70. WEN

My bleary gaze follows Jinny’s pointing finger, and my sluggish heart thuds painfully when I see them. Running from the direction of the dancefloor area.

Sarah, Matt, Cara, and Niala.

They all look disheveled, especially Sarah. Her usually sleek hair is all over the place, and she’s holding a bottle of that Nephilim liquor shit in one hand. In the other is what looks like a rope of blinding white light.

Cara is holding another, but it looks like a kaleidoscope laser encased in a teal glow. Both ropes are curving up, beyond my field of vision.

I crane my neck to see where they end, and find Aela, floating wings-down, looking like a comatose phoenix. Sarah’s rope is around her waist, and Cara’s is around her left foot.

They’re dragging her behind them like a kite!

Yeah, she’s higher than one. They all are. While I’m down in the dumps. But you’re in neutral, you lucky Null Genes.

Yeah, I’m so lucky, my epitaph will be “Angelhole’s Collateral Damage” or?—

Jinny slaps me across the face, so hard, she ruptures my eardrum, again.

What the fuck, Hellspawn!

She shrugs her elegant, blood-spattered shoulders at my mental shriek. You dragged me out of my fatalistic funk. Just returning the favor.

She leaps to her feet and yells, almost blowing out my other eardrum. “Bring the archangelspawn down!”

Sarah puts the bottle down, and she and Cara tug on their ropes with both hands, clearly as hard as they can. They only manage to drag Aela a dozen feet down—before she flutters her inverted wings like an epileptic butterfly, and rises up again.

“You two morons here for the show?” Jinny screeches at the other two girls. “Help them!”

Stumbling drunkenly in her crimson hooker-heels, Niala grabs the rope with Sarah, and Matt, who’s lost her heels, does the same with Cara.

Jinny roars, “On my mark, one, two—heave-ho!”

Matt screeches back, “Hove-hee!”

They tug with all their combined strength at once, and Aela plummets like a bird shot out of the sky—straight towards me.

For panicked seconds, I think I’ll go splat under her crashing weight, before she bounces off the forcefield and face-plants just outside it.

Jinny makes a hurrying motion and the other girls stagger towards us, only to slam against the forcefield. She sticks her arms through it, grabs them one by one, and drags them inside.

I have no idea how she’s doing this. I’m just grateful she can. They’ll be safe—safer from the fallout inside here. Besides being permeable to Jinny’s weird phantom power, this thing holds up to anything but Godric’s own power. If he unleashes another shockwave, all bets are off.

Sarah and Matt fall to their knees on either side of me, worry penetrating their blissed out expressions.

“Jinny grabbed us and said you were hurt, and to grab Aela because we’ll need her.” Sarah’s unfocused eyes scan me as she shakes her head, as if trying to clear them. It doesn’t seem to be working. “Where are you hurt?”

Matt raises her glazed eyes towards the Godric Warzone. “Which one of these feathered fuckers hurt you?”

I can’t answer them. Jinny’s stasis is slipping and the suffocation is returning with a vengeance.

It’s Jinny who grunts an explanation as she struggles to drag Aela all the way in, and fails, with her massive wings askew and heavy body limp.

Jinny whacks her upside the head, hard enough it would have taken a human’s right off their shoulders as she yells, “Put your chicken wings away or I’m cutting them off.”

I wince at the threat and the images it engenders, now I’m taking these kinds of threats literally.

“So that’s what bats escaping Hell sound like,” Aela slurs as she turns on her back, only one wing flashing out. “Do you have bats in your ancestry, demon, or just goats?”

Jinny slaps her across the right cheek, her claws carving deep, gushing gashes across its perfection. It’s clear she’s been taking it easy on me. “Snap out of it, Featherbrain.”

Aela just laughs as her other wing disappears. “Who banged you up like that? I’ll kill them. I take this Unitas Sticking Together Business so seriously, I’m the only one allowed to bang you up.”

Jinny rolls her eyes as she drags her in. “Yeah, dream on, Poultry Princess.”

Aela’s eyes lose their uncanny violet and start to glow gold. “You believe having arch before demon in your designation makes you on par with the archangels, don’t you? At the first opportunity, I’m demonstrating how deluded you are.”

Jinny slaps her again, decorating her left cheek in matching injuries. “You’re on, Nephi-lame. Next Weaponry and Combat class, I’m plucking your chicken-winged ass. Now shut your beak, and show me how seriously you take our USTBullshit. Use that Raphaelesque mojo to heal nearly-Nullified here.”

Aela looks at me as if just realizing I’m there. “Heal her of what? She looks fine.”

Jinny raises her hand threateningly. “Want your eyes scratched out this time? I bet you can use your powers without them, so don’t tempt me.”

Aela snorts. “That was a legitimate question, demon. She looks untouched.”

Jinny lowers her hand with a grunt. “Sit your drunk ass up and operate the archangelic MRI you inherited from your clucking father. Her chest is filling with blood, so scan her for injuries, then fix them!”

It takes a few more threats from Jinny, pleas from Sarah and cajoling from Matt and Niala before Aela finally focuses on me.

Sitting up, she holds her hands over my chest and that blinding light from the Trials encompasses both of us.

In its midst, everything falls away. There’s only us left in the universe. Within this pristine light that demands purity and perfection.

I feel it laying everything inside my physical being bare, asking my every cell questions. And they answer, showing it where they’ve been disrupted. My blood rushes to guide it where it’s being diverted, the exact points where its vessels have ruptured, where it’s pumping out with every heartbeat where it shouldn’t.

The light sees all, reassures, and guides. It convinces my cells to still, to calm down and not panic and self-destruct. It shows them how to realign, to knit.

Suddenly, I feel as if a fist is unfurling inside my chest. It rises up to my throat, blocking my airway completely.

Aela failed. Or made it even worse. My blood is flooding out.

I’m dying.

Panic mushrooms. That I will die in front of Sarah. And that Godric will realize why I did.

If he is massacring his men over threatening me, I can’t imagine what he’ll do when he discovers he’s the reason I died …