72. WEN

Ialways thought I’ve had every kind of nightmare. I was wrong.

Not even my gruesome imagination and evil subconscious has even approached this one.

No morbid dream could have gone so far as to envision my best friend looking like an avenging spirit, and bent on murdering the only other person I can’t live without.

Since the shit in my life and of this night just keeps accumulating, it doesn’t stop there.

Matt joins this circus of the macabre, closing in on Godric from his other side. “I’m with Sarah on this, Angelhole. Your abusive ass has been putting our girl through Hell. Since you have her trapped in this toxic cycle, and keep injecting her with your poison, the only antidote for her is getting rid of you.”

“That’s a worthy cause, Praetor,” Niala says as she joins their threatening advance. “Having a hand in your death would look amazing on my resume.”

“Killing you will be my pure pleasure, you loathsome bastard!”

My mouth hangs open as Cara advances on him, too, her eyes brimming with multi-hued fire and hatred. When she’s been Godric’s number one fanatic from day one. She would have probably killed me if it assured her of taking my place by his side.

Just what happened when she intercepted Godric on his way to me on the dance floor? What could he have done to turn her adoration to loathing in the couple of minutes Isaiah was distracting me?

Godric doesn’t even glance at Matt and Niala, the snub loud and clear with how irrelevant he finds them. But he does look down the extra foot he’s grown at Cara, and his gaze fills with—boredom.

He tsks. “The truth hurts, doesn’t it, angel-graced? I should have rubbed your nose in it the first time your revolting, bitch-in-heat fawning grated on my nerves. Your loathing is so much more preferable. Even if it is as inconsequential.”

She screeches like a banshee and charges him, just as the others do, too. Sarah jumps on his back again, this time sinking her teeth where his neck is still healing. Aela joins in, ginning up at him as she lands an explosive blow to his jaw. “Sorry, cousin. I have to stand with my Unitas on this.”

In response, he effortlessly tears Sarah off his back, and uses her to swat them all away, as if she were a newspaper and they were flies.

As they all crash on their asses, he shakes his head at Aela. “That’s regrettable, cousin. I was looking forward to adding such a powerhouse to my collective.”

Aela grimaces up at him. “Ugh, Borg much? But at least you acknowledge my power. I’m almost on par with you.”

His raised eyebrow is both incredulous and pitying. “Having power and knowing how to use it are realms apart, Raphaela. As I was going to teach you. As I will now demonstrate.” She starts retorting, but he dismisses her and looks over at Jinny, the only one who hasn”t attacked him yet. Which is weird. I thought she’d be the first one to charge him. “Well, Hellspawn? Are you sitting this one out? Not joining this pathetic assassination attempt? Afraid to see how you don’t measure up against me?”

“I held my own against you before, you Demi-Heavenly dipshit,” Jinny mumbles, sounding on the verge of lamenting again.

Godric shakes his head in chilling forbearance. “You held your own against the fully-restrained Sword of Heaven, who upheld the tenets of the Accords. The Praetor who observed the archangels’ dictates about not eradicating high-ranking demons like the plague that you are. This is me, and I’m finally free of the shackles I’ve always placed upon myself. So I applaud your wisdom in not engaging me.”

“You just convinced me to fry your fowl ass, Angelwad,” Jinny drawls, her voice losing the oppressive edge of melancholy. “I just saved Nullbrain’s life, the life you almost snuffed out. Now I’m gonna save her from your plague.”

Godric tuts, shaking his head at her in disappointment. “You already lost too much, demon. Your status, your mission, your horns. You’ve become so pathetic, I no longer thought you worthy of being eliminated. Yet you haven’t lost all the things that make you yourself yet. Stand between me and her, and I’ll strip you of each and every one of them. Painfully, and permanently.”

Jinny spits at her feet, a declaration of war, and the fiery glob eats through the iridescent, marble-like floor. So she could have done this to me when she spit in my eye that first day. She did threaten she’s melt my face or appendages off later.

But she hadn’t. Now she’s squaring off against the most dangerous being in existence. For me.

As the others converge around him again, Jinny joins them, her hands starting to glow like swords being tempered in fire. “Do your worst, Godawful.”

A frown darkens his blood-covered face. “You’re nowhere near worth my worst, Hellspawn. But I just might, if you keep using her names for me.”

“To think I thought you were the strong, silent type,” Matt snickers as her hands begin to crackle with a weird field of energy that looks like—the absence of all light and color. “Turns out you’re just a blowhard.”

Godric blinks at her, as if he found an ant antagonizing him. “Who are you again?”

“Oh, you’re also a wiseass. Let me introduce myself.” Matt hurls her hand out, hitting him with a bolt that looks like a rip in the fabric of reality, right between the eyes.

As his head flies back with the strike, it feels as if it hit me, too, in the heart, electrifying me into motion.

I stumble forward, plastering my back against Godric, putting myself in the middle, hoping it will deter them, and him.

“Guys, you’re all out of your minds,” I choke. “But what matters is that Godric is going out of his. Don’t provoke him while he’s in this condition, please?—”

“He can’t take us all!” Sarah cries, and the others shout back in corroboration, rallying each other.

“We can bring him down together,” Matt shouts, another bolt brewing in her hands.

“Especially with me in the equation,” Aela says as she begins to glow with that terrible, golden radiation, like when she incinerated that army of monstrosities during the Trials.

“And me,” Cara hisses, the energy field of teals and turquoises that also obliterated them forming around her.

“You’re about to see what a Princess of the Night Court will bring to this hunting party.” Niala laughs as what looks like living darkness swirls around her.

Spreading my arms as if to ward off this impending disaster, I stumble around Godric so I can face each of them. “Stop it, all of you! I don’t need you to defend me! Don’t you dare make another move against him!” I fling a hand at the mayhem in the distance. “Look at that slaughterhouse! Godric just took on a battalion of highly-trained nephilim, and turned them into that chicken fajita-like mess. Hell, he even got nuked and it only pissed him off. If you think you can do better than that, you must realize you”re fucking insane! So listen to me please?—”

Sarah gives a war cry and unleashes her light, and I’m suddenly airborne, shooting up dozens of feet in the air.

Godric got his damn forcefield around me again, a second before Sarah’s light hit us. I have no idea yet what it can do, but that she didn’t consider what it can do to me, is proof she is out of her mind.

It now snaps around Godric, surrounding him like a cocoon made of endless, blinding filaments. As it constricts around him, each strand seems to be cutting into his skin, like a million steel wires. As they squeeze deeper, and his blood starts flowing down his body, Jinny shoots lava lasers from both her hands and eyes, blasting him in the back of the head. It bursts into flame as the others bombard him from all sides, the collective of their power mind-numbing, and literally tearing Godric apart.

Terror, like nothing I’ve ever felt, tears into me with the same force.

He might have been wrong about their powers. My Unitas seem to be truly unprecedented. Matt and Niala seem off the charts as well. Even in the first stages of their training, they’re hitting him harder, causing him more damage than a whole brigade of nephilim. He might have overestimated his ability to withstand them.

They might really kill him.

Dread explodes into screams as I beg and plead and weep for them to stop. But they’re all too far gone.

My only hope to stop this catastrophe in progress, before they succeed in murdering him, or before he retaliates, is to knock them all out.

But in the aftermath of my injury, with the invasiveness of Aela’s power and the high of Godric’s blood reverberating in my system, I’m both amped and disoriented. I can see their Life Essence, and I feel I can pull at it from this distance. But in my state, I’m afraid I’ll do far worse than put them in a coma.

I can’t risk it. I shouldn’t. Of course they won’t kill Godric. His regenerative abilities are unmatched. And of course he won’t retaliate. Any moment now he’ll subdue them, without any lasting damage to anyone.

This peptalk does nothing to reassure me. I can do nothing but watch as they continue their overwhelming onslaught, and suffer each blast Godric takes from every side.

At one point, I can’t fool myself anymore. His healing is slowing down, and if they manage to deplete it, they will actually end him. Desperation detonates once more, multiplied by a hundred, and I start screaming again, begging him to fly to me, take me away from here.

If I’m the one doing this to all of them, once I’m out of range, they should all recover.

He doesn’t hear me. Maybe he’s incapable of hearing anything anymore. And if he won’t save himself, I have to do it. I have to risk yanking on their Life Essence?—

My heart stops. He’s looking up at me. Among the horrific injuries they inflicted on him, I can’t even see his eyes. I don’t even know if he can see me. Then, he nods.

Yes. Yes. He’s telling me he’ll comply, will cut this madness short, and come to me. Once we’re out of here, all this will stop.

My heart thunders in relief, before it almost ruptures as he starts roaring. Like he did when Azazel invaded his body and being, with the infection of his foulness and depravity.

Knowing they’re hurting him so much he can no longer hold back is unbearable. It shatters my reason, and with it any reasons I had for holding back myself.

I have to make them stop, come what may?—

Everything vanishes inside me, in existence, as I hurtle into the void, riding the edges of the shockwave that explodes from him.

It spits me back seconds later, and I find myself staring down at a horror scene.

Torn and gored, Godric is standing in the eye of the destruction, with Sarah and the others strewn around him at the periphery of its radius, unconscious. Or worse.

Sarah is lying face down, bleeding from her mouth, her right leg at a disturbing angle. The others are in a variety of unnatural positions, too.

As I feel my sanity fragmenting with worst-case scenarios, he starts glowing like the heart of a red sun, baking the blood covering him from head to boot into a bark-like crust. Then, spreading his arms and bending his back, he clenches his whole body, and it shatters and flies off him like the shrapnel of a bomb.

His healing seems to be picking up again as he looks up and lowers me within the forcefield.

As soon as he lets my feet touch the ground, he dissolves it. Before I can get my shaking legs to work to rush to Sarah’s side, Godric beats me to it, in slow, difficult steps. My heart is a tornado in my chest, and his blood a vortex in my veins as he stops before her prostrated form. I want to ask if she’s okay, but I can’t utter a sound.

He sweeps his gaze from her to the others before he waves his hands. They all float in the air like marionette puppets, before he deposits them next to her, arranging them like a collection of broken dolls.

If that wasn’t disturbing enough, it’s the way he’s gazing at them that shakes me right to my bottomless core. The pragmatic predation in his eyes looks like he’s considering whom to finish off first.

Shaking all over, I approach him as if I’m tiptoeing into a minefield. “Godric, step back from them. Slowly. Please.”

His gaze stops at Sarah. “You want me to spare them? I didn’t spare my own men.”

“Your men threatened me,” I choke.

Lifting his gaze to me, he steps over Sarah to meet me halfway, a nonchalant gesture dismissing my argument. “Your Unitas—and these two randoms—did worse than that.”

Fucking Heaven. If he thinks that, then he has totally lost his mind.

“Those bastards wanted to take you away from me, physically. That’s a threat I could, and did, easily thwart. Your Unitas want to deprive me of you in a more profound way. I’ve decimated cities for far, far less.” His still burnt and broken hand cups my cheek in utmost care, even as his calmly unhinged eyes inundate me with indulgence. “Once they’re dead, nothing will ever come between us again.”