2. WEN

The void feasts on my remains.

Its contentment pummels my scattered cells as it laps them up, sucks them clean of essence.

This is it. How it all ends, how I’ll always be. Alone, a part of it, forever.

This has to be that worse-than-death fate someone I no longer remember once warned me about.

If only it would quit making this horrible noise as it consumes me. So it’s happy it got me back, in such an easily digestible form, too, but does it have to be such a messy eater?

But after it stops feeding on me, the shrill sound gets even louder. And it’s no longer content, reverberating with a boundless, soundless rage. Which means something else is producing the noise.

The void tumbles me in its endless embrace, warding off the disturbance. It needs to preserve me in stasis, in eternity.

But now I know the noise is an external manifestation, I’m grateful for it. At least I am, until it grows talons. They sink into me, their pull as irresistible as the void’s. If I still had a body, they would tear it apart between them.

The strangest part is I register pain. When I should no longer feel a thing. But since I do, this might mean …

A quake goes through me as the noise blares higher, shattering the nothingness. It’s my name. Shrieked. Over and over.

“Wen, Wen! Wen!”

An unstoppable force hooks into my intangible substance then pulls, tearing me out of the void’s clutches. The void roars, a silent bellow that sunders all the realms.

But it can’t grab me back as my molecules spiral away from its grasp at the speed of light.

Sensations bombard me, dissecting my nerves down to their individual fibers, then breaking down each into their component cells. Then the process reverses, and I’m rebuilt, one atom at a time. It takes an everlasting moment of agony as my structure is reassembled, and an eternity longer before devastation recedes.

When my senses coalesce within the confines of my body once more, I realize I’m in my dorm bed. Tangled in my magical covers.

Sarah is looming over me, stricken eyes huge, their azure extra vivid in a paler-than-usual face framed by the golden halo of hair that has escaped her bunnytail. Her fingers are the steel probes sinking into my spasming muscles.

It wasn’t real. Everything Godric, and the void, did to me.

It was just a nightmare.

Or—this could be the dream, and I’m still in the void, and I’m creating this scenario as an escape from my eternal non-existence.

But if so, why do I feel like I’m dying?

“Wen, please, oh please—breathe!”

Her shriek makes me realize I’m not. It takes everything I have left to obey her.

“Sar …” I cough as air blasts my shriveled lungs open, voice wobbling as she shakes me like a rug she’s dusting. “You … can stop … shaking me … now.”

She tears her hands away, jackknifing up. “Oh, Wen, you’re—you’re okay?”

I raise a hand that feels detached, to a head that doesn’t feel screwed on. “Yeah—apart from feeling like a soda can that fell off a truck doing a hundred miles an hour.”

“Ugh, sorry.” Her eyes fill with contrition and tears as they scan me feverishly. “It’s just—you looked as if you were suffocating.”

Oh, I was. Under Godric’s phantom, burning hand.

The terrible pain, followed by the sickening numbness, when it snapped my vertebrae, are still shooting down my spine, my soul.

I shouldn’t find this strange, or anything else ever again. Not when I’m here, a human in Celestial Academy, conscripted by the archangels themselves. I’ve been attending classes and eating meals with the Nephilim, the Angel-Graced and the minority representations from every Supernatural race, with the Sword of Heaven himself as my personal trainer. All because the minor fluke of turning angel sweat into my exclusive drug turned out to be the unprecedented gift—or curse—of harvesting Angel Essence. It makes me inconceivably dangerous, and as useful—both presumably, and is why Godric dragged my ass back here on a leash, and changed my fate forever.

Now memories are flooding back into my spinning head, I remember more and more unbelievable things. Like the fact that I took on a black hole in the Imperium Trials, and won. A black hole. And that I met TheDevil. I think.

But both horrifying experiences pale into nothing next to this imaginary snuff episode.

What is it with me and imagining Godric killing me? Once with his blazing sword through the heart, and now this.

Seems I have a death wish. Another thing he’d triggered, it seems. Along with all-consuming lust, a submissive streak, and a strangulation fetish

Damn his gorgeous, Godawful feathers.

But I should have realized it was a dream. Finding him lying with me, then all over me were a dead giveaway, when that Angelhole never even touches me. If he did really kiss me, he did without laying a finger on me still. He even said that.

I didn’t touch you, White. I just kissed you.

He just kissed me. Just kissed me. As if the soul-extraction ritual he performed on me can be called “a kiss.”

After he flew away, leaving me in an agony of arousal, it’s no wonder that I spiraled into wish-fulfillment fantasies.

But I couldn’t have a proper erotic dream about that lethal wonder like any normal woman would have, could I? I had him putting me out of my misery, in a final sense.

Seems that was easier than imagining him fucking me.

It might also be what I fear would happen, if I ever fulfill my desire. Perishing under the brunt of Godric’s passion.

I mean, man of celestial steel and woman of mortal tissue? That’s probably a fatal accident waiting to happen.

Or maybe I was picking up on what he really wants to do to me …

No. It has to be the first explanation. I’m in over my head with him, with everything here. My subconscious must be going haywire with worst-case scenarios.

I’m almost certain he would have killed me in the beginning, if not for the archangels’ orders. But he no longer wants to kill me. Not since he started wanting to forge me into a weapon that might end the so-called Eternal Battle. So much had happened, and even more had changed between us, during the months since then, and until we were shoved into the Imperium Trials. Then when I was in danger of being lostthere, he tried to bring me back by giving me all his Energy, even at the price of a century-long coma and a drastic decrease in power after that. Once I returned, he was anything but murderous. Malice was not among the tempestuous emotions I felt from him last night.

Ifit was last night. I could have been out for far longer than that, and it’s why Sarah was so distraught.

“Uhh, Sar, how long have I been asleep?”

She deflates on the bed beside me. “I don’t know. Jinny just shook me awake so I’d check on you.”

It’s only then that I notice the others. My Unitas. The girls the Choosing selected as my roommates and “unity,” and whom I practically went to Hell and back with.

The memories of our Trials come crashing down on me. Pushing them away for later examination, I struggle up sitting, panning my gaze around. Seems everyone has just woken up, too.

My focus snags on Jinny first.

With her flaming-red hair in her preferred high ponytail and undulating behind her like a ponderous viper, she has her polished light mocha legs crossed on her black-satin comforter, hands on knees as if meditating. Even without transforming into a nightmarish form, like she had when Azazel had almost squashed her to death, the gorgeous monster looks deadly. I wouldn’t be surprised if she can turn into something even worse. I can just see her as a giant black widow, with massive hairy legs sticking out of her crimson hot-shorts, and eight of those flame-hued eyes spitting Hellfire. It’s impossible to pinpoint the emotion in them as they watch me and Sarah.

One thing’s for sure. She realized I was in distress, but didn’t rush to my aid herself. After I risked my life to save her from becoming demon mince under Azazel’s boot. Not to mention from being a black hole’s snack. But what else did I expect from a born and bred evil psycho like her?

Though—I’m actually surprised she didn’t leave me to suffocate, and woke up Sarah to help me. That must be her brand of demonic gratitude. She did tell me she couldn’t bear being indebted to me. She might consider us even now.

With a last glare that she returns tenfold, I move on to the other two.

Cara is making her bed, still in one of her mini-nightgowns, a lacy, teal creation that must have cost a hundred times as much as all the clothes I’ve ever stolen, for both Sarah and me.

I get glimpses of her classic bone structure among the somehow still-luxurious waves of her gleaming, burgundy hair. The way it spills over a perfectly tanned shoulder and into her deep cleavage hits me with the memory. Of Godric here, surrounded by all that scantily-clad, nubile flesh.

I stupidly taunted him if that was the reason he was prolonging his stay. As if he hadn’t seen, been offered and had had hordes of it, fully unclad.

His expression straight out laughed at me and asked: Jealous?

I admitted to myself that I was. Gnawingly so. I couldn’t stomach the comparison with the bombshells I have for roommates, not with him there.

So I’m no longer big bones dipped in a layer of sallow-skinned flesh, thanks to him, but I’m nowhere near their voluptuous perfection. I’m also in my Academy-issue gray pajamas. But so is Sarah, since we’re the only two who came to the Academy without any personal items. They’re nowhere near as unappetizing on her.

Feeling cranky that I aired my insecurity to him, my gaze moves to my largest source of the oppressive feeling. Aela, daughter of Raphael, our resident diva, and the most magnificent female I’ve ever seen. No wonder, when she’s the blonde, feminine version of Himself.

In a lilac silk cami and shorts that expose her miles of toned, polished limbs, and her masses of gold-spun hair up in a messy bun, she is presenting us with her powerful, elegant back, peering out of her window. I get the impression that, like Cara, she’s avoiding looking at me in specific. Neither of them tried to help me, either.

Maybe they realized I was only having a nightmare, and it was Sarah who panicked.

Nah. I bet I could have been having a seizure, and they would have let me suffocate on the tongue I bit off.

And to think I hoped we made progress after the Trials. After we fought an army of giant, acid-dripping, other-dimensional worms and survived only by counting on each other. Or after they trusted me to leech their Energy or Graces or whatever, to access something powerful enough to swallow that black hole. And after I ended up bringing us back here.

Would they even care if they knew I had to make a deal with the Devil himself to do it?

Not that I’d tell them or anyone else. Not until I’m sure I didn’t hallucinate it. No, not even then. If what I remember is real, Samael, as he called himself, seemed imprisoned in that Imperium Realm. As long as he remains there, he’s no danger. I see no benefit in bringing up our encounter, only a world of trouble.

I have enough of that already.

For now, it seems we’re back to square one. It was stupid to expect anything else. The Trials were extenuating circumstances, and we all did what we needed to do to survive. There was no trust on their parts, just a pragmatic decision in a hopeless situation.

Exhaling in resignation, I pat the hand Sarah has clenched over mine. Godric was right. She is different, and far stronger. The old Sarah wouldn’t be almost crushing my hand, and wouldn’t have caused the bruises I feel blossoming in my arms.

She removes her hand with a gasp, standing up to let me swing my legs over the bed.

I try to smile up at her, but my face contorts in a grimace instead. “I’m fine, I promise. I was having a nightmare. Who can blame me, right? I bet all of you had your own after what we’ve been through.”

Color rises in her cheeks. “Uh, sorry, but I—I actually had the best sleep of my life.”

I push myself up to aching, unsteady feet. “You didn’t just apologize for not having a nightmare, Sar.”

“It’s just you—you seemed so distressed, and after what you did, for all of us, I was afraid y-you were?—”

“I was nothing.” I look down into her face, relieved to find no physical evidence of our ordeal marring it. Nothing but worry for me. I force a grin that works this time. “You know me and nightmares. We’re old frenemies. Raphael himself examined me, and gave me a clean bill of health.”

Her face scrunches into an unconvinced frown. “You should still go to his Sanatorium to get checked up.”

“There’s no time to waste on such trivialities.” The frost-laced voice is Aela’s, who’s finally deeming to grace us with her even more impressive frontside.

So it was too much to expect her to like or even tolerate me. But I’ve at least earned a lower level of disregard.

I grit my teeth. “While I’m okay, your highness, it’s not trivial that my best friend is worried about me. After I tore your feathered ass out of a black hole’s grasp, no less.”

She flicks one of those elegant hands in dismissal, and I almost duck. I keenly remember them spewing that Celestial energy that barbecued dozens of monstrosities, and sent thousands more scurrying back into oblivion.

“She can worry about you, and you can investigate the repercussions of your heroics, later. We have exactly an hour to get ready. Now, excuse me. Showering is important to some of us.”

Before I can retort, Jinny hops off her bed. “Oh, no. You’re not commandeering the bathroom first, archangelspawn.”

Before Aela can take another step, Jinny blurs across our expansive quarters. In one second flat, the bathroom door slams behind her.

I almost yell, “You go, girl.”

On one hand, it’s a relief I’m not the only one antagonizing Aela. It’s no fun being her solitary bullseye. On the other, Aela lingers in there longer than the four of us combined. We always end up scrambling to divide the minutes she ungraciously leaves us in the wake of her lengthy morning routine.

Cara grabs her uniform and toiletries, and rushes to stand outside the bathroom. Aela might have healed her hands from the burns that would have crippled them, but it seems Cara won’t be courting her favor anymore. Not when we’re entering the phase where tardiness would lose her points. Her academic competitiveness, and obsession over her standing within the Academy know no bounds.

I give Sarah a gentle shove, insisting she take third place, leaving me to wrestle for fourth with the disgruntled archangelspawn.

Having no hope I’ll be anything but last as usual, I try to emulate her haughty expression. “So what can’t wait for such ‘trivial’ things as my health? Breakfast? While it’s as worthy a cause as I can think of?—”

“We’re not having breakfast.”

“What?” I sit back down before I fall, suddenly registering a hunger so acute, my stomach could be feeding on itself. “Is Azazel enforcing another fast?”

“Is food all you think about?” Aela hisses.

I want to glare at her on equal footing. But I can’t rise again, and she’s taller than me anyway.

I settle for smirking up at her. My expressions are inflammatory enough to make up for any disadvantage. “Yeah, that’s a pesky side-effect of being starved all your life. Something a pampered princess like you can’t even begin to imagine.”

Aela’s full lips thin. “I need at least three times as much food as any of you. But I don’t behave as if I’ll drop dead when a meal is postponed.”

I scoff. “Yeah. Must be nice to be born with a Celestial pedigree. Some of us have to pay in pain and degradation for every ounce of stamina and power we get.”

Her eyes darken with some intense emotion. “Being born into privilege isn’t the advantage the unprivileged imagine.”

“Boohoo, you poor, power-laden princess. You’re breaking my heart here.” She opens her mouth to retort, but I wave her off. “I don’t care what you have to say about the trials and tribulations of being born special. I do only care about food, or rather, not having it. This is worse than when Azazel withheld it before the Trials. I can’t tell when we ate last. Do you know what day it is?”

“It’s two days later than it should be,” Aela mutters, violet eyes flashing. “We returned twenty-four hours after all other cadets, then slept another day away.”

This succeeds in bringing me up to my feet. “Why are you looking at me as if I’m responsible for our delay?”

“You are. It’s whatever you did that consumed the first day, and knocked us out for the second.”

Before I can blast her ungrateful ass, she turns and walks away to her area.

As I watch her prepare her things in the ritualistic, serial-killer way of hers, I sit back down, and call out after her. “So what are we supposed to do that’s more important than breakfast?”

“We are to report to the Assembly Hall at Raziel Complex,” Aela intones without looking back.

Big of her. I didn’t actually expect an answer.

“What for?” I ask.

She tosses me an incredulous look over her shoulder. “You don’t remember?”

I don’t. I feel I’d dropped half of my memories in that realm. Memories of vital things, before, during and after the devilish encounter that I don’t fully remember, and never want to.

Aela finishes stacking her stuff and turns with an exhalation. “The Angel Amulet. Rings any bells?”

I wouldn’t have been more stunned if she’d roundhoused me in the head.

The Angel Amulet. What the angels have entrusted to me, for some inexplicable reason, before the Trials. What I was so reluctant to take, but what felt so right, so kindred once I did.

It recorded our experiences during the Trials. Then once we wear it in some kind of ceremony, it would reveal our respective Graces. I’ve been dreading what it would reveal about me, and Sarah, since neither of us is Angel-Graced.

Now there’s something even worse. Once in that Assembly Hall, I’m required to present it. And I won’t be able to.

Because Godric took it.

When my Unitas didn’t return via the Imperium Gate we entered the Trials through, like all other cadets, he manipulated his Celestial family into ordering him to take the Amulet, against the Trials’ rules. He convinced them it was their idea, and a prudent one, to examine it beforehand. They didn’t want any further irregularities about me, their pet project, to be exposed.

They didn’t suspect that he already knew what the Amulet recorded, and what he’d erase. The black hole incident. He couldn’t let anyone see how I took it on, starting with them.

When he told me all that, I was so out of it, I didn’t consider what punishment awaits me when I attend the Ceremony empty-handed. For all I know, my four-year sentence at Celestial Academy might become a forty-year stint in Pandemonium Penitentiary.

Not that it would come to that. Aela will probably kill me first.

The Amulet is the only way to reveal her Graces. Only then can she start developing them to their full potential. But I saved her life, and she’s still pissed at me for the two-day head-start everyone has on her now. If I lose her the chance of becoming one of the most powerful beings in existence, I’m toast.

I sit there, trying to control the cyclone of worst-case scenarios, and watching the girls taking turns in the bathroom. Each emerges immaculate and ready to head out. To the ceremony that will decide the direction of our lives from now on.

No biggie.

By the time I’m ready too, I still haven’t concocted a way out of this latest catastrophe, courtesy of Godawful. Again.

Feeling like I’m walking to a firing squad, I follow everyone out of our dorm—and something makes me stop at the threshold.

A whisper. A caress. To the very fabric of my essence.

Without volition, my feet take me back to my bed.

As I sit on it, Sarah realizes I’m not behind her, and runs back to me.

Concern bordering on panic fills her eyes. “If you’re not feeling up to it, please, Wen, go to the Sanatorium. I’m sure they’ll understand when we tell them why you’re not well.”

“We’re not telling them anything about what happened in the Trials.” That’s Cara, speaking up for the first time as she saunters back towards us. The accustomed venom of her upper-class NY accent is amped-up, but so is her practiced huskiness. She sounds as if she’d screamed for hours. Which isn’t far from the truth. There was a lot of frantic yelling during our encounter with the black hole. “Astaroth made it crystal clear the cadets are strictly discouraged from recounting their experiences at the Imperium Trials. I’m not getting penalized, or worse, kicked out of the Academy, if any of you blabs.”

Jinny’s eyes flare with Hellish excitement as she stops beside her. “If it gets me kicked out of this Celestial Swamp, you can bet your sweet angel-disgraced ass I’ll blab.”

“No, you won’t,” Aela bites off as she approaches, too. “Unless you want Sarah expelled and sent back to her Indenture.”

Jinny waves her away. “They won’t punish her for something I do.”

“As a being of chaos, I’m certain the basic tenets of discipline are beyond your comprehension, demon.” Aela gives her that look that can make even an archdemon like Jinny repent. “But in the Army of Heaven, just like any organized army, reward is personal, and punishment is general.”

“Even if this weren’t the case, in this Unitas business, what befalls one, befalls all,” Cara adds. “I thought you got that through your now-hornless head.”

I wince. At Cara’s jab, and Jinny’s polyphonic growl as it makes every window whine and rattle.

So Jinny is an evil bitch, but she likes Sarah. Hell, she almost gave her life in her defense back in that damn realm. It was too low a blow from Cara, referring to the traumatic loss of her horns, and in such scorn.

Cara returns Jinny’s murderous glare with her trademark disdain. “We might hate this situation, but for better or for worse, our best interests are aligned. So control your anarchic tendencies, because we’ll all pay for them.”

This makes Jinny look at Sarah, the only one she wouldn’t want paying for anything she does. Then a troubled look enters her fiery gaze. I think she just realized “blabbing” might start a chain reaction that would end in her never seeing Sarah again.

Jinny finally exhales as she looks at me. “You mean we won’t tell anyone how she?—”

“No, we won’t.” Aela cuts her off, voice almost as frightening as Godric’s. “Not anyone, under any circumstances, ever. Do you understand?”

Jinny smirks at her. “Calm your feathers. It’s not like I’d relish immortalizing the tale of Wen and the Black Hole.”

Aela folds her arms over her ample chest, a Godric-worthy scowl knitting her brow. “Excuse me if I don’t count on your reluctance to give a human credit for saving you. Everything that happened there is a secret we’ll all take to our graves. Swear it. All of you.”

As each of us mumbles her version of a pledge, I’m stunned to realize how right Godric had been.

He’d said he’d discount their testimony if they revealed what happened. But he’d been certain he wouldn’t need to.

While the others continue arguing the finer points of our pact, the caressing compulsion has me reaching below my pillow. And my hand closes around something that feels as old as the universe, as cold as the void, and as kindred as my own being.

The Amulet.

Godric brought it back!

Which means he could have watched me writhe in the grip of that erotic snuff dream I had of him …

What the Hell am I thinking? Embarrassment and humiliation should be the last of my worries. That semi-Celestial lout returned the Amulet, making the situation even worse. Now not only me might be punished, but Sarah, too!

Once we’re outed as neither Angel-Graced nor Demon-Blighted, they might expel us. They’ll probably bind us first, with a curse like the one binding Jinny’s. That would burn us in eternal flames if we ever expose anything about the Academy, even by mistake. Or they might mind-wipe us into the mental capacity of a turnip. Or worse.

“I would leave you behind—” Aela’s melodic voice scratches a trail of aggravation down my nerves. “But the Amulet will work only with all of us present. So move your lazy arse, human. You’ve made us late enough.”

“You’re welcome for your life.” I toss at her receding back. “You ungrateful?—”

“Please, Wen, let’s get this over with.”

Wincing at Sarah’s imploring glance and tone, I take her outstretched hand. I wait for her to turn away from me, before stuffing the Amulet into my pocket.

As we follow a step behind the others, I can only hope her words aren’t prophetic.

That we won’t get all this, including our very lives, over with.