32. GODRIC

The damn cheery voice jolts through me. Even when I already heard him coming from miles away.

I know the cadence of his wings, the frequency of his Energy, and could tell by his trajectory that he was heading this way. I knew he’d come anyway. He’s been dropping by unannounced every night for the past two weeks.

Now I see him in my peripheral vision as he shoots through one of the soaring arches into the penthouse.

It’s enough to make me question my decision to remove the windows and the magical barriers. That was the only other alteration I’d done around here. I can’t abide enclosures when I sleep, and my security system consists of everyone knowing they’re dead if they approach my quarters.

Everyone but this smug, no-boundaries arsehole.

“I doubt even an actual Heaven’s kitchen would smell this—dare I say it—Heavenly.” Lorcan smacks his lips loudly as he saunters in, as if he’s always welcome.

He has been. At least, I never minded him barging in. Now, I want only one person walking in on me.

His biggest crime right now is not being her.

“What gourmet magic have you concocted for us this fine night, old chap?”

His voice grates on my already compromised nerves. I can barely stand hearing it—or anyone else’s, for that matter. Because they’re not the voice I want to hear.

Her voice.

There’s no doubt I’m suffering withdrawal. It makes no difference that it’s self-inflicted.

Without looking his way, I walk to the cold storage units occupying the fifty-foot wall at the end of the kitchen area. “What I ‘concocted’ was for myself, and is long polished off.”

“You didn’t make enough for me?” he exclaims, sounding scandalized.

Flashing on my wings, I rise to the beverage compartments on the third level. “What delusion would lead you to utter this question? Just because I once or twice let you scarf food off my plates, when you descend on me uninvited?—”

His snort interrupts me with a force that vibrates the rows of bottles before me, making them clink madly into one another. “Letting me do it, then letting me leave with all my appendages intact, is tantamount to an invitation etched in gold from anyone else. Second, it wasn’t once or twice. Just this year it was?—”

“Four times so far.” I interrupt him in turn as I hover to another compartment, deciding to get the drink I always served her after Melek training. “You’re even more pitiful during the spring tides, I let you get away with it. But you already used up your perigean clemency.”

“I’ve at least earned the right to your leftovers!”

“What leftovers?”

“Yeah, rub it in, you cosmic-level glutton.”

I press the code to bring my selections to the front. “What are you whinging about, you rhino-sized locust? Raguel Tower has the best catering in the region, and you are served limitless quantities and selections from the top cuisines of all races, on demand. And yet you’re begrudging me finishing my measly self-prepared meal? If you’ve contracted some supernatural parasite and that’s why you’re still hungry, quit lamenting and eat. There’s enough food here to feed the whole Guard for a month.”

“I’m hungry for your food,” he says as he clangs around with the pots I cooked in, before making slurping sounds. “Whatever you demolished before I arrived, just the gravy is almost better than drugs, and sex.” He rises in the corner of my eye to hover beside me, still licking his fingers. “How about you recreate the recipe?”

I reciprocate his earlier snort as I pick up two half-gallon bottles. “You expect me to cook for you?”

“You do it for yourself, you can do it for your only friend.”

He didn’t say best, he said only. And that he is.

I never asked for his friendship, nor wanted it. I have it nonetheless.

Till recently, I was certain he didn’t have mine. That I had none to give. Now, I’m no longer certain of anything.

Had I been his only friend, I would still not accommodate him. I want him gone so I can wallow in her silence and my obsessions.

“I am not cooking for you. And from now on, I won’t even leave anything in my pots and pans for you to lick clean.”

His beseeching melts into sullenness. “She’s right, you know? You are a monster.”

As he flies down, I don’t ask him to clarify. We both know there’s only one “she” where I’m concerned. I suspect he’s the only other person who realizes it’s not on account of her being my charge.

I wave the door shut and turn around. “That would make it the only thing ‘she’ is right about.”

He looks up, giving me a ridiculing look, before he shakes his head, as if he’s letting this go to humor me. “You’re worse than a monster. You’re a sadist.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me. “But don’t play too hard to get. I only obey you for the next taste of your epicurean magic.”

Flashing away my wings, I slam to the Terram-spread floor, shaking the whole tower. “Give disobeying me a spin. I will rip those ornamental wings off your back and cram them down your gullet.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m no angel, dearest cousin. They’d only grow back.”

“Yes, but—as I told another imp recently—it would hurt. And I’d make sure they sprout back askew. Then you’d be Gimp son of Gabriel.”

“Ah, Godawful, you always say the nicest things.”

I have no answer to that. I’m too busy wrestling with the fury that always assails me whenever he uses her “nicknames” for me. Not because they’re insults, but because they’re hers.

I want them to remain only hers.

I place the bottles on the Terram counter with a measured click. Otherwise I would have hurled them into his presumptuous face. “Your aggravation will one day surpass your use.”

“But that’s not today, Chicken Wings.”

A rumble escapes me. “It could be. Especially if you’re going to ask me again where I was and what I was doing during those bloody sixteen days.”

Chuckling, Lorcan picks up one of the bottles of Shareeb I put out for myself, and downs it with relish. I glower at him, mostly because it reminds me of her same abandoned enjoyment when she drank the Nephilim energy drink after our grueling sessions. Even when she calls it fond names such as “eau de men’s room sink” and “rot flavored slum puddles.”

That she knows what these taste like, gave me further insight into what she suffered in her life of slavery, adding a further charge of vengeance on her behalf.

Belching loudly, Lorcan slams the bottle down on the kitchen counter, and turns to me. I raise a warning finger.

He shakes his head incredulously. “Really, mate? You expect me to stop asking? How about you tell me and end my aggravation?”

“How about I end your ability to speak instead?”

The bloody bastard has the gall to laugh my threat away. Lorcan has grown too secure in his value to me. “I hear humans say confession is good for the soul.”

“What soul?”

He guffaws again, as if I cracked an ingenious joke. I don’t bother correcting him.

“Yeah. But soulless bastard that you are, you’ve always been a bloody healthy one. When you came back looking like the undead, even my father grilled me about it. Do you know what it means when Gabriel, The Archangel of Nonchalance and Frivolity himself is curious? You made me look like a useless second-in-command when I had no answers.”

I flick him a stony glance. “You are useless. Now you’re also a nuisance, you’re tampering with your life’s odometer.”

Instead of laughing again, at the kind of witticism he appreciates, the human vehicle-related kind to boot, he grows serious instead. A serious Lorcan is one of the few things in existence that manages to disturb me.

“Just tell me, mate. You know it will stay between us.”

Instead of bashing him, with sarcasm or for real, I turn away and head through the sparse and all-too-spacious place towards the bedchamber.

He follows me all the way to the bed I’ve been unable to sleep in, imagining her there.

Knowing he won’t go away until he played out his reason for being here, I sit back on the bed, cross my ankles, and pick my magitech tablet from the grey-quartz bedside commode.

“I have work to do,” I say, my heart picking up against my will as I search for her messages. There are none. When they used to be incessant. A fist tightens in my chest. “Go use your powers of harassment on the suspects in Zinimar’s open case.”

The bed shakes under his weight as he flops down beside me. “You need to tell me. I can feel it.”

I consider zapping him, with contempt, or with my Elemental Grace. It would fry him crispy for a couple of days. But it would also make him more persistent. He thrives on challenge.

Ignoring him is my best option. He gets bored easily. If I stop engaging him, his need for action and occupation will drive him away.

But he’s right. I’ve always wrestled with the need to tell him. I wish I could tell her. But it’s out of the question. Always has been, always will be.

Lorcan sighs theatrically beside me. “If you’re not going to share your escapades, how about you share mine? I’m flying to meet three demon-blighted girls in L.A. Two nines and a ten, and so eager to please and be pleased. Pure pleasure and zero drama.”

“Tell me you didn’t just offer me a fivesome.” I pretend to yawn, still not looking at him. Lorcan is most dangerous when he manages to capture his prey in the snare of those feline eyes. He even does the slow blink.

His chuckle is both easy and horrified. “No, thank you. I perform best when I’m the sole focus of attention in bed. Definitely not one of my fetishes, sharing with another male. And when that male is you, my cousin and commander … Shudderrr.”

“Thank you for sharing your sexual insecurities. You can go now.”

He laughs again. “I’m going nowhere until you admit you have a major problem brewing, and you need to resolve it, before we all pay the price. I’m doing my bid for world peace, and offering you three seriously defusing solutions. If you come along, you can take your pick which answers your problems best. If you want all three, I can always get more for myself. Just imagine, mate—beautiful, voluptuous women, hot and wet, and begging for you. That’s the answer to any male problem right there.”

Just the idea of his three “seriously defusing solutions,” along with his description of them, lurches in my stomach with a sensation I’ve never felt before.

Is this nausea?

Wrestling with the horrible feeling, I growl, “You think the solution to my problems is sex?”

He nods vigorously. “Loads of it. You need to get laid, mate. Thoroughly, repeatedly, but most of all, urgently.”

Indeed I do. Very urgently. But there’s only one female I want hot and wet and begging for me. And I’ve currently made her hate me again. If I know what’s best for both of us, and the world, I’ll continue to do so.

Her voice rings in my ears again.

Guess what? I don’t know what’s best for me.

As I suspect, and fear, neither do I.

“The old Godric wouldn’t have thought twice before flying out of here and doing the female population the service of letting them worship him.”

I don’t even remember that Godric. How long has it been?

Now I think about it, it’s been eighteen months. I can trace the cessation to a specific event.

Not that I ever was “a sexual being” as Asmodeus put it. I’ve always just been going through the motions. Another thing that was expected of me, another role I played to allay suspicions of how different I am.

They expected me to be like all the Nephilim, to openly revel in the demands and pleasures of the flesh. I cultivated the reputation that appeases their prejudices about me.

I also set ruthless rules to limit the imposition playing that role inflicted on me. I made it known I’m never with the same female twice, and my preferences were non-negotiable, the ultimate in take-it-at-your-peril, and leave-it-to-your advantage.

Still, even when I made it as disconnected as I possibly could to avoid expectations and attachments, the lure of my position and power brought hundreds applying for my one-off. Each hoping I could be roped into more encounters, and deeper involvement.

No one even suspected, apart from Asmodeus, that sex was just another exercise that left me with the acrid aftertaste of futility. I tried to enjoy it, to lose myself in it, if only in the moments of release. I never did. I never actually wanted it.

Now I crave it. All the time. I burn for it.

For her.

Lorcan elbows me in the side. “C’mon mate. Summon the old Godric, and don something that would make women fall to their knees in a frenzy. Sprout your deathwings, and let’s go. Unless—” He gives a dramatic pause until I look at him, then he wiggles his eyebrows suggestively. “The new Godric has contracted an asexual disease, or even worse—a monogamous one.”

I stare at him, the word slamming into me harder than that nuke’s shockwave.

His eyes dance with a mirth that all but cackles, got you.

He smirks. “Just saying.”

Before I can hurl him all the way to L.A. and his foursome, he winks at me and zooms out of sight.

Bating my breath, I pan around my quarters, where she wanted to come so much. Where I want to make her come so much.

I’m hard and maddened all the time now. Even in sleep, unless it takes mercy on me and I wake up in the throes of release. Not that such relief lasts. I only have to awaken and everything in me converges on memories of her, or worse, the reality of her, and I’m back in the grips of this ferocious, perpetual lust.

Lorcan, that bastard, voiced my worst fear, what I’ve avoided putting into words, in a single one.

As Asmodeus, yet another wily miscreant, had recently diagnosed, it’s not only lust. It’s something far more dangerous and destructive. Like she is. Like I am.

I once thought putting us together in any equation was a recipe for disaster, when my fear was based only on our powers, and the power of our hunger. If it’s more than that …

I truly can’t project the enormity of the outcome.

Yet, no matter how I resist, whether she’s with me, or even realms apart, she’s shattering and reforming me, into someone I no longer recognize and cannot anticipate.

And sooner or later, I’ll succumb.

Unable to sit in bed anymore, when all I can see is her spread wide and begging for my possession, I boom out.

As I shoot beyond the perpetual cloud cover over the Celestial Region, I wonder.

When my last shackle snaps, and I give her everything she’s been asking for, everything her bottomless hunger needs, and take everything from her, until there’s not a shred of her left—will it be over the ashes of this world?