‘Where are Mom and Dad?’ Ryan snaps, and Lauren bristles at his tone of voice.
‘I did what you said!’ she cries, suddenly furious. ‘I arranged two tickets to a show in Portland I thought Mom might like to see — dinner, hotel, the works — then I told them everything was fine, that they needed to get away now that I was back, that I badly needed space. And I did it. I got them out of town. And now they’re stranded on the other side of the highway. Nobody’s getting in or out, not tonight.’
‘Why didn’t you go with them?’ Ryan mutters, his face softening.
‘I’m not ready to see a show or have dinner, Ryan, look at me. Today proved that. I thought I was going to die just from all the eyes. Besides, look outside my window. It wouldn’t matter where I went.’
Ryan strides over to the window and pulls one of the cheerfully patterned curtains aside, peers out. ‘There’s nothing there,’ he says with a frown.
Lauren looks at me numbly and I head across to the window, glance out quickly through the side of a curtain. And I see him. Over the side fence, outside the house next door, standing on the footpath, shining in the darkness with a sickly light. He looks up sharply as if he can sense me.
I nod at Ryan and his shoulders slump.
‘Semyaza probably sent Barachiel and Jeremiel on a fool’s errand,’ I say dully. ‘Luc’s not in Panama, neither is Raphael. They’re here, they have to be. It was me he always wanted, not Michael. I think he always intended to lead us here — from Europe through Asia to the Americas. Nuriel, Selaphiel, Gabriel were all bait. It’s the kind of thing Luc would do. He wanted to wear us down. Let us think we were in control. This is exactly where we were supposed to end up. Without friends, without allies. Completely isolated and alone. He will never stop punishing me. Never.’
‘Back up,’ Richard interrupts, frowning, trying to understand.
Ryan tells him and Lauren what happened after Carmen: about Lela and Irina and all that followed. ‘It feels as if we’ve been running forever,’ he finishes tiredly. ‘And now I’m supposed to just stand back and watch as Mercy hands herself over to the Devil on Coronado Beach.’
‘You’re not alone,’ Richard says. ‘You’ve got us.’ He indicates himself and Lauren.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Ryan says flatly. ‘Lauren isn’t going anywhere near that beach.’
‘Lauren is in the room,’ she says in a steely voice that I recognise, because it’s the same tone Ryan uses on me sometimes. ‘And maybe she wants to walk right up to the Prince of Darkness and spit in his face. Leave Lauren to Lauren.’
She and Ryan glare at each other.
‘It’s too dangerous —’ he begins, but she cuts him off. ‘What else could anyone do to me that hasn’t already been done?’ she screams.
Richard lays a hand on her arm, but she shrugs him off angrily, saying automatically, ‘Don’t touch me.’
Richard sighs, turns to me. ‘I have a bike you could use. You wouldn’t have to face him on your own.’
I am obscurely touched. ‘I can’t risk any one of you,’ I tell him. ‘And machines and weapons are no use against Luc’s people. But I thank you,’ I add softly.
‘If we choose to go, how could you stop us?’ he insists. ‘Choose to go?’ I parrot incredulously. ‘I don’t see how I have a choice, let alone any of you.’
‘Come, come,’ a familiar voice says quietly into the air beside me, ‘someone like you always has a choice.’
And the room is suddenly filled with light and a power of archangels. Gabriel and Uriel, Jeremiel and Barachiel, Jegudiel and … Michael. Towering and wingless, beautiful and inhuman.
‘Sister,’ they all say as one, as Lauren and Richard scramble backwards on the bed, shielding their eyes in awe against the light.
Michael’s dark eyes are clouded with pain. He drifts towards me slowly, bleeding from his manifold wounds, engulfs my small hands in his strong ones.
‘Tell me,’ he says quietly.
And I tell him of all that has occurred since we last met in Milan, and of the bargain that Luc would strike. ‘Me for Raphael,’ I finish hopelessly, ‘and justice and fair treatment for all in the new universal order, if you can believe that.’
‘Treachery,’ Michael murmurs.
‘Of course,’ I reply in anguish. ‘He is incapable of anything else.’
Michael looks down into Ryan’s face where he stands behind me. ‘Thank you,’ he says simply. ‘For keeping your word. And for letting her go, as she must.’
‘I can hardly make her stay,’ Ryan says bitterly. ‘But she doesn’t deserve to die.’
‘And nor will she,’ Michael snaps, his steely tone causing Ryan to pale. ‘We are not in the habit of sacrificing our own to Lucifer. Look out there.’
Michael points to Lauren’s window and Ryan hurries to draw the curtains open. When we peer down into the street, Ryan pulling me close, the watcher has vanished. I beckon Lauren and Richard over, and lean into Ryan.
‘Watch, watch,’ Michael says.
His voice is like a warm zephyr moving through the room as we look out over the darkened rooftops of Paradise. Against the thick covering of billowing black cloud overhead there are pinpoints of light in the sky, scores of them. They drift down towards earth, like the spinning clocks of dandelion flowers somehow illuminated, before coming together in a shimmering mass that vanishes suddenly, faster than sound, than light itself. A sight both extraordinarily beautiful and eerie.
‘Elohim, malakhim, ophanim, seraphim, others,’ Michael’s voice is quiet. ‘As many as may be spared.’
‘It’s like Judgment Day,’ Richard breathes beside me.
At my shoulder, Lauren is so still she could be made of marble. She watches, a heavy frown pleating her pale brow.
‘How could you guys possibly lose with those numbers?’ Ryan exclaims. ‘Aren’t you always going to be more powerful than those mutants Luc uses? Take him down, finish him.’
From behind us, Jeremiel murmurs, ‘Those angels that came down to earth, there will be no more reinforcements if any of them fall. Unlike Luc, we cannot “create” more.’
I stare at the sky, which is dark and blank once more with cloud. ‘Luc will get what he wants,’ I say finally, and I feel Ryan freeze beside me. ‘Me for Raphael. Like for like. That’s what he’ll get.’
Ryan spins me around, shakes me. ‘What are you saying?’ he cries. ‘That will trigger the “end time” you’re all so afraid of! Why aren’t you fighting it?’ He looks accusingly at the archangels gathered around us. ‘Why are you allowing this to happen?’
‘Listen to her,’ Uriel urges, his face so like mine.
I know he is the key to this whole damned mess. He is the one to buy us the time we need to save Raphael, then get me back home. A home I can’t even imagine now, don’t want to return to, because Ryan won’t be there.
I place my hands on either side of Ryan’s face and force him to look into my eyes. ‘What Luc will get is an illusion. When we reach Coronado Beach, “Mercy” will surrender herself to him.’
Ryan shakes his head in angry denial, but I turn from him to look at Michael. ‘But the moment Raphael is back safely with us and Luc places his hands upon that Mercy, there must be a shift,’ I say with quiet urgency. ‘A vast shift so that Luc’s forces see my face reflected in every direction. So disguised, our people must disperse across the landscape. In the chaos, I will leave.’
‘Merce …’ Ryan’s voice is low and anguished. ‘Put Luc back in his hole, Michael,’ I say wearily. ‘Repair some of the damage he’s done. The time for mere watching is past.’
Michael nods grimly.
Ryan releases me as if I’m radioactive. ‘I need to take a shower,’ he mutters. ‘I don’t feel clean.’ He leaves the room abruptly.
‘I’ll get the bikes,’ Richard says, hooking a sweater and a bunch of keys out of a duffle bag lying in one corner of the room. I hear his footsteps pound down the stairs, the bang of the front d
oor opening and shutting.
I walk across to Uriel, look up into his face. ‘It must be you,’ I say, and he nods, then smiles.
‘Who else?’
He stares down at me for a moment with a quizzical expression, as if I’m a wondrous painting or a poem he must commit to memory.
‘His little joke,’ I remind him, and he shakes his head at me in mock exasperation. Then his outline seems to glow more brightly for a moment, before vaporising.
One by one, Jegudiel, Barachiel, Gabriel and Jeremiel do the same.
But Lauren throws herself in front of Michael before he can disappear, too.
She is shaking with fury as she cries, ‘Why didn’t you help me? If you can do this,’ she stabs her fingers at the air where the others were standing only seconds before, ‘why didn’t one of you save me?’ Tears spring out of her eyes, run down her cheeks. ‘You could have done it. Or put me out of my misery,’ she wails.
Michael bends and takes her clenched fists in his great hands, looks into her eyes from which the tears fall and fall.
‘What has been done to you will one day be made right. There will be an accounting. Until that day, Lauren Daley, I take your pain, I take your suffering, I will bear your burden. And I am sorry, sorrier than you will ever know, that we were not there when you needed us, that evil was done to you.’
Then he’s gone, too, and Lauren is moving like a sleepwalker towards her bed. She pulls the covers over her wasted, pain-racked body and in moments she is asleep.
I turn left unerringly, past Lauren’s bathroom, making for Ryan’s bedroom. I open the door tentatively and see that he’s asleep too, his short, spiky hair standing up all over his head, contrasting with the stark white of his pillowcase. He’s bare-chested and smells of clean, male skin and soap. The covers are drawn up to his waist, and I slip beneath them, lie down beside him.
He’s so tired that he does not stir, does not waken. All I can do is hold him and let his energy, his life force, wash over me, through me, one last time, like the strains of a familiar love song.
This, I think, is what I will miss most when I am gone. The closeness, the beating of his heart beneath my ear.
It’s still dark when we leave the Daleys’ house, Ryan, Lauren and I. None of us touching each other, keeping our distance. Lauren’s dressed in a shapeless navy parka over a pink sweatshirt and baggy jeans, her hair plaited back so tightly that her face looks skull-like. But she seems less jittery today, less defensive. I can tell by the way she’s moving.
I’m wearing my ‘human’ travelling face and the deeply unsexy outfit that I wore across half the world, which Ryan has probably grown to hate. He’s still got on his torn and stinking leather jacket, over a fresh long-sleeved tee and jeans, as if it’s a talisman that will somehow bring him luck. He hasn’t said a word to me since he woke alone in his bed, probably never knowing I’d even been there.
Let him think me callous and uncaring, I tell myself. It’s easier that way.
Out on the street, beside the nature strip, Richard Coates jumps out of the cab of his rusting, red, two-door truck. In the open tray there are a couple of mud-splattered bikes — one green and white, the other blue and yellow — anchored with black and yellow cables. He starts moving them down onto the road, and Ryan hurries to help him after he’s rechained the front gates to his parents’ house and pocketed the key, for no good reason except maybe habit.
Wordlessly, Richard hands Ryan the key to the green and white machine, and takes a bunch of helmets out of the cab of the truck. He hands a couple to Ryan before shoving one on his head, then beckoning Lauren over and placing a helmet carefully over her plaited hair. He reaches back into the truck one last time and takes out a long, cylindrical black bag that he clips to the back of the blue and yellow machine. He swings his leg over the saddle, then turns and helps Lauren up behind him. I see her hesitate before she closes her arms around his waist, tightly.
‘Ready?’ Ryan mutters, handing me a red helmet and putting a black one on over his head. We look at each other from behind the visors like two blank-eyed aliens, before Ryan swings onto his machine and waits for me.
I get on behind him and wrap my arms around his waist and we roar off through the silent streets, down the main drag with its faded front-window displays screaming Shop here for heavenly savings! Past the boarded-up front door of the Decades Café where I tried to down a cup of coffee with Spencer Grady and failed miserably because I will always hate the stuff.
We hit the deserted coast road heading away from Paradise down towards Port Marie, drawing closer and closer to Coronado Beach, which I’ve only ever seen in dreams, in the thoughts of others. As we pass the abandoned military base that’s halfway out of town — miles of rusting steel fence ending in a set of chained gates at least twenty feet high — Richard and Lauren pull out from behind us with a roar, putting on such a clean burst of speed that they are soon lost to sight.
We catch up with them at the turn-off for the oil refinery. In the distance, across the salt plains that run right up to the refinery gates, the towering concrete chimney stands still and silent, belching neither flame nor smoke today.
‘Coronado Beach!’ Ryan yells, turning his helmet towards me briefly, as we take a right at the next crossroads, Richard and Lauren leading the way.
We see the trees first, a long stand of them, like sentinels upon the crest of a steep hill, their dark, twisted, leafless boughs raised to the slowly lightening sky. Then the road goes down over the hill, long grass waving in the stiff breeze on either side, and ends in a small car park. A set of stairs leads down to the beach below.
Neither Richard nor Ryan stops as we hit the car park. There’s a rev of engines — like the buzz of multiple chainsaws — and both bikes sweep down the stairs, onto the damp sand of the beach.
Richard does a complicated set of wheelies for the sheer hell of it on the wet sand near the water’s edge, before burning to a stop in front of Ryan and me where we’ve parked high up the beach, near the staircase.
Ahead of us, the water is grey and tempestuous, pierced by jagged rocks that rise up beyond the shallows like claws. As I gaze back, I see the stand of gnarled black trees in the far distance, the undulating line of stark and beautiful cliffs that hug the perimeter of the beach. It seems prehistoric, even primeval, here. A fitting arena of battle.
We all take off our helmets, and Ryan moves towards his sister, who’s still laughing and breathless from doing wheelies on the back of Richard’s bike.
‘Hey,’ he says, his expression softening. ‘It’s good to see you like this,’ he adds uncertainly, half-raising a hand to touch Lauren before thinking better of it and letting it drop.
Lauren tips her small face up to the strong breeze that’s blowing off the water, straight tendrils of pale hair whipping around her face, her skin almost translucent.
‘It’s good to be out,’ she says, sounding surprised. She looks at me, then down at the sand. ‘I’m feeling better today, kind of … lighter.’
We four stand there awkwardly, like the first people ever created. Ryan’s got his hands in his pockets and he’s scuffing the sand at his feet like he doesn’t want to know me. The wind picks up, sending the sand stinging against our faces. The sky begins to lighten, just a little, at the horizon.
Suddenly, pain bursts into life behind my eyes, almost bringing me to my knees. And I know that Luc’s searching for me, that he’s close and gaining, trying to force that strange mental connection we’ve always shared but which I no longer welcome.
Luc knows me well enough to be sure I would want to be here, personally, to ensure Raphael’s freedom. For I did love Raphael, once, and deeply, as one would love a brother. And I owe him a debt that cannot be repaid. I owe him for this life, for gifting me Ryan.
Ryan sees me buckle and catches me easily before I crumple to the ground. He holds me tightly, keeping me on my feet, as the noise that no one else can hear intensifies so that I feel as
if I’m made solely of pain.
I want to shriek my agony at the leaden sky as Luc murmurs in my head, his voice dark and low and seductive, You’re mine, still mine, and I will do with you as I will.
When he feels no flowering of contact with me, no acceptance, no acknowledgment, everything around us changes in an instant, as if we are players on a stage and someone has changed the script, the set, the backdrop, the lighting, without any warning.
There must be fault lines running below our feet in every direction, for the ground begins to roll beneath us as if it’s alive, as if the fearsome tremors are merely a physical manifestation of Luc’s anger. We fall to the sand beneath a sky that is as black as pitch. It’s like the sky from my dream: when I stood here with Luc in the very centre of a perfect storm and gazed at vast waves breaking over the reef that he called the ‘Crowned One’. Heavy rain pours down as if Luc would drown us where we lie.
The sea turns against us, too, the waves reaching four or five feet in height before smashing onto the beach, surging inland. They drag Lauren back towards the sea, sucking her into an angry whirlpool of boiling white water. The storm is so loud that although I see her mouth moving, I can’t hear her cries for help.
Ryan, Richard and I crawl down the beach towards her, but the water from above and below tumble-turns us, making us lose any sense of direction. And Lauren is pulled further and further out, towards the rocks.
And then they are among us, my people, as far as the eye can see along the beach. They come clothed in glory, the light of them piercing the darkness, brighter even than the lightning that hits the distant water and illuminates the teeth of the jagged, offshore reef. The storm touches none of them, from lowest malakhim to the Archangel Michael himself, our Viceroy, who commands in place of our absent Father. The water burns away before it can even touch them.
It is Michael who drifts through the angry swell, bearing Lauren up the beach to where Richard is kneeling.