Fury (33 page)

Azraeil releases my hand and I look at my trembling fingers with wonder. My skin is matte, flat. The scar is gone, will never return.

Azraeil lays Ryan’s head carefully upon the ground and Ryan blinks up at us, unsure whether this is real or dream or afterlife.

The Archangel of Death rises, looks around challengingly at all who are gathered here. ‘My touch can mean death, or life,’ he says.

He turns and pins me with his bright gaze. ‘I gave him to you because your choice was just, it was considered. You
are
what you wished to be — a creature of clay, subject to the whims, cruelties and mercies,’ there’s the ghost of a smile on his face, ‘of this human life.’

He scans those gathered here again. ‘And none of you,’ he roars, so loudly that even Luc, even Michael, quail to hear him, ‘may touch them. I have marked them for my own. Any of you who reaches out to them in hatred or in anger will bring death upon your own head. They are mine,’ he says more quietly, ‘and in time I shall collect what is due to me.’

And he vanishes.

Ryan sits up, whole and unmarked, breathing easily, blazing with joy.

‘Mercy?’ he says uncertainly, scarcely able to believe I’m standing here, in a simple white dress, my feet bare on the cold concrete floor, my long, straight brown hair hanging forward over my shoulders.

I look around and everything seems two-dimensional. I can’t read anyone; I get no sense of the life force of anything alive in this room. I see the same faces I saw before Azraeil touched me, but the colours have no depth, the sounds I hear have no extra resonance. I have no ability any longer that is not super-natural. Only natural. Only human.

I am split by joy, but also by grief, for I can no longer read the mysteries inside Ryan’s heart. He is as blank and opaque and walled off from me as everyone is.

He rises slowly to his feet and we move towards each other like two people stumbling out of a fog. He catches me and spins me around lightly, as if we are dancing, and laughs.

Michael looks at Luc across the room. ‘She is beyond your power now. Find some other means to bring the end of the world upon us all, for you won’t find it here.’

Luc is looking not at Michael, but at me, as he hisses his reply. ‘Even Death cannot rule over me. Walk carefully in this world, my lost love, for harm comes in many guises, many forms.’

Then, without warning, he and his followers are gone.

I blink, unsure what to feel. I’ve been threatened and belittled and lied to for so long, survived so much, that Luc’s threat barely moves me. Just like that, I’m no longer necessary to him. I’m nothing, expendable, just clay.

‘I think I’m …
free
,’ I say to Ryan in dawning wonder. ‘Free at last.’

‘As free as any human will ever be,’ Gabriel says, moving forward.

Ryan releases me as Gabriel places a hand on my shoulder. He looks down into my face from his great height. ‘You are sure?’

‘It’s done, brother,’ I murmur. ‘There’s to be no undoing.’

He nods, a touch of sadness in his bright green gaze.

Uriel moves up behind him, gazes down at me, too. ‘You make a pretty human, sister,’ he says, and smiles.

‘And you a pretty angel,’ I tease him.

Michael calls out sternly behind them, ‘Come, brothers, the battlefront shifts again. Mercy has earned her rest. We shall see her ’ere long.’

He raises his burning black gaze to me and then they’re all gone, vanished into motes of light.

By the doors, I see Lauren and Richard craning their necks up, watching the light stream towards the ceiling before it disperses.

Ryan takes me in his arms. ‘Are you scared?’ he whispers.

‘I’m terrified,’ I reply. ‘Listen to the way my heart’s beating.’ I place his hand above my heart and his face collapses into shock.

‘I’ll try and keep things, uh, exciting,’ he says tentatively. ‘I know how much you’ve … given up. You can throw it in my face every day, if you want to.’

‘Standing still seems pretty exciting right now,’ I murmur, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him.

We don’t come up for air until Richard starts hooting and telling us to ‘get a room, already, people’.

‘I’m tired,’ I say suddenly, realising it’s true. ‘I could sleep for a year. And I’m …
hungry
.’

Ryan hears the surprise in my voice. ‘Are you ready to start again?’ he says, putting an arm around my shoulders and walking me towards the hangar door.

Outside, the rain has stopped, and soft sunlight bathes the cracked tarmac, the motorbikes and the shot-up houses in a soft, wintry glow.

‘Yes,’ I reply, as the others put on their helmets and climb onto their bike.

I turn and look at Ryan and kiss him again, because I can, and say fervently, ‘Yes, I am.’

Mercy ‘wakes’ on a school bus bound for Paradise, a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business — or thinks they do. But they will never guess the secret Mercy is hiding …

As an angel exiled from heaven and doomed to return repeatedly to Earth, Mercy is never sure whose life and body she will share each time. And her mind is filled with the desperate pleas of her beloved, Luc, who can only approach her in her dreams.

In Paradise, Mercy meets Ryan, whose sister was kidnapped two years ago and is now presumed dead. When another girl disappears, Mercy and Ryan know they must act before time runs out. But a host of angels are out for Mercy’s blood and they won’t rest until they find her and punish her — for a crime she doesn’t remember committing …

An electric combination of angels, mystery and romance,
Mercy
is the first book in a major new series.

All Mercy knows is that she is an angel, exiled from heaven for a crime she can’t remember committing.

So when she ‘wakes’ inside the body and life of eighteen-year-old Lela Neill, Mercy has only limited recall of her past life. Her strongest memories are of Ryan, the mortal boy who’d begun to fall for her — and she for him.

Lela’s life is divided between caring for her terminally ill mother and her work as a waitress at the Green Lantern, a busy city cafe frequented by suits, cab drivers, strippers, backpackers and the homeless, and Mercy quickly falls into the rhythm of this new life.

But when Mercy’s beloved, Luc, reappears in her dreams, she begins to awaken to glimpses of her true nature and her true feelings for Ryan. How can she know that her attempts to contact Ryan will have explosive consequences?

Meanwhile, ‘the Eight’ — responsible for her banishment — hover near, determined to keep Mercy and Luc apart, forever …

Mercy’s search continues in the second book of this major new series.

In the third MERCY novel, Mercy wakes in a new unknown host, her love for Ryan and Luc burning stronger than ever. But who will she make the ultimate sacrifice for?

Mercy is thrust into the excessive world of fashion when she awakes in the body of a troubled Russian supermodel, Irina: bitchy, hot-tempered and known to be dabbling in things she shouldn’t, Irina is on the verge of a very public breakdown. Against the glamorous back ground of opulent Milan, Mercy continues her increasingly desperate search for Ryan to lead her back to her immortal lover, Luc. But this time Mercy is aware that her memories and powers are growing ever stronger – and she begins to doubt Luc as The Eight reveal more of her mysterious past. Are Luc’s desires as selfless as her own or does he want her for a more terrifying purpose?

The grand scale celestial battle for Mercy’s soul builds to an incredible stormy crescendo as archangels and demons clash in a cataclysmic showdown that not all will survive …