‘That’s the family hotline,’ Bianca says. ‘Anyone wants to move a lover, a vintage car, a carton full of contraband for our own personal use, we call the wizards that man this number. I’m not saying I approve or disapprove, I’m just saying that’s how it goes. Borders are porous, and all borders can be worked — it’s almost a family motto. I’ll get you into Paris, and this is a free pass, if you need it, to get out of there again. You just say where and when, and it’ll happen like magic.’ She blinks rapidly and her eyes grow shiny again. ‘Just quote Crespigny19A when asked — the name of Félix’s favourite dog and our apartment number on the Upper East Side. Stupidly easy to crack, but I haven’t got around to changing it yet. Something that will shortly be rectified.’
I hand the card back to Bianca and she looks down at it, crushed. ‘So you won’t do it?’ she says in a small voice. ‘You won’t go?’
‘Merce?’ Ryan’s hold tightens as he looks into my eyes.
‘The dark place that Nuriel finds herself in now,’ I whisper, ‘Paris represents that place for me. The misery I felt then was nothing compared to the torment that Nuriel has endured, but I was at my … lowest there. I don’t think I will ever again be as alone, as lost, as forsaken, as I was in Paris.’
Bianca leans forward as if to touch me comfortingly, and I draw back into the solid warmth of Ryan’s body.
‘I don’t need your card,’ I say quietly, and her dark brows draw together unhappily. ‘I don’t need it,’ I go on, ‘because I’ve already memorised the number and the magic password. I won’t forget them, not now. You can keep it.’
Bianca sits upright, letting the card fall from her fingers. ‘So you’ll do it?’
I can see her immediately working out what she has to do, what she has to say, to make the magic happen.
I nod wearily within the circle of Ryan’s arms. ‘No other course would honour Selaphiel’s compassion for the monster that I was, nor Nuriel’s selflessness. They never deserved torture, and their bravery deserves mine. Those that guard Selaphiel were drawn to the darkness below, and in the darkness they must remain, or die — there are no innocents among them. Luc’s people have made a desert enough of this world. If I — who never had a task, never had a purpose — must be the one to slay the dragons that guard the gates of Hell in order to save Selaphiel, then so be it.’
I look up at Ryan. ‘But it’s not your fight, and you don’t have to do this. You should take up Bianca’s offer and go home.’
‘Damned with you,’ Ryan whispers, smoothing my hair back off my forehead, ‘damned without you, remember? You’ve got cover, whether you like it or not.’
The house is quiet now, with all the phone calls made, details exchanged.
Earlier, Bianca paced the dining room, working a telephone, laptop and scanner furiously, while Ryan trawled through the contents of her industrial-sized refrigerator, answering her questions between bites.
Excluded from talk of permits and clearances, flight-plan filing, catering requirements and ground handling procedures, I drifted through all the elegant, expensively furnished rooms of the house like a restless ghost, beset by a formless fear, struggling to remember the shape and contours of the ancient, sprawling city I’d once gravitated to to die. But though I dug and dug, my memories were chaotic and fragmentary — no more than snatches of sound and colour, a stench, vague impressions, a glimpse of a woman’s face, mouth stretched wide in a scream, eyes fixed in terror on something. Me?
The only clear memory I possess of that time is waking with the Eight standing over me, deep within the putrid heart of Cimetière des Innocents. It would have been my eternal resting place, too, but for Their interference.
When the planning was done, Bianca retreated to her rooms near the front of the house, exhaustion shadowing her blue eyes. ‘Tomaso will have the car brought around at six,’ she’d said. ‘He’s arranged for a police escort to take you from the police blockade to Malpensa airport. There’ll be a full VIP meet and greet at the hangar, Ryan, that will speed you onto the plane. And when you reach Paris,’ she’d added quietly, ‘I promised you point to point, exactly as if you were family, and I meant it. One of our drivers will be waiting on the tarmac at Le Bourget; he’ll meet you straight off the plane. Customs and immigration will happen onboard, Mercy, so make yourself scarce at that point. If you’re seen, and your presence can’t be explained, I’ll have no choice but to deny any knowledge of you.’
She’d refused to accept our thanks before turning and hurrying down the hall.
Now, I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lamplit master bedroom, waiting for daybreak. I am looking across the troubled, black waters of the lake when Ryan emerges from the en suite bathroom, the light streaming out behind him, his hair still wet from the shower, a half-eaten apple in his hand. There’s a pale blue towel knotted tight and low around his narrow hips. Droplets of water gleam upon his broad shoulders, catching the light like faceted gemstones. I don’t think I’ve seen anything more beautiful for a long time.
He smiles instantly when he sees me, dropping the apple onto a nightstand and holding his hand out to me. But before I can move towards him, I get a disorientating flash: of Luc, bare-chested, similarly wreathed by light, holding his hand out to me in the same way. I shake my head, stepping backwards, genuinely frightened and confused.
The dark versus the light, though the dark and the light are inverted and distorted.
I see confusion grip Ryan, too, at my weird reaction. Then a deep anger flares in his expressive face, which is rapidly overcome by a bemused tenderness.
‘This is so messed up,’ he sighs, bending down and grabbing one of the large, overstuffed pillows off the top of the bed, punching it a little before leaning it up against the wall. He sits with his back against it, on top of the coverlet, watching me steadily as he finishes his apple.
‘I’m messed up,’ I correct quietly as I move across the room towards him.
When I reach him, I look down into his face. And it’s both familiar and unfamiliar, a signifier I have neither the wit nor the talent to read.
Ryan doesn’t hesitate; he does what he always does when I get close — pulls me into him like we’re two halves of the same whole, though we can’t be, it’s impossible. I’m falling again, but this time I feel no fear. I end up half-sprawled across his lap, the towel between us damp from being drawn across his skin, laughing as I try to keep some semblance of balance, of distance. The skin of his chest is warm and yielding beneath my fingers. I feel the play of his muscles as he draws his arms around me tightly and just breathes me in, for a time.
‘Why is it,’ he murmurs wonderingly, ‘that you smell of snowfall?’
He is a jumble of contradictions, every part of him like velvet-wrapped steel.
He tips me over, suddenly, onto my back, catching me unawares the way he has done from the very beginning, somehow getting in under defences that were wrested in place by the hands of archangels. He lays a line of fiery kisses from the hollow at the base of my neck up to my jawline, and I arc up to meet him. He only pulls away when he reaches my mouth, and I feel his reluctance to do it.
‘Now you know how it feels to be me around you,’ he murmurs, his mouth breaking into amused and sensual lines as he braces himself over me. ‘Jittery, psyched, out of control, out of my mind. We’re right back where we started, you and me. All that separates us is a damned towel.’
My eyes widen, grow dark with my desire, and he sees how devastated I am by his actions, his words, exactly the way he intended me to be.
He opens his mouth over mine, kissing me, moulding me to him, flesh to flesh, energy to energy, until I feel the heat bloom under his skin of steel and velvet, an answering rush of heat rising in me. He tastes of apples and mint and the salt-sweet, roiling sea. There’s that thrill of fire, of warning, along my nerves, but I dig my fingers into the muscles of his shoulders, his back, unable to pull away, because we are magnetic. We are two disparate
energies colliding. And I grow so hot beneath him that he gasps out loud and has to push away from me, shield his eyes because I’m wreathed in light.
He shudders and drops back onto the bed, covering his face with his hands. He gives an involuntary groan.
‘Why do you persist,’ I say, accusing and anguished, ‘when loving me is a kind of hell? K’el, Raphael, even Luc — they’re proof that I bring the darkest end upon all who claim to have loved me. I am the siren’s empty call, Ryan, I am a plague. I’m cursed, and I will drag you down the way I did those others. Why, why do you persist?’
He uncovers his face and looks at me, his expression unreadable.
‘Give me up,’ I whisper brokenly, as the light within and around me fades until it is tolerable once more. ‘Renounce me utterly, so that I might come to my senses and set you aside, too. I don’t have a heart, Ryan. I can pretend that I do, even fashion one for myself as the circumstances require, but I don’t need one. I don’t need food or water or air, sunlight or rest, to keep me alive.’
I see his shock as I add, ‘I want you more than anything, but I can’t give you what you want. In all my “lives” upon this material earth, you’re the one thing I’ve reached out to, again and again, against all reason, every obstacle. But this could never be enough for you. How could it?’
Ryan suddenly launches himself off the bed without looking at me, and I’m too afraid to reach out and read the turmoil in his mind for fear of what I will see there. He hooks a tee-shirt and a pair of sleek, black boxer briefs off the back of a chair before striding into the bathroom, and emerges a few seconds later, dressed and without the towel.
‘This is not Hell,’ he says, and his voice is shaky with emotion. ‘Hell is keeping vigil in a hospital room at the bedside of a weird, prickly girl you think you’ve fallen for, only for her to wake and deny ever meeting you before in her life. Hell is thinking I’d found you again and then watching you “die” right before my eyes. If you think the only thing that’s keeping me here is the prospect of some hot sex,’ a faint flush appears high on his cheekbones, ‘then you don’t know me at all.’
He throws himself down on the bed beside me and turns his back to me.
‘I need to sleep,’ he growls softly. ‘You can keep insulting and cheapening this thing we’ve got going on, so long as you do it quietly. I’m beat.’
I don’t move, don’t speak, until I see the hard lines of his body slacken into sleep. Then, and only then, do I move up beside him and mould my form into the sweet shape of his, placing my cheek against the back of his neck, hooking one arm around his waist to keep him close, to keep him safe.
And then I close my eyes, too.
I’m not really sleeping; I’m thinking. But it’s a state of consciousness that starts as an acute awareness of my surroundings, of Ryan breathing deeply and evenly beside me, and gradually evolves into a state almost of grace, or meditation.
I find myself deep within the waters of the lake once more. I see Ananel surge towards me, and it all happens again, as if for the first time: his deadly, envenoming kiss, the flare of recognition in his eyes. And, again, I find myself with a blazing blade in my left hand, which I drive through his throat without hesitation. What else could I have done?
But this time Ananel does not die.
He is pinned to the rock by my killing energy, but the light of his grey eyes does not fade. Instead, they begin to change, in shape, in colour. The lashes grow longer, more luxuriant, dark gold in place of black, and the irises bleed from grey to a blue so pale and lustrous, they are like living ice, like broken water.
And his face … my God, it is not Ananel impaled upon my blade, but Luc. The Luc of Milan, of this world, the one I’ve never really known, his golden hair worn shorter than I remember it ever being, that sexy hint of stubble along his jawline.
The instant I see his face, pain floods through me. I feel myself physically convulsing within this false dream, this twisted memory, and I know that he’s causing it; he’s reaching across time and distance to hurt me in the here and now. It’s as though I’ve somehow called him to me, though I no longer want him in my mind or in my life.
As I thrash in agony in the water, Luc’s mouth widens into a grin as predatory as it is devastating. He grasps the hilt of the weapon that is buried deep within his throat and pulls it free.
The weapon does not obey the laws as they were laid down in the beginning; it does not vanish in his hand with a flare of light. Instead, he holds the twisted, burning blade aloft, and I watch the light of the flame change instantly, so that the pale blue holy fire is eaten away by a light that holds the taint of demon-grey at its heart.
Time seems to speed up and slow down all at once as I watch him open his beautiful mouth to speak my name. But I can’t hear it, because Hell is opening in my head and I am deaf, dumb and blind with pain.
Luc roars my name as if it were the darkest incantation of the blackest, most evil magic, and I feel one of his long-fingered hands encircling my throat, pressing deep, beginning to merge into my flesh.
Then, with a rush of violence, he bears me down into the filth of the lake bed, the water churning with our velocity. There, he lies atop me, writhing against me, in some terrible parody of the way we might have lain together in our secret garden. I feel him place the tip of the short, flaming blade beneath my jaw as if he would drive it through.
As I struggle to scream, I hear Luc say softly into the space between my eyes: Little fool, you’ve told me exactly where you are more clearly than if you’d used words.
And I scream at myself: Wake!
My eyes flash open into Ryan’s concerned gaze. I’m so disoriented, so wretched and distressed, to see that face, that beautiful face, leaning over me, that I scramble away from him and throw myself off the bed, dry-retching on hands and knees on the floor. I’ve never been good at reading the signs, but this time I know what my inner voice, my inner demon, is trying to warn me of. The threat is too real to be ignored.
‘We need to go,’ I gasp, finally comprehending where I am. ‘Luc knows I’ve left Milan. If Michael and the others haven’t still got him cornered, he’s going to come for me. For us.’
After a second of stunned incomprehension, Ryan is by my side on the floor, pushing my heavy hair off my face. He pulls me upright against him.
I’m shaking so hard I can barely articulate the words. ‘We can’t let him find us here. He can’t know of Bianca’s involvement. It would be a death sentence for her.’
I surge to my feet and stagger across the room, and begin feverishly stuffing our scattered belongings into the daypack Gia gave us.
‘But what did you see?’ Ryan asks, looking up at me from where he’s still kneeling on the floor.
‘I was thinking,’ I murmur, ‘meditating. Maybe even dreaming, I don’t know. But the first of the demons that I …’ I falter to a stop, remembering the violence of the kiss and the violence that followed.
Ryan doesn’t drop his gaze from me as he stands and dresses quickly, automatically checking the inner pocket of his leather jacket for his valuables, for that picture he keeps of me like a traveller’s medal.
‘Go on,’ he urges, as he shrugs into his jacket, steps into his worn-out boots.
‘It was Luc I saw. In place of the demon I … I … killed. And Luc overcame me. He saw how Ananel died, he knows it was me …’
‘But how could he know?’ Ryan scoffs, still unable to put much credence in a dream. ‘That can’t be possible — you’re making it sound like he has some kind of celestial GPS for you. No way.’
‘Then how did he find me in Milan when I was Irina?’ I wail. ‘I still don’t understand how, after all this time, he was able to work out who I was, where I was, when he’d never been able to do that before.’
Ryan shakes his head, unconvinced, and I grasp his arm, the leather of his sleeve cool beneath my burning hand.
‘We’ve always had this strange connection, Luc and I.
Maybe because he was the one that marked me, I don’t know, I’ve never been able to work it out. It used to be that when I slept he had access to my thoughts, he could reach out to me across any distance and we could speak with each other as if we were face to face, like you and I are now. But even with that weird connection, he’s never been able to find me, not until now. If he can still get into my head, if my thoughts aren’t safe from him, then we need to move. We need to reach Selaphiel before Luc can figure out what we’re doing. And we’re putting Bianca at risk every second we stay here. Luckily for us, he didn’t see me at Villa Nicolin, he saw me at the lake. Let him think me still there when we’ve already fled for … Paris.’ I shudder as I say the word. ‘We’ve got to go. Now.’
Ryan picks up our backpack, finally catching the flame of my urgency. I can see from his face that he knows very well what the Devil is capable of. Ryan lives in his world. This is the earth that the Devil has made, as much as any other, and it would serve no purpose to remind a Son of Man what Lucifer is capable of. Every thought, every deed, every breath, the Devil would claim his stake in, if he could.
Ryan looks out the windows, but to his mortal eyes it’s still dark as night out there. ‘What time is it, anyway?’
‘Five fourteen,’ I say unerringly.
‘Close enough,’ he says. ‘Let’s wait for the car out front.’
Bianca opens the door to her bedroom before we reach it. She’s wearing an elegant pair of man-style pyjamas in oyster-coloured silk, piped in navy, but her eyes are heavy with sleeplessness.
‘You’re too early,’ she says without preamble, looking up into my eyes, into Ryan’s. ‘I’ll come fetch you when I hear the car being brought round. Try and get a little more rest.’
‘The way you have?’ I query softly. ‘I don’t sleep very well these days,’ she murmurs, shrugging. ‘Bad dreams.’
‘I get those, too,’ I say, making my voice as even and calm as possible. ‘And the last one I had convinced me that you have to throw together a bag of personal possessions and move up to the main house. Now. Better still, you, Clara, Tomaso and whoever else you’ve got working here, you all need to leave with us. It’s just a feeling I get.’