31. GODRIC

Her scream is still ringing in my ears.

It’s still reaching out to me through time to flay me on a constant replay.

For the past two weeks, I have failed to stop the echoes from shredding my sanity. More than it has already been shredded. Each reverberation has been bringing me nearer to the end of my tether.

At least not all the memories of that day are as clear or as maddening. Many are shrouded in a fog.

I don’t remember anything at all until she hit me with that rock.

Of course she did. She’s always hitting me with rocks. Verbal, paradoxical, existential. As if all that weren’t enough, she’s added emotional and sexual to her ammunition.

Yet all I want is to be her target, to stand there and let her pelt me unto eternity. Until she’s buried me under a mountain of her rubble.

But it was I who could have buried her under mine. I would have, if my natuq hadn’t deserted my body of its own accord to protect her. I have theories about how it happened, but I can’t depend on anything that involuntary ever again. I can’t even contemplate what I would have done if I’d ended her by mistake.

Exhaling my lingering turmoil, to no avail, I turn my gaze downward over the edge of Raguel tower.

Eternity Falls are just beyond its grounds, presumably plummeting into its namesake. I haven’t been able to find where they end. But it’s over four thousand feet to the bottom of the tower itself.

She, that self-destructive lunatic, had attempted to scale it. When she seems terrified of heights.

I could tell where she aborted that endeavor, and made a hasty descent. More than halfway up. At two thousand and sixty-six feet to be exact.

Apart from that act of mind-boggling insanity, everything else is as inexplicable. That no one caught or even saw her, or found evidence leading to her as the vandal who defaced the tower. Which she did during said clumsy retreat.

I only did when I examined the damages, and sensed her resonance. What no one else could have done.

“How the bloody Hell did you do it, White? And why?”

I pause when I hear my voice. I’m talking to myself.

Splendid.

Even more so since this isn’t the first time. It’s been happening more often the past two weeks.

What else will she drive me to do?

Mumbling curses under my breath, I turn away from the edge and walk back into the penthouse.

My feet take me to what Lorcan calls Heaven’s Kitchen. For years, he has never tired of making a running barb of that description. He’d coined it the day he learned it was the one addition I made to these quarters.

According to him, people changed bedrooms and outfitted game rooms in their new accommodations. Single males installed sex dungeons. He found it endlessly facetious that the Firstborn of Azrael would add a place to cook rather than fuck.

Thinking I was shooting his witticism down, I asserted I wasn’t eating with rowdy, grubby subordinates in what is so aptly called a mess hall. He’d taken that declaration as fuel for his jokes about my prissy tastes. He even told my Guard one of my Graces has a culinary manifestation.

Cursing him all over again, out loud, I go through the motions of gathering ingredients for another massive meal.

I’ve eaten only an hour ago, but I’m so famished, I could eat a leg off that son of a degenerate archangel. Which isn’t far from the truth. I eat one-eighth of my body weight each day, and I’ve been eating twice as much since my return. It’s no wonder, since I lost a fourth of my mass.

She lost even more. She seemed to have been cut down in half. It appalled and incensed me, and is still ensnaring me in a jumble of emotions I’ve never experienced before. It has been making me struggle with the need to descend on her at every meal, and leash her into eating every last bite I dictate.

I’ve allowed myself one outlet since I left her behind two weeks ago, with an order to recover from the deterioration she incurred on my behalf. One message detailing her doubled intake, and demanding that she report her gains.

No such reports have been forthcoming. But my spies have been telling me she’s finishing her meals. Except for the extra kale. She leaves that arranged on her tray in the shape of a dainty hand sporting a middle finger. They made certain to transmit her message along, with photographic evidence. Every single time.

So far, she’s flipped me the bird forty-one times.

It would have been entertaining, in that stymieing way of hers, if that hadn”t been the sum-total of her communications.

Tearing my thoughts away from her, I focus on cooking and devouring my meal. Then I think it’s as much food as she eats in three days, and my mind is dragged back to her.

I again imagine her scaling this tower, and try to ponder why she did it, and again, I fail.

The superficial why is actually clear. It was an attempt to get into my quarters. Even had she done the impossible, and made it all the way up here, her exact motive still eludes me.

Did she think I was hiding here? Or that she’d find clues to my whereabouts, or a secret method to contact me?

Unable to think of anything else, two things still flabbergast me. The incomprehensible determination, and the utter desperation that had driven her to such lengths—and heights.

What disturbs me even more is that I now understand the level of obsession that fueled her irrational actions. On the most profound and fundamental levels. The only difference is, my own obsessive behavior would probably result in incalculable mayhem.

Leaving the dangerous territory of the why behind, I again try to fathom the how. How she got that far into this territory, or that high up, and how she got away with it.

I still find no valid scenarios.

Since I currently doubt she’d provide answers if asked, I resign myself to remaining a prey to my consuming curiosity.

The one certainty I have about her caper, is that it intensified my appreciation of her skills as a criminal mastermind, and spawned ideas how to make use of them in her future training. The training I need to restart.

To do that, I need a clear mind and an undivided focus. I need to stop hearing her scream for me. I must erase the whole nightmarish experience.

The ordeal itself, what kept me away all that time, was nothing. I’ve regrown too many skins, limbs and organs, I’m deadened to the horrors of physical agony and desecration.

What tested me in ways I never envisioned was this unendurable gnawing when I had to leave her behind. As if my very Life Essence was being eaten by demonic ants, a morsel at a time.

Then it got unimaginably worse.

In this dreadful existence, the one mercy has always been that I don’t possess a smidgeon of psychic powers. The silence on that plane, the isolation, afforded me the one reprieve that I’d ever had.

But she’s invaded that haven. In the past, it was as a single cry that receded to indistinct, maddening murmurs. In the present, her presence has become a perpetual, prodding hum in my mind and blood.

Then as I lay helpless during the procedure, the hum became a moan. It got louder and louder until it became an unending lament.

I’ve never known such desperation as when I felt my absence dismantling her, too. I hadn”t imagined it could possibly affect her at all, let alone that terribly.

I’ve failed to anticipate her again, and grossly underestimated the catastrophic connection being forged between us.

As I suffered her intolerable anguish, the hardest thing was to not let them realize what I was feeling. That I was feeling. My most effective weapon has always been their belief in the untainted purity of what I am. The flame that annihilates all in its path without remorse. The sword that cuts down anything and anyone for the cause.

I’ve been playing the longest game, layering it in misdirection, and I needed them neutralized. To serve my purpose, but mostly to perform the procedure. The Purge.

They’ve been serving that purpose less and less efficiently. The Purge has been taking longer, requiring more force, and more cycles of regeneration.

This time, the need for it attacked without warning. Right after she clucked her way away from me.

It was the worst time yet, and it slowed to a crawl in the most excruciating phase, as if the very fabric of Existence was resisting its completion. It’s why what usually took days, lasted far longer. I have no idea when it would have ended.

I’d never know if it would have, because her laments rose to a wail, and the process stalled. There was no way to get out by terminating it. Or so I thought.

Until I heard her scream my name.

That scream ripped me out of what I thought an inexorable process, had me hurtling through the matrix of realms to her side, to answer her call, to obey her need, for me.

Only me.

Now the Purge is incomplete. Whether it’s because I was torn out prematurely, or because it can no longer be completed, remains to be seen …

“Knock, knock, Angelhole.”