I’ll take it as a sign that I’m doing the right thing.
The air smells of burning. If I concentrate hard enough, I can actually taste ash on the air. As Ryan and I stagger on past the roadblock facing onto Via Santa Margherita, the handsome, copper-skinned, hard-faced policemen behind it wave their arms dismissively, shouting, ‘Go back! Go back!’ in Italian, in English, as people try to argue their way into the restricted zone.
The street we’re moving down now is packed with banks and insurance houses that occupy elegant, towering mansions standing shoulder to shoulder. A few people begin filtering past us, afflicting me with their thoughts, their random energies. The dark-haired woman is only a little ahead of us now, and her gait has grown so slow and torturous that we finally overtake her.
‘Not much further,’ I tell Ryan distractedly as I glance at the woman’s shuttered face in profile, note her youthful features and strangely clouded blue eyes.
It hits me a few feet later. The wrongness about her. The way her old-woman shuffle doesn’t sync with her smooth skin and shining hair, her robust frame and fashion-forward clothes. I stop and look back at her over my shoulder, wondering why I get no sense of her at all: of what she’s thinking, or feeling, or even any sense of her peculiar life force, her human energy. What I do feel is something incredibly faint, but insistent. Almost … familiar, that’s setting up a distant, almost painful hum in my bones.
Then, without warning, the woman crumples forward onto the footpath. The palest, gleaming blur, like a mobile patch of sunlight, seems to shriek away from her still figure — as if ejected, or rejected — darting and rebounding off all the faces of the buildings, the street signs and manhole covers, before fleeing back in the direction we’ve just come from. It’s rapidly lost to sight.
What I want to do is run, but I don’t. Not yet, because I need to be sure.
I tell Ryan to wait, and force myself to walk calmly towards the woman lying facedown on the pavement. I kneel beside her and turn her over, relieved to see she’s still breathing. I place my hands against her chalk-white face and she gives a great choking breath, her eyes opening. I’m sure that the fear and panic in her eyes are mirrored in my own.
She looks up at me as I cradle her head off the ground. Her blue eyes are clear again, though huge, in her pale face. ‘Where am I?’ she asks in Italian, and when I answer her gently in her own language, she says, bewildered, ‘But what am I doing here?’
People have seen us; they hurry towards us from both sides of the street. I leave the woman in the care of a small, gesticulating crowd and return to Ryan, who is standing exactly where I left him, with his head bowed, hands in the pockets of his jacket, feet planted shoulder width apart to stop himself from toppling over. All I can do is hug him to me tightly, in horror.
The malakhim are blunt-force instruments with none of the subtlety of the elohim about them; so-called lesser angels, they were created to do our bidding, and they will always leave signs that my kind can read. That woman’s flesh contained a signature, and I am certain it was left by the same tormented creature I came across when I was Lela, and again when I was Irina — something that was once angelic, but is now no more than a shattered remnant. Weak as it is, can it somehow still sense me? It came to Milan with a warning for me from Michael, about Luc. What warning does it bring me now?
As Ryan and I enter Via Victor Hugo, a sense of déjà vu returns so strongly that my eyes fly at once to a three-storey, grey stone building across the road. I study its graceful Palladian roofline intently, half-hoping to see K’el still outlined there by storm clouds of such brilliance they could be a portal to another world. But of course he’s not. The pale blue sky is cloudless from end to end and I have to take the sudden anguish I’m feeling and drown it deep within me, like the light I have hidden away, that is the essence of being elohim.
I see her before she sees me. She’s standing beside the bonnet of a familiar-looking black limousine that has more doors than a normal car and rides a little too low to the ground because it’s armoured. She’s arguing fiercely with someone, as usual, because she’s tough and resourceful and it’s her job to stand up to tyrants and crazies on a daily basis. The bruising along one side of her face is still a livid purplered, and there’s a nasty red weal on her neck, like a burn, but she looks surprisingly well for someone who somehow survived a celestial firefight inside the Galleria.
A passing car draws her gaze, and her eyes widen when she takes in Ryan and me standing still and silent across the road. She recognises him first, of course, because I’m a stranger to her. She’s never seen me before, not like this.
She steps without hesitation around the front of the limo in her artfully studded, black patent-leather biker jacket, her precision-cut, glossy China-girl hair blowing across her eyes in the stiff breeze. She shoves it back impatiently and shouts, ‘Ryan? Ryan Daley?’
When he doesn’t answer, doesn’t even lift his eyes to acknowledge her, she looks at me, really looks at me, and says, tentatively, ‘Mercy?’
We cross the road towards her, and she tells the scowling, balding, suit-wearing gorilla she was arguing with that he just has to wait, she’s got no orders. ‘It’s just too bloody bad.’ Then she moves towards me briskly and slings Ryan’s other arm around her shoulders without me having to tell her to.
Wordlessly, we haul him together up a grand circular driveway lined with luxury sedans and limos, and through a revolving front door of high-shine glass and bronze. It spits us out into a palatial hotel foyer crowded with antiques and chandeliers, and I’m immediately assailed by muzak and human noise, the smells of disinfectant, air freshener and the kinds of expensive, towering floral arrangements that I’ve come to detest.
The male concierge in maroon and gold livery standing behind the immense, marble-topped reception desk almost steps back from us in disgust. Ryan’s hair is a little matted now and he could use a shave. He looks wasted beyond redemption. But the concierge recognises Gia Basso immediately and says, icily, ‘Signorina,’ his pale grey gaze flicking from Ryan to me, before he favours her with a small smile, an almost imperceptible nod.
When the lift doors open, Gia fumbles a security card out of the back pocket of her skin-tight, black, waxed jeans, shoves it into a slot on the control panel and punches a floor number.
The brass and mirrored lift reflects us back to ourselves from all angles; we three appear infinite. Ryan’s head keeps lolling into the crook of my shoulder and there’s a rip in his jacket, running up under the right arm, that I think I might have caused. It’s clear from the way Gia’s wrinkling her nose that Ryan could use a shower.
‘Jesus,’ she mumbles, looking over his bowed head at me, unable to tear her unusual eyes — one blue, one brown — away from my face. ‘You’re both still alive. When the shining giants with the swords and, uh, wings appeared,’ she shoots me a sharp glance that seems to come back at me from everywhere at once, ‘some clumsy idiot smacked me in the face and then the whole place just exploded in flames. I’m ashamed to say that I lost sight of everything except getting to the nearest exit. I’m glad you made it. You look …’ she hesitates, ‘… good. Uh, different. But good.’
From the strange expression on her face, I can tell that she somehow recognises me, though my features, my voice, my body, aren’t even remotely familiar. There’s no doubt in her mind about who I am.
‘So do you,’ I reply, almost suffocated by sudden gratitude, a fierce affection for this prickly, practical woman. ‘Nice,’ I say, indicating her body-hugging, shiny jacket bristling with shoulder spikes, buckles and intricate quilting because that kind of stuff seems to matter so much to her. ‘It’s so very … you.’
She bares her teeth in a sudden, shark-like grin and lifts up a cone-heeled, patent-leather, black ankle boot for my inspection, which also bristles with matching short, sharp metal spikes all over the toecaps and heels. ‘The jacket I had on yesterday was trashed beyond salvation. It smells like
a barbeque. I felt like I needed armour today — I’ve been kicking heads since the phone rang this morning at three seventeen. I figured, if people didn’t pay attention, I could just impale them with my footwear.’
We grin at each other for a moment, and Ryan shifts restlessly against me, his head against my cheek. And it hits me how little time we have left together, and how it’s things like this I’ll miss most: friendship, the warmth of human contact, love. Just the small things.
‘Too sophisticated,’ Ryan mumbles suddenly, struggling to focus on Gia beside him, and she looks obscurely pleased by the comment.
‘He looks the way I feel,’ she notes almost kindly. ‘Seedy.’
‘Considering I almost killed him twice today already,’ I say quietly, ‘he’s doing all right.’
Gia’s face is suddenly serious. ‘You didn’t decide to drop by just to approve my wardrobe choices, did you?’ she says in her cut-glass British accent.
I shake my head, and indicate Ryan between us. ‘He needs food, sleep, the usual things.’
‘Human things,’ Gia says sharply. ‘And what do you need?’
‘Help,’ I say immediately, and her strong, dark eyebrows fly up into her glossy, slanting fringe in open disbelief.
The lift doors slide open, and we’re walking under the same Murano glass chandeliers, across the same elaborately patterned royal blue and gold carpet I strode down yesterday on my way to the catwalk parade, as Irina. And it’s completely disorienting to be returning like this when everything I am has changed beyond measure.
I get an echo of my own thinking from Gia, but her thoughts are indistinct and hard to read, as if she’s somehow trained herself to hold her cards close, even from creatures like me. She’s like a steel trap, this one. Good at keeping secrets.
She clears her throat delicately. ‘Irina still hasn’t come around since you … left. She’s like Sleeping bloody Beauty. There isn’t a mark on her, not a scratch. All the vital signs are good, she’s breathing unassisted. But she might as well be dead. It’s like she’s just a shell; zero response to external stimuli. We’re debating whether to move her or wait it out. But the medicos say that if her vegetative state persists the body’s going to …’
‘Die,’ I finish.
‘It sounds as if you know what’s wrong with her,’ Gia replies. ‘I was hoping you might.’
‘I have a few theories,’ I say grimly. ‘I want to leave,’ Gia says suddenly. ‘Leave this city, leave Irina, leave this bloody business for good. But I’m not going to do it while she’s frozen inside her own body like Snow White after eating the apple. She’s a “beeeetch”, the queen of bitches, actually, but she’s got no one right now. Burnt too many bridges. And don’t look at me like that.’
‘What?’ I say, straight-faced. ‘Like I was about to accuse you of having a heart? Never.’
Gia hoists Ryan’s heavy arm up awkwardly while she punches her security key through a brass slot by the door to Irina’s suite. ‘I’ll do what I can to help you,’ she says in a low voice. ‘You know I’d do it anyway. You were a good boss, better than what I’m used to.’ She favours me with a crooked smile. ‘In return, all I ask is that you do what you can for me?’
I nod without hesitation and Gia throws wide the door. ‘Welcome to the madhouse,’ she mutters, then calls out loudly, ‘Carlo! Your assistance, please, dead man walking,’ as we wrestle Ryan into the formal sitting room.
The sitting room is full of people. There are a couple of youngish suits I don’t recognise, both speaking in English, both on their mobile phones and perched uncomfortably at different ends of a long, low, French Empire-era settee that doesn’t seem sturdy enough to hold them. A thin young woman with shoulder-length, curly auburn hair in a navy pantsuit and sensible shoes moves past with some fluids and medical instruments on a tray. Juliana Agnelli-Re is there, and her impeccably dressed family physician, the man who treated me after I leapt off the roof of a moving limousine, cutting up Irina’s feet badly.
Carlo and Jürgen, from Irina’s personal goon squad, surge to their feet at the sight of us and move forward to brace Ryan while Gia opens the door to her own set of rooms, then pulls down the covers on her own king-sized bed.
‘Boots off, lay him down,’ she orders. ‘Gently does it. He’s been through the wars.’
Carlo and Jürgen meekly do as they’re told, and Gia pulls the covers back up to the level of Ryan’s waist. ‘Dottore Pellini?’ she calls out through the doorway of her bedroom. ‘If you’d be so kind?’
The doctor moves towards her.
I’m still standing by the front entrance, taking everything in. The suits haven’t given me the time of day, and Juliana … I survey her forlorn figure sharply. She’s staring into space, still dressed in the burnt-orange pantsuit, filmy chartreuse blouse and vintage-looking lime and dark green Mary-Janes she was wearing at the haute couture show. Her crazy two-tone hair — dark roots, bright yellow ends — is looking pretty rough. Like Gia, she’s carrying a few bruises, cuts and weals around her head and neck, but she’s surprisingly whole for someone who made it out of the Archangel Michael’s presence alive.
‘She’s taken over global design duties at Atelier Re,’ Gia murmurs beside me. ‘Private Label, Black Label, resort, diffusion, menswear, accessories. Everything rests on her shoulders now. Effective today. Board rushed it through, unsurprisingly. She was the Chosen One, in any case. Only now it’s official.’
I’m so surprised at the news I can’t stop myself blurting out loudly, ‘But what about Giovanni?’
At the mention of her uncle’s name, Juliana looks across the room at me with tear-reddened eyes. Gia places a restraining hand on my arm; the gesture tells me all I need to know.
Juliana calls out in her heavily accented English, ‘Were you a friend? He had so many friends.’ She looks down suddenly to disguise the sheen in her eyes. ‘It was instant, they say. He was already very sick.’ She gives a loud sob that she instantly tries to swallow.
I can’t help walking over to her and placing a hand over hers where it lies on the dining table. Just touching her gives me a brief window of access to her memories: the technicolour past seems to flash up at me in stereo, from out of her head. I see, feel, hear, exactly how it was to her the moment her uncle died. She was standing just a few feet away when he was crushed by a portion of steel beam the size of a car. He hadn’t stood a chance.
I am Juliana as she tries in vain to move the steel pinning down Giovanni’s bloodied figure. Flames tower over us and we’re gasping for air, constantly buffeted by a fleeing, hysterical mob that’s been reduced to impulse and reflex alone. For a moment, at the periphery of our sight, there’s a tall figure dressed all in black, a lock of his long silver hair falling forward as he bends his youthful face low over Giovanni Re’s prone form, touching him only briefly. The stranger vanishes before we can beg him for help and is lost again in the sea of constantly shifting faces, lost in Juliana’s memories. Just one among many. Azraeil meant nothing to her; she doesn’t even consciously remember him. But the Archangel of Death was there, in the chaos. It has always been his way to come and go unheralded. He would have been busy last night, beneath the Galleria’s palely blue-lit dome.
I release Juliana’s hand and the memory vanishes instantly. ‘Giovanni didn’t suffer,’ I say quietly, with absolute certainty.
She doesn’t answer, crying in earnest now. She covers her face with both hands, her shoulders shaking with raw grief. The men on mobile phones grimace at the sound she’s making and get up from their settee, move towards the door.
Gia raises an eyebrow. ‘While the going’s good?’ she reminds me.
I nod and approach Irina’s bedroom, place my hand on the gilt-edged wooden door panelling.
One of the suits looks up sharply from his conversation and says, ‘Miss, you can’t go in there. Did you hear me, Miss?’
‘This is an old friend of Irina’s,’ Gia retorts. She crosses the index and mi
ddle fingers of her right hand and holds them up. ‘Until yesterday, these two were like this, okay? Inseparable.’
I see her mouth twitch; she may be trying to suppress laughter.
‘Irina will not even know I am here,’ I pipe up in Russian-accented English, making my voice sound young and naive.
Gia looks at me, startled at my pitch-perfect inflection, which is a little bit Irina herself, a little bit Dmitri Dymovsky.
‘Well, make it quick,’ the man huffs. He waves a hand dismissively before returning to his call.
We enter Irina’s bedroom and I recognise every single thing in this insanely over-decorated space, other than the saline drip and feeding tube, the pushcart filled with meds and dressings, and the unused respirator machine standing in one corner.
Irina’s lying in silent state on the king-sized bed beneath a crisply mitred blanket and top sheet pulled up to just above her waist. Her roses and cream complexion is unmarked, and her narrow chest rises and falls steadily below her unflattering hospital-style gown. It’s the strangest feeling to be standing here looking down on the body I was last incarcerated in.
Irina’s so beautiful, even in sleep, with her caramel-coloured hair loose and shining all over her pillow. But this is no ordinary sleep. I have to concentrate hard to even feel she’s alive, her soul’s buried so far down. When Luc wrenched me free of her body, he didn’t bother to release the strange slipknot that keeps her soul captive inside her.
The nurse bustles in behind us, deposits the now empty tray on top of the fussy, bow-fronted armoire near the en suite, before leaving again. Through the open door behind us, I can hear the two men winding up their phone conversations.
‘We don’t have long,’ I tell Gia, and she crosses quickly to the door and shuts it, before moving ahead of me to the bed.