43. WEN

Born of my sheer fury, the boulder is almost Godric-sized.

I should have knocked him down this way in the first place.

But I don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing it shattering against him. Not only is he awake, he’s fully alert, and avoids it with infuriating ease. It crashes in the distance, breaking the thick ice, and disappearing into the eerie lake.

The unholy choir that has never stopped droning in the background intensifies to a crescendo, as if to score his descent towards me. He takes his time doing it, the theatrical bastard.

It diminishes once more as he lands before me, in utmost tranquility. Now he must have realized he’d end up in the lake like that boulder if he did his shock-and-awe number, he engaged his brakes. The posturing Angelhole.

My aching gaze still eats him up as he flashes away his wings and sweeps the situation with a scowl. At least, before he turns it down to me.

A volcano of resentment rumbles within me. After the anguish and despair I suffered on his account, again, he wakes up only to berate me and—Argh.

I’m using fire this time. I’ll burn off those spectacular eyebrows he’s knotting. And his gorgeous hair and lashes. And these feathers and?—

He reaches out and touches me.

Everything in me, lurches, wobbles then dissolves.

I’ve been so utterly resigned that he never does, I almost forgot that he already did. Somehow, this touch feels even more monumental than the first one.

Will it always be like this? Will every time he touches me feel life-changing, all over again?

His eyes emit my emerald as his hand engulfs my jaw and cheek. Tears overflow from my very soul.

His thumb strokes them away, oh so gently, soothing my trembling flesh as he purrs, deep and devastating, “Were you worried for me, my bane?”

“Worried?” I rasp a scoff. “Have you met me? I was ‘worried’ I didn’t … uh, you know … make you, uh—come. When I thought I might have put you in a coma or-or worse, I lost my fucking mind!”

His hand slides to my nape, hauling me against him. “For future reference, I don’t require that you ‘uh, you know … make me, uh—come.’”

I splutter as he chuckles at the expense of my Oblivious Novice stuttering.

I jab him. He catches my hand before I break it against his abs, takes it to his lips, burying them into my palm.

I’m dealing with a heart attack when he sucks two fingers inside his mouth, almost searing them off, and stabbing hot, wet pleasure right into my core. I convulse against him with a mindless cry.

His answering rumble as he crushes me into his body is feral. “This is what I require. Making you incoherent with arousal, then driving you to excruciating orgasms.”

Squashing my swelling breasts against him, I moan into his neck, tears pouring again at feeling his scary-slow, powerful pulse beneath my lips. “This is a requirement I can give you, so, so easily.”

His chuckle sounds amused, and exasperated. “Of course. The one area where I want you to be difficult. Give me something to do, my bane.”

That freezes my arousal solid, making me push away. “Too easy for you, huh? And you thrive on challenge.”

“Heaven will merge with Hell before easy can be put in the same sentence with you. Any harder—“ He slams me back into him, grinding my belly into his daunting erection. “And I’d Godawful out for real. And no—I don’t thrive on challenge. I despise it. I’ve had nothing but opposition and conflict all my life. Yet, when it’s intractable, impossible you, being so eager for me, so—attuned to me, your dichotomy makes your challenge addictive—vital.”

Just like that, everything is forgiven and forgotten and I mash myself into him. “The feeling is oh so mutual.”

His arms envelop me, and I finally understand something. Something I’ve always heard about, but never even imagined.

So this is what a haven feels like.

His chin rests on top of my head as he exhales in what sounds dangerously like contentment. “So, it wasn’t my Angel Essence you made me see.”

I try to look up at him. He enfolds me deeper until I’m lost in his embrace. I’m very okay with never being found again.

“It looked nothing like it,” I mumble, nuzzling into him. “But I didn’t wonder for a second what it was before I obeyed you and made a grab for it. I wasn’t in my right mind at the time.”

A harsh hum reverberates beneath my ear, making my toes curl within their tough leather prison. “Neither was I. I’m never in it around you. But after I commanded you to come for me, and you did, and the way you did—let’s just say I shot farther out of it than ever. So considering you clearly accessed my powers, while you ‘didn’t make me, uh—come,’ you did trigger an ejaculation of a different sort, along with our ability to see it.”

I bury my face in his chest, choking on embarrassment, when I’m the one who accosted him, who asked for everything with him. Now he’s putting what happened into words, I’m shriveling with mortification.

I really need to lose my Oblivious Novice card. I can’t wait until he shreds it to pieces.

A finger beneath my chin brings my blazing face up to his. “Tell me what happened?—”

“You tell me what happened,” I burst out, my hands shooting up to grab his face. “After that explosion, I woke up in the void, but I couldn’t feel you.” I rush through an account of my tussle with it, and how it punished me. I don’t recount the psychological warfare part, since I’m no longer sure I wasn’t imagining it. “Then I found you, hanging there, looking—gone. Feeling gone. I-I thought that was your Life Essence I took, that I might have–k-killed you?—”

He swoops down and seals my lips, pours his reassurance into my depths between consuming, comforting kisses. “You didn’t do anything to me. I—retreated.”

I want nothing but to drown deeper into his feel and passion. But I need to understand. It takes more will than I knew I had to pull away. “What do you mean ‘retreated’?”

His eyes fill with reluctance. This isn’t something he wants to share. He never wants to share, unless he’s forced to.

“Tell me, Godawul, or I will suck the fucking life out of you.”

He huffs an abrading chuckle. “Not what I want you to suck, White. But until then …” He dips his thumb into my mouth, saws it in and out.

I latch on it, suck deep, rub myself against him in a fever. He’s delicious, mind-altering, like sucking on unadulterated power and pleasure. And that’s just his thumb. I think I might overdose on his taste when I finally get my hands, and mouth, on his cock.

“Tell me, damn you!” I mumble around his thumb, biting it, hard.

His eyes glaze with vicious hunger. Just as I think he’ll throw me to the ground, rip me out of my clothes and just do what I begged him for, take me, invade me, fuck me within an inch of my life, he squeezes his eyes.

When he opens them, they’re resigned. “Fine. But like everything else I tell you, it’s only for you. No one else can know about this.”

He waits until I nod, duels with my tongue one last time before sliding his thumb out of my mouth, eyes promising me this would be how he’d leave my body. Still hard, slowly, torturously, inflaming us both all over again.

Then he exhales. “Like you, I’m unprecedented. Being a Level Nine was unknown to Celestials, until me. No one knew what that would mean, or how they would handle me, but I was certainly their most exciting—project. When they realized what worked with other Nephilim didn’t with me, they kept inventing more creative methods to—contain me.”

My heart clutches, at how he’s sanitizing his account. Far more than the book I stole from Metatron Library did. It, too, euphemized how the Cultores tortured him in unspeakable ways to force him to control his powers.

“They believe they succeeded, that they have charted my limits, and that they can control me when they need to.” His lip twist is savage. “They don’t have a clue.”

Ferocious glee goosebumps all over me, pulling my lips so wide, I must look like a lunatic. “Of course they don’t.”

He gives me a conspiratorial wink, like he once did before the Imperium Trials. That bolt of levity within his severity was so shocking then, he almost gave me a heart attack. Last time, I was sitting down. This time, I almost pool at his feet.

Before I mutter he’s not allowed to do stuff like that—when he won’t defuse the hormonal hurricane he causes—he sobers. “Just like they must never know your limits, White.”

My heart kicks. “And you do now?”

“I’m still finding out. You just shattered another constant of existence. Not only did you see my Energy, and showed it to me, but you accessed it on the fly, and used it, perfectly.”

“Uh, I’d like nothing more than to take credit, but that’s not an accurate account of what happened.”

A formidable eyebrow arches. “Explain.”

Feeling as reluctant as he was to explain, I know I have to. He must know everything, so he can guide me, train me.

I sigh. “When I couldn’t see what you ejacu—uhh, exuded anymore, I hoped I took it inside me. And I did. I reached for it, but it recoiled from me, much like its owner did for months.”

He restrains me before my elbow connects with his unyielding body, gathering both hands behind my back in one of his. “No need to give your healing powers extra work, my bane. So, how did you force it to cooperate? You pursued and stymied and drove it beyond reason, until it gave in, too?”

This time I headbutt him, eliciting groans of pain and stimulation from both of us. “No, Angelass. I took a gamble, and let it go. I thought it would either return to you and jolt you awake, or it would cooperate of its own free will. Of course, being your Energy, it did neither thing. That pesky pest crashed back into me, with the same force you always crash-land in my path.

“Then I had to haggle with it. I told it it was in its best interests to help me rescue you, its primary residence. I made a deal with it, to let me use my powers to access it, so I could bring you down, and wake you up. I told it to ease me into using your powers, but like its slavedriver host, it lashed me with its full force at once. After I got over the shock of basically experiencing everything the way you do, all I did was think of what I wanted, and it did it.”

His stare has been growing more incredulous with every word. When I fall silent, he shakes his head with a stunned huff. “You bloody bargained with my Energy. I would bet my left wing this is another first in all of history.” His eyes crinkle and his dimples make a brief yet devastating appearance, making all sorts of things combust inside me. “So how did you intend to wake me up? With the kiss of Life Essence?”

“Whatever it took, I intended to do it.” I stand on tiptoe and nip his chin. “Now tell me what this top secret ‘retreated’ business is.”

He rolls his eyes as he lets my hands go. “To think I once thought Anissa was the most tenacious female in my life.” Before I could ask who the Hell she is, he sighs. “While no one suspects the extent of my powers, and I maintain the advantage this obliviousness affords me at any cost, they do come with a huge disadvantage. It’s another thing I keep hidden, since its exposure would be a far worse problem.”

When he falls silent again, I grab his sweatshirt and haul him to me, only slamming myself into him. “No silent beats when I have a hair-trigger void ready to suck me in at any sign of distress! Quit giving me impending heart attacks and just tell me!”

His gaze encompasses my face in a different texture of disbelief. He really can’t stop being flabbergasted that I care about him. I’ll let him take his time coming to terms with it, and with how much I do care. Madly, ferociously, lethally.

I give him another tug, and he exhales. “Bear in mind this is another of my theories, since I have no precedent to validate it. It’s built solely on my experiences.” I make a hurrying gesture and his expression shutters. He’s really finding it that hard to share. “I believe my powers shouldn’t be contained within the same entity. Yes, abomination territory again. The fact remains that I do embody them all, and their coexistence creates something akin to a perpetual—chain reaction. I need to ‘retreat’ from time to time, to vent the overload. I used to fly high enough into the stratosphere, or descend on some hapless mountaintop to do so, but it was only a partial solution, since I couldn’t discharge too much power without causing a recordable disturbance. Then I found and excavated this place, and the lake became the perfect diversion for the surplus.”

An idea bursts in my mind. “Is this where you were, what you were doing when you disappeared?”

“No.”

“Just no?”

“Yes.”

I start to object, but he silences me with a caress to my lips. “I’m answering this question, not any of your outstanding ones, White. Either let me finish, or I’m done.”

Fuming, I dig my fingers into his chest and nod, grumbling some choice curses. His lips twitch as he corkscrews a strand of my hair. My feverish imagination takes that movement and extrapolates all the things he’d do with those fingers, to me, in me.

A warning rumble echoes deep in his chest and he tugs my hair, the sharp pain aborting my spiral before I forget everything and beg for him some more.

“If you’re done messing with my precarious control, may I continue?”

“It’s not like I do it on purpose!”

He scoffs. “Whether you’re premeditated or unaware, you are a hazard.” My knees tremble when his finger rubs my lips as if it’s beyond him to stop. I whimper and he removes his hand and lowers it to his side, slowly, fisting it.

His harsh exhalation abrades my every nerve. “To continue while I still can: When I felt the detonation spark, I shielded you. But in the same split second I felt your power flooding into my every cell.” I start to exclaim and he shakes his head. “Your power was obeying a pull that originated within me. I somehow accessed it. But instead of draining my powers, it boosted them. The upsurge was so overwhelming, I acted on auto, zoomed over here and shut down. If I hadn”t, the ensuing damages might have been incalculable.”

“So you were basically hanging up there sort of—decompressing?” He nods, reaches for me again with a resigned groan, and I burrow into him with a ragged sigh. “What do you think caused this explosion? And don’t say you need to investigate.”

“I do need to investigate?—”

I pull away to glare up at him. “Will you save us both the hassle for once? Just fucking give me one of those theories you’re full of.”

“Are you sure that’s what you think I’m full of?”

“Since when do I sugarcoat what I want to say to you? If I think you’re full of shit, I smack you over the head with it.”

“Indeed.” His gaze caresses me, as if I showered him with the sweetest endearments, before he sighs. “So theories. You no doubt want my worst one.” I nod and gulp. “Fine. Though unsubstantiated by any evidence, I believe I know what was behind that detonation.” I bate my breath as he makes another theatrical pause. “It was Existence itself.”

My jaw drops so hard, I might have unhinged it.

Pulling it back into place, I croak, “What the actual fucking Hell! Is existence even a thing? Even if it is, how or why would it do that?”

His eyes grow scary somber. “Oh, Existence is very much ‘a thing.’ And I think its very balance was trying to stop us from realizing a power exchange between us is possible. I think it tried to kill us both to prevent it.”