Ryan hesitates, clearly torn, and I say fiercely, ‘It’s not about fate, Ryan. No one owns anyone else. I am the last creature on earth to want to trap you, to keep you here against your will. It’s about gut instinct and reaction and choice. It’s about what you can handle. If this feels bad to you, I release you. I won’t hold it against you. You are already peerless in my eyes. I have … trouble saying the words you want to hear because I’ve been burnt so badly, so literally, I shouldn’t even be here. But you know what I feel about you, and you have to know that it’s real. One day, maybe, we’ll have that time for ourselves, just to be and be with each other. But not now. You’ve seen things no human being should ever have to see. If you love me the way you say you do, you’ll go.’
I rise to my feet and kiss him, tasting that all-permeating dust on his lips, the familiar salt-sweet tang of him. Everything I feel for him in my mouth, in my hands.
But I tear myself away before there can be that lick of warning fire that whispers: forbidden. Then I bend and wriggle through the drill hole without looking back.
When I get to my feet, I’m in a long, narrow tunnel with a blind corner ahead. What I notice immediately is the uneven line of spray paint running along each wall, black on one side, green on the other. The paint’s fresh; I can smell it, sharp and heady. One boy, one can, each unimaginatively vandalising the seamed stone as he walked.
There’s a bump behind me and I turn instantly, my outline beginning to shred protectively into mist, into vapour. But I recognise the pack that’s come through the drill hole, and Ryan follows it, hands first, moments later. I coalesce immediately, the outline of my human form solid and unremarkable in the darkness, and watch him straighten with my green, green eyes. I know that he can’t see me in the absolute absence of light.
‘Tell anyone I almost lost my nerve, angel girl,’ he whispers, ‘and there will be repercussions.’ He dusts himself off self-consciously before feeling around and picking up the pack.
I grin, and look down at the skin of my hands, expecting to see them gleam with the joy that I can’t seem to contain: that he chose me over safety. But my hands are matte and unrevealing in the darkness, and Ryan fishes his torch out of his back pocket and flicks it on, his dark eyes settling first on me, then on the graffiti.
We walk again, me ahead, following the black line, the green. I reach the blind corner, Ryan at my shoulder, and we suddenly find ourselves standing ankle deep in bone shards. For a moment, I feel the chill flash of ancient memory rise up: of waking atop a stone dais in a chamber choked with bones, to find the Eight waiting and watching.
The chill intensifies as we walk forwards, and the ground drops away until the fragments of bone rise up to the level of our knees. Ryan scans the area around us with his flashlight, his hand shaking badly.
‘I don’t like this,’ he mutters, as the torch picks out the eye sockets of broken skulls that stare at us lifelessly from the sea of bones surrounding us. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
The ground rises again beneath our feet and we’re into another long passageway with the tags of green paint and black on either side. I read rising terror in the unsteadiness of the lines.
When we reach the next fork, we turn into the passageway that’s marked by spray paint, but then it peters out, both lines running partially down the wall before stopping completely.
There are three gaps in the rock wall ahead of us. The left opening leads to more tunnel, blank and unrevealing. The middle one, more of the same. But in the third tunnel, I see a faint gleam of luminescence trailing low upon the wall to the right, as if something injured came this way, and recently. I imagine broken wing feathers bleeding light.
Even Ryan can make out the smeared and glowing uneven line near where the wall and the floor meet. The fear he’s radiating spikes up, and stays up, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to block it out because it’s in me, too.
We follow the glowing smear of light for at least a mile. I know the boys must have come this way because we pass a can of green paint dropped on the ground, then find the black one abandoned on a natural ledge of rock on one side of a narrow opening.
The opening is only just wide and tall enough to accommodate me, and I hear Ryan grunt as he ducks his head to pass beneath it. From our narrow corridor of stone we stare out into a cavern that’s vast and high and filled with murky, grey water from end to end. On the other side of the cavern, another opening leads on into darkness, but it’s what’s positioned inside the huge chamber that catches my attention immediately, makes me place a shocked and stilling hand upon Ryan’s sleeve.
No wonder those boys ran. I would run, too, if this were not the very place I am seeking.
Rising out of the great underground lake are two stone statues on pedestals, like funerary monuments, at least thirty feet of slowly swirling water separating them. Each figure is male and flawless, at least eight feet tall, winged and rendered from a pure white stone that captures every feather, every fold of the wearer’s sleeveless robe, as if he’d been caught mid-movement. The figures are half-turned away from each other, giving the sensation of imminent motion, of imminent flight.
The one on the left has long, waving hair about his shoulders; a steely, forbidding expression. Inscribed upon the pedestal on which he stands are the words: In flagella paratus sum. I am ready for the scourge. The stone angel grasps a triple-thonged whip in one long-fingered hand, and I recognise it immediately. It was always his weapon of choice. None could wield it like he could.
‘Jegudiel,’ I whisper aloud, shocked.
My eyes flash across to the other winged being in dawning horror, and I see that he holds an open book in one hand; an orb shaped like a globe, or a planet, in the other. His eyes, his face, are lost in thought, beneath a head of shoulder-length curly hair. In life it would be sandy-coloured. A coronet of stylised stars rings his brow.
‘Selaphiel,’ I murmur, appalled.
The inscription on his pedestal reads, simply: Bellator Deus. Warrior of God.
The words are in bad taste. A taunt. For Selaphiel has no warrior side, it is not his métier. He is only contemplation and quietude, as mysterious as the universe he meditates upon.
The footage of Uriel drifting across the surface of an icy Scottish loch suddenly flashes into my mind. Jegudiel somehow located Selaphiel when Uriel could not, but something went terribly wrong. Jegudiel never made it to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan that night because he was trapped here; taken while he was trying to free Selaphiel. They are caged within these stone effigies, I would wager my life on it. Beings of energy, of light, weightless and airy, cast into blocks of heavy, lumpen stone. What I am looking at is a deliberate and calculated provocation, an insult.
‘How …’ Ryan begins, but I place my hands on his shoulders, pleading with him in a low voice to wait.
I move forward into the strange lake. Immediately, the water around me bursts into flames, which ignite the entire surface of the lake with a roar. I understand immediately what these flames are for — a special effect to keep out the mortal, the unwary, who might think to enter this chamber in which celestial beings are held captive in plain sight.
I turn and look back at Ryan, his skin lit by a weird red glow, his eyes showing his helplessness.
‘Be careful,’ he mouths. ‘I love you.’
I nod to show that I’ve heard, give him a crooked smile.
I turn back and study the stone angels, their faces averted as if each can’t bear the sight of the other. The smokeless flames lick at my boot-clad ankles, my denim-clad legs, but I do not burn. Oh, the flames are hot enough. But my own energy these days is equal to them, and they trouble me not at all.
I move forward through flaming water that is soon up to my waist, feeling the broken bones of a multitude of human dead shifting underfoot. Though there is demonsign aplenty, there are no demons in evidence. And I wonder at it, whether this is some elaborate trap. But nothing comes screaming
at me from out of the darkness above or the waters below.
I cover the last few feet to the statue of Jegudiel at a stumbling run, and place my hand upon the stone that looks so cold. But it is warm beneath my fingers, and that warmth tells me all I need to know: that a being of fire is indeed bound within the rock.
I leap up onto the pedestal, and it’s reflex what I do next. I plunge my hand through the surface of the stone, feel my own energy run in and through the hard, crystalline structure, seeking some thread, some flaw, some sign. Though Jegudiel himself eludes me, I can somehow read the signature, the pattern of him, within the rock. For his hand once wrote upon my soul the way I now seek his, and I will always recognise him now.
‘Where are you?’ I growl, half-merged with the stone, almost feeling something then losing it again.
Something seems to shift inside the rock. I feel him coiled there, like a serpent, and then the serpent begins to move. But something continues to hold him there, and I’m too afraid to give myself over to the stone completely in case I, too, am lost.
In frustration, in a voice with a ringing, steely edge to it, like a tolling bell, I cry out, ‘Libera eum!’ Free him!
A vast, cracking sound echoes across the underground lake. The stone statue blows apart, into splinters, the mocking inscription instantly obliterated. I fall back into the water, shielding my face automatically, as a mist rapidly gathers in the place where the statue once stood, forming into the towering, glowing figure of a winged man that crumples forward silently.
He hits the flaming surface of the water and goes under, and I can’t find him with my hands, though I search and stumble, crying out his name, throwing up a glittering spray all about me that reflects the firelight. Underfoot, the bones slide and tumble and tangle.
‘Mercy!’ Ryan screams, and I hear the awe in his voice. ‘Over there.’
I turn and follow the line of his pointing finger and see Jegudiel staggering out of the water at the feet of the other stone angel, the one that wears the cosmos as his coronet. Flaming water sheets down off Jegudiel’s powerful figure, cascading down through the folds of his bright and luminous robes, his wings. I see that some of their end feathers are bent and broken and trailing.
He plunges his hand into the stone angel before him and roars out, as I did, ‘Libera eum!’
The second statue flies apart, raining fragments of stone across the blazing lake surface.
It seems an age before Selaphiel’s palely glowing figure coalesces and grows recognisable. Like Jegudiel, he falls forward and hits the flaming waters of the lake, going under. But he does not rise again.
Jegudiel spins, throwing up a desperate flurry of spray, his eyes seeking to penetrate the oily, burning water that swirls and shifts with some unseen current. As he looks up, he meets my eyes, and I see shock flare in his. The flames reflect on their dark surfaces so that it seems, for a moment, that he is on fire from within. A whip appears in his hand and he gathers himself like a lion, then surges towards me with a fearsome war cry loud enough to shake the cavern, intent on striking me down.
He believes me human, I think in wonder, in terror. Or demon. My disguise must be absolute. He does not know who I am.
Jegudiel has already half-covered the distance towards me, his whip raised high, before I relax the control I’ve fought so hard to maintain. I let my outline ripple, let it blur, so that he sees me before I reassume my human guise like a cloak.
He stops dead the instant he catches the shift, then the shift back, and his weapon is suddenly gone from his grasp.
‘Find him!’ he pleads. ‘He’s almost past help, Mercy. This could end him.’
Immediately, both Jegudiel and I dive beneath the surface of the burning water and I feel his trailing wing feathers brush across my face as we spear through the airless, roaring depths, seeking our fallen brother. There’s nothing but darkness and filth and noise below, bones a foot deep in every direction, everything washed red by fire.
I surface, surging upright to see Ryan lunging through the flames at the lake’s edge as he drags the gleaming figure of a slack-limbed giant, wings bedraggled, up onto dry land.
Jegudiel appears on the far side of the chamber and prepares to re-enter the water, but I cry out, ‘Look to the mortal!’ — for Ryan’s name would mean nothing to him. ‘The mortal has found him.’
Jegudiel turns, astonished. He’s crossed the length of the flaming lake and is looming over Ryan like a creature of nightmare, faster than I can move to stand between them. Ryan steps away from Selaphiel’s prone body, his hands up and open in a gesture of parley, eyes wide, head tilted back, as he takes in Jegudiel’s terrifying countenance so far above his.
‘Who are you?’ Jegudiel roars. ‘Speak.’ And the whip in his right hand twitches.
I place my small, human-sized hand upon Jegudiel’s side, but he does not turn to acknowledge me, just continues staring at Ryan as if he would turn him to stone with his eyes.
‘Brother,’ I say quietly, ‘he’s with me.’
Jegudiel’s head whips around, his dark gold hair momentarily tangling in the feathers of his wings, and stares at me in disbelief.
I step out of the water and around Selaphiel’s still form sprawled across the stone. I grasp one of Ryan’s hands in mine. ‘He’s with me,’ I say again, my voice stronger. ‘His name is Ryan, and he’s a good guy. Azraeil would claim him in a heartbeat — he’s already tried to.’
Jegudiel looks at Ryan in consternation. ‘But how could he “be” with you? He’s human.’
Ryan lifts his chin. ‘Nevertheless,’ he says defiantly, ‘I love her, we’re together, and we came to get Selaphiel out.’
Jegudiel’s eyes widen in astonishment. But then he turns and scans the cavern. ‘This is no place to talk of love. Neqael and Turael — those who enslaved us inside the rock — will soon return. We are closer to Hell than you think: they move constantly between the fiery stronghold that gives them life and all the cemeteries and bone pits of Paris. And what they find there, they use to create … monsters; daemonium enough to overwhelm all life.’ His eyes snap to me. ‘Since Selaphiel has been imprisoned here they have sent that foul legion against him for their own amusement, for sport. Time after time, his body has been broken almost beyond repair, but they “heal” him only to ready him for another contest, another indignity. They planned to pit us against each other when he was strong enough to face me. We must be gone before they return.’
Neqael: a name I haven’t heard for millennia. She, too, had loved and followed Luc, and had seemed to me — in form, at least — as lovely and as fresh, as frail, as a wildflower. She had hair like russet leaves, cornflower blue eyes and the slyest sense of humour that could cut you to the quick.
Turael was just another hanger-on, dark eyes, dark hair, a beautiful boy in a pack of beautiful boys. Easily impressed, easily swayed. A sycophant; the type I’ve never been interested in.
‘They are not as you remember them,’ Jegudiel says harshly. ‘These days, they are harder than the stone angels they create from the broken headstones of the ancient dead. They are angels of rage — and they will brutalise you without hesitation or remorse. We need to go.’
I bend and touch Selaphiel’s flawless face. His eyes are closed. He could be a beautiful youth sleeping on the ground. There’s not a mark on him, not a single wound, but the energy he gives off is terrifying and strange; and as we three stand over him, he seems to gutter, to flicker, and his wings shred and vanish before our eyes, as if he lacks the strength even to hold his own form.
Ryan gasps as Selaphiel begins to grow in brightness, increment by increment. I get a flash of the instant K’el died at Luc’s hand. How his form grew hotter, brighter, even than the sun, before his energy exploded outward, dispersing back to the universe, never to return. The same thing is happening to Selaphiel.
Jegudiel’s voice is raw with an uncharacteristic emotion. ‘I have to get him home. His body may not appear broken
, but his mind, his soul … who can say?’
‘Mercy!’ Ryan yells suddenly, and his voice sounds so strange, so fevered, with so much terror in the word, that for a moment I think he’s begging for clemency, not calling my name. ‘The water!’ he shouts. ‘Look at the water.’
Jegudiel and I turn to see yellowed skulls, scores of them, rising out of the burning water behind us, their eroded, fleshless faces topping a travesty of mismatched bones. Some of the skeletal figures have two legs, others four, others have whipping tentacles of bone in place of limbs, like the tails of scorpions. All of them move towards us, firelight gleaming on them, through them. The energy this army of bones gives out is utterly inhuman. It’s low level, just enough to animate, but so utterly wrong.
At the opening in the rock on the other side of the cavern, I glimpse something shining. It moves so rapidly it’s but a blur, and the energy it gives off is discordant and inhuman, too, but powerful.
‘She comes,’ Jegudiel snarls, brandishing his whip high. ‘Get them out, Mercy. That boy should never have come here. God willing, I’ll find you. Go.’
The deformed army of bones throws itself at the narrow spit of stone upon which we stand, and Jegudiel begins to scatter skulls and bony limbs in every direction with fist, with violent whip lash.
Still they come — a phantasmagoria of nightmare rising out of the lake. They are joined by more misshapen, skeletal forms that pour out of the opening on the other side of the cavern, single-mindedly entering the water and moving in our direction.
Ryan and I exchange wild-eyed looks as he grasps Selaphiel beneath the arms and I gather up the rest of him and we lurch forward, angling him awkwardly out through the narrow breach in the rock.