12. WEN

Godric turns to me, urgency radiating from him. “For the love of your Sarah, White, you will shut up. From this point until I tell you otherwise, you will say and do absolutely nothing, and will let me handle this.”

As I nod shakily he takes off into the air like a missile, the backdraft of his wings knocking me off my feet this time.

Landing on my ass, I stare up after him as he intercepts the angels two hundred feet above me. From the way they all stop, it seems he caught them in some telekinetic net.

But surely he can’t hold all of them back for long. I can see them struggling to escape his influence, and once they do …

Possibilities flood my mind, each worse than the last. In the worst one, I see angel ichor and body parts rain down on me.

Thankfully, the massacre doesn’t come to pass. Whatever he said to them must have been very convincing, since they cut short their struggle against his restraints, and their pursuit of me. The moment he lets them go, they zoom back where they came from.

I clamber up to my feet as he lands and beckons for me to follow. “Time to face the aftermath of another of your delightful escapades, White.”

Any other time, I would have snarked his gorgeous ass off. Now I only stagger in his wake, dread mounting with every step.

From our surroundings, he tossed me dozens of miles from Raziel Complex. At least he does that fast-forward trick of his, taking us back into the Assembly Hall in under five minutes.

As we pass through the Cadre angels’ rows of antipathy and malevolence, I wish I could burrow into his side. Settling for the shelter of his shadow and the menace of his presence, I feel positively angelicidal toward the fallen hunks of shit. They’re blocking my view with their sea of their wings.

It’s only when we clear them, and I climb the stage behind Godric that I see Sarah. She’s standing where she did before all this started, looking paler than usual. Apart from that, she does look okay. I’d trusted what he’d told me, but the relief of seeing it with my own eyes adds a tremor to the unsteadiness of my legs.

More than ever, I have to believe she has something inside her that makes this Academy the place for her to be. And whatever it is, it became much more powerful after the Trials. The old Sarah wouldn’t have recovered from such a bang to the head this quickly. Or at all.

Reassured, at least about her, I seek out Jinny.

The thick, long waves of her flaming hair, which she’d left loose today, are obscuring her chest, and the burn the Amulet must have caused her. She’s standing between Aela and Cara, and they’re clearly the only thing keeping her on her feet. That surprises me, since I thought they’d leave her collapsed at theirs after her latest ordeal. It seems they’ve decided to take our USTB seriously.

I meet her gaze, unable to subdue my alarm at how wan she looks. She only gives me a weak yet defiant smirk. It somehow steadies me.

Godric stops, and I dare a look beyond the barricade of his body. The Committee are still standing a dozen feet behind Astaroth, with another squadron of Cadre angels behind them. They’re all looking at me as if I’m an abomination. Which according to Godric, I am.

Then I get a clear shot at the ground at last, and my heart convulses. The angel I took down is no longer there.

Did they take him to the Sanatorium? Or did they remove the body?

Expecting an interrogation, maybe an arrest, I’m startled when Astaroth ignores me and Godric, and beckons to Sarah.

She hesitates, her eyes darting to me filled with agitation bordering on panic. She didn’t see me cutting down that angel, but she must have gathered enough to know whatever I did would have terrible consequences.

I nod to her with as reassuring a smile as I can muster, urging her on. Might as well get this over with.

Once she’s in front of Astaroth, he puts the Amulet over her head. It lights up as soon as it rests on her chest.

But it’s not a sudden blast like Aela’s and Cara’s. It’s a hypnotic, purest white light that fills the Hall. Like Jophiel’s, it permeates everything it touches, making it seem to glow from within. Yet it’s so different, in texture and effect. I feel as if it has bathed me on a cellular level in the illumination of her very being.

The laser circle in the middle of the Khamsa is also missing, and no Grace runes stand out like they did with the others. The glow of the Amulet is homogenous and ethereal, like a white sun shining from another realm. When the light finally subsides, a white gem, indistinct and glowing, appears on the middle finger, above Aela’s golden one.

Snapping my gaze back to Astaroth, to catch his reaction, I find him exchanging a glance I can’t understand with Godric.

I’m dying to know what it means, but he’s already looked away and is removing the Amulet. His face is carefully expressionless as he says, “You don’t seem to have a specific Grace, Cadet Conrad. All thirteen appear of equal, yet unquantifiable intensity.”

The Committee buzzes at his back at yet another unprecedented result. He spares them a calm glance that ends their discussion, then turns back to Sarah.

“I’ll have to refer to the Celestial records for even remotely similar cases. Meanwhile, we might have to resort to more testing. Some Graces might stand out by a small degree. If not, you might be in need of special training to take into consideration your unique situation.”

Sarah stares up at him as if she didn’t understand a word he said.

With one of his suave smiles, which for once blares uncertainty to me, he gestures for her to resume her place.

Then he beckons to me.

Sarah grabs my hand as we pass each other, giving it a sweaty squeeze, making my reassuring smile tremble off my face.

As I stop before Astaroth, I snap a glance at Godric. He gives me an imperceptible nod. He has my back. From the first time I felt he no longer wanted to kill me, he always had, in every way.

Ijust have to not fuck up again.

As I turn my eyes to Astaroth, I see his are on Godric again. Within the same second, they’re back on me, and there is something in them, something even deeper than the bottomless darkness of his irises. As if he knows a secret. Sarah’s? Godric’s? Or is it mine?

Everything empties from my mind the moment he places the Amulet over my head and it touches my chest.

It’s like a gong as large as the Earth goes off inside me. It shatters something inside me. Some dam. Some limit. One that should have remained undisturbed.

Feeling no longer in touch with my body, I don’t know if I react outwardly. Inwardly, I writhe and wail as the void within me yawns wider.

Before it swallows me whole, something clings to me, a compulsion against the hurricane of its feeding frenzy.

Then I hear it. Him.

Come back to me.

The pull of the void is irresistible, its greed unstoppable, but his call is even stronger. It makes me want to fight, to find myself again, so I can go back to him.

Always back to him.

I tear myself out of its shredding grasp, and crash back into my own senses.

I find my eyes wide open, and staring down into—my eye.

It’s jutting out in the middle of the Khamsa hand, covering the Grace rune dial, but not the newly-formed gems. A crimson one has appeared on the last of the three middle fingers, no doubt Jinny’s.

But instead of getting my own gem, too, I get this disembodied eye. Of course. I’m the anomaly, after all.

It’s the most unsettling thing, looking at a part of me, that’s looking back under its own volition. And I’m certain it’s my eye. My iris, actually, as I now know it to be.

All my life, I had no idea it looked like that. I’ve always avoided looking at my reflection. When I did, it was in terrible lighting and age-stained mirrors, where I only saw a distorted approximation of what I looked like. I always thought I had black eyes.

I got my first clear view of myself in that bathroom, on my first day in the Academy, and realized they were the darkest blue instead. That day I thought they looked like the night sky. They even had flecks like the stars, along with flickers of something that seemed about to ignite.

At the time, I decided I was seeing things that weren’t there. That seemed plausible, after the tumultuous night and day I’d had at Godric’s hands. But I wasn’t being far-fetched then. I actually see all that and more in the reflection of my eye as it bores back into me. Way, way more.

Then I realize why. Because the eye isn’t mine. Or isn’t only mine.

It’s also the void’s.

Shock almost uproots my heart as it stares back at me in its endless lifelessness and voraciousness, studded with pinpoints of light, those of all the life it had consumed throughout the eons. Stars. Galaxies. Universes.

I begin to shake, and a burst of azure flares below it, staining its fathomlessness with its vividness, and exposing the ancient veins of its gluttony, a catacomb of eternity.

My heart stutters as glowing spots start oozing up around the Amulet’s periphery like multi-hued lava, sixteen in all, alternating crimson, gold, teal and white. Then fumes start rising from the cardinal directions, in the same four colors.

Suddenly, they brighten and braid together, forging into an undulating laser that blasts into my chest.

I cry out as the ribbons of power shoot to every cell in my body, and irradiate every recess of my being.

The absolute pain of it, the sheer delight are transfiguring. Or they tear apart my wrapping, and reveal what has always been hidden inside. Deep, deep, deep inside.

For a moment of forever I’m dismantled, scattered, everywhere and nowhere. Becoming everything and nothing.

Nothing.

Then it all shatters and the return to the confines of my body and senses, is like before, a brutal blow. This time, I find myself staring into eyes as dark as the abyss.

But they’re no longer mine or the void’s. They’re Astaroth’s. And they look as shocked as I feel.

Blinking, I look around and find his same expression covering every face in the Hall.

All but Godric’s.

I suddenly yelp as something icy burns me. The Amulet!

It feels as if it’s trying to corrode itself into my chest wall.

Astaroth rushes to take it off, and I gape at it.

It looks as if it has charred—and frozen.

Silence reigns for endless moments, as if no one is breathing. As if all hearts have stopped.

Still staring at me like he would at the end of everything, Astaroth finally rasps, “You’re a Null.”