30. WEN

Ashriek escapes me as the war zone beneath our feet shrinks, like a zoom-out function gone mad.

“Close your eyes.”

I don’t heed Godric’s murmured order/advice. I can’t. My eyes are glued to the receding ground. But I do dive deeper into him, clinging for my life, literally.

Not that he’d let me fall. At worst, he’d retrieve me if I couldn’t hang on any longer. I’d rather not drop, though. I’m still having vertigo dreams from the times he’d caught me at the last moment.

At least he slowed down after almost breaking the sound barrier. Yet somehow, a leisurely pace is even more terrifying, letting me register each of my screaming survival instincts. It’s why it takes me a while to realize where we’re going.

I peel my face off his chest and yell, “You’re taking me back to Fem!”

“You said to take you home.”

“Your home!”

“I don’t have a home.”

The way he said it shuts me up.

When I find my voice again, I shout against the wind, “What do you mean you don’t have a home? You have the penthouse at Raguel Tower.”

“That’s the Praetor’s accommodations.”

“And you’re the Praetor, so it’s yours.”

“For now. I don’t intend to remain there. Also, living in a place doesn’t make it a home.”

Lots to unpack in those short sentences. He could be sick of his job, and has ambitions for something more. And he hasn’t made that place a home. More, he doesn’t feel that he has a home, anywhere.

It stands to reason. From my Metatron Library and the Shrinking Tome adventures, I know he was raised by some angel-worshiping cult. All the Nephilim are. The Cultores take them from their mothers between the ages of six and ten, and use extreme methods to train them into controlling the powers that develop before the Grace Development stage. But with Godric’s powers manifesting at birth, he was taken then. With him being the most powerful nephilim in history, extreme doesn’t begin to describe the methods they used to train him.

That was one of the things that made me feel so much more for him. That he’d never known family life or a parent’s love, that his childhood was stolen, and turned into a nightmare.

When I first learned about this, I had an overwhelming urge to hug him and say: me too. That was impossible then. Now I’m in the perfect—position to act on my feelings.

Tightening my full-body hug around him, I try to transmit a few gallons of the empathy and compassion flooding through me. I’m also reassuring myself that he’s with me again, and I get to revel in the delight and torment of his being and uniqueness.

He rumbles something tortured deep in his gut.

I loosen my hold in alarm. “A-are your injuries still not healed? Are you in pain?”

My answer is another lion-like rumble that makes me dare to look up. And my breath clogs in my aching chest.

His face, with its leaner flesh, sharper planes and darker skin, is a mask of torment. Intense, prolonged and unbearable.

It’s not that he’s grimacing, or frowning or any other outward expression. Anyone looking at him would see the same lethally gorgeous nephilim. No one ever sees beyond his signature barely-putting-up-with-this-lousy-Afterworld, and preserve-your-anatomical-integrity-and-stay-out-of-my-way looks. Tory once laughed heartily when I told her how expressive I think he is, telling me he has only three modes: Fed-up, contemptuous and deadly.

It’s me who’s hung on his every subtlety until I could read way, way more. Every intoxicating, terrifying, addicting expression and nuance. I actually think I did from the very first night. If I ever feared I was fooling myself about that, I am certain now.

He is in pain. Terrible, unfathomable, unrelenting agony. Torment that goes way beyond the physical. And with everything in me, I need to ease his suffering, in every way I can.

My heart overflows as I grab his head, turning his face down to mine, and surge up to press my lips to his.

The world explodes.

When my senses come back online, I realize what happened.

He treated me to a firsthand experience of what a passenger would feel when he crash-lands, even within his protective shield.

Before I can see where he did, he vibrates beneath me, shaking me off him. I make a grab for him again, but he steps out of reach.

Stunned and unsteady, I stare up at him, then around.

He’s taken me to the back of Fem. The damn building herself had brought me here once. This area was deserted then like it is now, as if no one knows it exists. That time, I thought she’d taken me to Lucifer’s shrine to die, before collecting my bones for the pyre under his colossus’s feet. When I threatened to suck the Essence out of her and leave her sentient ass an inanimate crumbling husk, she’d spit me out here.

He’s dumping me here, too, and would fly off, returning to wherever he hides out when he’s not with me—and to our earliest status quo.

As if I’d let him drag us back to that. Everything has changed, and not because he would have put himself in a coma for me, or because he kissed me. We’re way beyond that now.

He was taken from me, for sixteen days of desperation, and I was almost taken from him, forever. I’m never letting him deny what we have between us, or push me away again. Whatever his fears of letting me close, of letting himself take what we both need, nothing could be as bad as what we’ve already been through.

All those rational arguments vanish when I open my mouth, and the heartache of his absence rushes out of me. “Don’t you dare leave me here, Godric, or leave me again. Take me to your home or your place or whatever you call it. I need to be with you. We need to be together.”

He doesn’t move, his gaze glowing emerald now, brighter than ever in his darkened face, stonily roving my face.

My anguish ignites with anger. “After everything that happened, you didn’t hug me back. You didn’t even touch me—still!” I shove at his shoulder. I’d get more give from a steel tower. And more reaction. “What’s wrong with you? What happened to you? Tell me!”

Without a word, his gaze cascades down my body, stops at my blood-soaked left pant leg.

His growl shakes the ground beneath my feet. “You’re wounded.”

His disregard of everything I said would have incensed me, if not for the haunted look that invades his eyes. “I’m-I’m fine.”

“Did I do that?”

“What do you …? Oh, you mean when you crash-landed like a meteor, again?”

His growl sounds pained this time.

I grab his arms, managing one stroke before he pulls away.

Before I persist in offering him comfort, what no one imagines he could need, a terrible thought makes me rock on my feet.

His ordeal could have been so bad, it’s making him more averse to contact. It’s not only me Godric never touches. Not even Lorcan gets any form of friendly physicality. I bet Godric never touched another being except in violence, and lust.

That’s how I was, minus the violence and lust of course, before I let myself open up to Sarah’s demonstrative affection. It took me sixyears to initiate a hug.

I sure as hell hope it won’t take him that long. Or to at least accept one. Not when I need far more than to hug and be hugged by him. When I get us to that stage, I won’t take less than everything.

For now, he’s in crisis, and I need to soothe him.

I raise my hands, showing him I won’t jump him again, even if not touching him is killing me. “I was just teasing you, okay? I’m glad—no, I’m delirious that you crash landed like a meteor, that you still exist to rock my world, in every way. I never, ever want you to stop.”

He stares at me, as if at a loss. When Godric is never at a loss. What the Hellish Heaven happened to him?

Unable to bear contemplating anything bad enough to impact him this much, I wave. “Don’t mind me, I’m out of my mind, probably literally, with relief. I-I thought I lost you.”

Some barrier crashes down behind his eyes. “I once told you there’s no getting rid of me.”

“You actually told me the opposite, when you were going to put yourself in a coma, and dared suggest I’d be happy about it. About never seeing you again.”

He shakes his head, as if he’s finding it hard to understand me. “You’re talking, but you’re not saying what I want to hear. Now, answer me, before I destroy this building too.”

A nervous laugh escapes me, wishing Fem hasn’t heard him. “Then us freshwomen would have to crash the freshmen’s dorm. Everyone would thank you for such a creative workaround to the Academy’s priggish rules?—”

His wings darken and bunch forward, containing me in a menacing curve. “Answer me. Did I do this to you?”

“What’s with the fixation? Since when are you Mr. Careful and Considerate? You hurt me before, tossing me around during training, and yanking me around by the leash.”

His jaw tightens and his wings draw back, disappearing in a flash. “There was no training you without simulating real-life stakes. But I never let you sustain any injury that could have tested your healing powers. I broke any fall that would have caused you any.”

My eyes widen. “You did?”

He disregards my amazement. “As for the leash, I did what I had to, to—curb you. And I knew what I was doing.”

“Yeah, because you’re ‘intimate with the limits of a human body, and how far to push before it breaks.’” The look that comes into his eyes chokes me. Not the right time to tease him. Check. “I know why you hurt me—” His teeth grind like a rusting door on gravel. Can I ever say the right thing around this man? I rush to attempt damage control. “Not that you ever really hurt me. Seriously. And this isn’t your fault, either.”

“It is when I’m the one who ‘crash-landed like a meteor.’ If this injury was somewhere more vital?—”

“It wasn’t. And that wasn’t your doing at all. Your forcefield protected me, so that when the ceiling came raining down, not a pebble reached me. How did you even manage that, when you hadn’t seen me yet, and were basically out of your mind?”

His eyes grow unfocused, disturbed, looking through me as if he’s getting sucked back somewhere nightmarish.

My heart kicks hard, demolishing my resolution not to touch him. I grab his arms, shake him. “Stay with me!”

His focus recalibrates back to me. “How did you sustain this injury?”

I let him go, exhaling in resignation. “It was one of the Cadre, okay? He found an opening in your forcefield and threw a dagger at me.”

His eyebrows descend in a sharp slash of wrath. “Which one did this to you?”

“Why? So you’d make him a fallen fajita?”

“Which. One?”

Fearing his hissing would sand the paint off Fem’s facade, I wave him off. “How would I know? They all look alike to me.”

He gives a terse nod. “Fine. I’ll punish them all.”

“Just so you’re sure you get the one in question? Aren’t you taking this ‘punishment is generalized’ army thing too far? You already sliced and diced him and his chicken wing brothers enough, anyway.”

“I was only repelling their attack, on me. Now one of them hurt you, on purpose, and would have killed you if he could. They will learn that everything they suffered when they fell, is nothing to what I’ll put them through.”

“You mean it!” His glare takes me to task that I even questioned his intent. “C’mon Godric! It was a fight, and everyone was trying to hurt the other side. I yanked my fair share of their Life Essences, and Heaven only knows if I caused any of them ‘lasting damages.’ Let this end, please.”

“This didn’t and can’t end. Azazel tried to take you away from me.”

My knees wobble at the way he said that. As if the what-could-have-been is making him seethe for wholesale damnations.

While it thrills me—even when a voice says it’s more about Azazel infringing on his turf—I need his mind off this fiasco, and back to us. Back to opening up to me.

I attempt a teasing grin. “And you kicked his ex-Celestial ass for it. You ground him beneath your boot, and gave him the defeat and humiliation of his eternal life. You made him yield, in front of his Cadre, and bound him not to try anything like that again.”

His eyes simmer with that terrifying emerald fire. “None of that is enough. I should have ended him.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but he didn’t end you when he had the chance, so I’m glad you didn’t end him, either.”

He shakes his head, as if he’s slipping back into that fugue. I’m about to shake him again when he says, “There was no way he could have ended me. And his transgression against me is not the issue. He would have enslaved you.”

So none of this is about Azazel’s attempt to deprive him of the weapon he needs? This is all for me?

I almost jump him again, without regard for his condition. Thankfully, there are other things to focus on for now. All concerning him, and those days of torture when I thought he was lost to me.

I had flayed my sanity with a thousand and one theories of what could have happened. I even came up with a scenario where he’d been abducted by Lucifer and left in the Imperium Realm, with nothing but those slimy, man-sized slugs to hunt and eat forever.

But Azazel was behind his disappearance, and I need to know how he achieved it. And how my scream for him made Godric break out of his prison.

“So how did he do it?” I ask.

“Do what?”

“Overpower you. Did his Cadre coordinate an ambush? Do they have some kind of Nephilim kryptonite?” My aching gaze slides down his body and my heart thrashes in my chest. Even with his injuries almost healed, and that blazing rune and those it spewed all over him gone, the evidence of abuse is clear. It’s in the sharper angles and deeper hollows, the sheer suffering stamped on his every inch. As if he’d been dismantled, and not fully put back together. “Did he have them torture and starve you?”

His blink is sluggish and bemused. “I might have something wrong with me, because I didn’t understand a word you said.”

“I’m asking how Azazel managed to abduct and incarcerate you.”

“Azazel did not abduct and incarcerate me.”

I gape up at him, my mind stalling. “Th-then what happened to you?”

“I—had to leave.”

“You mean you left of your own free will?”

He only stares back at me.

It feels like I’ve crashed into a wall headfirst.

Everything stops, vanishes for a hundred, hammering heartbeats.

When it bursts back, everything is crumbling to dust. All my theories and dreads and rationalizations. Everything I thought and suffered and obsessed about.

“And you stayed away of your own free will?” I choke.

He looks away.

I begin to tremble, the tremors reaching deep within the void. The void that was starting to consume me in his absence, and that now seems appeased by his mere presence. “Where did you go? What were you doing?”

After a distorted, maddening beat of silence, he says, “It’s—classified.”

“Classified my ass!” I explode. “You left me without a word, for sixteen days that felt like sixteen years. You made me think you were dead, or worse. You let me go to Azazel and his Congress alone, and they almost bound me to him for life. Don’t you dare ‘It’s Classified’ me!”

His whole face clenches at my shrillness as I pant and shake, waiting for an excuse, a reasoning, anything.

I’ve given up on him speaking again when he exhales. “It’s all you’ll get.”

Accusations and abuse upend each other in my throat, mushroom like a nuclear cloud in my head.

I try to vent them before my brain splatters over a mile’s radius. “You Godawful louse, you monstrous Angelhole, you atrocious sadist …”

My breath runs out and I choke, staring up at him in mute outrage. He deprives me of even that as his gaze moves away from mine, to simmer the lava of disapproval down my body.

“You’ve lost weight,” he grits, his voice like a chainsaw against steel. “You’ve lost all of it, and more. You’re in much worse condition than the day I arrested you. How did this happen?”

“How?” I punch him in the chest and almost break my hand. My yell is more fury than pain. “How do you think? You were gone, and I tried everything, to find out anything about where you were, what happened to you, and failed. Not knowing—the doubts and dreads, the void, they ate at me, and I couldn’t—couldn’t …”

As my voice breaks off, his wings flash on again, rising above him in arches of austere reprimand. “Now you can and will resume your dietary regimen. I will increase your intake to make up for the hard-earned weight and muscle mass you sacrificed in your obsession to investigate my whereabouts. You will gain it all back, and fast.”

With that, he turns away.

Before he takes off, I grab at his wing. My fingers sink into the indescribable substance of his feathers, and I cry out at the brutal zap that lodges into my every cell, from scalp to toes.

I don’t let go, even if the sensations are overwhelming. They feel like simultaneous stimulation of every nerve, along with a high-voltage current to the soul.

It seems my touch is affecting him as much. His feathers fan out and rustle as if in a seizure, the wind they produce almost blowing me off my feet. I grab on with my other hand, and the runes burst out all over, blazing brighter than I’d ever seen them, until I fear they’d burn his wings to ashes.

The dread makes me release him. “Don’t leave me behind. Take me with you. I need …”

He swings around, cutting off my unsteady words. “What you need is to disregard all this nonsense and refocus on what matters. I will not allow you to undo all of the progress we’ve achieved.”

“So you’re flying away, after everything that happened? Just like that?”

“Exactly like that. I have duties I need to resume. Go eat dinner and get an early night. I’ll have further instructions for you in the morning.”

This time when he turns away, I can’t move. Can’t breathe.

I stagger in the backdraft of his blast off, then stand there watching him recede in the distance with everything he said churning in my stunned, seething brain.

He called what he put me through nonsense. He wants me to refocus on what matters. Eating, sleeping, regaining weight and retraining.

It brings me to one conclusion. Among all the uncertainties I have about everything, from my own nature, to where we stand, to my and Sarah’s future in this Academy, I know one thing with absolute certainty.

I’m going to kill him.