Fury

‘You feel so real,’ he rasps.

Self-preservation is instinctual in me now and I move out of reach, warning him raggedly, ‘Don’t.’

‘Or what?’ He sighs, leaning his head back against the wall. It’s so cold in here that his breath streams out white, like a cloud, or a soul departing.

‘You know, I’ve had my own freaky theories about you for some time now,’ he murmurs. ‘I went away and did my research like you said to, between dealing with a mountain of self-pity and anger and … grief.’ He shoots me another glance. ‘I don’t know how it’s possible … how you’re even possible. You’ve made me question everything I’ve ever believed in. I deserve a little more … clarity.’ His voice is strained. ‘I think I’ve, uh, earned it.’

Warily, from the safety of my corner, I meet his eyes.

‘For what it’s worth,’ he says, ‘I feel like everything’s new again between us. Like we’ve been given permission to … start over.’

‘Permission?’ I laugh despairingly. ‘In what universe could someone like you and someone like me make any kind of sense? Who “permits” this?’ I look away from the tenderness in his gaze, the hurricane inside me begging to be set free.

‘You need to explain things to me,’ he insists. ‘I need to understand who it is that I’m —’

‘Dealing with?’ I cut in.

Something flares in his eyes, and I’m instantly ashamed of my own cowardice because I know what he was about to say, the words he was going to use.

‘You could put it that way,’ he says, stung.

I look down at my hands, wanting to touch him, to tell him I don’t deserve his love. Maybe I’ve never really known what love is; after all, I chose as my first love someone who soon after became … the Devil.

I shudder. Ryan catches the movement and frowns.

‘Trade?’ he says so softly, I almost miss the word.

For a long while I don’t answer, seeing landmines in every direction, seeing ancient history that could only cause Ryan pain, the last thing I would ever want for him. All the while, I struggle to keep my nausea at bay, to contain that sensation inside me of building, of escalation.

‘You promised.’ Ryan takes a shuddering breath. ‘It’s because of you I got broken in the first place.’

‘And I fixed you!’ I reply, turning on him like a wounded animal. ‘So quit complaining.’

‘I was broken the moment you left me the first time.’ His voice is very quiet. ‘Damn straight, it’s up to you to fix me. And you haven’t even begun to mend the hurt you caused. You can’t hide from what’s between us forever! You deserve … love as much as anyone does.’

It’s as if the word is ripped out of him. He’s unaware that I’ve already read his heart like a map, like the constellations.

‘Let me in,’ he begs, murmuring again, ‘you promised.’ ‘What?’ I say, struggling to hold myself together, to hold myself apart from him. ‘What did I “promise”? How was I even in any condition to promise you anything?’

I see his face soften as his eyes glide over my features, over my glowing form, the curls of energy that drift off my skin, then blur and fade.

‘You promised that you’d never hurt me,’ he whispers. ‘Remember? When you were Lela. Then you went and died on me. It felt as if I was the one who’d been shot. I even looked down to see if I was bleeding …’

I close my eyes, feeling again the ghostly impact of the bullet that ended Lela’s life. ‘I so badly wanted to go with you then,’ I murmur, ‘but it wasn’t permitted.’ I place the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to stem the ache I still feel for that lost girl. ‘I’m trying to protect you,’ I mutter over the white noise in my head, ‘for what it’s worth. You don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘That talk we were always supposed to have?’ Ryan pleads. ‘We’re having it now, Mercy. So start talking. You’re afraid, I’m afraid. But we’re here now, you’re free.’

‘I may not be caged inside another any longer,’ I say from behind my hands, ‘but you have no idea how wrong you are, what you’re up against. I will never be free.’

Of you, of him. Not while I live.

I see it again: the hills around Lake Como, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, all exploding in a kind of liquid flame, consumed by the wrath of demons and archangels colliding. In those memories, I see Ryan’s death foretold, and I almost cannot bear it.

‘Why are we even arguing?’ Ryan whispers, his breath stirring upon my skin. ‘Where have you gone?’

‘Beyond the stars,’ I whisper, hearing the static and the silence, the inexorable distance, in my head. How very far I fell, how far.

He places a tentative hand upon my bare and glowing arm; against all wisdom, I allow it to remain. Ryan always was brave, and foolhardy around me. We’ve always fed that impulse in each other, and isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Lend you wings; grant you the strength and courage of Titans.

‘So real,’ he murmurs again in wonderment.

Through his skin I can read the chaos in his thoughts: love piled upon fear, layered upon hope and desire, anger and frustration. The weight of them, their metaphysical noise, is almost intolerable.

It feels wrong to have access to his innermost thoughts. Knowledge like that is so dangerous in the wrong hands. It’s little wonder that Luc’s ambitions have gained a certain purchase in this world: they are here for the picking, these mortals. Everything you need to know — their dreams, their vices — all flowing beneath the skin constantly, like a river. To be drawn from, or poisoned.

Without consciously recalling how it’s done, little by little I turn Ryan down, tune him out. So that his inner energy, the random glimmers of thought and emotion I get from him now are almost bearable. It’s not perfect, but at least I can think again. I drop my hands from my face, turn to look at him.

Finally, I tell him of home. And as I describe it, the way it was when it was fresh made and new, and every small thing seemed a miracle in and of itself, tears of fire spill down my cheeks, melting away even as they hit the chilly air.

‘My kind,’ I weep, ‘were not created to feel sorrow. Everything about me, about us, is impossible, Ryan, so frightening, I can’t see my way clear …’

‘You told me to go look up that word, elohim,’ he says. ‘The word for what you are. And I did, but I’m still missing something important. It can mean so many things. I’m no good at languages. Or history. All the stuff I read just confused me even more. I just want to hear what it means, from you.’

He puts his arm around me and hauls me close, and it’s so electrifying, so longed for, that I can’t think again, can’t move. We’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and I’m so distracted by the achingly familiar scent of him, his human warmth, the life force surging inside him, that I close my eyes and give myself over to sensation, resting my head against the hard line of his shoulder. It feels so right. And so real. It’s just a moment or two out of time. Even the Archangel Michael would grant me that much.

But then a bright, numinous light sweeps past the windows of our tower, followed swiftly by another, causing me to flinch, for I alone recognise its source. I can almost hear Gudrun breathing in the night, all her hatred, and that of her dead-eyed hunting partner, Hakael, bent towards me. They smell my fear. They seek to know where we hide inside this vast stone edifice. If Ryan and I had not reached sanctuary, I’m sure we’d already be dead.

‘Once,’ I say, struggling to keep my voice calm as the sweeping, searching light recurs, and recurs again, ‘there were upwards of a thousand elohim. Some created male, some female. Eight were made most powerful, most prescient, of all things that dwell in the universe: His regents. His princes. Tasked to discern His will.’

Their names rise like smoke in the icy air. ‘Barachiel,’ I murmur, ‘Selaphiel, Jeremiel, Jegudiel, Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael …’

A look of shock appears on Ryan’s face. ‘Mercy, those are the names of archangels. Beings that people actually … worship.’

‘And they were my friends,’ I whisper, ‘like my brothers. The name of God is woven into the very fabric of their beings, their names, as it is in mine, if only I could remember it, but something was done to me to make me forget, do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’

There’s baffled wonderment on Ryan’s face. For a moment, I get a torrent of feeling from him, denial the strongest thread.

‘And these eight, uh, archangels …?’ he says hesitantly.

‘Were the ones who kept me “safe”, who placed me inside a woman called Ezra, into another called Lucy, a girl called Susannah, then Carmen, Lela, Irina; and, before them all, an unbroken chain of human lives I can no longer recall …’

Ryan frowns. ‘Kept you safe from what?’

I pretend not to hear. ‘Our people are further divided into malakhim — the messengers, who are sometimes seen to intercede with the living here on earth; and seraphim, ophanim, dominions, powers, others. There are many … “castes”, for want of a better word, but the elohim are highest of all.’

Ryan rolls his eyes. ‘Castes? You’ve just described Paradise High. And, I guess, I used to be one of the elohim, too. Before I fell. So snap! Some pair we make.’

I return his grin with a startled smile of my own, but then my voice grows sombre again. ‘There are three classes of being under God: bestial, human, angelic. And one thing is known and understood by us all: never shall they intermix, or evil is the result. I know it as if it is written on my soul in letters of fire.’

‘Evil?’ Ryan leaps on the word. I feel his sudden tension in the arm lying across my shoulders.

‘When the Daughters of Man began to multiply upon the earth,’ I explain, unsure of how I gained such knowledge, where the words arise from, ‘some of our people lay with them, begetting a race called the nephilim. Some say they are murderous giants, some say devouring spirits.’

‘Fairy tales,’ Ryan scoffs.

My eyes sharpen upon his. ‘The way the Devil and his demons are?’

‘What we are isn’t evil,’ he insists.

‘I don’t know what we are,’ I reply. ‘And I’m not saying I agree. I’m just giving you an idea of the … baggage that I come with.’

Two supernatural factions wrestling for control of my soul across the centuries, reduced to this one word: baggage.

Ryan’s answering look is wry.

I recall Irina’s roomful of bespoke luggage and give a short laugh. ‘I’m just telling you that this is how we’re … wired. So if you don’t think I come with the biggest damn warning sign you’ve ever seen, you aren’t really looking at me properly. Why aren’t you afraid of what I represent? Why aren’t you already running?’

Ryan looks down. ‘You know the answer to that. Don’t make it any harder for me than it already is. And I’m not saying that the, uh, nephilim were a good thing. But the fact that they, uh, might exist,’ his face is sceptical, ‘shows that some of your people broke “the law” in the past, right? By mixing with us lower life forms. You might say you’re programmed one way, but I see you questioning things all the time. Everything you’ve done since I’ve known you has been a process of trying to break free; to override what was done to you by eight of the most powerful beings in existence.’

I stiffen at his words, recognising both truth and heresy in them. It’s true that I no longer comprehend the ways of my own kind; that, in some way, for better or worse, I’ve … evolved. After all this time, I may be more human than not. Don’t I feel pain, fear, grief, sorrow, when I was created to feel none of these things?

‘Were they all there? The Eight?’ Ryan asks, catching me by surprise. ‘At the Galleria?’

I shake my head. In my mind’s eye, I relive the instant Luc cut K’el down and pain explodes through me again. I rock forward, crossing my arms tightly to hold in the hurt.

‘K’el’s last act in life was to protect me,’ I gasp. ‘Even though I never loved him enough to deserve such sacrifice.’

‘K’el?’ Ryan seizes on the unfamiliar name, his grip tightening. I know what he remembers: a gleaming giant, tawny-haired, unyielding, honourable, bitter, with eyes like a young lion, who stood between me and Luc.

‘Raphael was supposed to be there, too,’ I whisper. ‘But he never made it. Nor did Jegudiel. And Selaphiel’s been … missing for a while now.’

‘Missing?’ Ryan queries sharply.

I hear his frustration as he struggles to piece together the little I’ve seen fit to offer.

‘Taken,’ I clarify bleakly. ‘All three of them, by Luc’s forces. K’el was just a stand-in; he was out of his depth, and his reward was an unjust death. He was singular and perfect, Ryan. And he will never be made again. I think that’s all I want to “trade”. You don’t need to know the rest.’

Ryan grips me by the upper arms, turning me to face him with a hard shake. ‘Why can’t you trust me?’ he growls. ‘Don’t underestimate me. Don’t treat me like I’m something less than you are — I don’t deserve that. Who is he, Mercy? The one who was threatening you? He’s the reason K’el’s dead, the real reason Raphael and the others are missing, right? The reason the Eight have had to hide you for so long, inside so many people? I’m not as stupid as I must seem to you.’

I begin to tremble as if I’m in the grip of a killing fever. Don’t make me tell you, Ryan. Please.

‘Who is he?’ Ryan insists. ‘That … archangel,’ he stumbles over the word, ‘who looks just like me? If he isn’t one of the Eight, then who is he?’

Trust Ryan to cut to the heart of it, of me.

He gives me another shake. ‘He was hurting you and I tried to kill him. Kill him!’

I hear his disbelief. He is wide-eyed now at the memory. I know that he’s seeing what I’m seeing: Luc suspended sixty feet in the air, arms outspread, flames enveloping his living form, laughing wildly.

‘He was on fire,’ Ryan shudders, ‘but he wouldn’t die. And I wanted him to die because he was trying to hurt you. Tell me who he is!’

I look at Ryan again, really study him. For an instant, I see eyes as pale as broken water, as living ice, in place of his brown ones; golden hair where his is dark; golden skin where his is so pale. He could be Luc in disguise. Save mortal and vulnerable in a way Luc has never been and never will be. Could Ryan represent some kind of warning? I was never good at reading signs and portents, having fallen to earth before I could work out, for myself, who I was and what my purpose could even be.

‘Who is he?’ Ryan’s voice is raw. ‘He’s no archangel,’ I murmur. ‘Not any more. I’ve always called him Luc,’ I add reluctantly, ‘but you would know him as Lucifer, Ryan.’

I see Ryan blanch as understanding finally dawns: that he is a dead ringer for the Devil Incarnate.

As if to underscore my words, a soul-rending scream pierces the storm-tossed night. It reverberates in the silence that has fallen over Ryan, over me, deep inside our stone citadel.

Both of us flinch as another scream sounds, closer this time, and louder. For a moment, a bright, constant light pierces the narrow window set deep into the walls above our landing, and we stare up at it, frozen with fear, before it suddenly extinguishes.

Ryan lets go of me abruptly, leans back against the wall.

I pull my knees up under my chin, tightening my arms around myself defensively. ‘So you see how this is hopeless, you and me?’

In answer, Ryan just closes his eyes and tilts his head back, as if he can’t bear the sight of me.

I never babble, I’m no good at small talk, but I rush to fill the silence with the oldest story there is. About a girl seeing a guy through a crowd for the first time, and falling in love.

‘It was like a sickness,’ I mutter. ‘We were young, capable of things your people would deem impossible. We were … obsessed with each other, with what we could do. We thought we were outside the order of things. That rules were only there to be broken. We sneered at the others — believing they didn’t possess our depth of understanding about the way things could be. The whole universe was our playground, and Luc loved to walk in your world. He’d return with stories of some strange, rare place he knew as “Eden”. The greatest irony is that he should be trapped here for an age, growing in vengefulness and spite and pure evil because of me …’

Can Ryan hear my unspoken plea?

I did nothing but fall for the wrong person, Ryan. I picked Luc, when I should have picked Raphael, even K’el. But then I never would have met you …

Even then, Luc had been trouble. He’d been wild. We’d been created to govern. We were responsibility and duty and faith and principle made flesh, made real. But Luc had taken all the power bound inside him, all the unspoken covenants laid down between us and our creator — the covenants hard coded into the very matter of which we were made, thou shalt, thou shalt not — and he’d used them for his own … sport.

It had been exhilarating, and frightening, being with him. Almost from the first, Luc had behaved like a god himself: creating, destroying, twisting the animate and inanimate world around him into anything he desired simply because he could. He was different from us all and somehow … free. And more beautiful than the sun.

And I fell for that. Who wouldn’t have?

Maybe I hadn’t transgressed the way Luc did, but I never tried to rein him in. I was implicated, a witness; at the very least, I turned a blind eye, when I must have known he’d never be satisfied with things the way they stood.

I tell Ryan all of this and he doesn’t say anything, or open his eyes.

‘I had it wrong for the longest time,’ I finish softly. ‘It was never the Eight who cast me out of home, cut me off from everything I’d ever loved, everyone I’d ever known. It was Luc all along. The Eight did the best they could to keep me alive down here, but they couldn’t stop Luc filling my sleeping mind with longing and lies. Some fatal bargain was struck between Luc and Michael, all those years ago. But Luc gave it a special twist, all of his own making, like he’s always done. He was the one who exiled me and it almost killed me. But he didn’t count on me surviving. And he didn’t count on being cast down himself, by Michael. And because of a rash vow that Luc once made me, he’s been trapped here on earth.’

I close my eyes in horror, whispering, ‘Luc craves a monstrous empire. And I am the key, the touchstone. What he wants won’t be possible until he has me back under his control. He will never stop pursuing me.’

Ryan still hasn’t moved. ‘And are you still … obsessed with him?’ he says finally, without opening his eyes.

His voice is emotionless, steeled against more hurt. ‘Yes,’ I whisper over the hurricane inside. ‘More than ever.’

Ryan swallows and opens his eyes and I see them shimmer with an unspoken devastation before he abruptly looks down at his clenched hands.

I watch the skin of his face tighten in rejection as I say, ‘I am consumed — with thoughts of destroying Luc the way he destroyed K’el, the way he’s been responsible for destroying and defiling more of your kind than you could begin to number, the way he tried to destroy me. He robbed me of time, Ryan, of choice, the two things I consider as precious as life itself. He raised his hand against me when all I ever did was love him beyond reason.’

Ryan raises his head as my words sink in. I hold up my aching left hand, which I’ve been concealing from his gaze, and the living flames rise off my skin as if they reach for him. He gasps, recoiling.

‘I’m sick of being objectified by those who are supposed to “love” me,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’ve been a game piece for far too long. I want vengeance, Ryan. I want to rain down upon my enemies like a ruinous plague. But most of all? I’m ready to be loved, just for myself, no other reason. And I don’t think you’re strong enough to be with someone like me. No one is, not now.’

Ryan’s continuing silence tells me everything I need to know. I feel such a sudden weight of sadness that, for a moment, the screaming, spinning world beneath my skin grows still. Abruptly, my burning scar extinguishes all together, ceases to ache.

Who could love me the way I am? Nameless, stateless, flawed.

‘I have no name,’ I say, my voice bleak. ‘And there is a legion after me who would reduce you to blood. For what it’s worth,’ I whisper, ‘I feel it, too. Felt it, almost from the moment I met you. When we’re together, I feel so much less … alone. And I would like nothing better than to lose myself in the human world with you, but that’s a dream, Ryan. And I’m done dreaming. I’m awake now. Now and forever. And where I’m going, you cannot follow.’

A demonic shriek shatters the night, so close beside us that I surge upright in fear, only to have the entire world tilt through its axis as I struggle to retain my balance.

Ryan is on his feet immediately, steadying me.

He’s so tall, taller than me, built like a line-backing angel.

I’m still Irina’s height, still mortal-sized. I can’t seem to find the energy, or the will, to dominate the space I occupy, to reclaim my true nature. There doesn’t seem any point. I’m no “better” than he is. Not any more.

I struggle in Ryan’s arms, but he won’t let me push him away. Maybe I imagine it but, for a second, it seems as if my outline ripples, like Ryan’s clasping a creature made of fog, I can see the ground below my bare feet, through them.

‘Don’t you dare!’ Ryan cries, his grip momentarily tightening on emptiness as I struggle to draw myself together. ‘Don’t you dare disappear on me again. I know what we have is impossible to rationalise, but once I met you, my old life was over anyway. I was dead inside. All that stuff, that Ryan, they were already gone, already past. Only this matters. Don’t leave me.’

I want to lean into him and draw upon his solidity, his indescribable, peculiar energy that I could pick out in a crowd, anywhere, but I’m falling again, falling.

I’m caving in, I’m vertigo.

‘All that exists,’ I gasp, as if saying the words will somehow protect me, ‘is this present.’

It’s something I told myself when I was Irina and believed that Luc was dead, and I’d never see Ryan again. Maybe it’s the only thing capable of being true in a world like this one; that the moment we inhabit, is all we can ever really be sure of.

‘That’s it, that’s it exactly!’ he pleads. ‘All I want from you is more time.’

The laugh that escapes me has the quality of hysteria. ‘We need to carve something out for us,’ Ryan exclaims. ‘The big guy with the big sword said so himself. He ordered me to take care of you in the human world, which tells me that your time on earth is nowhere near over. And he thinks I can help. Somehow.’

The screwed up look on Ryan’s face is almost comical and it hits me that he’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever known. Then the world begins to spin in earnest and I feel his hold on me slip again.

‘We take this moment, this now, and we draw it out, we turn it into a chain of time that will keep us together,’ Ryan insists.

When I reply, my voice is almost inaudible. ‘The “big guy with the big sword” is the Archangel Michael, and he overestimates his jurisdiction where I’m concerned. I’ve been taking care of myself in the human world for a very long time without recourse to anyone. Every time They put me into someone new? It all came down to me: me doing the starting over, me making things up as I went along. Being with me will only get you killed. I can’t be responsible for losing you, the way I almost lost you tonight.’