Chapter 190: I’m Back

Seraphel

"You skipped a great deal, did you not?"

A deep, unfamiliar voice sounded in my ear, and my eyes flew open at once, because I had not only heard the words beside me. I had heard them inside my own head.

I came out of my chair so fast I knocked it over.

A figure stood by the window, simply standing there in a room that had been completely empty a few minutes earlier, before I fell asleep. The light came through the glass behind him without ever quite settling on him, as though it could not decide whether he was truly there at all.

He was tall, with silver-white hair exactly as Author Nude had described it in her books, and though I had never once laid eyes on him before, I recognized him instantly.

The resemblance was scattered across him in pieces. He had Sariel’s amber-gold eyes, and he carried himself with his shoulders drawn back in that same rigid, imperious way Luceriel always did, and his robes were every bit as extravagant as anything Raizel would have chosen for himself.

There were probably traces of the others in him too, somewhere, but I could not place exactly where they were or what they belonged to.

"I know who you are," I said, pointing at him. "You are the father of the seven sins. Ophaniel."

He inclined his head slightly. "Seraphel."

Hearing that name in that voice, in this room, lifted every hair on my arms. He had not called me by my real name, which meant he had no idea what it was, and yet here he stood in my world regardless.

"How are you here?"

"I am not, particularly." He glanced down at his own hand as though it were an unfamiliar object. "This is the last of what I have. You are dreaming, Seraphel. All of this is a dream, brought on by your grief."

"A dream?" I looked around the room slowly. There was no possible way this was a dream. I had spent days here. I had gone to classes, eaten, bled, torn my knuckles open on a wall. Every single thing about it had pointed toward reality. "How can this be a dream?"

"Your mind created this domain."

"I can create domains now?"

Ophaniel nodded.

So this was not my world at all, but something I had built myself, probably because I was so furious with myself for never reading the rest of the plot. This was the only way left for me to make amends for all of it.

"Then how do I get back? Azriel is going to die because of me, and Draca is winning. Do you understand what I am telling you? Your son is dying on a rock in Verolona, and I was standing right there—"

"I know precisely where my son is." Something shifted behind that calm for a moment, and then it was gone again. "I have watched all seven of them for longer than you have existed, and I have never once been able to reach them. Not through dreams. Not through prayer. Not through anything at all. I am bound to stay away from them because of what I did." His gold eyes settled on me. "You are not bound in the same way. Through your connection to Azriel, I believe you are tied to all of them now. You are the only crack in the wall I have ever found."

"So you used me."

"I would not call it using you, though you have certainly played a great role in helping me." He let out a slow breath. "I will only tell you this once, because it seems this is the last time I will be able to appear to you at all, and I suspect you have already worked it out for yourself. Castiel’s light is what you need. It is the only thing that can give you what you want."

I nodded, and for a few long minutes the two of us simply stood there in the dorm room I had apparently built out of my own grief, neither of us saying anything.

"They hate me," he said finally, breaking the silence. "My sons. They believe I abandoned them."

I thought of Azriel’s face when Castiel had defended him. I will never call abandoning his children a sacrifice.

"Yes," I said. "They do."

He nodded slowly, absorbing it, and for one second he did not look like a celestial at all. He looked like a man who had waited a very long time to hear something he already knew.

"And what of you? What do you think of me?"

I gave him a long look before answering. "I think you could have protected your sons if you truly wanted to. Instead you abandoned them and left them to carry the weight of it alone, in a realm that hated them for existing."

Ophaniel let out a heavy breath. "You are... you are truly worthy of being Castiel’s son."

The moment the words left his mouth, I turned toward the mirror on the wall and stared at my own reflection, and I was no longer Nathan.

I was Seraphel again.

"Send me back."

"Where?"

The question caught me sideways, and I gave him a questioning look. "I know this is my own domain, but you are the all-powerful father of the sins. I need to go back to before Draca appeared."

Ophaniel studied his own palms. "I can only send you back to a point that holds genuine importance to what you intend to do. My power is limited now. I am already dead, and if I overreach I will break the law of time itself."

I let out a long breath, thinking back over how the battle had unfolded. If Pazuzu had been standing with us instead of being sent out of Verolona. If we had actually used that meeting to plan something rather than tearing each other apart over an engagement. Perhaps then we would not have lost so quickly, so completely.

And then I remembered the blood covering Azriel’s face as he collapsed in front of me.

I refused to watch that happen twice. Going back was the only way I could protect him now.

"Take me back to before Draca returned. Back to when Pazuzu was first introduced to the brothers."

Something crossed his face then that I did not entirely understand. Pride, perhaps. Or grief. With him it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

"Then go," he said, raising his hand. "See that you succeed, and seal Draca away once more. And when you see them, when you see my sons..." He paused, his golden eyes dimming. "Tell them I never meant to abandon them, and that I love them. Every one of them."

I nodded.

A bright light bloomed in front of me, swelling until it filled the entire room, and I looked at Ophaniel one last time and smiled at him before it swallowed everything whole.

"Truly, out of the seven of us, you would be the one to end up bound to a demon capable of holding an Elysium god by the throat without breaking so much as a sweat over it, all while somehow managing to look bored the entire time."

Sariel’s disdainful Voice cut clean through the haze, and my eyes fluttered open to find myself back in Luceriel’s meeting chamber.

The first thing I did was press a hand to my stomach.

I felt it. The small, stubborn press of it beneath my palm, and my eyes went wide.

I was truly back.

"Seraphel?"

Azriel’s voice.

I lifted my head slowly to meet his eyes, and he was not covered in blood. There was not a single gash anywhere on him, no black poison eating its way through his skin, no cuts of any kind.

He was fine.

"Seraphel," he said again, brows drawing together as his hand came up toward my shoulder. "Are you alright?"

I did not answer him. I could not. I simply threw my arms around his neck and held on as though we had been apart for years.

"I’m back," I said into his shoulder, and my voice broke completely apart. "I’m back! I’m back! I’m back!"