Chapter 183: I Am Not Doing This Again

Seraphel

Kaevian was alive.

The words sat wrong in my head, refusing to line up into something that made sense.

I had watched him die. I remembered the way his eyes were closed after Malachi brought his body back, his and Eiren’s both, laid out side by side like something that no longer belonged to the world of the living.

And yet here he stood, that same obsidian gaze locked on mine, that same mouth curling faintly at one corner like he already knew something I did not.

"Do I remind you of someone, little vessel?" the voice that used to belong to Kaevian purred, soft and mocking, and then he laughed, louder this time, delighted with the sound of his own cruelty.

"That is not Kaevian," Malachi said, low and even, stepping half in front of me without ever taking his eyes off the figure.

"What?" My voice came out thinner than I wanted it to.

Azriel’s hand found my shoulder, gripping hard enough that I felt it through the barrier still humming around me. "He is right." His jaw was tight, his eyes fixed somewhere past Kaevian’s shoulder, on one of the other seven figures still drifting down through the torn sky. "Look there."

I followed where he pointed, and my stomach dropped all over again.

A woman. Dark, curling hair loose around her shoulders, her face set in the same faint, knowing smile Kaevian wore.

I did not recognize her, not directly, but the moment Azriel spoke her fate out loud, something in me went cold anyway.

"I killed her myself," Azriel said, quiet, almost to himself. "She was Lumiel’s mate. Anabelle died centuries ago. And yet here she stands."

The words dropped into the space between us like stones into still water.

"Then it is not them at all," I said, the pieces finally clicking together. "That is Draca. And the seven lords we were warned about. And I think they are connected somehow to everyone here."

The moment I said his name, the figure wearing Kaevian’s face turned his head, slow and deliberate, and looked directly at me.

Then his smile widened, stretching past the edges of the face he wore, and without so much as lifting a hand, a bolt of white lightning tore across the sky toward me, faster than anything I had ever seen in my life, a spear of pure light that seemed to bend the air itself around its path.

"Seraphel!" Azriel’s voice cracked through the chaos.

Solmira and Elios threw themselves into its path, gold light flaring bright between us and the bolt, and for half a second I actually believed it might hold.

Then the light shattered, and both of them were thrown backward through the air like they weighed nothing at all, crashing into the broken ground somewhere behind me.

The lightning kept coming. Straight at me. Not at the barrier around me, not at the wards Taizel had layered over it. At me.

I watched Azriel lunge, watched Uriel throw up a wall of ice that dissolved on contact, watched Lumiel swing his sword through it and get nothing for his trouble but a shower of sparks.

None of it mattered. Whatever this was, it wanted through, and it was going to get there.

I am not doing this again. The thought arrived before I understood I had even thought it.

I was so tired of standing behind barriers other people built for me, tired of watching everyone else bleed and burn while I stayed folded up small and safe in some corner like I was made of glass.

Whatever I had inside me, whatever Castiel’s light actually meant, I wanted it now. And since I had already broken through the first gate, I believed, for the first time, that I might actually be stronger than I had ever given myself credit for.

Something in my chest cracked open.

Heat surged up through me so fast it hurt, gold and blue light bursting out from beneath my skin like it had been waiting there the whole time for permission.

I threw my hands up on instinct, and the light poured out of my palms in twin streams, gold twisting through blue, meeting Draca’s white lightning head-on in the open air above the barrier.

The collision lit up the entire sky.

For one blinding second, everything around me turned white, then gold, then a violent, flickering violet where the two lights fought for space.

The sound of it was enormous, a booming crack that rattled straight through my teeth, and the ground beneath my feet actually shuddered from the force of it.

I felt the recoil travel up both my arms, into my shoulders, into my back teeth, but I did not let go.

I planted my feet and pushed harder, forcing more of that heat up out of my chest and down through my hands.

Draca’s lightning surged again, a fresh wave of white crackling down the length of it, and I answered with more of my own, gold and blue weaving tight around the white like something alive, strangling it at the source.

Again and again, bolt after bolt, the two of us locked into something that felt less like a fight and more like a conversation neither of us was willing to end first.

My arms shook. My lungs burned. But the light held.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized how quiet everything else had gone.

I tore my eyes away from Draca for half a second, just long enough to look around, and my stomach turned over completely.

Nobody was moving.

Azriel stood frozen mid-stride, a thin net of golden lightning wrapped tight around his entire body, his crimson eyes wide and furious and utterly still.

Lumiel knelt on the ground beside him, sword half raised, caught in the same shimmering gold.

Uriel. Sariel. Taizel. Raizel, Pazuzu, and Luceriel.

Every single one of them was pinned in place, wrapped in threads of light that had not been there a moment ago, light that had come from somewhere I had not even seen.

I was alone out here. Completely alone, holding back a god’s lightning with nothing but whatever had just torn itself loose inside my chest.