Fury (32 page)

‘Lord,’ she says beseechingly, kneeling before Lucifer, head bowed, turning her back upon Michael and those she knowingly betrayed. ‘I am dying. Give me what you promised, before it begins and you forget. I found her when no other amongst your people could find her. I shadowed her as you asked — across half the world — and I have suffered, how I have suffered. Give me a warm body, a living body in which to end my days. There are humans upon the beach; give me one of them for my own.’

I feel the others draw tight around me at the creature’s words, sense their fear.

Luc looks down upon her bowed head for an instant, then puts a hand beneath her chin, lifts her sweet, lost face to his, so far above.

‘You have been faithful, my child,’ he says kindly. ‘And for your faithful service I give you what you ask — an end to your suffering.’

Faster than the human eye can follow, there’s a blazing dagger in his hand and he cuts her throat, the way he cut K’el down, without a flicker of emotion.

There’s no heat, no energy, when she dies. Her outline just seems to collapse, like a cloud of dust, and she’s gone.

I think I try to scream, but Ryan has felt it building in my body and he’s got his hand over my mouth, his arms binding me to him fiercely, before I can make a sound. My keeper, my anchor, my rock. Always.

‘Release him to me, Devil,’ Michael thunders.

The chains of fire that hold Raphael to the stone dissolve and he falls from a great height onto the surface of the glassy, unmoving sea, lying still for so long that Richard mutters against Ryan’s ear, ‘Dude,
está muerto
.’

But Raphael finally stirs, pushing himself up from the ground, his long, dark hair straggling across the strong, angular planes of his face. He drags himself slowly to his feet and stumbles through the ranks of Luc’s bastard children, who jostle and assault him as he passes. His sable eyes are clouded with agony, light bleeds from the wounds of his torment. I cover my mouth with my hands at the sight of him.

I’m suddenly overwhelmed by snatches, fragments, of memory. Of Raphael laughing; of him and me walking arm in arm upon the surface of some lonely world; of me telling him it would always be hopeless, that I’d never love him the way that I loved Luc. Raphael was patience and kindness, compassion and propriety, but none of it had mattered to me then.

The way Raphael has tried to keep me alive all these years — all of it was motivated by love. Even if the way it all panned out felt like the opposite of love, felt like punishment.

‘Luc has hurt everyone I ever cared about,’ I say tautly. And I feel the muscles of Ryan’s body go rigid at my words.

Across the water, Luc roars, ‘
Give her to me
then you shall have your “brother”.’

He spits the word, throwing his right arm out like a barrier. Raphael cries out from behind him, held in place by some invisible force.

There is a ripple of movement amongst the ranks standing behind Michael, and from the very back of that shining throng comes … me. In robes of blazing white, my long dark hair hanging down my back, my arms and feet bare.

I see myself drift through the gathered angels towards Michael, see Michael place a hand upon my shoulder to halt me beside him.

‘Like for like,’ he bellows.

At Michael’s words, Luc lowers his right arm, causing Raphael to lurch into motion again.

He stumbles forward towards the false Mercy standing next to Michael, indescribable longing on his face. He falls to his knees, and looks up as if begging for forgiveness.

‘It was my fault you were sacrificed,’ he says. ‘You know I loved you beyond measure. You know that, more than once, I tried to win you from Luc, because I knew his true character — the one he hid from you. I knew how he sought to place himself higher than Michael, higher even than God. In desperation, I begged Michael to force Luc’s hand.
Make a bargain with him
, I urged.
Get Luc to declare before us all what it is that he wants and let him believe he will have his way
. But first, Luc had to give you up forever.

‘But Luc saw what moved me. If he could not have you, then neither could I. For exiling you when it was not within his province to do so, Luc was himself summarily exiled.’

Luc doomed me for millennia because he was jealous of Raphael
. I let out a small whimper and Ryan grips me fiercely. I turn my face into the hard line of his body so that no one will see the tears — hot and bright — spilling down my face.

Raphael looks up at the being he thinks is me. ‘Forgive me,’ he pleads. ‘For I thought I was the truest friend you would ever have. I tried to save you — and in saving you, I damned you for centuries.’

I start to shake again in Ryan’s arms as I turn and gaze at Raphael in the distance. Love and loyalty lay at the heart of everything, but how dark and twisted a path grew from them.

Raphael lurches to his feet, moving into the space between Luc and Michael. ‘Return to your rightful place at my side,’ he begs. ‘
Be with me
. Let me somehow counterweigh the years, the suffering.’

Luc laughs derisively, the sound like steel on steel, ugly and grating, filling the skies.

I almost tear myself away from Ryan then and run, down towards Raphael’s bent and wounded figure. I want so desperately to hold him in my arms again and tell him not to speak of fault or blame; that I understand, and that I’m finally at peace with what was done to me. But I have to maintain the fiction, hold the line.

Uriel, wearing my face, says brusquely in my voice, ‘The choice is made, the bargain struck.’

And Raphael, hanging his head in grief, has no choice but to walk past me, to let me go.

But before Uriel can reach Luc and seize him, Gudrun steps forward and grabs him by the hand. The left hand.

Horror rises in me as I realise, even before Luc does, what she is doing.

‘Betrayal!’ Gudrun shrieks. ‘We are betrayed!’

She raises Uriel’s left hand high and Luc sees in an instant that it does not burn with an incandescent scar — for it does not burn at all.

Uriel’s disguise falls away and he is himself once more. For a moment — like an ache in time, a breath suspended — every soul upon that beach freezes.

Then Luc’s blazing weapon is in his hand and he plunges it towards Uriel’s chest before any of us can move or cry out. But Uriel is almost Luc’s equal in power — for he is counted second in strength only to the great Michael himself — and he throws himself sideways. Luc’s blade slices across his forearm, leaving a deep and blazing score, but it does not kill him. Then Uriel vaporises.

‘
Where are you?
’ Luc screams, scanning the beach wildly, and that terrible pain lashes me anew as he seeks a way in, a weakness, an opening. It feels as if I’m being torn apart from the inside, and then he begins to bellow: ‘
H—
’

The instant Luc begins to say my name, every angel on Coronado Beach, from lowest to highest, transfigures to resemble
me
. They scatter in every direction, flaming swords igniting in every hand. But in this whirl of white fire and movement, I fall to the ground, convulsing and helpless. For Luc is roaring my name, my true name, again and again.

Ryan curses and scoops me up into his arms.

I hear Richard gasp, ‘Move,
chicos
. Move or die,’ and get a dim sense of him and Lauren running and stumbling for their lives.

Ryan hauls me towards the motorbike we left parked further up the beach. The air resounds with the crack of blade meeting blade, the sizzle of holy fire meeting its polar opposite. Over and over, I catch glimpses of myself everywhere — my face, my dark eyes, my long, straight hair, my strong-limbed form. It’s like a nightmare I can’t wake from: seeing myself flee and fall, fight and die, time and again, in a howl of vaporising energy.

I’m sobbing uncontrollably from the horror as Ryan throws me onto the bike, then guns the engine, not bothering with the helmets, shouting at me to
hold on
. I clasp my arms around him from behind, press my tear-streaked face against the back of his battered jacket as we take the stairs at full throttle.

I know I shouldn’t look back, but I do, and I’m so overwhelmed by what I see that I almost let go of Ryan, almost fall. Every single angel does battle in my name. Every demon battles
me
. I have been a legend, a pariah, a lost cause, for many, many years, yet many of my brethren make the ultimate sacrifice to protect me.

I can’t stop my left hand flaming into life the way Uriel’s never could have, and the wound that Luc gave me all those years ago burns so brightly, so fiercely, that Ryan cries out as he catches sight of it wrapped around him, almost losing control of the bike as we crest the hill.

As we speed past the trees, the rain starts again, obliterating the world around us.

At the crossroads, Richard pulls up alongside Ryan and screams, ‘Where to now?’

I gesture left, indicating the gates we passed on our way here what feels like a lifetime ago. Richard nods, and roars off up the coastal highway towards the abandoned military installation, Ryan and me following.

At the gates, Richard jumps off his bike and fumbles open the black bag clipped to the back. He digs through the jumble of human weaponry stashed inside it and takes out a pair of boltcutters, slices open the chains that keep the gates closed against trespassers.

It’s some kind of abandoned airbase. There’s a vast expanse of cracked tarmac beyond a row of identical houses to our left, their front doors riddled with bullet holes. Long grass has overtaken a lot of the land. In the distance, through the pounding rain, I can make out an iron jetty that extends into the water; concrete bunkers built into some of the hills overlooking the sea. There are a couple of large, rusting steel hangars each with a double band of broken windows running around the walls and loudspeakers mounted in groups of three on the roof.

We ride up to the first of them, and Richard dismounts and studies the sliding doors for a moment before simply pushing one of them open. Then we’re inside. The sound of the rain upon the steel roof is very loud.

As the others take off their helmets, I say, ‘This is the place. For me, time stops here.’

Ryan turns and looks at me, his heart in his eyes. Lauren takes one look at her brother’s face and drags Richard away, to give us space. They clutch each other tightly by the hangar doors as Ryan closes his arms around me fiercely.

I shift, one last time, so that he’s looking at
me
. And I whisper, ‘I told you once how miraculous you are: that you were somehow able to find me and love me when I had no face of my own, no body. From life to life you’ve been my rock, my friend, my protector, my constant. You were right when you said I’d never find anyone like you, or what we have, anywhere else. You’ve been my solace and my greatest joy, and I love you, Ryan Daley, and I thank you. And I will always, always miss you and be thinking of you until “some day” comes.’

He tips his head back in that way I’ve come to recognise: as if he can somehow rein in strong emotion, hold back his tears.

I lean up and pull his mouth down to mine and kiss him, as the wind shrieks through the catwalks and steel beams crisscrossing the space above our heads. Then he’s kissing my face, my eyes, pulling me into him, weeping into my shining hair, his strong, lean body racked by the strength of his feeling.

‘Touching,’ a voice drawls, ‘but ultimately pointless.’

Ryan and I freeze in horror as we see Luc outlined against the back windows of this empty, dusty space, Gudrun beside him. A dozen of his strongest fallen are ranged around them.

Luc walks forward, his long, luminous robes open to the waist to display his preternatural shining beauty to its best advantage, that scar that burns in the centre of his chest. The sight of him makes me recoil, causes me to stumble backwards.

‘Seen from the air, your telltale scar such as we all wear,’ he gestures around him at his faithful, ‘cannot be disguised.’

Gabriel, Michael and Uriel materialise behind Ryan and me, wings outspread, flaming swords raised before them.

‘You’re already too late,’ Luc roars, surging forward to grasp my left hand, wrenching me out of Ryan’s grasp.

At Luc’s touch, the flames grow brighter, flare higher, and I cry out in agony.

‘She is
mine
,’ Luc snarls. ‘
I
made her what she is. She is my chattel, my possession, my slave once more, and I will do with her
as I will
.’

Ryan starts forward, but Gudrun swiftly bars his way, planting a long, red-painted fingernail in the centre of his chest. ‘So pretty,’ she purrs.

‘But a hindrance,’ Luc snaps, releasing me suddenly.

Before I even see him move, he is gripping Ryan by the front of his throat. He plunges his other hand into Ryan’s chest as if he would pull Ryan’s soul free of his living body and devour it before us all.

‘NO!’ Lauren and I scream together.

Ryan convulses and falls to the floor at Luc’s feet, looks up at me, wide-eyed, struggling to breathe.

Luc lets his hand fall back to his side. ‘Your entire life has been for nothing,’ he sneers as he looks down at Ryan, twitching and shuddering on the floor. ‘Someone as worthless and powerless as you are could never hope to hold onto a being like her. Soon, I will end
her
life,’ he indicates me. ‘And
hers
, too,’ he gestures at Lauren, ‘the way it should have ended inside that monster’s dungeon.’

He laughs as he sees all the life, the colour, flowing from Ryan’s face like the receding tide.

He turns and looks at me. ‘The moment we quit this accursed place forever, everything becomes possible for me again.
Everything
. We have been too long apart, my love. Look at me. Take my hand.’

His voice is so full of dark seduction that I almost forget where we are; that we are no longer those two lovers who lay entwined in a bower of flowers, vowing eternal love for each other. He holds his hand out to me as if whole centuries have not come between us, as if he doesn’t bear the blood of millions upon it.

I back away from him, my burning left hand held up between us in a gesture of negation, screaming, ‘Azraeil!
Azraeil!
’

There is no sound but the harsh rattle of Ryan’s breath inside his chest, the sound of him dying. Luc has stopped time to let me hear Ryan die, to watch him die. His life is ebbing away at my feet. I feel it the way I felt it within the Duomo. The light of his dark eyes is failing; he has no strength even to tell me he loves me, and to say goodbye.

I scream again into the echoing space, ‘Azraeil! I know you want him, he’s one of yours, you’ve marked him for your own.
Azraeil!
’

‘Azraeil is in the business of listening to and helping no one,’ Luc taunts.

He gestures at Gudrun, at dead-eyed, auburn-haired Hakael beside her. ‘Keep them all back,’ he orders. ‘Once I take her beyond the boundaries of this vile planet, do as you will with all of them; do your
worst
.’

But then a sudden wreath of fog, a fine silver mist, twines rapidly across the floor. It coils around Luc’s ankles, and he leaps back from it, cursing God.

When Azraeil materialises between us, clad in his customary black, there’s actual fear on Luc’s face, for even Death takes precedence over evil. Death is a power unto itself.

I fall to the ground beside Ryan and cradle his head in my hands, weeping tears of bitter light.

‘Give him back to me,’ I beg Azraeil brokenly, ‘for he goes beyond my power. I have no power to heal a mortal wound dealt by Lucifer himself.’

Azraeil looks at me measuringly with eyes as blue as the daytime sky. ‘You hold free will in such regard, sister,’ he says quietly. ‘If it were to come down to a choice, who would you be for?’ He indicates Luc, then Michael, with his eyes. ‘Choose correctly and the mortal lives; incorrectly, and he dies. It is a gamble, as all life is. I am in a wagering mood today.’

‘Why make me choose, why test me with riddles, when this good man lies dying?’ I sob. ‘He is my love, and I will never find his like again, not in any life, yet you ask me to choose between two warring houses that shall never agree a peace, not until the other is utterly destroyed?’

‘
Choose
,’ Azraeil says in a steely, ringing voice. ‘And choose wisely because the world turns on your decision; though your choice has always been pre-ordained.’

‘Nothing is predetermined, pre-ordained!’ I cry brokenly. ‘How could that single heinous act of Luc’s — of casting me down — mean that Ryan
must
die? The human world and the celestial world will always be spheres that operate independently, that only ever briefly collide from time to time. We are just random acts to them, Azraeil, like the Ebola virus, or a nuclear bomb dropped from the sky on a clear day. Random, unpredictable, rare; so often destructive. They exercise free will as much as we do. Ryan chose
me
,’ I sob
.
‘When he could have chosen safety, normality,
life
.’

‘But we are the highest beings in creation,’ Azraeil parries. ‘Weren’t we created to do God’s will? Are we not God’s will? How could this man even presume to “choose” you?’

‘We were
formed
,’ I cry. ‘We are acts of God in living form, mere instruments of His power, as senseless and directed as every mortal upon this earth. We are the same …’ I weep. ‘Underneath it all, we are the same. There is no fate, Azraeil, only coincidence. I have lived as a human for millennia. Nothing is predetermined. It is all chaos, and from it you must wrest your life. You make your own fate. You see the cards that you are dealt, and you play them, as they come, you play them.’

‘Choose,’ Azraeil says quietly, implacably.

I raise my burning eyes to him.

‘Then, before God,’ I cry, ‘before all here assembled, I reject you all.’ I turn to Luc. ‘You, Lucifer!’ I spit. ‘I reject you utterly. And you, Michael! I reject the rigid determinism that you espouse. And even you, Azraeil: I reject Death. I refuse to choose sides. I choose him, I choose Ryan, and a life lived in simplicity and goodness that hurts no one. That is what I choose.’

Azraeil kneels and wrests Ryan from my arms, and I cannot hold onto him, though I claw and weep and plead.

Ryan’s breathing is rapid and erratic and his eyes struggle to hold mine as the glorious face of Death smiles down upon him.

Azraeil places his hand upon the spot where Lucifer wounded Ryan. Without looking at me, he says quietly, ‘That is your final choice?’

‘Yes,’ I sob, ‘that is what I choose.’ Understanding, at last, the gift that he is giving me.

‘Then rise,
Mercy
,’ Azraeil says, looking up at me from where he holds Ryan on the floor. ‘And prepare yourself for the consequences of what you have chosen.’

And I feel such a shock of joy when I understand his meaning. For Death consents to kneel to me here, upon this cold concrete.

I remember how it felt when I tried to heal Karen Neill of her cancer. How it felt when I tried to stop Lela bleeding to death on the floor of the Green Lantern Café. I remember pursuing Ryan’s soul through the corridors of his dying body on the roof of the Duomo; of wresting Irina Zhivanevskaya’s soul out of the purgatory Luc had left it in.

One last shift
. And no one here but Death comprehends the choice that I am making.

Azraeil’s blue eyes meet mine. He reaches up and takes my burning left hand before Luc can lurch forward, fingers outstretched; before Gabriel can even finish saying, ‘Mercy,
no
!’

I let out a shattering scream as Azraeil’s will moves through me, like a breath of holy fire.

Light begins to pour off me, out of me, in waves. I have no sense of up or down, no sense of place, of time. I am the world, or the world is in me, and like the world, I can feel plates moving, floes breaking, separation, reconfiguration, transfiguration, an unlinking.