77. WEN

That’s what I instinctively felt he was from the first night.

That iridescence he’s now exuding could be the Life Essence of those he massacred. He might even have powers similar to mine.

It’s no wonder that once his rigorous control started disintegrating, he found doling out extermination to those he found deserving his right. Maybe even his duty. It’s a miracle he’d let me talk him down, and hadn’t just vaporized Sarah and the others, once he considered them worthy of termination.

I once thought the Nephilim combined the powers and vices of both their parent races into a unique kind of monster. I thought that Godric took that concept a light year further, as the anomaly that was never replicated, the abomination he said shouldn’t exist, like me, who has powers that shouldn’t coexist.

Now I realize it’s worse than that. With his exposure to me and my powers, he seems to be changing. Metamorphosing into something unknown, and uncontrollable.

Whatever is happening to him, I feel he’s on the verge of snapping. His instability is manifesting as a conviction that anything that breathes is a threat to his single-minded goal, and all-consuming madness.

Me.

The flip side is it makes me the only one with any sway over him, and I have to use that power now. He’s already breaking the tie, and starting to pummel Lorcan and Gideon into bloody pulps.

I have to distract him with something far stronger than his fury with them. Fear for me is the only thing that comes to mind. I need to put myself in danger so he’d forget about them and come to my rescue.

The only plan I can come up with is to push his forcefield into the stratosphere where I’ll hopefully be in danger of freezing or suffocating to death. For that, I need Mani.

Feeling frayed by the whole night, by the storm of his blood raging inside me, I reach deep down, searching for it.

But I can’t see it in the corner it had chosen, or anywhere else. It’s this damn—opaqueness that plagues my own power. Like a thick fog that prevents me from seeing it, let alone using it.

Now that I can’t access my powers, any gamble of yanking their Life Essence to put them out of commission is no longer a possibility.

Which leaves the last option. Finding someone capable of stopping him. I can only think of one being.

His father. Azrael.

Problem is, when I reached him before, it was through his currently insane sons. I can’t communicate psychically with anyone apart from Jinny, and Godric.

But—maybe it’s because I haven’t tried to reach anyone else before. Maybe if I can access the Mindscape, I can reach Azrael though its plane, especially since we do have a connection.

I never got the chance to find out what it is, but I just know it’s there. I have to believe it. He’s the only one who can stop his son now. The only one Godric can’t vanquish.

If I can reach him, he might also enlist the help of the other archangels. Together they can overpower Godric, without harming him. At least, not too much.

But what if there’s no stopping him, without ending him?

It’s a possibility. Maybe even a probability. One I’d be powerless to do anything about.

No. No. I can’t risk it. Can’t risk him.

But if I don’t, everyone I care about, all those who became central to my life are in danger of not surviving the night. And it’s all probably because of me.

Unable to bear it anymore, I scream. And scream. Letting all my helplessness and guilt and dread tear through my being, and into the infinity within.

It’s as if my desperation galvanizes Godric into ending his battle. With that mind-boggling prowess he’d only started teaching me, he knocks Lorcan and Gideon out, one after the other. This time when he sends them crashing down, the impact brings down a whole section of the building.

The debris doesn’t bury them like it had Sarah and the others, giving me a heart-bursting view of their broken and bloodied bodies slumped over the wreckage. This time, they don’t get up again. They don’t even move.

I have no idea if they’re still breathing.

I scream again. I never stopped screaming.

He zooms up towards me like a blazing comet, then reaching for me through the forcefield and taking me into his massive arms.

“If my fight with these bastards hurt you again, I will?—”

I wind my arms around his neck, squeezing him with all I have as I wail, “Stop, Godric. Just stop. Everything.”

The blinding glare of his eyes subsides, and his chest empties, then he’s flying me higher.

When he finally stops, he encompasses me within the forcefield again, and takes off his shredded jacket. His hands emit flames in every shade of grey like his wings. They melt and reshape the fabric before he reaches to drapes it over me. It feels as if I’m wrapped in his heat and scent, literally.

My consciousness is floundering as his eyes pan below. Mine follow.

Like hours ago when Lorcan flew me here, I have a birds-eye view. But in place of the majestic Noctis, there’s a heartrending scene of total destruction.

His exhalation sounds wistful. “Lorcan did say he wanted to tear the place down. Gideon wanted me to foot the bill of trashing it, again. The former got his wish. The latter, ”

“Are they?—?”

His lips close over mine, silencing my question, and sending my anxiety shrieking.

To vent it, to tear us both out of the fulminating sensual haze even a touch ignites, I bite into his lip, ripping his flesh.

He chuckles as he withdraws to look down at me, flames of delight and fumes of desire swirling in his mismatched eyes. “I’ve been tormenting myself with fantasies of what I’d do to you. I’ve been remiss in imagining your response, if you want me a fraction as much as I want you.”

I sink my blunt nails into his ears again. “There’s no ifs, Godric. Or fractions. What I feel is total and absolute and fathomless. Which is why you must listen to me when I tell you, this is all wrong.”

“What’s wrong with giving us both what we desperately need and crave? Or punishing all those who would come between me and what’s mine?”

“Since I’m not winning this argument, I’ll give you another incontrovertible proof that something is wrong with you.”

He tilts his head, his serene curiosity a shock after his fury and brutality minutes ago.

His willingness to listen to me, and the power it gives me, crush me with the weight of the dreadful responsibility, and the suffocating dread of misusing them again.

I swallow the serrated lump in my throat. “When Azazel was about to squish me, you weren’t even in the region but still felt my danger. When he was about to bind me with the Ligare, and I wasn’t even in physical danger, and you were only-you-know-where being tortured out of your mind, I screamed for you, and you heard me. This time I was a few hundred feet away from you and I almost died, and you didn’t feel me.”

A frown of another kind of anger settles between his brows as his eyes dim by degrees.

Then he finally inhales sharply, his nod more to himself. “Something is profoundly wrong with me.” Before I draw a breath of relief at his breakthrough, he shrugs. “Not that realizing it makes any difference. Whatever I once possessed that rationed my mind and leashed my powers, has dissipated like water on the sun’s surface.”

“Godric, please, you must stop this. For me.”

“It’s for you that I cannot stop, my bane. Everyone is conspiring to take you away from me.” His gaze glows with aggression again as he looks down. “Starting with those two bastards.”

“Oh, no, Godric, no! They’re not!”

“You don’t notice how they treat you? Look at you? You didn’t see what they risked to challenge me for you?”

“They were not challenging you. They just thought you were hurting me, like my friends did, and misguidedly tried to rescue me.”

But he’s not listening to me, still looking down with that deadly calculation in his eyes. “Now they have demonstrated they’re capable of putting their own feud aside to unite against me, they pose a real threat.” Before I can let my frantic objections fly, or he flies down to finish them, that chilling indulgence comes over his expression again as he looks back at me. “Are you going to remind me of a vow I made concerning them, too, my bane?”

“I don’t need one, because you’re not going to come near them again.” He raises his eyebrows lazily, and I tighten my arms around his neck. “You always brought me back, Godric. Whenever the void tried to swallow me, mind and body, it was your voice, your need, your being, that always brought me back. Listen to my voice and need, feel my being. Let them bring you back. Come back to me, Godric.”

His eyes flare, both burning and freezing me to the marrow. And that’s before he looks into the distance over my head.

I squirm in his hold, and see the target of his calm rage.

A sea of wings. An army of Nephilim.

The new detonation of fright almost takes the top of my head off as I drag his face down to me. “Don’t you dare confront that horde?—”

“Host.”

“Fuck you, Angelhole.”

“You will, indeed. Right after I get rid of their nuisance.”

“Godric, please, you said you’d do anything for me.”

“I would. I am. This is me doing anything for you.”

“Do anything I ask. And I’m asking you to stop this. Please take me away from here!”

“It won’t make any difference if I do. Now they know what you are, they’ll keep coming after you. I must and will eliminate their threat to you. By the time I’m done, no one will be left who can ever take you away from me.”

“I’m not a toy to be taken. I won’t let anyone take me. But I need you to turn away now so you can take me to my friends. We need to help them?—”

“Your friends are dead.”

His calm declaration razes through me.

In the scorched wasteland of rejection it leaves behind, I shake my head, shake all over. “No. No they’re not.”

His gaze grows placating, and everything inside me snaps. I punch the pitying twist right off his healing lips, splitting them, and splintering my bones again. “Stop looking at me like that! They’re just pinned down. They’re the most powerful cadets this damn place has ever seen. It will take far more than some debris to do them any serious harm!”

The solemn indifference is back in his eyes, his Archangel of Death side on full display. “I heard one of their hearts stop, and felt her soul depart her body. I’ve been too busy ever since to bother focusing on the remaining five, but I can no longer hear their heartbeats. They’re gone.”

I gape up at him as an unending scream of denial rises from the depths of the void to fill existence.

When it ends, nothing remains.

Nothing but this entity regarding me out of Godric’s unknown eyes, as if it can’t comprehend my devastation.

The army of Nephilim have gathered all around us. It’s a testament to his power and threat that even this many of his kind, suffering from his same derangement, aren’t charging already. I can find only one reason why they’re here at all, clearly bent on attacking.

It is me. Whether it’s my Angelescence power, or it’s something else, and they’re staging this suicide mission to come after me as a Null, one way or the other, I am behind this.

“You were right all along, Godric,” I rasp. “When you told me I’m an abomination. That I shouldn’t exist. We both shouldn’t.”

“Or maybe it’s everything else that shouldn’t. Maybe only we should.”

“You must hear how insane that sounds,” I moan.

“The insane thing was giving you up, and letting anything come between us. I won’t let anything deprive me of you again.” Suffering escapes me on an expiring whimper, and his hand cups my shuddering cheek. “Your pain drills into my very being, right here.”

He takes my numb hand and presses it into his chest over his tattoo. As soon as my flesh touches his, that rune blazes to the surface and his eyes start to flicker, something faint and distant appearing in their mismatched depths. An emerald glimmer.

My emerald.

The shock of seeing it again is so brutal, it stops my heart. Before anything else can register, the emerald gutters, then it’s gone, and his eyes are back to those alien copper and steel fires.

It feels as if I lost him, all over again.

Grief liquefies my shattered heart and I sob it into his palm.

A sigh escapes him, as deep as his endlessness, fanning my cold face. “I did mean it when I said I would do anything for you, my bane. Including this, it seems.”

I raise my drowning eyes to his. “This?”

“I can’t stop myself, so I will let you do it.”

“I-I can’t.”

“You can. You have a piece of me inside you. Just take the rest.”

“I can’t do it even if I wanted to. I can’t see your Life Essence or Energy. I can’t even see your or anyone else’s Angel Essence. I-I think I lost my powers.”

“Then I’m sorry, my bane.” He rubs his large thumb over my lips, his expression of absolute indulgence burning my insides with misery. “I always suspected I would destroy my plans, and everything else anyway, because of you, for you. Now is as good a time as any.”

As he starts to turn away from me, I know he’ll exile me again in his forcefield, before he turns his massacre into a genocide.

In the next fractured edge of a heartbeat, before I have a chance to second guess myself, I wind myself around him tighter, hold his face between my shaking, stinging hands and draw his head down to mine.

He’s so large now, my lips cover only a part of his as I sob into his mouth. “I’m sorry, Godric—so sorry.”

Then I let the gaping wound in my soul rip open, and I throw us both into the void.