‘Taken,’ I clarify bleakly. ‘All three of them, by Luc’s forces. K’el was just a stand-in; he was out of his depth, and his reward was an unjust death. He was singular and perfect, Ryan. And he will never be made again. I think that’s all I want to “trade”. You don’t need to know the rest.’
Ryan grips me by the upper arms, turning me to face him with a hard shake. ‘Why can’t you trust me?’ he growls. ‘Don’t underestimate me. Don’t treat me like I’m something less than you are — I don’t deserve that. Who is he, Mercy? The one who was threatening you? He’s the reason K’el’s dead, the real reason Raphael and the others are missing, right? The reason the Eight have had to hide you for so long, inside so many people? I’m not as stupid as I must seem to you.’
I begin to tremble as if I’m in the grip of a killing fever. Don’t make me tell you, Ryan. Please.
‘Who is he?’ Ryan insists. ‘That … archangel,’ he stumbles over the word, ‘who looks just like me? If he isn’t one of the Eight, then who is he?’
Trust Ryan to cut to the heart of it, of me.
He gives me another shake. ‘He was hurting you and I tried to kill him. Kill him!’
I hear his disbelief. He is wide-eyed now at the memory. I know that he’s seeing what I’m seeing: Luc suspended sixty feet in the air, arms outspread, flames enveloping his living form, laughing wildly.
‘He was on fire,’ Ryan shudders, ‘but he wouldn’t die. And I wanted him to die because he was trying to hurt you. Tell me who he is!’
I look at Ryan again, really study him. For an instant, I see eyes as pale as broken water, as living ice, in place of his brown ones; golden hair where his is dark; golden skin where his is so pale. He could be Luc in disguise. Save mortal and vulnerable in a way Luc has never been and never will be. Could Ryan represent some kind of warning? I was never good at reading signs and portents, having fallen to earth before I could work out, for myself, who I was and what my purpose could even be.
‘Who is he?’ Ryan’s voice is raw. ‘He’s no archangel,’ I murmur. ‘Not any more. I’ve always called him Luc,’ I add reluctantly, ‘but you would know him as Lucifer, Ryan.’
I see Ryan blanch as understanding finally dawns: that he is a dead ringer for the Devil Incarnate.
As if to underscore my words, a soul-rending scream pierces the storm-tossed night. It reverberates in the silence that has fallen over Ryan, over me, deep inside our stone citadel.
Both of us flinch as another scream sounds, closer this time, and louder. For a moment, a bright, constant light pierces the narrow window set deep into the walls above our landing, and we stare up at it, frozen with fear, before it suddenly extinguishes.
Ryan lets go of me abruptly, leans back against the wall.
I pull my knees up under my chin, tightening my arms around myself defensively. ‘So you see how this is hopeless, you and me?’
In answer, Ryan just closes his eyes and tilts his head back, as if he can’t bear the sight of me.
I never babble, I’m no good at small talk, but I rush to fill the silence with the oldest story there is. About a girl seeing a guy through a crowd for the first time, and falling in love.
‘It was like a sickness,’ I mutter. ‘We were young, capable of things your people would deem impossible. We were … obsessed with each other, with what we could do. We thought we were outside the order of things. That rules were only there to be broken. We sneered at the others — believing they didn’t possess our depth of understanding about the way things could be. The whole universe was our playground, and Luc loved to walk in your world. He’d return with stories of some strange, rare place he knew as “Eden”. The greatest irony is that he should be trapped here for an age, growing in vengefulness and spite and pure evil because of me …’
Can Ryan hear my unspoken plea?
I did nothing but fall for the wrong person, Ryan. I picked Luc, when I should have picked Raphael, even K’el. But then I never would have met you …
Even then, Luc had been trouble. He’d been wild. We’d been created to govern. We were responsibility and duty and faith and principle made flesh, made real. But Luc had taken all the power bound inside him, all the unspoken covenants laid down between us and our creator — the covenants hard coded into the very matter of which we were made, thou shalt, thou shalt not — and he’d used them for his own … sport.
It had been exhilarating, and frightening, being with him. Almost from the first, Luc had behaved like a god himself: creating, destroying, twisting the animate and inanimate world around him into anything he desired simply because he could. He was different from us all and somehow … free. And more beautiful than the sun.
And I fell for that. Who wouldn’t have?
Maybe I hadn’t transgressed the way Luc did, but I never tried to rein him in. I was implicated, a witness; at the very least, I turned a blind eye, when I must have known he’d never be satisfied with things the way they stood.
I tell Ryan all of this and he doesn’t say anything, or open his eyes.
‘I had it wrong for the longest time,’ I finish softly. ‘It was never the Eight who cast me out of home, cut me off from everything I’d ever loved, everyone I’d ever known. It was Luc all along. The Eight did the best they could to keep me alive down here, but they couldn’t stop Luc filling my sleeping mind with longing and lies. Some fatal bargain was struck between Luc and Michael, all those years ago. But Luc gave it a special twist, all of his own making, like he’s always done. He was the one who exiled me and it almost killed me. But he didn’t count on me surviving. And he didn’t count on being cast down himself, by Michael. And because of a rash vow that Luc once made me, he’s been trapped here on earth.’
I close my eyes in horror, whispering, ‘Luc craves a monstrous empire. And I am the key, the touchstone. What he wants won’t be possible until he has me back under his control. He will never stop pursuing me.’
Ryan still hasn’t moved. ‘And are you still … obsessed with him?’ he says finally, without opening his eyes.
His voice is emotionless, steeled against more hurt. ‘Yes,’ I whisper over the hurricane inside. ‘More than ever.’
Ryan swallows and opens his eyes and I see them shimmer with an unspoken devastation before he abruptly looks down at his clenched hands.
I watch the skin of his face tighten in rejection as I say, ‘I am consumed — with thoughts of destroying Luc the way he destroyed K’el, the way he’s been responsible for destroying and defiling more of your kind than you could begin to number, the way he tried to destroy me. He robbed me of time, Ryan, of choice, the two things I consider as precious as life itself. He raised his hand against me when all I ever did was love him beyond reason.’
Ryan raises his head as my words sink in. I hold up my aching left hand, which I’ve been concealing from his gaze, and the living flames rise off my skin as if they reach for him. He gasps, recoiling.
‘I’m sick of being objectified by those who are supposed to “love” me,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’ve been a game piece for far too long. I want vengeance, Ryan. I want to rain down upon my enemies like a ruinous plague. But most of all? I’m ready to be loved, just for myself, no other reason. And I don’t think you’re strong enough to be with someone like me. No one is, not now.’
Ryan’s continuing silence tells me everything I need to know. I feel such a sudden weight of sadness that, for a moment, the screaming, spinning world beneath my skin grows still. Abruptly, my burning scar extinguishes all together, ceases to ache.
Who could love me the way I am? Nameless, stateless, flawed.
‘I have no name,’ I say, my voice bleak. ‘And there is a legion after me who would reduce you to blood. For what it’s worth,’ I whisper, ‘I feel it, too. Felt it, almost from the moment I met you. When we’re together, I feel so much less … alone. And I would like nothing better than to lose myself in the human world with you, but that’s a dream, Ryan. And I’m done d
reaming. I’m awake now. Now and forever. And where I’m going, you cannot follow.’
A demonic shriek shatters the night, so close beside us that I surge upright in fear, only to have the entire world tilt through its axis as I struggle to retain my balance.
Ryan is on his feet immediately, steadying me.
He’s so tall, taller than me, built like a line-backing angel.
I’m still Irina’s height, still mortal-sized. I can’t seem to find the energy, or the will, to dominate the space I occupy, to reclaim my true nature. There doesn’t seem any point. I’m no “better” than he is. Not any more.
I struggle in Ryan’s arms, but he won’t let me push him away. Maybe I imagine it but, for a second, it seems as if my outline ripples, like Ryan’s clasping a creature made of fog, I can see the ground below my bare feet, through them.
‘Don’t you dare!’ Ryan cries, his grip momentarily tightening on emptiness as I struggle to draw myself together. ‘Don’t you dare disappear on me again. I know what we have is impossible to rationalise, but once I met you, my old life was over anyway. I was dead inside. All that stuff, that Ryan, they were already gone, already past. Only this matters. Don’t leave me.’
I want to lean into him and draw upon his solidity, his indescribable, peculiar energy that I could pick out in a crowd, anywhere, but I’m falling again, falling.
I’m caving in, I’m vertigo.
‘All that exists,’ I gasp, as if saying the words will somehow protect me, ‘is this present.’
It’s something I told myself when I was Irina and believed that Luc was dead, and I’d never see Ryan again. Maybe it’s the only thing capable of being true in a world like this one; that the moment we inhabit, is all we can ever really be sure of.
‘That’s it, that’s it exactly!’ he pleads. ‘All I want from you is more time.’
The laugh that escapes me has the quality of hysteria. ‘We need to carve something out for us,’ Ryan exclaims. ‘The big guy with the big sword said so himself. He ordered me to take care of you in the human world, which tells me that your time on earth is nowhere near over. And he thinks I can help. Somehow.’
The screwed up look on Ryan’s face is almost comical and it hits me that he’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever known. Then the world begins to spin in earnest and I feel his hold on me slip again.
‘We take this moment, this now, and we draw it out, we turn it into a chain of time that will keep us together,’ Ryan insists.
When I reply, my voice is almost inaudible. ‘The “big guy with the big sword” is the Archangel Michael, and he overestimates his jurisdiction where I’m concerned. I’ve been taking care of myself in the human world for a very long time without recourse to anyone. Every time They put me into someone new? It all came down to me: me doing the starting over, me making things up as I went along. Being with me will only get you killed. I can’t be responsible for losing you, the way I almost lost you tonight.’
The sense of vertigo is so bad now that Ryan seems fuzzy, as if I’m seeing him through a veil of light.
‘You’re already responsible,’ Ryan implores. ‘I’m a marked man. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. With you, or without you, I’m marked for death. And I’ll take my chances with you. In any life, given the same choice, I would choose you. Are you hearing me?’
Ryan could be a being of fire, light is scattering off his skin. I reach out and touch his face with my fingers, feeling the energy spike beneath the surface of him, his iron self-control wavering. So much passion in him, so much life, all for me.
‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ I whisper through the pain sweeping through me. ‘And it won’t work. This isn’t a game, Ryan. Run, or die. Those are the choices. Am I worth that much to you?’
‘I’ve got your back,’ Ryan vows fervently, ‘if you’ve got mine. You know it.’
He wraps his arms around me as if he would bind my energy to him. And the bright glow that my skin gives off seems to bleed into him, or draw tight around him, so he glows brighter to my dazzled eyes. It’s as if we are bound together by light. Light is refracting off us onto the walls, the worn handrails, the uneven stone stairs, like some kind of chemical reaction is happening.
Ryan’s breath is warm upon my face. ‘Now, are you done throwing out challenges?’ he asks. ‘Maybe I lied a little when I said that all I wanted was your time, because I’m greedy for whatever you can give me. I’ll steal what I can. Because there’s something I’ve had to wait more than one lifetime to do, and I’m not waiting any more …’
Before I can divine his intention, shore up my defences, Ryan tips my face up to his, curving me into the hard line of his body, lowering his lips swiftly to mine.
My eyes fly wide then shiver closed.
I am love, and desire, and fear.
I’m suffused with a roaring heat.
Those things are inside Ryan, too, surging beneath his skin.
We are two disparate energies colliding and the light around us, in us, through us, seems to build and build.
So potent a mix are we that the mere act of being, of holding myself together, becomes untenable and I shatter into a billion pieces, into ragged motes of light, like an exploding star, instantly dispersing.
Ryan is buffeted by a blast wave of heat and energy, it ruffles his dark hair, his clothing, and he’s left to grasp the empty air, howling just one word, ‘Mercy!’
Thinking me already fled, gone, departed, as I have done so many times before.
I am the hurricane that was promised.
I am boundless.
There’s nothing to stop me penetrating these stone walls and go slipstreaming into the night.
I am insubstantial, yet indivisible.
I feel inviolate, all-powerful.
It is as it should be. It is as it was.
But something holds me here. It’s like an itch, a small and nagging cut dragging at my attention.
I know it. I can almost taste it: some messy human emotion I should put behind me forever, but cannot now ignore.
It’s grief, Ryan’s grief radiating into the icy air.
To every action, a reaction; it’s something my people dismiss. We look down on all those below us and think that our actions, our inactions, have no consequence.
But mortals live in a storm of consequence, and Ryan has been hurt enough for one lifetime.
Somehow, that thought draws me back.
I am clumsy and unpractised, and my whole being yearns to be and remain weightless light, but still I pull my fractured energy together like a swarm of angry bees. I force myself to become a perfect simulacrum of a human being once more: fleshy, dense, solid.
Then I’m facing him again, and Ryan’s eyes are still wide with horror and sorrow. He’s close enough to touch, but neither of us makes a move towards the other. Now he knows what I have known all along: that touching is dangerous. It invites the unwanted.
I see suddenly, blindingly, how love and loss are two sides of the same coin. To know one is to know the other, even before it has come to pass.
Ryan pushes his hair out of his eyes. ‘I thought you were … gone.’ His voice cracks on the word. ‘This time for good. It’s never going to be easy for us, is it?’
I shake my head.
‘You scare me, Ryan Daley. Even more than those demons outside that scream for my death. How is it that I want what you want? I’ve spent an eternity feeling powerless. Love did that to me — robbed me of all control. I never expected to feel this way again. I don’t want to feel.’
‘Neither did I,’ Ryan rasps, ‘because feeling anything at all was dangerous. If I let myself feel, then maybe I’d have to believe what everyone was saying — that Lauren was dead. But from the moment I laid eyes on “Carmen”, you kept getting under my skin. At first, all you did was irritate the hell out of me, bailing me up that way outside my house, inviting yourself along for the ride when all I wanted was to be left alone. But t
hat irritation turned into curiosity, which turned into something else, becoming this chain of, of … feeling that brought me here. I dropped everything for you. I veered left. And I’d do it again in a second. That’s what “feeling” does. It tells you you’re alive, it gives things … I don’t know, proper meaning. You’re still trying to maintain some veneer of independence? Toughness? Do words like that even apply to you? But I see through it, Mercy. I see through you. You’re not that different from me after all, under your armour. Crumbs, Mercy, that’s all I’m after. Just crumbs. It’s not a lot to ask for.’
Ryan steps forward and tries to catch hold of me again and it’s reflex what I do next.
I slam up a force-field between us, a seamless web of energy the way K’el reminded me was possible. And Ryan hits it with just his outstretched fingers. A crackle of intense, blue-white light is thrown up at the point of contact and he rocks back on his heels, cradling his stinging fingertips in his other hand.
He stares at me, wounded, before laughing ruefully. ‘No sudden moves from now on, I promise, if you promise me something back.’
‘What?’ I say warily. ‘I suck at keeping promises, remember?’
‘Just promise,’ he says, ‘that you’ll take me with you this time. You won’t just fade out and leave me behind again. Just let me be with you, just stay for a while, that’s all I’m asking.’
It hits me once more, that he’s the sweetest thing. But I don’t move any closer, though I want him more than anything.
What I want is impossible. And Ryan’s given me the answer to this mess, the only answer that makes any sense.
The thought of what I’m about to say fills me with an ache so powerful that a terrible sense of dissolution returns.
‘You might not need me,’ he insists hotly. ‘You might not want me, but you’ve got me.’
That force-field, that protective shell I’ve cast about myself, I let it drop. I hold my right hand out to Ryan, and both of us can see that it’s shaking.
Hesitantly, he takes my fingers, then grips them tight, as if he will never let me go. I have to tune out everything I can feel beneath his skin, everything about him that unsettles every particle of my being, in order to speak.