67. WEN

“What the fucking Heaven and Hell, you literal flying fuck!”

The scream gashes my throat and intact ear as Godric advances on me.

His bloody lips tug, making a deja vu hit me between the eyes like a throwing knife. He gave me that ominous shadow of a smile before. When he was trying to subjugate me that first day. I thought it was the scariest—and sexiest—thing I’d ever seen.

It’s still both, and he’s still the most cruelly beautiful thing to ever exist, but all I feel now is crushing guilt.

I’ve done this to him. I’ve turned him into a monster.

At least, I’ve unleashed the monster he’s always kept under control. Until me.

But—I don’t feel like I’m doing anything. Every time I used a power I wasn’t aware I had, I felt something.

If it’s not me, what else could be causing this madness epidemic? Either way, how do I stop it?

“Flying fuck, eh?” The bass thrum of his murmur reverberates in my marrow harder than the cacophonous music did. “Now there’s an idea. Always provide me with your carnal fantasies and kinks, my bane. I’ll fulfill them all, starting with this one. I’ll take you over, sideways and under, to a whole new world.”

My jaw falls lax. He didn’t just quote that Aladdin song— right after he bit off his cousin’s hand!

Seems the macabre humor I’d seen at the beginning, which he’d been keeping under control since, is also resurfacing. The monster he always claimed to be is coming out to play, and he is a merry one.

“But first, I have to fulfill the pledge I made to you.”

Before I can figure out what he means, a roar inundates me in a fresh wave of fright.

Time slows down again as Isaiah—now pressing the stump of his right arm into his chest to stem the bleeding—charges Godric. My scream for him to stop, to fly away and hide, is swallowed by another detonation.

When my senses coalesce again, I’m slumped against a wall, where the shockwave of their collision hurled me. A whistle is slicing through my healing ear, and the shrapnel of a fracture is radiating from my right thigh to shred my nervous system.

Almost blacking out with pain, I try to rise, and bump against an invisible barrier. Even in his condition, Godric protected me. Either too late, or I shattered my femur hitting his forcefield.

Slumping to the ground, I can do nothing but pray for the healing to kick in as I watch their battle unfold.

I know they’re moving at super speed, but I register them in slow-motion. Despite his pain and handicap, Isaiah is formidable, and there’s no doubt his objective is to kill. It confuses yet reassures me that Godric’s isn’t the same. Until I realize what he’s doing.

He’s toying with Isaiah.

Like he did with Azazel, he’s letting him inflict some damage, before retaliating, in the most humiliating way possible.

Bile rises in my throat as everything inside me hangs on every nuance of his methodical cruelty. Even more so when I realize that it—excites me.

Disgust at myself is cut short, just like the conflict. Godric has tired of his game fast, and is now standing over a pulped Isaiah, boot on his heaving chest.

My breathing stalls, dreading he’d drive it through the other man’s ribcage. I have no idea if an archangelspawn can survive that, like Azazel did.

Seeming to debate his next move, Godric turns his head to me, and my mind empties of everything but one thought. That he is bleeding.

The memory of tasting his blood, and the indescribable high a drop caused me, almost snuffs out my consciousness.

I don’t know what horrifies me more. That Godric might kill his cousin, just because he touched me, or that all I can think of is jumping him, and licking the blood off his face as he does. When I don’t have the excuse of being out of my mind.

But I’m suffering from something far worse than insanity.

I hunger.

The damned voracity I now feel wrapped around, a vessel for, unfurls from the deepest reaches within me and clamors for his blood, his savagery. For all of him.

Godric ups the awfulness ante as he flicks his hand, and Isaiah’s severed one flies into his palm. Removing his boot off his chest, he crashes down, replacing it with his knee. Isaiah roars with pain as I hear his steel bones crack, and Godric shoves the bloody appendage into his open mouth.

As a Demon-Owned, I’ve been through some gruesome shit since I was four. This is on a whole new level. Because it’s Godric. Moreso, because of my terrible reactions to his horrific actions. The elation and viciousness they, and the deranged possessiveness driving them, elicit.

Up until Godric caught me, my stomach was steel-lined. Now acid and that damn foul drink shoot up my throat as Isaiah writhes beneath Godric’s immovable intent, blood flooding his chin and neck as he chokes on his own hand.

I lie paralyzed by the agony of horror and healing as Godric’s mismatched eyes pan to me. “That’s one pledge fulfilled.”

If he’d been manic or raging, it would have hit me far less than this serenity, this—amusement.

His expression doesn’t waver as a roar of wind explodes around us, and the vast space darkens.

I can barely turn my head and what I see makes me wish this would all turn out to be a nightmare.

But since this is my shitty life, the squadron of nephilim zooming towards us is real. There must be at least sixty of them, all Godric’s Guard.

Some of them land feet from him, rocking the ground beneath me. The rest remain circling above like vultures, looking down at the macabre scene. Their brutalized comrade being fed his own hand, by their crazed commander.

Problem is, they all look just as insane. But contrary to Godric, their madness is apparent. And from their injuries and dishevelment, they’ve already been brawling. As for why they hurtled here in force like that, they look like sharks who smelled fresh blood.

Godric finishes turning Isaiah into a meat grinder, and rises, massive wings spreading out, now fully flaming with those terrifying runes.

“I will punish you all for interrupting me, later.” He kicks Isaiah, turning him into a missile that knocks down the nearest ones like bowling pins. “Take this bloody sod away, but not to the Sanatorium. I haven’t finished with him yet.”

With that, Godric resumes his advance towards me, his smile returning, as if he hasn’t just committed an atrocity, and there aren’t dozens of manic nephilim all around.

Those he knocked down shove Isaiah’s bloodied deadweight off and rise to their feet.

“We’re not here to do your bidding, you son of a filthy bitch.”

“And we’re sure as fuck not cleaning up after you, bastard. Ever again.”

My eyes snap to the nephilim who spat that at him, a chill washing over me.

It’s two of the Guard assigned by the archangels, not picked and trained by him. I forget their names, but I know Godric despises them, and their presence among his team.

His detached gaze shifts to them. “That was your first strike, Amos. You won’t get a second. You already used up your one warning, Caius.”

Shit. Now I’m connecting the dots. Caius is the guy he threatened with anatomy rearrangement the night he caught me.

Until minutes ago, I thought his threats were an exaggeration. Now I know Godric does exactly what he says. More than ever now that his inhibitions are gone. I don’t dare imagine him carrying out this specific threat. Or if Caius can survive having his organs scrambled. Being a nephilim, he might. I bet it’s one of the worse-than-death fates Lorcan once warned me about.

“You’re done giving us warnings or orders, abomination,” Caius sneers, his eyes turning pitch-black.

“You’re done breathing, period,” Amos snarls, his wings starting to glow a sickening, dried-blood red. “We’re going to tear off your arms and shove them down your throat.”

Oh, Hell. They’re so far gone, they’re threatening Godric. Caius is seriously smarmy and Amos gives me the creeps, but I don’t want them dead. At least not at Godric’s hands, when they’re all in this state, probably because of me.

Godric nods in hair-raising tranquility. “Amos, Caius, you have my gratitude—for providing me with incontrovertible grounds for ending the nuisance of your treacherous existence.”

Before the next breath tatters into my constricted lungs, the two nephilim are surrounding Godric, driving daggers deep into his chest and back.

“No!”

At my scream, and with his blood spurting around the embedded weapons, Godric glances over at me—and blows me a kiss.

I gape at him, nothing computing in my mind anymore as he brings his hands together. The clap unleashes hurricane level winds and a sonic boom that blows both nephilim away like leaves in a storm.

They regain their footing at once, and square off against him. Or they try to. In less than a blink, he’s in front of them, seeming to have grown another foot taller. Before either can make another move, he rips an arm off each nephilim.

The arterial geyser exploding from their torsos has me throwing up with the same force. I retch over and over as he tosses one arm up in the air like a juggler, freeing a hand to tear Amos’s head off his shoulders. In the same smooth sequence of motion, he jams his severed arm down his trunk so that the hand is sticking out in its place. He catches Caius’s arm and shoves it into his face and it bursts out the back of his skull.

Shock short-circuits my heart as shards of bone and globs of brain-matter explode everywhere.

Copiously covered in his own and his subordinates’ blood, Godric watches their mutilated bodies crashing to the ground, head inclined.

After extracting the daggers from his flesh, he scratches his night scruff thoughtfully, looking like an artist contemplating his latest piece, and finding it wanting.

“Not the anatomy rearrangement I had in mind. There’s just no …” He rubs his fingers together with a grimace, as if searching for the right word. “Finesse.” He shakes his head in mild annoyance, before glancing down at the corpses at his feet in resignation and sighs. “Oh, well, you got what your coarse minds came up with.” He flicks a bored glance around. “Collect this garbage, and bugger off.”

He seems to expect the others to obey. After all, chain of command is deadly serious to the Nephilim, literally so, and those two went against it. If he were in his right mind, he might have executed them still, only with—finesse and due process. Or maybe not. What do I know about the inner workings of his race? Nothing, really.

In response, another dozen or so advance, and far more land. But this time, it’s me they surround.

The steel and copper flames of Godric’s eyes flare into an inferno as his gaze lashes around like a scythe. “I will say this only once. Never approach Cadet White.”

The largest one of those surrounding me, a guy who looks like a genie, laughs like a desert demon. “Oh, we will do far more than approach her.”

A massive redhead hoots. “You want finesse in anatomical rearrangement, motherfucker? We’re taking you apart, like a jigsaw puzzle, one piece at a time.”

“You die tonight, Son of Azrael,” a hulk who looks like he stumbled out of a Viking drama roars. “It has been decreed.”

“And we’re going to make you watch us taking your abomination,” the genie-like guy taunts. “You’ll die never knowing if we finished her, or kept her to use, battered and broken, and on our leashes.”