Fury (9 page)

‘It’s because she was fighting me,’ I reply into her haunted eyes. ‘Two sentient souls suddenly sharing one body. It’s never going to be pretty unless something … gives.’

Gia shudders and says fervently, ‘Let nothing like you
ever
come after me that way.
Please
.’

It’s no comfort, but I say, ‘The sooner we get out of here, the less likely you’ll ever hear from any of us again. What happened at the Galleria was an … aberration.’

‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’ Gia’s eyes are troubled as she adds, ‘Now a deal’s a deal, and, by God, you delivered and then some. Tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen.’

We’re at her open bedroom door now, and I see Ryan’s sleeping form on the bed, his head thrown back carelessly, his dark hair spilling across the pillow, blankets rumpled down to his waist. As if he feels my eyes on him, he shifts in his sleep, mumbling some word I can’t catch.

Dottore Pellini joins us, telling Gia discreetly in Italian that there’s nothing essentially wrong with Ryan that a little less partying wouldn’t cure.

‘What he really needs is rest,’ I tell Gia regretfully when the doctor has moved away again, ‘but there’s something I need to do and he’s insisting on coming with me. So, could you get him some food and drink? I don’t know when his last square meal was. His clothing’s torn, and he needs a new pack. He also needs … props.’

‘Props?’ Gia says, confused.

I frown, unable to think of the right word. It’s my own shorthand for shape-shifting, and Ryan’s no shape-shifter.

‘You know,
things
. He looks too much like himself,’ I say, ‘and too much like
him
.’

In my mind’s eye, I see Luc glaring across the catwalk at Ryan, Ryan at Luc, one so dark, one so light, like the negative and positive sides of a single image. With me caught in the middle.

‘Oh, the sexy ex,’ Gia replies in sudden understanding. ‘The blond god sitting beside Gudrun who made my mouth go dry with lust the moment I set eyes on him?’

‘It’s his speciality,’ I reply, horror dawning in my face as the thought suddenly crystallises. ‘Gia, Ryan’s in so much danger. When they can’t find me, they’ll go looking for him.’

‘So it’s best if you stay together then,’ Gia replies, trying her best to sound reassuring. ‘Watch each other’s backs.’

‘Which is just as well,’ I say miserably, ‘seeing as I can’t seem to give him up.’

Gia grins, looking Ryan over again with an expression of amused regret on her face. ‘Like sugar, or cigarettes. I completely get it. Look, I’ll get Tommy onto it. He can put together a man bag for him. But what about
you
?’

‘All I need is information,’ I reply instantly. ‘An update.’

Gia’s expression sharpens immediately. ‘Shoot.’

I search her face. ‘Remember how you told me about the fires that destroyed Domaso, Gravedona, Rezzonico, Menaggio, Tremezzo, Argegno, Laglio, Urio?’

She nods, hugging herself even more tightly, as if she’s cold, the wicked spikes on her shoulders catching the brilliant lights in the room.

‘What happened after Urio?’ I ask. Gia frowns. ‘Was there anything … more?’ I add.

‘I couldn’t honestly tell you,’ she replies. ‘But Juliana would know. She has a villa by the lake, as did Giovanni. Her staff will be keeping her informed.’

I trail Gia back across the room to where Juliana is still seated at the dining table beneath vast windows. She seems shrunken in her grief, all her usual vitality, her habitual curiosity, leached out of her. Gia repeats my question to her in rapid-fire Italian, and she looks up, startled.

‘I’m told that Moltrasio was partially destroyed before it all … stopped. After Moltrasio there was no more … burning.’

‘As if the cause of the fires was interrupted?’ I ask in perfect Italian.

Gia’s eyes widen for a moment in surprise, before her expression goes bland.

Juliana nods, looking perturbed. ‘Yes! It is exactly how it was described to me — as if the arsonist was interrupted. Though the arsonist must have been in league with the Devil, for it should be impossible for fire to behave that way, as if it were alive …’

She shivers and crosses herself, then says to Gia, ‘Bianca St Alban’s family estate is in Moltrasio and I haven’t even called to ask after her, or to let her know that I’ve decided to give to her as a gift the haute couture pieces she ordered. Nothing in Giovanni’s final collection will ever be reproduced again, for anyone. But he would have wanted Bianca to have the gowns she selected before he … before he …’ Juliana looks down, but not before I see her eyes filling rapidly. ‘The police are only letting locals into the area,’ she whispers. ‘I could deliver them myself, of course, but I don’t have the heart to see it. It is too much …’ Her voice trails away.

I have to look away quickly so that she will not see the sudden flare of excitement in my eyes. My voice is casual, unhurried, as I study my booted feet. ‘I could do it for you. I have business in the area. And Bianca knows me. We spoke only a few days ago in fact, face to face.’

I glance up just as Juliana looks at Gia dully. ‘You would vouch for this young woman? Can she be trusted to take the two pieces directly to Villa Nicolin? Deliver them personally into Bianca’s hands? A price cannot be put on those dresses now, but I would sooner harm my own children than touch them again.’

Gia’s expression doesn’t waver for an instant as she stares into Juliana’s grief-ravaged face. ‘Absolutely. She is —’

‘A creature of my word,’ I interject. ‘If I say I will do something, then it will be done. Without question.’

Juliana turns her reddened eyes upon me. ‘Then please do so, with my thanks.’

She looks away from us towards the vast sash windows that dominate the room. ‘See to it,’ she tells Gia. ‘Give her every assistance and Atelier Re will make good any trouble it has caused you, twice over.’

Gia nods and calls out across the room, ‘Carlo.’

‘Miss?’ he replies, rising from the low-slung and impossibly fragile-looking Louis XV-style armchair near the front door that he’d somehow folded himself into.

‘Mercy must be given the exclusive use of one of the cars today,’ Gia barks. ‘Clear it with Gianfranco. Atelier Re will meet the expense. She needs to leave as soon as some gowns arrive and her friend has had a meal and bathed.’

‘One way or return?’ Carlo says, surprised, raking one large hand through his head of short, tight, black curls.

Gia raises an eyebrow at me and I say, ‘One way. The driver’s to drop us and go. No waiting.’

Carlo is already dialling from the in-house phone when he looks up again, at me. ‘Destination, Miss? Where shall I say the driver is going?’

‘Moltrasio,’ I reply, and Carlo’s olive skin goes pale. ‘To the Villa Nicolin.’

His eyes fly to Gia’s for confirmation, and she gives him a terse nod before tapping away on the seamless screen of her slender, black phone. She is making things happen the way I’d hoped, prayed, she would.

I bend over Ryan’s unconscious form and his eyelids flicker. Someone’s taken off his leather jacket and jeans and thrown them across an armoire beside the bed. He’s just wearing the long-sleeved tees he was wearing when I last saw him in Australia, one blue, one grey, both looking a little grey now around the neckline. I want so badly to trace the exposed line of his collarbone that I have to turn away and busy myself in the marble en suite bathroom.

I perch on the side of the massive stone spa that dominates the room and start drawing him a bath, dumping in an array of bath salts and potions from all the little brand-name bottles lined up neatly beneath a vast urn of white flowers on a ledge beside me. I play my fingers beneath the running water and allow the flesh of my hand to turn opaque and vaporous. The water runs right through it, and I find that it’s still easier to make myself a creature of mist than it is to hold this human form that I’ve chosen. But the dizziness, the disorienting sense of dislocation, of vertigo — they’re lessening all the time. I pull my hand back together, rebuilding it until the water ricochets once more off its sleek, solid surface.

‘Mercy?’ Ryan calls out uncertainly.

I turn away from the running water and rise quickly, unable to suppress the smile that spreads across my face. It’s echoed by Ryan’s grin.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ he says softly as I approach him. ‘Run me a bath, I mean.’

I lower myself down on the edge of the bed beside him and reply cheerfully, ‘The weird thing is that I
want
to, and I can’t understand why. I’m the most selfish creature alive. Anyone will tell you that.’

He sighs, shifting across the bed, making room for me beside him. I shake out my head of wild, dark curls and lie down on top of the covers. Both of us turn inwards to face each other so that we are eye to eye. There are still dark circles under his eyes, but that sense of him that I get is no longer clouded by sheer exhaustion. He reaches out, tracing the line of my nose; and when I smile, he touches the dimples beside my mouth, my laughter lines, and traces them, too.

‘I could get used to this,’ he murmurs, playing his fingers through the ends of my curling hair, then says hesitantly, ‘You know what I was most afraid of? It sounds so dumb even saying it. I was afraid …’

He swallows, tries again. ‘I was afraid that I’d never be able to
compete
. That maybe what I thought you felt for me all this time was just a pale reflection of what you really felt for
him
…’

‘Compete?’ I say dazedly.

‘Yep, compete.’ Ryan laughs self-mockingly. ‘As if anyone would ever win in a play-off against the Devil.’ He laughs again, softly.

‘Brenda wasn’t my first serious girlfriend,’ he says in a weird rush. ‘Before we moved to Paradise, I was crazy-in-love with a girl called Edie Nolan who dumped me after she caught me drunkenly helping her best friend out of her shirt at a party. Edie would never let me touch her, and I was
dying
. You’ll have no idea what that feels like, what I’m even talking about. After that, I couldn’t have moved towns fast enough. First kiss at seven, in the dark, in the gym, on a pile of smelly old gym mats with a girl called Nikki whose dad ran a bar. Our teeth kept clashing. She’d just eaten a cheese sandwich. I remember thinking it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, kissing.’ Ryan’s words are almost tripping over themselves.

I see them, those girls. I let myself see them through his skin, and then I tell myself to shut it down, to stop torturing myself, though the damage is already done. Edie walks through my mind — a gentle-looking, strawberry blonde; the best friend, an up-for-anything brunette; Nikki — a tough-looking kid with straight, sandy bangs.

‘And maybe Brenda and I were bad for each other,’ Ryan almost gabbles. ‘But after Edie, being with Bren was like being with a, a …
blowtorch
. If what happened to Lauren hadn’t happened, we’d probably still be together.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,’ I whisper.

‘I need you to know,’ Ryan insists softly, ‘about me; I need you to know
me
. But it’s coming out all wrong.’

I feel the rising heat beneath his skin, read his intention the same instant he leans forward gently and takes my mouth with his, reaching out and cupping the side of my face with one hand, his fingertips tangling in my hair, the kiss deepening until my entire world, my entire horizon, is Ryan, and every sense is flooded with him.

Some dim recollection steps forward: of Bernie drunkenly kissing Ezra under moonlight, of me in a score of past lives being kissed or kissing someone in return. But did I ever feel this sense of flowering? Did I ever feel as if it meant something more than mere mechanics? Did it ever touch
me
, the real me, the way Ryan is doing now?

‘You overwhelm me,’ I murmur against his lips, staring into his hooded eyes, the pupils so dark and dilated. And it’s true. I can feel his peculiar energy singing against me, breaking against my skin. He’s like a kind of wild music running through my head, the living energy of him. He’s transfixing.

He pulls me closer, kissing me harder, and there’s nothing grating or unpractised about his mouth now. He is heat and velvet, and the salt-sweet roiling sea.

He rolls me over onto my back, bracing himself so that he’s lying half across me and the two of us are hopelessly entangled in the bedclothes. It’s a new kind of imprisoning, but one that does not engender loathing or anger. Just wonder.

Love plays out so differently among the
elohim
. We guard ourselves, our essential natures, from each other. We were created with self-knowledge, and, as a consequence, are so wary, so loath to cede control, that it’s rare to know what courses through the mind of another of our kind.

There’s that lick of fire along my nerves
. I can’t recall even the Devil’s kisses burning me this way.

Ryan’s eyes flash open suddenly and he scrambles back from me with a gasp. ‘You’re so
hot
,’ he says.

‘And that’s … good, right?’ I reply, puzzled.

He shakes his head, looking at me wide-eyed. ‘No,
hot
as in
scalding
. Like trying to kiss a candle flame. Not that I’m complaining,’ he adds hastily. ‘It just makes things a little … trickier.’

We stare into each other’s eyes. Only a few inches separate us, but they could be light years.

‘Food’s on its way,’ Gia calls through the door we’d forgotten was wide open. She leans against the doorframe, grinning. ‘You two look cozy.’

Ryan says, ‘Aaaaarrrrr,’ and flips over onto his back, covering his face with his hands. I see the faint blush on his skin beneath his outspread fingers, a hint of sexy stubble roughening his jaw.

‘Gia!’ I growl. ‘Push off. We’re working something out here.’

‘Ah, young love,’ Gia smirks, ‘so relentlessly hopeful, so nauseating.’

The doorbell to the suite peals loudly and Ryan takes his hands away from his face, looking up at the ceiling. ‘What
now
?’ he sighs.

Gia’s expression grows serious. ‘The dresses are on their way, and Tommy’s arriving separately with a ton of looks for Ryan to try out. So stop trying to put the moves on her, Romeo, and haul ass into that bath. You’re a mess. No one in their right mind could possibly want you the condition you’re in. When I come back, you’d better be up to your neck in suds.’