Chapter 188: Nathan

Seraphel

I was back, and not in Verolona, not in the cave with Azriel bleeding out in my arms. I was back here, in my dormitory room, staring up at the same cracked ceiling I used to lie under when I could not sleep.

The same desk was shoved against the window with its wobbling leg I never got around to fixing, and my secondhand laptop still sat open on it with the screen glowing.

My phone sat face up beside it, and the time read 3:05 in the morning.

I picked it up with hands that would not stop shaking and stared at those numbers until my eyes burned.

Five minutes. I had been reading at 3:00. I remembered the exact moment, remembered thinking I would finish one more Chapter before bed, remembered the words blurring together on the screen.

Five minutes had passed here.

Months had passed there.

I dropped the phone onto the desk and pressed both palms flat against the wood to steady myself, and that was when I caught my own reflection in the dark window.

Nathan looked back at me, not Seraphel. The dark blue hair I had grown used to seeing every morning was gone, replaced by the plain dark hair I had carried my whole life, and the eyes staring back at me were brown instead of that deep blue Azriel loved so much.

I wore the same hoodie I had on that night, the one with the stain on the sleeve from a coffee I spilled three days before any of this started.

I was truly back as Nathan.

And my stomach was flat.

I do not know how long I stood there staring at that.

Long enough that my eyes went dry. I pressed my hand against it anyway, the way I had done a hundred times in Verolona, and there was nothing.

There was no weight, no warmth, no small stubborn life pushing back against my palm.

It was just me, back as Nathan, standing in a room I had left five minutes and several months ago.

What the hell was happening? I wondered as I turned toward the wall and hit it.

I did not decide to do it.

My fist was simply moving, and then the drywall split under my knuckles, and then I hit it again, and again, until my hand throbbed and something inside me finally tore loose and came out as a sound I did not recognize as my own voice.

"Why?" I slammed my palm flat against the wall. "Why now? Why now?"

Azriel was dying. Right at that moment, wherever there was, he was bleeding out on cold stone with his life draining out of him, and I had been standing over him, ready to fight, ready to finally be worth something, and the story had simply plucked me out of it like I was a page being turned.

"Take me back." My forehead pressed against the cracked wall. "Take me back! Take me back! Take me back!"

Nothing answered me.

Of course nothing answered me.

I was a twenty-one-year-old business major standing in a dorm room at three in the morning, screaming at plaster.

I slid down the wall and sat on the floor with my ruined hand in my lap, and I cried until there was nothing left in me to come out.

I was going out of my mind over how everything had turned, and instead of going to the hospital to have my ruined hand looked at, I did not go at all.

I did not sleep either. I could not, no matter how hard I tried. Instead I got up, wiped my face, sat down at that desk and opened my laptop, staring at the page of The Book of Lust still sitting exactly where I had left it. The same Chapter. The same paragraph. The last thing I had read before the world swallowed me whole.

I started from the beginning, and this time I did not skim a single line. I did not skip ahead to the smut or scroll frantically past the battle formations and the cultivation theory and the long stretches of ancient politics looking for the next scene where somebody got kissed against a wall.

I read every word of every Chapter of all seven books, from The Book of Lust straight through to The Book of Sloth. Seven books I had owned for years and read maybe forty percent of.

I hated myself for that. Genuinely, viciously hated myself. Every time I hit a section I recognized as one I had skipped, every time I found something that would have saved me weeks of fumbling in the dark, it landed like a fist under my ribs.

Luceriel’s visions had a cost. It was written in Chapter forty-one of The Book of Pride, plain as anything. The sight of a Sin consumed the vessel that carried it. I had read that Chapter. I had read the first two paragraphs of that Chapter and then jumped ahead, because Pazuzu showed up eight pages later.

I could have warned him. Months ago. If I had simply read the Chapter, maybe I would have been able to save Azriel, and stop Draca before any of this began.

But I was useless. The useless Seraphel who could never do anything except stand there and watch while everyone else fought around him.

Now that I was back in my own world, what exactly was I expecting? Some miracle that would send me back, let me fight Draca, and let me win?

"I am so foolish," I groaned, running a hand through my hair before dropping my head onto the desk.

Why the hell was I back here, and what was I supposed to do about any of it?

The tears came before I could stop them, soaking into the sleeve of my hoodie where my face was pressed against the wood. I did not bother lifting my head. There was no one here to see me fall apart anyway, no Azriel to gather me up and tell me everything would be fine, no Analisse hovering nearby with that worried look she always wore.

There was only me, alone in a room that had never once felt like home, in a world I had stopped wanting to belong to a long time ago.

"Please," I whispered into the crook of my arm, and I did not even know who I was speaking to. Whatever had pulled me out of that cave. Whatever had decided I was worth dragging across worlds twice. Castiel, maybe. Author Nude herself, wherever she was, whoever she was. "Please. Whatever you are. Whatever brought me here."

My fingers curled against the desk.

"Take me back to him. Please, just take me back."

I stayed there like that, head down, shoulders shaking, waiting for something to answer me.

Nothing did.