Chapter 55: Awakening Fury
The clean ache of exertion lasted exactly until Angel stepped back into the corridor. Then the heaviness returned, different this time—a weight in her bones, a low thrum in her soul that had nothing to do with the leftover souls and everything to do with the faces waiting outside the infirmary door.
Alyce nudged her hard in the ribs. “Told you. Morons didn’t move an inch.”
They were all there, a ragged council of worry and tension. Kilson paced a trench in the stone floor, his massive shoulders tight. Silas leaned against the wall, eyes closed but not sleeping. Crow stood perfectly still, his back to the wall, arms crossed, watching her approach with an intensity that felt like a physical touch. Amber hovered near him, looking small and fierce.
The nurse, a woman wrapped in beige bandages with only her sharp, dark eyes visible, threw her hands up. “Finally. Inside. Now. The rest of you, plant yourselves. She is not a communal artifact.”
Angel felt a flicker of gratitude for the woman’s no-nonsense tone. She walked past them, avoiding eye contact with Crow, whose silent stare was a magnet she couldn’t afford to be pulled by right now. The door shut with a firm click, muffling Kilson’s immediate, growled protest.
The infirmary was painfully bright. The hum of the soul-frequency monitors was a high, insectile buzz.
“Sit,” the nurse instructed, gesturing to the cot. Her movements were efficient, unspooling a sensor wire from a wall unit. “Let’s see what your little stunt did to your core resonance.”
Angel sat. The sensor was cold against her temple. She watched the nurse’s eyes scan the flickering data on a slate screen. Minutes passed in silence, broken only by the beep of machines.
“Stable,” the nurse announced, a note of surprise in her voice. “Remarkably so, considering. The expulsion of energy likely did you more good than harm. Your wavelength is… dense. Powerful. Unusually cohesive for a fresh transformation.” She removed the sensor. “Any pain? Dizziness? Unusual cravings?”
“No,” Angel said. Then she hesitated. “Just… a deep tiredness. Not sleepy. Just heavy.”
“Your soul is rebuilding its architecture. It’s allowed to be heavy.” The nurse made a note on her slate. “Alright. You can—”
“Can I leave?” Angel asked, the words coming out in a rush. She needed air that didn’t smell like antiseptic and worry.
The nurse paused. She set the slate down on a counter with a soft tap. She turned, her bandaged face giving nothing away, but her eyes softened almost imperceptibly. “Angel,” she said, and the use of her first name sent a trickle of cold down Angel’s spine. “There is something you need to know.”
Angel’s mouth went dry. She swallowed. “What?”
The nurse pulled a stool over and sat, putting them at eye level. She reached out and took Angel’s hands in her own. Her hands were warm, dry, and surprisingly strong. “Just know, Angelina, that whatever you decide, I will help guide you through it.”
Angel stared. Confusion was a blank wall. “Decision? What do you mean?”
The nurse looked at her then, with a profound, weary pity that carved a hollow in Angel’s chest. It was the look of someone holding a lit fuse.
The nurse sighed, a sound like wind through old parchment. “Angelina,” she said, her voice low and clear. “You are pregnant.”
The world didn’t shatter. It simply stopped. The hum of the machines faded into a white-noise void. The bright lights dimmed, tunneling down to the nurse’s pitying eyes and the impossible words hanging in the air between them.
“P-pregnant?” Angel heard her own voice, thin and far away. “I thought… I thought that fertility was low for Meisters…”
“Low, yes,” the nurse said, squeezing her hands gently. “But still a possibility. Some Meister couples have to try for decades before they conceive. Maybe the mix of your Weapon blood, and… the potential Witch lineage, makes you more fertile. It’s not unheard of for hybrid physiology to express differently.”
Angel stared down at her own stomach, flat beneath the infirmary tunic. A frantic, disconnected calculation began in her mind. “But he and I have been sleeping together for almost a year. Why now? All of a sudden?”
“Biology isn’t a schedule,” the nurse said, her tone turning clinical, a shield against the emotional fallout. “It is still recommended to use protection, even with low odds.” She took a steadying breath. “Now, we need to discuss your options. You can choose to continue the pregnancy, which would require specialized prenatal care given your… unique composition. Or, you can choose to terminate. Both paths have their own complexities here at the Academy. The sooner we decide, the better.”
Options. Paths. Termination. The words were sharp, surgical instruments laid out on a tray.
Angel began to shake. A fine, uncontrollable tremor started in her hands and raced up her arms, rattling her teeth. Her voice was a scratch of sound. “How far along am I?”
“About four weeks.”
Four weeks.
The number echoed, a bell tolling inside her skull. Four weeks. Four weeks. Four weeks.
Four weeks ago, rocks had struck her window in the dead of night. Four weeks ago, she’d run down the fire escape into the cold and thrown herself into Crow’s arms. Four weeks ago, after months of painful separation, they’d finally said the words aloud, desperate and raw in the dark of her apartment. I love you. I love you. I love you. That night. It had been that night.
The nurse was still speaking, her voice a gentle drone about soul-harmony scans and nutritional supplements for Weapon-Meister hybrids, about discrete procedures and recovery times.
Angel stood up. The motion was abrupt, violent. She pulled her hands from the nurse’s grasp.
“I need some time,” she said. The words felt like someone else’s.
“Of course, Angel,” the nurse said, rising as well, her eyes filled with that terrible, professional compassion. “I’m here for you, whatever you decide. Please, though. We need to decide sooner rather than later. So we can start prenatal care, or… other things.”
Angel didn’t hear the rest. She turned and walked to the door, her legs moving on autopilot, numb and heavy as stone.
She yanked the door open.
The small crowd in the hallway snapped to attention. Kilson stopped mid-pace. Silas opened his eyes. Amber straightened. Crow pushed off the wall, his silver eyes searching her face, instantly seeing the cataclysm there.
“Angel?” he said, her name a question, a plea.
She looked right through him. She saw their mouths moving, saw Kilson step toward her, saw Amber’s confused frown. Their voices were a muffled, underwater sound. The only thing loud in her head was the echo. Four weeks. Four weeks. Pregnant.
She walked. Past Kilson’s reaching hand. Past Silas’s quiet observation. Past Amber’s whispered, “Lina?” She stormed past Crow, a force of nature in a hospital tunic, leaving a wake of stunned silence.
Her feet carried her down the gleaming hall, away from the infirmary, away from the choices, away from the looks of concern that felt like threats. She needed the silence of her own room, the dark, a place where the world wasn’t trying to reshape her into something new every single damn day. A Meister. A Weapon. A Death Scythe. A granddaughter to a witch.
Now this.
A mother.
The word sent a fresh, seismic crack right through the center of her soul. She hit the stairwell door at a run, the cold metal bang echoing behind her like a shot.
She hit the stairwell door at a run, the cold metal bang echoing behind her like a shot. She took the stairs two at a time, her bare feet slapping against the stone, descending past the muffled shouts of training rings where students sparred unseen. The air grew colder, damper, smelling of wet earth and old iron.
Her thoughts were a shattered mirror, each fragment reflecting a different impossibility: a positive test, a witch’s dying scream, the warm static of Crow’s soul, a whispered ‘I love you’ in the dark. She couldn’t go to her room. That space was filled with him, with the ghost of that night.
She needed a hole. A place to stop being all these new, terrible things.
She pushed through another heavy door, the hinges groaning a protest. This was the sub-basement, the administrative detention level. The corridor here was narrow, lit by flickering bulbs in metal cages. The walls sweated a thin, cold mist.
She heard them then, a distant commotion of footsteps and hushed voices far above her on the stairs. They were following. But their pace was careful, measured, not chasing. Someone had told them to let her go. To not crowd her.
The knowledge offered no comfort, only a heavier solitude.
At the very end of the corridor was a row of old, reinforced cells, relics from a time when the Academy held more than just wayward Weapons. In the first cell, a figure stirred. Regir, Medusa’s son, looked up from his cot, his pale, gaunt face showing plain shock as she sprinted toward him.
“Angel?” he stammered, his voice reedy from disuse. He pressed his hands against the thick glass barrier of his door. “What are you—?”
She didn’t answer him. She didn’t even look at him properly. She ran to the empty cell next to his, its door unlocked and slightly ajar. “We’re going to be neighbors,” she said, her voice flat and toneless.
She yanked the heavy door open, stepped inside the cold, dark space, and slammed it shut behind her. The iron clang was final, a period at the end of a sentence.
The cell was bare except for a rusted cot bolted to the floor and a bucket in the corner. It smelled of mildew and stale, trapped air. She went to the cot, the thin mattress crackling under her weight, and lay down on her side, curling in on herself. She hugged her own ribs, as if she could physically hold the pieces of herself together.
The exhaustion returned instantly, a lead blanket dropped over her soul.
Outside, she heard the arrival of the others. Muffled whispers grew into heated, overlapping arguments. Kilson’s voice, strained and loud. “…just drag her out of there!” Crow’s lower, sharper tone. “Give her a minute, you’ll make it worse.” The Headmaster’s calm, impossible authority. Silas’s reasoning murmur. Amber’s high, worried pitch. Alyce’s snapped, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
They were arguing about what to do with her. Like she was a problem to be solved.
“Leave me in here!” Angel yelled, her voice cracking against the stone. “I’m a murderer!”
Silence fell in the corridor, heavy and complete. For a long moment, there was only the drip of water somewhere and the ragged sound of her own breathing.
Then, slowly, the cell door creaked open. A bar of dim light from the hallway cut across the floor, widening. It was tentative, as if someone had drawn the short straw and lost the argument outside.
She looked up.
Kilson stood framed in the doorway, his large form almost filling it. He hesitated for a second, his expression a battlefield of worry and frustration, before he stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving them in the near-dark.
Her father. The father she’d only known for two years, who had barged into her life with all the subtlety of a thunderclap. The one who tried too hard, loved too loudly, and whose past failures hung between them like smoke.
Looking at his familiar, strained face, something in her chest split open. A hot pressure swelled behind her eyes. “Papa?”
The word, that childhood term she never used, seemed to physically strike him. His tough facade shattered. His shoulders dropped, and his eyes glistened in the gloom. “Oh, Angel,” he breathed, the fight gone from his voice.
He crossed the small space in two strides and sat on the edge of the cot. He didn’t ask. He just gathered her shaking body into his arms, pulling her upright against his broad chest. One big hand cradled the back of her head, his fingers carefully combing through the tangled mess of her orange curls.
“My dear girl,” he murmured into her hair, his voice a low rumble. “What’s wrong?”
The feeling of being held, truly comforted by a parent, was a forgotten country. Her adoptive parents had been kind, but distant. This was different. This was a shelter. A bastion. She’d forgotten what it was like.
The dam broke.
She turned her face into his leather jacket, her body convulsing with sobs she couldn’t control. She cried for the grandmother she’d unmade, for the souls inside her that weren’t hers, for the man she loved who she couldn’t even look at, for the future that had just turned into a foreign, terrifying landscape. She cried until her throat was raw and her eyes burned, messy, ugly crying that soaked his jacket.
He just held her, one hand stroking her hair, the other a steady weight on her back. He didn’t tell her to stop. He didn’t say it would be okay.
When the worst of the storm had passed, leaving her hiccupping and hollow, he gently tilted her face up. With surprising tenderness, he tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear, his calloused thumb wiping the tears from her cheek. “No, you didn’t, honey,” he said softly, answering her earlier scream.
“I killed my grandmother,” she whispered, the confession a poisoned shard she had to pull out.
He didn’t flinch. “Marjorie was an evil witch who came here to manipulate and kill us,” he said, his voice firm. “What you did was survive. You protected your family. You ended a monster.”
She shook her head, fresh tears spilling over. That wasn’t the core of it. That wasn’t the real stone in her gut. She took a shuddering breath, the words forming like ice on her tongue. She had to tell him. He was her father. He should know.
“Papa,” she said, her voice so small it was almost lost in the dank air. She looked up, meeting his concerned brown eyes. “There’s something else.”
He waited, patient, solid.
She swallowed. “I’m pregnant.”
Kilson froze. The comforting motion of his hand on her back stopped. The very air in the cell seemed to solidify. His expression didn’t change, but it emptied, all the fierce, worried love draining away into a perfect, stunned stillness. He was a statue holding her, his eyes locked on hers, seeing a new, profound depth of the catastrophe.