Among Us: A Supernatural Novel written by Carver Edlund

Aegis

Feet first, Castiel dropped through the dimensional gate. Corrosive darkness rushed upward, a tunnel that devoured all, airless, breathless. He kept falling, away from the strobing, shrinking circle of light, and past tar-like webs. They curtained a vast, incomprehensible space, squeezing the light out of existence.

While he could see, his vessel could not. It was a strange sensation, and he could feel Jimmy's growing unease, which in turn made him uneasy. Jimmy had been quiet these past months, having given himself over wholly to Heaven's will, suspended in unending prayer. It would not do to have him awake now.

Fortunately, the webs had not reacted to either him or Aya; her soul, and Jimmy's, were still enmeshed within corporeal bodies, their shine baffled. The webs contracted and expanded listlessly, tar and slime and venom as elastic as the walls of an enormous esophagus, aching with eternal emptiness. Below, balls of grayish light lay scattered like weary glow-in-the-dark toys across black velvet. The souls that had preceded them into the Void. They dimmed as he watched.

He dove forward and straightened his limbs to fall faster, to catch up to Aya. He pulled her against the pounding of the heart in his chest. He tucked his chin against her hair. She was so small but wonderfully warm. Alive and squirming, her elbows and knees jabbing at him.

His name in her mind. A prayer, though she wouldn't call it that. A source of strength for an angel.

He closed his eyes so he could concentrate. This time, he would not drop her. He was her guardian, whether his superiors liked it or not. He spread his wings to fly her out of danger.

And knew right away that something was wrong.

His wings—dear Father in Heaven his wings—failed to make the shift to a telluric current and instead burst into existence attached to his human vessel. The first instinctive down-sweep punched the breath right out of him. Worse, with his wings present, he could no longer find the exit, where the dimensional planes should lay against each other, compressed like pages in a book. The weight of a human being, so much heavier than the bare wreck of a soul he had flown out of Hell not long ago, dragged at him. They were still falling, unable to go back the way they had come.

In his current state, he could not regulate the flare of celestial power that accompanied the manifestation of his wings. Greedy, dripping, and hungry, the webs drew up and then shot outward in long, thick spikes of slime. They engulfed him like an ocean wave, clinging to his clothes, splashing into his eyes and mouth and ears, coating his wings. He cried out at pain he had not often experienced, which lanced directly through his true self, not the vessel. At the same time, Aya's whole body convulsed, and she gave a muffled shriek; she'd had no warning. She frantically scrubbed her face in his ruined shirt, skin dragging across fabric and blood and skin.

The web-stuff felt like mud against his face, hot and stinking of bile. On his wings, it felt like acid. The tarry strands tautened, and then snapped him back and up like the lash end of a whip, ripping out feathers by the roots. Though his head swam at the pain, he did not lose his hold of Aya. He folded his body around hers. Many of the strands broke and bounced away as they began, again, to fall.

Together, they crashed to the ground, which was as smooth and hard as a pane of diamond, and as lightless as the sweep of space between the arms of galaxies. The vessel took damage he no longer had the reserves of grace necessary to fully repair. Supernovas burst behind his eyes.

He lay gasping the foul air, half his face pressed to an inch of water that tasted of metal. Then the remaining strands tightened and thickened like sinews, drawing him up to his knees. They tore a choked grunt out of him and jolted Aya, as stunned as he, from his grasp. She splashed into the tepid water and then limply rolled to a stop.