A heavy breath shoves through the pressing feeling in my chest, and I hate how fucked my emotions are right now.
Can’t they just… I don’t know, take a fucking vacation every now and then? Calm the fuck down on occasion?
“Whatare you?”
He doesn’t answer, and my eyes narrow on him.
We glare at one another for several long seconds before I shrug and shake my head at him. His teeth grind together hard, total frustration darkening his eyes, and it’s then that I can see just how terrifying this man truly can be. Hell hosts a lot of demons. Some of them are just like humans, really. They are so alluring you don’t realize they’re bad until they’ve dulled everything around you and happiness can’t bloom in their presence. They destroy everything good.
Until there’s nothing left.
And then they carry on, completely unharmed, to do it all over again to someone new.
Azazel may look angelic, but he’s all demon as far as I’m concerned.
“She needs my help,” he says more to himself than anything. “I’m coming. I can’t do it directly under our new watchful ruler, but I’ll get to her, I promise.” His gaze is fixed on the statue of the angel my physical body is currently slumped down inside. But I know he’s looking at the headmistress, not me. “Tell her—tell her she needs to listen to both sides. It’s more than just demon magic,” he says cryptically.
What the fuck does that mean? What a useless fuck this guy turned out to be.
His attention slips back to me, and I don’t agree to anything he just asked me to do.
Because I can’t tell Izara any of those things.
Even if I understood it and even if I could reach her, I wouldn’t waste our last minutes together relaying messages from a fucking stranger.
He doesn’t pause or wait for my response. He doesn't give me a second glance at all. His body tenses all over in a tell-tale sign. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. It’s like he’s frozen where he stands. And then poof. He’s gone.
On his side, he’s woken up to his own reality. He carries on with his life as he knows it.
On my side, more darkness crawls in. It seeps into the starry sky above. It eats away at the bricks of the school. It shadows over the forest. The world around me crumbles in on itself. He takes the surroundings his mind built for him and leaves me there forgotten in the darkness.
Just like they always do.
I linger there for a moment longer, standing in the nothingness. It doesn’t really matter if I stay here in this void or return to my physical body. Both have the same dark setting.
It all presses in on me. It feels like a weight on my mind and chest, and I finally relent and settle back into my own skin.
My lashes open slowly.
It’s an emptiness I can’t escape.
It’s still pressing, and it’s still suffocating.
I wanted to see Izara. I wanted to help her.
Of all the fucking people I could have met with, Azazel has to be the most useless one.
I shove a tense breath from my lungs.
“What a fucking waste,” I whisper.
My head hangs, and I push my hands through my messy hair. Immediately my eyes clench together, and I’m too tired to drift to another dream, but I have to. I have to find someone who can actually help her. Maybe I will die here, but I can’t let her die out there.
I can’t.
As I try to focus, the storming sound of the war outside grows louder. It roars to life in a startling way. What’s even more startling is the cold night’s breeze that slips over my arms.
And it doesn’t compare at all to the chilling fingers that close ever so slowly around my arm.
