42. WEN

Dread suffocates me—until I realize.

Nothing happened. There was no explosion. The manifestation seems to have been searching inside me for something, and seems to have found it. It now wriggles, as if trying to find the most comfortable position in the part it has chosen, before it settles.

I swear I can hear it sigh.

“You scared the living shit out of me, you little shit!”

In answer, it purrs something that feels like the equivalent of a middle finger. Before I can scrape its non-existent hide with abuse, I feel it burgeon through every cell and spark of being.

Irritation forgotten, I coo my relief and delight. “Yes, you dark, lethal beauty, you. That wasn’t so hard now, was it? Let me have that wonderful power. Just be aware I’m—according to your master—an Oblivious Novice, in this, as well as in sex. So, take it easy on me, okay?”

It doesn’t. It lashes out at full force, and everything splits open under its brunt, scattering my mind and senses across all of existence.

I experienced something similar, both times a higher Angelblood teleported me. But that was far less traumatic, since I’ve been an observer, of everything I was traversing, my experience secondhand.

This time, this is happening, to me, within me.

Is this how he perceives everything, all the time? This overwhelming bombardment of details, this sensory overload of registering, all at once?

How can he bear it? If this is how it is for him, I can now understand, on a cellular level, why he is such a control freak. He must have long learned to shut it all out, to ration his exposure.

If I thought his control prodigious before, now I have no words for it.

So that’s what he means when he keeps warning me against tampering with it, when he says I ruined him. Ruined his control.

Now I might have done far worse.

Shutting this possibility out, I surrender to this unexpected light-year in his shoes. With every flaying sensation and awareness that invades me to my recesses, emotions swell inside me towards this beautiful monster, fiercer than I imagined anything could be felt, suffered.

Just as I think I’d burst with it all, the beyond-endurance avalanche recedes, and my senses coalesce within the confines of my body and being again.

Then I feel it. The power crackling through me. His power. Even a tiny drop of it is indescribable. Just like he is.

“Okay, great, thank you,” I croak to the manifestation. “I could have done without the crash-landing trick of your master, so please do what I ask next time. Though I really hope there won’t be a next time. You belong in the one-of-a-kind bod of my Godawful. Now, any idea how I can make use of you?”

As if it understood me, it surges to my fingertips along with what feels like a brewing hurricane.

But if I unleash a haphazard storm, I might knock him into the lake. I’m not risking that. “How about we just pull him back here telekinetically? Can we do that?”

I sense no comprehension this time. Maybe this manifestation is part of his Energy that can only do Elemental tricks. If so, my original idea sounds better.

I share it with the manifestation. “I need to freeze the water, to make a layer of ice strong enough to take his falling weight. Once I’m close, we can do the wind bit. I’ll need water, too, to douse those flaming suckers, since I think they’re what’s keeping him up there.”

What happens next, is a marvel.

My senses converge on the power seething within me, every last pore gathering a sub-zero energy. I let it all out, and watch in stunned amazement as the lake, from the shore to a point well beyond Godric’s position, turns into pristine ice.

Yelping with excitement, I rush to test it.

It’s really thick, hopefully enough to handle a plummeting Godawful. Problem is, it’s also slick, and even my Academy-issue combat boots slip on it. I take two damaging falls before I’m beneath him.

This up close, he’s higher than I thought. Gulping, I summon the idea of water, and the pressure of a firefighting hose, reaching to the manifestation with my will and imagination.

The currents of water that shoot out of my hands are second only to those Godric put the fire out with. But they do nothing.

Argh. I should have known. The flames of his runes are magical.

Okay. The water pressure alone should knock him down.

Forcing everything I have into the manifestation, I think tsunami-level force. It gives it to me, yet still—nothing. He remains floating up there as if I hadn’t hit him with enough water pressure to topple a building.

I try the wind part of the manifestation’s abilities next, summoning a tornado, trying to suck him down.

I don’t even budge him. Not even the slightest wiggle!

The strain of accessing that slice of his power soon has me heaving and retching on the ice, vomit and snot mixing with tears of exhaustion and defeat.

He’s so near, yet impossible to reach.

When I can breathe again, I stagger up to my feet, frustration boiling my blood, and freezing a fist-sized lump of ice in my hand.

I throw it at him with all my remaining strength. The wind I’m still wielding turns it into a missile. It hits him right in the nose.

In horror, I hear his bones shattering even as I watch his head jerking back and blood bursting out in an arc.

Crumpling on the ice, I remain staring up at him as he remains floating there, bleeding, and lose my mind. Completely. Utterly.

It could have been days later when my heart bursts again. At the flare of emerald.

It’s coming from his eyes. Then they’re widening, focusing down on me, his hand moving up to inspect his broken nose.

His voice fills the cavern, inundating me with its beloved, baleful frequencies. “Will this always be the way you get my attention, when I don’t bloody answer you at once?”

I gape at him as he wipes the blood on his sleeve, spreading his wings and absorbing the runes back into them.

He’s awake!

Awake, and looking down his healing nose at me.

And did he just say …

Heaving up to my feet with a voiceless roar, I hurl a boulder of ice at him.