have been oozing in the distance in their hundreds, or thousands, start shrieking. I barely see their retreat as they clot back into the fabric of this nebulous place.

Then they’re gone. Just like that.

Aela lands soundlessly, folding her wings. With another flash, they’re gone.

I scramble off Sarah just as Jinny does, and Cara sits up. We exchange depleted, wary looks before panning dazedly around. We’re half buried in the carcasses, body parts and ashes of the horrific creatures we’ve killed, each in her own way. Though I mostly knocked out mine, before the others finished them off.

As if we agreed, me and Jinny crawl to drag Sarah into a monster-mess-free spot.

Her arms are still covering her head, so spastically, I have to apply force to remove them. Her eyes are squeezed shut, her lips quaking on fractured breaths. The creature’s postmortem goo—which doesn’t burn like its feeding one—is covering her head and arms and back. Apart from that, she looks unharmed.

I stroke her hair, removing as much tar-like slime as I can. “It’s all right, Sarah. They’re gone. You’re okay.”

“We killed them all.” Jinny runs a soothing hand down her sticky back as she, too, scoops gunk off her.

Sarah’s lashes flutter, then her eyes open, reddened, their azure too bright as she looks brokenly up at me.

I force a trembling smile as we help her sit up. “You’re fine. It’s over.”

“You!” Aela’s furious hiss makes us all jerk.

It takes a moment to realize she’s stabbing a finger at Sarah, not me.

“You pull your weight around here, human,” Aela growls. “You don’t get to cower and indulge in a panic attack when things get nasty. I’m not playing guardian to your damsel in distress again.”

Still shaking, Sarah only nods and hangs her head.

I don’t think she’s ever directed a word at Aela. Even when she said she wasn’t going without me, she wasn’t addressing her, just stating her decision. She talks a mile-a-minute with Lorcan, doesn’t find any difficulty talking to our professors. Or even Godric, who stares down at her as if she’s some sort of talking pet. Hell, I heard she even dared talk in class to Azazel.

But for some reason, Aela has always struck her dumb.

I heave up to my feet, shielding Sarah as I glare at Aela. “Sarah isn’t a pampered-from-birth, supremely-trained archangelspawn with powers at her literal fingertips like you.”

Aela swings her volcanic ire to me. “You’re not, either, and I saw you fighting. To my shock, you far more than held your own.”

“Thanks to Godric’s training,” I grit. “And then she’s always been the brains in our outfit.”

Aela flings a contemptuous glance between me and Sarah. “Unless she wants those brains splattered all over this—nothingness, she better put the training the Academy has been affording her to use in situations that need brawn.”

“It’s not like you put yourself in danger or even broke a sweat to help her out,” I snap. “You just landed on this thing, then crackled and glowed like some on-the-fritz celestial lightbulb for a minute. So stop your whining, you spoilt, heavenly brat!”

Aela’s jaw muscles bunch and her eyes start to emit that amazing, scary golden light. “You will watch how you speak to me, human.”

“Or what, archangelspawn?” I square off with her, then another thought strikes me. I can’t believe it wasn’t the first thing that did. “And how dare you complain at all, you—deserter!”

Her eyes round, turning a glowing purple. “What?”

I limp to crowd her personal space, poke a finger into her ample chest. “You took off as soon as those things showed up! You left us fighting them alone for what must have been three hours!” Judging by the state of my exhaustion, the same as at the end of Godric’s Phase One. “We could have all been long dead by the time you deemed to come back! Whatever the reason you decided to come back. So don’t you dare behave as if you rode to our rescue!”

“I hate to say this, but I’m with Wen on this.” Cara rises to stand beside me, voice and face racked with pain, hands still curled at her chest. “You’re the only one who had access to some of her powers already, and could have done what you just did from the start. I might end up l-losing my hands—and it’s all because you left us!”

“What those two said, archangelspawn,” Jinny drawls, her usually coppery complexion ashen, as if her hellfire is depleted. It probably is, after firing it nonstop for a couple of hours. Apart from that, she seems back to normal. Her regenerative powers must rival Godric’s. She now completes our trio of accusation around Aela, even using my name for her and her cousins. “These things weren’t targeting me, but I made myself a target standing between them and the others, because I take this Unitas business seriously. But because you weren’t here to ‘pull your weight,’ as you just accused Sarah, I got depleted. A minute more, and you would have gotten rid of me like you wanted to yesterday.”

“I didn’t want to get rid of you!” Aela exclaims.

Jinny waves a bored hand. “Oh, you did. I would want to get rid of you, too, so don’t sweat it. You just got cold feet about being the direct cause for my death, and theirs, too. So don’t expect thanks because you worried about your own test results and standing within the Academy, and decided to save us at the last moment.”

Aela’s frown deepens as she glares from one to the other. “Have you all gone insane with fear, or is this place warping your minds? I was gone for mere minutes. I had to see what we were up against from an altitude, and where these things were coming from.”

“That’s the story you’ll tell back at the Academy?” Jinny scoffs. “That you flew up to assess the situation, like the good little general that you are, and we all lost our minds in your absence, and imagined everything?”

“Oh, yeah?” That’s Cara, any remaining awe she had of Aela evaporating under the brunt of anger and dread over her hands. “How are you going to explain all those creatures we killed? We killed hundreds while you hid away. Or are you going to say you killed them all?”

I smirk at them. “She probably counted on not saying anything, since the Academy discourages cadets from recounting their Trials.” I swing my venomous glare at her. “But you miscalculated, Princess. We’re telling them everything.”

Aela growls. Actually growls. Like a lioness about to lash out.

From the way Cara and Jinny take a step back, they must have felt my same surge of fright. We’re enraging a nephilim who can cut us all in half. And we just gave her reason to do it, to silence us.

The one thing that makes me stand my ground is sensing Aela’s confusion. She’s more bewildered and frustrated than incensed and cornered.

Her next words prove she isn’t on the same page as the rest of us at all. “What the Inferno are you all talking about? I was gone only a few minutes! Three or four at most. And I know you fought these creatures, I saw it from above. Though…” She stops, stares at us, eyes glazing. “…it was a—very long fight, I remember now. But how…?”

She falls silent, frowning again, but this time it seems as if her vision is turning inward. She looks as if she’s afraid she’s going insane.

As the other two girls glare up at her, thinking she’s pretending, my mind races.

A whole scenario forms as I step between them. “Hey, guys, I think I know what happened here. This place is messing with us. It must have identified Aela as the strongest of us, the one capable of ending this test prematurely. So it trapped her in a different level or whatever, where she couldn’t judge the passage of time. What felt like minutes to her, was hours for us.”

“That’s a cute theory,” Jinny says, sounding bored. “What’s with taking the archangelspawn’s side all of a sudden, Nothing?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side, Demonspawn. That’s the one thing that makes sense.”

Jinny gets in my face lazily. “What I said makes the most sense. She left us to die, then got cold feet, probably because she realized she might need us if there are other tests. She might have also feared they were observing all this somehow. I did keep feeling a presence watching us every now and then.”

Now that she mentioned it, I did feet the brush of some awareness. Vast and timeless. Like what I’ve been feeling surveilling me for the past two months. But I was too busy fighting for our lives to fully register it. But something was there. Maybe still is.

“Bottom line is,” Jinny says, like an attorney summing up a murderer’s motives. “She worried there’d be evidence of her crime, and probably feared it could deprive her of joining their blasted Army. So she cooked up this alternate timeline story to absolve herself of any nefarious intentions, and put on the last-minute light show to look like a hero.”

I twist my lips at her. “Seems you missed your vocation as a writer, O Daughter of Lilith.” Jinny’s eyes flare lava. But I feel more acrimony directed at her mother than me for mentioning her. Yeah, more Supernatural family strife for me to use, if I ever get the chance to. I scoff. “Never too late, though. If you survive this Academy, get this attempted-murder mystery published in your nefarious Court. It would break the Infernal Charts. But, while the angel-hating denizens of Hell would eat it up, there’s one major plot hole in your story. Aela is telling the truth. As she believes it. So my ‘theory’ is a way better explanation.”

Jinny scoffs. “You’re telepathic now, White?”

I smirk at her. “Just a human who lied all my life to survive. We established I know a liar when I see one. This here Princess of Feathers? She can’t lie to save her life.”

Another growl issues from Aela. “Say one more word about me as if I’m not here, and I will knock you both out. It will rid me of your incessant bickering.”

We snap our gazes to Aela. She means it.

As if agreeing we’d rather remain conscious, we hobble away from each other.

Aela exhales. “I now realize how dangerous this place is, if it can mess with my mind.”

“That’s why it’s dangerous?” Cara whimpers. “Not because it spewed a million giant, acid-vomiting worms that m-mutilated us, before almost making us their next meal?”

Aela blinks at Cara, as if seeing her for the first time since she returned. Then she flicks a gesture at her hands. “Let me see those.” Cara gapes at her. “I’m Raphael’s daughter.” Cara still looks uncomprehending. Aela exhales her impatience. “The Healer? Ring any bells?”

Cara’s eyes widen with such vulnerability. “Y-You mean you have healing powers like his?”

“Oh, nowhere as powerful. At least for now. But I can heal the worst of the damage.”

“So I’ll still have scarred, useless hands,” Cara moans.

Unmoved by Cara’s pain and desperation, Aela shrugs. “Possibly. I won’t know until I examine you. Now, your hands?”

With a sob, Cara stumbles closer. Her face twists in agony as she lowers her burnt-raw hands, forcing them open with a cry.

Aela holds her own hands over them, and they start glowing. The glow looks like her destructive energies and what fuels her amazing wings. All the range of silvers and golds, but entwining with the purple/violet hues of her flaring eyes.

“Those creatures’ secretions are more corrosive than napalm,” Aela murmurs. “It’s proof that you are already way beyond human that your hands didn’t melt right off. You only have second and third degree burns, and muscle damage. But your nerves and tendons are intact.”

This was her diagnosing Cara’s condition? Holy CAT scan! Literally.

I look down at my own hands, find remnants of the same feeding slime that burned Cara’s hands. It did burn mine, too, but they’re almost healed now.

Sticking them behind my back, I wipe them on my butt. I don’t want them to wonder why I didn’t suffer the same injuries. I can pretend it’s my Grace powers kicking in, but I’d rather hide my vacillating healing feature for now. Now it has activated in Godric’s absence, I no longer understand how it works myself.

As for the gallons they belched all over me, I have the same alibi as the others, our weapon-proof uniforms. They’re made to withstand anything from human bullets to demon fire and Fae blasts. They did protect our bodies, but at the cost of severe damage. Mine looks like it’s fresh out of an incinerator.

Cara’s shriek makes me and Jinny jump.

“W-What are you doing?” Cara struggles to pull her hands away. But though Aela isn’t holding them, they’re trapped within her light.

Totally unfazed by the other girl’s agony, Aela frowns at her. “Stop squirming, angel-graced, or I will put you out during the treatment.”

“J-just tell me what’s happening,” Cara sobs raggedly.

Aela exhales, as if it’s such an imposition to explain herself to others. “You do have supernatural healing abilities, but left to their own devices, at this level of damage, they’re already taking shortcuts in their effort to restore you quickly. Such hastiness has a haphazard component, one that I’m stopping, otherwise, it will leave you with scarring, and loss of function. I’m arresting your own abilities until I supply them with order and a perfect pattern to follow, along with the correct healing spark, so they can complete the process properly. Satisfied?”

Cara nods shakily, tears streaming down her trembling face.

There’s total silence from then on, apart from Cara’s agonized moans.

I bet even Jinny breathes again when Aela’s light goes out, and she steps away from Cara with a nod. “It’s done. You should be fine soon.”

“Th-thank you,” Cara chokes as she stares down at her half-healed hands, her shuddering cheeks drenched. “Oh, Aela, you’re amazing!”

Something flits in Aela’s eyes. Embarrassment, discomfort, even a little shyness? This paragon of perfection isn’t used to receiving thanks? Or praise?

Nah.

“Aela was right.”

I whirl around at Sarah’s rasp. Finding her struggling to her feet, I race Jinny to her side. As we support her, our gazes meet above her head, and I bet she sees my guilt as I see hers.

After we made sure she was okay, we confronted Aela and all but forgot about her.

She sways between us, and I squeeze her hand. “Take it easy, sweetheart.”

She shakes her head. “Aela was right to be angry at me.”

“Oh, no she wasn’t!” Jinny growls.

As we both visually dagger the nephilim for making Sarah feel guilty about having a panic attack, Sarah insists, “No, no, she was. Just not the way she thought. I think I figured out what this test was all about. And maybe what to expect next.”