23. WEN

Reading the fallen’s intentions, too, Sarah stands up, hands fisted, lips thinned. “I’m coming with Cadet White.”

The fallen’s eyes target her, their pupils glowing coals among the Heavenly blue. “You’re going nowhere, cadet. You’ve already undergone your assessment and allocation.”

A hardness I’ve never seen darkens her azure gaze. “There’s no law against accompanying a friend to hers. I’m coming.”

The fallen turns to her fully, gaze baleful, pose intimidating. “You will not make another move, or say one more word. This is an order. By my higher status, you are bound to obey.”

“As you are bound to obey, when I order you to stand down.”

The bass male voice, full of mayhem and nightmares, reverberates in my hollow chest, deepening my numbness.

It’s not him. It’s Gideon.

Sarah’s confrontational posture sags. She would have taken the fallen on, but is still relieved she didn’t have to.

A wave of dismay and hatred crosses the fallen’s perfect face, before he wipes it of expression as he turns to the larger male. “What is the meaning of this, nephilim?”

“It means your services are no longer required,” says a sultry, feminine voice. “We’ll escort Cadet White.”

My eyes drag to the speaker, finding Tory prowling closer, managing to make her Second-Year charcoal uniform look regal.

With her raven, segmented ponytail swishing behind her like the tail of a stalking lioness, she parts the Pax Vis angels with a flare of her purple-palette wings. She stops before the fallen, tall enough to drill her steel-hued challenge into him on the same level.

If anything, I think she intimidates him more than Gideon. I wouldn’t blame him. If ever there were a personification of a goddess of the hunt and war, this wonder woman is it.

The fallen recovers from the one-two nephilim combo, and tries to stand his ground. “This is highly irregular.”

Gideon’s bronze wings rise at his back. “Are you contesting my higher status, fallen?”

Tory glares at Gideon, then at the angel. “And mine?”

That’s news to me, that a cadet can outrank a full-fledged, elite soldier around here. Seems being an archangelspawn makes you cut the line from the day you’re born.

And to think Godric once told me there’s no nepotism on the Celestial side. No wonder the other races hate them. It’s also clear their own parent race resents the Hell out of them most.

Murder blooms in the fallen’s eyes, but he grudgingly bows his head. “Gideon, Son of Azrael, Ashtorath, Daughter of Michael, by the Celestial Laws governing the Army of Heaven, I recognize your status. In light of your authority, and at your express request, I hereby submit the sacred task of delivering Cadet White before Lord Azazel and the Grace Development Congress, with all the honor and consequences attached to the responsibility. As it has been professed, let it be recognized.”

“Duly noted and acknowledged,” Gideon intones, as if declaring a judgment in court. “Dismissed.”

With a glare that promises he would mutilate and murder Gideon if given the chance, the fallen bows again and turns away.

“Twat.” Tory tosses her ponytail over her shoulder, smirking at his receding, winged back.

“Wanker,” Gideon adds, his tone still solemn, his demeanor noble.

I’m sure the fallen heard them. Every feather of his wings shivers, probably the equivalent of goosebumps. I bet he would have turned and zapped them, if he weren’t certain he’d lose, big time.

The Pax Vis angels glare between their wings back at Gideon and Tory on their superior’s behalf.

Tory gives them a gracious head tilt. “Knobheads.”

Gideon nods in calm agreement. “Arseholes.”

If I could, I would have laughed. I would have also stored this demonstration of dissension within the Army of Heaven for future investigation and use. I would have admitted that of all the races here, I have a definite bias for the Nephilim.

That they remind me of Godric would have been enough. But Tory and Gideon—even when I can’t figure out the first’s motives, and am sure the second’s are nefarious—have become favorites in their own right. They’re the only nephilim beside Lorcan who don’t treat me like “demon droppings.”

For now, they saved me from Azazel’s nazis. I can’t bring myself to wonder why, or feel grateful.

Tory looks down at me as if I’m the stray cat she’s fond of, and she found me banged up in a dumpster. “I would ask how you’re holding up, but you look like I might need to hold you up.”

“You won’t. Let’s get this over with.”

The moment I shuffle past her and Gideon, I stumble. My shaky hands shoot out, grabbing the nearest thing. It’s Gideon, or rather his Praetorian Guard top.

His hands clasp my arms, steadying me, and when I meet his gaze, it’s tinged with an off-guard concern.

Then his eyes are superimposed by the eyes filled with emerald conflict, and the memory of touching Godric for the first time flares in my mind.

It was on the angelic jet on the way to the Divining. I grabbed him just like that to save myself from face-planting.

He only held his hands away as if touching me would taint him, and said, “Next time, just fall down.”

Always the Godawful bastard. The Angelhole I can’t seem to live without. I would take anything, even a return to that initial loathing and antipathy, if only he’d come back to me.

“I can come, too, right?” Sarah asks as I step away from Gideon, supporting me on the other side.

Gideon looks across at her, as if noticing her for the first time, and his incredible turquoise eyes flare with something unreadable.

Then he gives her what I assume is one of his knee- and panty-melting smiles. “Would you let us stop you, when you wouldn’t let Azazel’s goons? When we’re the lesser evil, and where you’re concerned, no evil at all?”

Sarah blushes, her eyes darting to mine. Previously, I would have told him to lay off the auto-seduction schtick, and hold his testosterone. Now, I only shrug.

If I expected her to chicken out, as the old Sarah would have, the new one answers his smile with a whopper of her own, guileless and confident at once. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Welcome to the rescue party, Cadet Conrad.” Tory grins at her, the jumble of emotions she bestows on me nowhere in sight. She thinks Sarah’s great, pure and simple. “Only until we deliver her to the chambers of the Congress, though. She has to go in alone.”

Sarah nods, the same clear and bright emotions filling her eyes for Tory. “At least she’s safe until then. I’m sure that fallen would have forced her to defend herself, so he’d have an excuse to hurt her.”

“Not that he should have bothered. He could have hurt her just by breathing hard.” Gideon’s gaze skims over me as we exit Ariel Hall, his disapproval as sharp as a slap across the face. One I don’t feel at all. “All this because Godric left for a couple of weeks?”

“He disappeared,” I mumble. “And can’t be reached or found, you unfeeling lummox.”

His laugh is delighted. “You must lend me your verbal abuse codex. I’m in need of brushing up on my own repertoire.” Then a frown overtakes his smile as he shakes his head in disgust. “Did he have you on a regimen of Celestial elixirs and magical protein powder, and you’re wasting away now his supply is cut?”

“What about those illicit experiments we heard about? In Grace replication and transfusion?” Tory pipes up. “It’s something he would do. He could have been transfusing her with dupes of his Graces, like farmers inject chickens with hormones to multiply their muscle and fat mass. Her improvement was too much, too fast.” Tory flicks a gesture over my scrawny-again body between them. “Now whatever he had her on is fading from her system, she’s deflating to her original pathetic form.”

For the next twenty minutes, as we walk through nodes, they come up with ever more ludicrous explanations for my condition. None even in the same universe as the real ones.

Not that it surprises me. They can’t realize my true need of Godric’s training and presence, and the impact of its loss and his absence, because they have no idea about my real powers, and the void.

But what really hurts is the rest of it. Beyond their theories about my physical condition, they think my mental and emotional states are some kind of chemical or magical withdrawal. They can’t even imagine it has anything to do with him. They’d probably laugh if I told them it’s all fear for him, need for him, for himself.

I bet they’d be flabbergasted if they learned of the lengths I’ve gone to for mere news of him. Or if I told them I’d stop at nothing, and pay anything, including my own life, to get him back, safe and whole. Or that he’d done the same for me.

It’s inconceivable to them that anyone can develop emotions at all, let alone such consuming ones, for him. They don’t consider him worth my allegiance and my turmoil. Like everyone else, they think he can only inspire the ugliness of envy, fear, hatred and lust.

But I don’t bother correcting them. It would take words I don’t have, to explain everything between us, everything that I feel for him. And anyway, if I can one day wrap my own head around the complexity of it all, they wouldn’t be the ones I’d tell. I doubt I’d even tell Sarah. I would only want to tell him.

But if he never comes back, what I feel will just have to remain an unarticulated secret that will never be shared, because the one to share it with is no longer there.

After they exhaust their theories, silence falls over our quartet. I’m thankful for the reprieve as they all seem to retreat into their own thoughts.

As I start to hope no one will say anything more until we reach our destination, Gideon looks down at me. “I heard what you did.”

“We heard,” Tory snaps.

I sigh. These two are always bickering like siblings born “on top of each other’s heads” as the demons say.

“So, a Null, eh?” Gideon elaborates.

I exhale. “News sure travels slow around here.”

Gideon huffs a chuckle. “Normally, the Celestial grapevine is the fastest in all the realms. But everything has been irregular, as that fallen said, where you’re concerned. The delay in your return from the Trials led to your solitary Ceremony, so only the Committee and the fallen witnessed your demonstration. Seems it was decided to keep the news secret, until they knew what to do with you.”

“And now they know?” I ask, wishing he’d say no, that this is just a preliminary session.

It would mean they haven’t given up on Godric’s return.

Any rickety hope crumbles as he nods. “Apparently.”

Gulping down an expanding lump of agitation, I croak, “So everyone heard? Weird. No one looked at me differently at breakfast.”

Tory gives me a smug look. “It’s because no one else heard.”

“It’s only us ‘archangelspawn’ in the know.” Gideon wiggles the perfect arches of his bronze eyebrows at me. “For now. It’ll come out soon enough.”

“Then we expect all sorts of interesting developments,” Tory adds, miming an explosion with her hands.

I groan. “Whatever.”

“You know, Witty,” Gideon muses. “I’m now kicking myself that I didn’t figure it out first.”

“How could you have, you deranged peacock?” Tory grumbles. “There was no way you could have deduced she’s a Null, when her kind has been extinct for thousands of years.”

“I could have, because I’m second only to Metatron himself as a historian. And from that first time I saw her on Godric’s leash, I felt something within her. Like a reverse charge to everything around her.” That’s a lot like how Jinny described it on our private channel during the Trials. “If I had enough time and opportunity to observe her, I’m confident I would have worked it out.”

“There are no boundaries to your conceit, are there, ‘Giddy’?” Tory teases him with my nickname for him. “It’s a larger stretch than your ego to think you could have worked out that Nulls could exist again, or to imagine the first one would also do the impossible, and come back in human form.”

“How do you know she’s the first one?” Gideon tugs her ponytail, and she lashes him with it across the face. He only laughs. “She could just be the first one Godric stumbled upon.”

My dulled focus sharpens, cleaving through the fog in my brain. That’s something I should have considered.

Godricshould have.

What if I’m not the only one? Maybe there are more Nulls, and Worse-than-Nulls roaming the world. That Apocalypse could have triggered dozens, hundreds—thousands of us.

The idea has something twitching inside me, like a blip on a heart monitor.

Before I can examine it, the ground shudders beneath my already shaky legs.

My gaze rises, begging for it to be him, yet no longer hoping.

Despair has it right. It’s Lorcan who’s landed a few dozen feet away.

I bite my lip on the scream that almost escapes me at yet another letdown.

But as he approaches, I see the fierceness glowing in his whisky eyes, and something lurches in my chest. As if my heart is stirring under the rubble.

He has news.

My legs twist over each other as I rush towards him.

I stumble on the last step, and he catches me. Before I can ask, he shakes his head and my resurrected heart booms its anguish.

He didn’t find him. He couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Godric is nowhere to be found. He’s gone, and I’ll never know where, how or why.

It is really over.