60. WEN

Watching Godric recede into the crowd, I struggle not to hurtle after him, and cause a scene fit for the Codex Celestia.

But since it wouldn’t achieve a different result, and I’m afraid my Unitas would still do something “stupid,” I follow them to the dance floor instead.

Not that I should have bothered. None of my companions are aware I’m around anymore as they lose themselves to the mind-numbing rhythm.

I would have welcomed the same level of dissociation. But all I feel is the driving beat and bassline almost liquefying my bones and congealing my blood, while everything going on around me keeps screwing my nerves tighter with anxiety.

To think I came here thinking I’d get a break from the Null shitstorm, and Godric’s exile. I’d hoped to drink myself into oblivion, and that everyone would get as hammered and forget about me for the night.

So I ended up getting one of my two wishes. No one has given me a first, let alone a second, glance. By now I realize it’s not because they’re too drunk or high or both.

It’s because everyone has lost their fucking minds!

And that’s no exaggeration. Everyone is behaving like loons.

Their last sane action was escaping Godric’s menace when I used him as a deterrent. Once outside his orbit, it’s like I’ve fallen into an alternate reality filled with doppelg?ngers. Replicas with unknown—and unstable—personalities.

Just minutes ago, Aela sprouted her phoenix-like wings and took off, joining the other nephilim circling high above like drunken pigeons. Now she keeps slamming around and knocking them out of the air, like a DUI archangelspawn-sized firefly.

Down here, it isn’t any less weird. Matt is going around cackling and plucking feathers, and shoving them down her bodice. She’s starting to look like an upside-down turkey. Cara helped her for a while before she disappeared.

Sarah just did too, among a couple dozen male and female nephilim. Before she did, their daisy chain of dry humping had her as the nucleus of their abandon, while she laughed and laughed.

Jinny has another circle forming around her, of demon cadets. But unlike the ecstatic Sarah, she looks despondent. They all do. An emotion I’ve never seen a demon exhibiting.

I’m not an authority on nightclubbing, especially the Supernatural kind, but I worked in a bar slash brothel for sixteen years. I know most races’, especially demons’, drunk and high states all too well. That’s not what’s happening here.

Everyone is—something else.

It has to be the effect of the liquor designed to alter Angelbloods’ moods and minds. What clearly should be contraindicated for Demonbloods.

Not that theorizing what’s happening is reassuring me. I feel something bad is going to happen. We have to get out of here before it does.

Making the decision, I fight my way through the barricade of bodies to reach Sarah. She looks through me as if I’ve become transparent until I resort to pinching her, hard enough to bruise.

She bursts out into more raucous laughter. “What the Hell, Wen!”

“My thoughts exactly,” I yell back. “Something wrong is going on, Sar, and if it keeps escalating at this pace, this night won’t end well.”

She throws her head back and howls, “Hell, yeah!”

I grab her head to force her to look at me. “Sober Sarah wouldn’t say that, or any of the things you’ve been saying and doing since you set foot in this place!”

She grabs me by the hair, yanks me down and puts her mouth to my ear, shouting loud enough to almost blow out my eardrum, “I like Smashed Sarah. And I’d like to meet Wasted Wen—if she can just quit being a party pooper, and come join me.”

Before I can say anything else, she shoves me away and dives back into the crashing waves of bodies who engulf her as if they’d been starving for her presence, and she’s what sustains their erotic energy and disinhibition.

I gape at the spot where she disappeared as I get shoved around. Once I’m expelled from the dance floor as if I were an offending zit, I throw my hands up.

Fuck it. I give up.

Maybe she’s right. There’s nothing I can do to stop whatever train wreck is in progress, so I should just join the insanity. It sucks, big-ass time, being the only stone-cold sober one among thousands of shitfaced Supernatural beings.

I fight my way back to the table, and glug down all the remaining drinks—what amounts to almost a bottle of the finest Nephilim-grade booze—and still nothing. All I register is the vomit aftertaste, what alcohol of any sort always tastes like to me.

Damn whatever neutralizes mind-altering stuff inside me to the Ninth-Level of the Pit!

Since it also nullifies the nodes, I can’t leave this loony-bin party and get back to Fem. I’m not asking Lorcan for a ride back, either. Not when he’s currently glued to Godric’s side at the bar. I sure as Hell am not asking Him. I can’t handle more of his rejection right now.

Guess returning to my Unitas is my only option.

That’s easier said than done, since finding them again in the tumultuous crowd is proving impossible.

Just as I’m about to go back to the table to wait for them to tire out, I see Jinny. Then I realize why.

Her immediate vicinity is clearing. Because she’s glowing like a nuclear reactor on the verge of a meltdown.

It’s weird, what that makes me feel. It’s no longer loathing or rivalry or whatever shit has been brewing between us since the moment we met. Not judging by the fright that rushes through me at seeing her losing her shit.

And that’s before she starts slapping her own face with both hands, over and over, in escalating violence.

Something ferocious expands inside me in response to her shocking, inexplicable actions. It’s the same urge that had driven me to try to save her from Azazel, and again during the Amulet Ceremony, but on steroids.

I can swear that surge clears my path to her, then I’m pouncing on her, trying to stop her. I only get swatted away for my trouble.

Damn, she’s strong. Just the ricochet of her hand on its way back to her cheek sent me barreling head over heels like a football thrown by a champion quarterback.

Thanks to Godric doing far worse to me during training, I don’t crash and break multiple bones. Instead, I land on all fours like a cat, like he taught me. Then I’m on my feet and charging her again.

She only flings me away, again and again, and continues to self-flagellate, pummeling her own face black and blue.

The Hellish sounds of suffering and anguish she produces reach me on a frequency beyond the audible, almost shattering my bones—and heart. If that weren’t horrifying enough, her nails elongate and sharpen as she drops her Glamor, revealing the stumps of her severed horns.

I can’t believe I’d almost forgotten about them.

I’ll never forget watching her clawing at them as if trying to gouge their remnants out, shredding her own flesh to the bone. My own blood tugs and burns as her own, glowing and darkest crimson, pours down, covering her face and chest, and soaking her clothes.

I have no idea if she would inflict lasting damage on herself, but I’m not taking that chance.

This time I come at her from the back, jump on her in a Melek whole-body grip, and scream in her ear, “Snap the Hell out of it, you fucking Hellspawn—now. Sarah’s new bestie is not mutilating herself on my watch.”

I feel her tensing beneath my arms and legs, and brace for being bucked off. That’s the good scenario. Someone with this strength, this far gone, might rip them right off.

Just as I get ready to loosen my grip the moment she lashes out, she tenses beneath me, then goes limp.

Hopping back to the ground, I rush around her. “Jinny? You back with me?”

She’s not, and is now hanging her head, so I can no longer see her face. Her hair starts to undulate all around her, like fiery tongues from Hell.

Then she starts to move. Slowly at first, then faster, more erratic, bobbing and weaving her head, then whole body, like a pendulum gone mad.

I stumble back, my mind glitching on a recollection that wouldn’t form. At least she stopped self-mutilating. Mission accomplished, I guess.

The other demons stream back, surrounding her, each getting lost in their own weird interpretative dance. It’s only then the memory sparks.

They’re doing a Zaar!

During the nights when most of Demonica’s patrons were demons, sometimes one would get up and start doing this, and it would spread among the rest like an Infernal infection.

It was always fascinating to watch those vicious beings getting their inner demons—pun intended—out of their system in that disorganized and cathartic boogie. Sure, I was there to clean up their corrosive puke, but I always wondered how it would feel, to lose oneself so utterly in movement like this.

I never got anything like that release. Unlike Sarah, I’m not much of a dancer. Okay, I’m a lousy dancer. If my life ever depended on moving to the rhythm, I’d ask for a pen and paper and write my will. That’s why this haphazard self-expression slash therapy rave appeals to me so much.

Now that I stopped Jinny from excavating holes in her skull, and the others are in their own realms of abandon, it’s time to give it a go.

Closing my eyes, I crush down on my anxieties and heartaches. I try to force my mind to shut up, and just lose myself for once.

Just lose myself …