Fury (8 page)

We grin at each other for a moment, and Ryan shifts restlessly against me, his head against my cheek. And it hits me how little time we have left together, and how it’s things like this I’ll miss most: friendship, the warmth of human contact, love. Just the small things.

‘Too sophisticated,’ Ryan mumbles suddenly, struggling to focus on Gia beside him, and she looks obscurely pleased by the comment.

‘He looks the way I feel,’ she notes almost kindly. ‘Seedy.’

‘Considering I almost killed him twice today already,’ I say quietly, ‘he’s doing all right.’

Gia’s face is suddenly serious. ‘You didn’t decide to drop by just to approve my wardrobe choices, did you?’ she says in her cut-glass British accent.

I shake my head, and indicate Ryan between us. ‘He needs food, sleep, the usual things.’

‘Human things,’ Gia says sharply. ‘And what do
you
need?’

‘Help,’ I say immediately, and her strong, dark eyebrows fly up into her glossy, slanting fringe in open disbelief.

The lift doors slide open, and we’re walking under the same Murano glass chandeliers, across the same elaborately patterned royal blue and gold carpet I strode down yesterday on my way to the catwalk parade, as Irina. And it’s completely disorienting to be returning like this when everything
I
am has changed beyond measure.

I get an echo of my own thinking from Gia, but her thoughts are indistinct and hard to read, as if she’s somehow trained herself to hold her cards close, even from creatures like me. She’s like a steel trap, this one. Good at keeping secrets.

She clears her throat delicately. ‘Irina still hasn’t come around since you … left. She’s like Sleeping bloody Beauty. There isn’t a mark on her, not a scratch. All the vital signs are good, she’s breathing unassisted. But she might as well be dead. It’s like she’s just a shell; zero response to external stimuli. We’re debating whether to move her or wait it out. But the medicos say that if her vegetative state persists the body’s going to …’

‘Die,’ I finish.

‘It sounds as if you know what’s wrong with her,’ Gia replies. ‘I was hoping you might.’

‘I have a few theories,’ I say grimly. ‘I want to leave,’ Gia says suddenly. ‘Leave this city, leave Irina, leave this bloody business for good. But I’m not going to do it while she’s frozen inside her own body like Snow White after eating the apple. She’s a “beeeetch”, the queen of bitches, actually, but she’s got no one right now. Burnt too many bridges. And don’t look at me like that.’

‘What?’ I say, straight-faced. ‘Like I was about to accuse you of having a heart?
Never
.’

Gia hoists Ryan’s heavy arm up awkwardly while she punches her security key through a brass slot by the door to Irina’s suite. ‘I’ll do what I can to help you,’ she says in a low voice. ‘You know I’d do it anyway. You were a good boss, better than what I’m used to.’ She favours me with a crooked smile. ‘In return, all I ask is that you do what you can for me?’

I nod without hesitation and Gia throws wide the door. ‘Welcome to the madhouse,’ she mutters, then calls out loudly, ‘Carlo! Your assistance, please, dead man walking,’ as we wrestle Ryan into the formal sitting room.

The sitting room is full of people. There are a couple of youngish suits I don’t recognise, both speaking in English, both on their mobile phones and perched uncomfortably at different ends of a long, low, French Empire-era settee that doesn’t seem sturdy enough to hold them. A thin young woman with shoulder-length, curly auburn hair in a navy pantsuit and sensible shoes moves past with some fluids and medical instruments on a tray. Juliana Agnelli-Re is there, and her impeccably dressed family physician, the man who treated me after I leapt off the roof of a moving limousine, cutting up Irina’s feet badly.

Carlo and Jürgen, from Irina’s personal goon squad, surge to their feet at the sight of us and move forward to brace Ryan while Gia opens the door to her own set of rooms, then pulls down the covers on her own king-sized bed.

‘Boots off, lay him down,’ she orders. ‘Gently does it. He’s been through the wars.’

Carlo and Jürgen meekly do as they’re told, and Gia pulls the covers back up to the level of Ryan’s waist. ‘Dottore Pellini?’ she calls out through the doorway of her bedroom. ‘If you’d be so kind?’

The doctor moves towards her.

I’m still standing by the front entrance, taking everything in. The suits haven’t given me the time of day, and Juliana … I survey her forlorn figure sharply. She’s staring into space, still dressed in the burnt-orange pantsuit, filmy chartreuse blouse and vintage-looking lime and dark green Mary-Janes she was wearing at the haute couture show. Her crazy two-tone hair — dark roots, bright yellow ends — is looking pretty rough. Like Gia, she’s carrying a few bruises, cuts and weals around her head and neck, but she’s surprisingly whole for someone who made it out of the Archangel Michael’s presence alive.

‘She’s taken over global design duties at Atelier Re,’ Gia murmurs beside me. ‘Private Label, Black Label, resort, diffusion, menswear, accessories. Everything rests on her shoulders now. Effective today. Board rushed it through, unsurprisingly. She was the Chosen One, in any case. Only now it’s official.’

I’m so surprised at the news I can’t stop myself blurting out loudly, ‘But what about Giovanni?’

At the mention of her uncle’s name, Juliana looks across the room at me with tear-reddened eyes. Gia places a restraining hand on my arm; the gesture tells me all I need to know.

Juliana calls out in her heavily accented English, ‘Were you a friend? He had so many friends.’ She looks down suddenly to disguise the sheen in her eyes. ‘It was instant, they say. He was already very sick.’ She gives a loud sob that she instantly tries to swallow.

I can’t help walking over to her and placing a hand over hers where it lies on the dining table. Just touching her gives me a brief window of access to her memories: the technicolour past seems to flash up at me in stereo, from out of her head. I see, feel, hear, exactly how it was to her the moment her uncle died. She was standing just a few feet away when he was crushed by a portion of steel beam the size of a car. He hadn’t stood a chance.

I
am
Juliana as she tries in vain to move the steel pinning down Giovanni’s bloodied figure. Flames tower over us and we’re gasping for air, constantly buffeted by a fleeing, hysterical mob that’s been reduced to impulse and reflex alone. For a moment, at the periphery of our sight, there’s a tall figure dressed all in black, a lock of his long silver hair falling forward as he bends his youthful face low over Giovanni Re’s prone form, touching him only briefly. The stranger vanishes before we can beg him for help and is lost again in the sea of constantly shifting faces, lost in Juliana’s memories. Just one among many. Azraeil meant nothing to her; she doesn’t even consciously remember him. But the Archangel of Death was there, in the chaos. It has always been his way to come and go unheralded. He would have been busy last night, beneath the Galleria’s palely blue-lit dome.

I release Juliana’s hand and the memory vanishes instantly. ‘Giovanni didn’t suffer,’ I say quietly, with absolute certainty.

She doesn’t answer, crying in earnest now. She covers her face with both hands, her shoulders shaking with raw grief. The men on mobile phones grimace at the sound she’s making and get up from their settee, move towards the door.

Gia raises an eyebrow. ‘While the going’s good?’ she reminds me.

I nod and approach Irina’s bedroom, place my hand on the gilt-edged wooden door panelling.

One of the suits looks up sharply from his conversation and says, ‘Miss, you can’t go in there. Did you hear me,
Miss
?’

‘This is an old friend of Irina’s,’ Gia retorts. She crosses the index and middle fingers of her right hand and holds them up. ‘Until yesterday, these two were like this, okay? Inseparable.’

I see her mouth twitch; she may be trying to suppress laughter.

‘Irina will not even know I am here,’ I pipe up in Russian-accented English, making my voice sound young and naive.

Gia looks at me, startled at my pitch-perfect inflection, which is a little bit Irina herself, a little bit Dmitri Dymovsky.

‘Well, make it quick,’ the man huffs. He waves a hand dismissively before returning to his call.

We enter Irina’s bedroom and I recognise every single thing in this insanely over-decorated space, other than the saline drip and feeding tube, the pushcart filled with meds and dressings, and the unused respirator machine standing in one corner.

Irina’s lying in silent state on the king-sized bed beneath a crisply mitred blanket and top sheet pulled up to just above her waist. Her roses and cream complexion is unmarked, and her narrow chest rises and falls steadily below her unflattering hospital-style gown. It’s the strangest feeling to be standing here looking down on the body I was last incarcerated in.

Irina’s so beautiful, even in sleep, with her caramel-coloured hair loose and shining all over her pillow. But this is no ordinary sleep. I have to concentrate hard to even feel she’s alive, her soul’s buried so far down. When Luc wrenched me free of her body, he didn’t bother to release the strange slipknot that keeps her soul captive inside her.

The nurse bustles in behind us, deposits the now empty tray on top of the fussy, bow-fronted armoire near the en suite, before leaving again. Through the open door behind us, I can hear the two men winding up their phone conversations.

‘We don’t have long,’ I tell Gia, and she crosses quickly to the door and shuts it, before moving ahead of me to the bed.

‘What’s
really
wrong with her?’ she says.

When I don’t answer, she looks back at me impatiently, then gasps. For a fine bloom of light has swept across my skin, my entire form, and I’m already changing, my outline is already shredding into vapour.

Within seconds, I draw myself up and up, looking down into Gia’s awestruck face. Then I collapse into a towering cloud of fine, silver mist, swirling and dense, taking all the heat in the room with me. Immediately I’m pulled into that terrifying, alien raceway that the human body represents to those of us who have no need of a chemical, mechanical presence. This time, I’m not looking for a way out, not yet. I’m searching for that knot, that kernel, that Irina’s soul has been reduced to.

Where is it?

Luc tore me free. There must be some disjuncture, a loose seam, a clue.

And then I chance upon something … like notes written in living blood, in cellular walls and electrolytes. The signature of my brethren is here: elegant, luminous, their intentions joining together like plain song to create a safe harbour for me within another living being. I read their haste; and then I read the work of another — one whose touch had once made me feel like I was the most beautiful thing in creation — rendered here in hatred and fury and spite.

And then I find it … a seam, a thread, a clue. So tiny I almost missed it.

I follow it back to its source, and the pattern and energy of her is there. So compressed and distorted it’s a wonder I could find her at all.

Mercy!
I seem to hear a desperate voice echoing all around me, though I have no ears to hear, am nothing but pure, directed energy.
Hurry
.

I take that tiny fray and tug at it, unravelling it further and further, letting it stream out behind me like an unfurling ribbon as I follow the linkages, the switchbacks, the false trails, the complex broken pattern that Irina’s soul was cast into. Smoothing, untwisting, laying bare, so that the flame might be relit, so that the soul might return.

Pressure begins to build, a vast electrical storm, and I feel everything that Irina
is
convulse as if her body were a building being shaken to its foundations. I feel her soul struggling in mine. I hear the sounds that are torn out of her, as if she is being tortured.
Possession
. In this moment, I could truly be classed as demon. She does not want me here, she feels me like a burning presence that must be cast out. I can’t begin to tell you how wrong this feels.

Mercy!
I hear it again, the voice disembodied, desperate.
Please. Quickly
.

I can’t wait to go, can’t wait to get out. There’s a sensation of abrupt coalescence, and I’m flung out of Irina’s body. For the very last time.

I come to on the floor beside Irina’s bed and turn to see Gia across the room, her back braced against the closed bedroom door. It’s clear from her strained expression that someone’s trying to open it from the outside. The warning voice I’d heard was hers.

She looks at me, white-faced, with wide, desperate eyes. ‘Do something,’ she hisses, indicating the telltale gleam coming off my skin. ‘Can’t hold it much longer.’

‘Open this door!’ a man roars. ‘Open it at once!’

And this time, the door jumps open an inch or two before Gia slams it shut again, pushing back with every ounce of strength in her slender frame.

The pounding and rattling intensify. ‘
Mercy
,’ she pleads.

It feels as if it takes forever to extinguish the glow, but it can’t be more than a few seconds because I’m suddenly standing at the foot of Irina’s bed and the surface of my hands, the ends of my curling hair, my clothing, of
me
, is matte and dull once more. I give Gia a nod. She takes a deep breath and pushes away from the door, which bursts open immediately. One of the suits — tall, dark-haired, overweight, red-faced — thrusts through the knot of concerned people at the entrance.

‘What are you doing to her?’ he demands, trying to see around me to the bed. ‘We heard the most terrible sounds. As if you were trying to kill her.’

‘Like the
animale
,’ the nurse says with a shudder, entering the room behind him.

‘Old Russian remedy,’ Gia improvises smoothly. ‘Quite the eye-opener.’

‘Like the prayer,’ I say in my girlish Russian accent, fluttering my eyelashes a little. ‘Only with the growling.’

‘Don’t forget the screaming,’ Gia drawls, and only I can tell how truly shaken she still is. ‘The screaming’s integral to the whole cure. The louder, the better. We all joined in actually, it was quite cathartic. That’s what you heard.’

‘
Dio!
Miss Irina,’ the nurse cries out suddenly, ‘you are awake!’

‘She’s awake?’ the man exclaims.

I turn to see the nurse with her hands clasped together against her lips, and Irina drenched in sweat, her eyes wide with shock. Her arms and legs are stretched out and rigid, hands curled into claws upon the rumpled mattress, her blanket and top sheet a crumpled heap of fabric on the far side of the room. The red marks of her own nails are on her neck. She reminds me a little bit of me, that time I woke in Carmen’s body. There’s a wild look in her eyes that I recognise.

‘Give her a leetle time,’ I say casually in my heavy Russian accent. ‘Then she will be — how you say — as good as new.’

I look down at the fingernails of one hand, like a ditz, as if I’m bored. But I’m almost as shaken as Gia is. I think I just pulled off bringing a captive soul back to the surface, the same way Gabriel himself might have done with me. And Irina might be suffering her own set of adjustment issues right now, but she’s struggling to sit up, she’s trying to speak. And, in my book, that’s got to be better than one rung above
dead
.

‘No, really, what did you do to her?’ the man demands. He scrabbles in his jacket pocket for his mobile and starts dialling, as the nurse scoops up the bedding and smooths it back over Irina’s body.

‘All she did,’ Gia says crisply, grabbing me by the arm and walking me away, ‘is remind Irina of how good it feels to be alive.’

I can’t help looking back over my shoulder at Irina, and she suddenly rolls her head and eyes in my direction, raises one long, thin, pointing finger at me accusingly.

‘
You
…’ she gargles.

Gia pulls me out the door. ‘Irina was
convulsing
, foaming at the mouth,’ she mutters, ‘clawing at her skin. And her eyes …’ She swallows hard. ‘And the sounds!
God
. It was like something out of a horror film except it was all
real
. I almost passed out.’ She stares into my face, crossing her arms tightly. ‘One day, you’re going to have to sit me down, buy me a beer and explain to me what I just saw.’