But I can’t speak, can’t even move. Everything I’m feeling is in my eyes. Adoration, terror, pain.
Luc sees me watching him and smiles, saying softly, ‘Hello, my love.’
And I think that maybe I have died. And this is my reward.
His ruffled golden hair is shorter than I remember it, and there’s a sexy hint of stubble along his jawline. He’s wearing a sharp, narrow-cut, single-breasted, three-piece navy suit with a thin navy pinstripe running through the weave, which emphasises his snake-hipped, broad-shouldered, long and lean form. He’s paired it with a snowy-white shirt with French cuffs, two large and faceted sapphires set in gold for cufflinks, one at each wrist. At his neck is a Windsor-knotted striped tie in iridescent colours, like the sheen on a dragonfly’s wings. Socks in a discreet grey-on-grey herringbone pattern; black leather lace-up brogues. There’s a folded pair of aviator sunglasses with reflective lenses in the top pocket of his jacket. He couldn’t look more perfect in his pitch-perfect human clothes.
Beyond him, I see that Felipe is turning to say something else to me, but I can’t hear the words. It’s obvious that he doesn’t see Luc, because as he throws out his left hand, it seems to pass straight through Luc’s left shoulder.
‘H …’ I gag.
I’m trying to say: How? But also, I think: Help me.
Because Irina’s body is spinning out of control. There’s too much light, too much heat inside the car, inside us. I’m going blind. I’m a house of cards on the brink of tumbling down. Everything inside her, inside me, is simultaneously speeding up and shutting down.
It’s a horrible way to die. And I wonder if she can feel it, if she knows. If she’s frightened the way that I’m frightened.
Irina collapses across the back seat and I go down, too, powerless to stop it; the two of us so inextricably entwined in the throes of some terrible opiate I don’t even have a name for.
Luc’s pale eyes narrow as he studies us sprawled here, but he doesn’t reach out, and I’m pierced by a sorrow so intense that a dull ache, a remembered pain, begins to build in the fingers of my left hand, the hand that last held his.
Luc is here. K’el wasn’t lying. But why won’t Luc touch me?
‘It’s only taken you by surprise because it’s such a pure and concentrated dose. You need to focus,’ Luc says, and his voice is curiously urgent though his body language is still detached, distant. ‘You should be doing more to control the outcome. Just because it’s synthetic doesn’t mean it must simply be surrendered to. Science is there to be countered. We were here before it, we’ll be here long after it’s gone. You need to pull away from her. You know how to do it. I know you do.’
How … Wide-eyed and stricken, I can’t even finish the thought.
‘This is no dream,’ Luc replies, and I hear a strange tension in his voice. ‘You’re in that waking state of paralysis between death and life that mimics the conditions of sleep. I can see you, even speak with you, across time, across great distance, but I can’t help you because I’m not really here. I’m just an expectation, a forward projection, if you like. I’m not going to reach you soon enough to salvage that body you’re in. If Irina’s idiot driver spiked her drink with enough liquid meth to stop her heart, it’s up to you to bring the girl back. I’ve shown you how it’s done in your dreams. And I know that you’ve done it before — how else did you escape Paul Stenborg? When, if you’d stayed, I would’ve found you. We would already be together.’
I frown, trying to make sense of all he’s saying.
‘You need to stop looking to other people for answers,’ he snaps. ‘Be assured that your “confinement” will soon be over — I’ll see to it. And I’ll personally destroy every one of our kind that has ever had a hand in keeping you from me, that’s a promise.’
The terrible anger I see in his eyes only seems to make him burn brighter, make his beauty even more piercing. And it reminds me how alive he always made me feel. Around him, everything always seemed hyper-bright, hyper-real, better than it actually was.
‘I’ll move Heaven and earth for you,’ Luc insists harshly. ‘But you have to keep Irina alive. Then I’ll take over. With you by my side, everything becomes possible again. I expect you to be in Milan, waiting for me. If she dies, I lose you again. Don’t let me lose you again. Not now, when everything is in readiness for you, my queen.’ He leans forward, his gaze fever-bright. ‘Do you think you can do what I ask? It’s such a simple thing, Mercy.’
When he says the word, the false name I have given myself, his defences come down for a moment, and I’m stung by what I see in his eyes. Sure, there’s affection there, even love. But nothing like it used to be; there’s no heat.
There’s doubt, too, and fury. Exasperation, desperation, disappointment, a dark and voracious need. And I can’t reconcile any of it before Luc’s gaze grows unreadable again.
His voice is low and insistent. ‘When you see me again, when I am actually before you, you must fly to my side. Come to me. Only then will you be safe. Flee the Eight and their legion at whatever cost. But if I should somehow fail,’ his beautiful mouth tightens ominously, ‘then locate that human boy and return with him to the place where he lives, to Paradise.’ He spits the word. ‘He, too, will play a part in the final reckoning, when all debts due and owing to me shall be met in full and repaid in blood.’
There’s a jump-cut moment — like a break in transmission — where I imagine for a moment that Luc’s outline wavers. Then he abruptly dissolves out of being, and it’s Felipe behind the wheel, chuckling almost to himself.
‘So, chica, what are you going to give me, eh? What will you give me to keep the channels open?’
Irina’s body goes rigid, and I know I should be working out how to fix her, fix us. But all I feel is a paralysing fear. Luc called me my love, as he always has, but something rang false. His mouth had said one thing, but his eyes …
It’s the same kind of fear that used to strike me when we lay alone together in the secret garden he’d conjured for me out of thin air, out of wishes and longing. As I’d watched him sleep, I used to think: What if, one day, he discovers I’m not good enough, that he doesn’t want me any more? I’ve survived so many things. But I couldn’t survive that.
Irina’s body convulses again, and I wonder dazedly how it is that she can sense my pain.
A man’s voice suddenly emerges from a speaker set into the dashboard of the car, drawing me back to the present against my will.
‘How far?’ snaps the voice in Italian-accented English.
With an oath, Felipe picks up a small handset and joins the chorus of disembodied voices discussing ETAs and alternative routes in every accent under the sun while the hard rain drives down, turning suddenly into hailstones the size of golf balls. The car slows to a virtual crawl and I let their words wash over me, let myself drift out like the tide.
I don’t know what Luc meant by countering science, but I know I have to try if I ever want to see him again; if I want to be free; if I want him to love me the way that he used to.
I dive down, following the strands of myself inwards, following the linkages and switchbacks and false trails, the broken pattern that I have somehow been cast into. It seems easier this time, this process of atomisation, of unbecoming. I know what to do now, what I’m capable of. There’s no pain, no resistance, no panic, as I cleave away from the flesh, shiver into a billion pieces behind Irina’s eyes.
I am light now, I’m pure energy, as I flow through the canals of Irina’s lymphatic and cardiovascular systems, her connective tissue, her muscles, the nerve endings and sinews, wet matter and bone of which she is made. As liquid as that poison I’m seeking. I chase it down. And where I find it — foreign, lethal, so concentrated it’s a wonder Irina’s not already dead — I break it down, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. Counter its dark science by turning it to vapour within my vaporous self, though it tastes to me like gall, like venom. I subtract it from Irina’s blood
, Irina’s flesh, so that she’s left clean and whole.
Even though Irina’s soul is locked away, out of reach, I know that at some deep, animal level she’ll remember this feeling of burning, of purging, of healing. And she won’t be tempted to use again. My touch is electric. I have placed a mark upon her that cannot be seen by mortal eyes.
Abruptly, the weird sensation of unbecoming reverses, as if I’ve done all I can do. I’m pulled back, coalescing again inside Irina’s skin, behind her eyes, as if I am her, and she is me, and there’s no gap, none at all, between us.
I brace myself against the armrest with my elbows, feeling my temperature, my heart rate, fall. My sight grows clear again. The light, the air, no longer hurt me.
I’m on the point of sitting back up in my seat when I hear Felipe place the radio handset back in its cradle and murmur, ‘Usted es una estúpida, una drogadicta, una puta. ¿Ve que fácil es poseer a otro ser humano? Ahora la poseo. ¿Desea que continue? La primera cosa que haremos será deshacernos de esta perra curiosa Basso.’
You stupid, junkie whore. You see how easy it is to own another human being? Now I own you. You want me to keep it coming? The first thing we’re going to do, is get rid of that nosy bitch Basso.
He laughs, and I know he doesn’t care if I hear him, because he thinks that by the time I come down I won’t remember.
I sit up suddenly, tucking Irina’s long hair back behind her small and perfect ears. Felipe catches sight of the movement, then my expression, in the driver’s mirror. Something he sees there makes his own eyes widen in shock.
The car swerves abruptly to the right, hitting the raised edge of a stone kerb. The limo mounts the footpath momentarily before Felipe swings the wheel hard left, over-correcting so that the entire car skids with a squeal of tyres through a slow-motion arc, throwing up a huge plume of water and sleet. A car coming the other way swerves wildly to miss us with a long blare of its horn. There’s the sound of rending metal as we take out the side of a parked car, before coming to a jerky stop hard up against a lamppost on the wrong side of the street, facing back the way we came from.
The hail keeps coming down. And that’s all I hear in the car for a long while. That, and the sound of Felipe’s chokey breathing.
‘Creo en Dios, Padre todopoderoso, Creador del cielo y de la tierra. Creo en Jesucristo, Su único Hijo …’ he murmurs, looking curiously shrunken, his face in his hands. I realise that he’s praying.
The radio erupts with voices. I hear fingers scrabbling at the back doors of the limo and realise that the central locking is still on. The scrabbling turns to pounding, on the sides of the car, on the roof.
‘Irina!’ I hear someone roar. ‘Irina!’
I’m getting so sick of that name.
Felipe looks up and around almost fearfully before releasing the central-locking mechanism. He does not look at me.
My passenger side door is wrenched open. Jürgen’s standing there holding a large black umbrella, melting sleet streaking his overcoat. Then Carlo materialises out of the grey atmosphere and beckons me forward. Both men are soaked through and look very pale. Their eyes scan the inside of the car quickly and thoroughly, before homing in on Felipe’s hunched figure behind the wheel, then flick back to me, raking me up and down.
Satisfied with what he sees, Carlo says, ‘You all right, miss?’ in a gentle voice, the way you’d address a frightened child. ‘Please, come with us. Felipe, he will handle this.’
When he looks back at Felipe for confirmation, something Carlo sees in the other man’s face makes his mouth harden. His voice is icy as he says, ‘Gianfranco wants to talk to you after you are finished here.’
I hear the splash of many footsteps converging on us, hear urgent shouts in Italian, an approaching siren. There’s the reflected glow of flashing lights through the open car door. The hail comes down as if it will never, ever stop. And I wonder why each life I’m being forced to live seems ever more unquiet than the last.
I gather up my hat, overcoat and handbag and hand them to Carlo as I prepare to step out of the car. Before I do, I turn to Felipe again, but he will not turn his head to meet my eyes. His cowardice causes a hot anger to rise in me like a rattlesnake striking.
‘Deal’s off,’ I hiss. ‘The product’s lousy. Stay away from Irina, you piece of shit, or I’ll track you down and force-feed you the same stuff you just gave a mentally unstable nineteen year old. ¿Comprende?’
Outside the car, Carlo and Jürgen are huddled beneath the umbrella, talking loudly, while they hold onto Irina’s things. They do not wonder at the strangeness of my words because they did not hear them.
But the sound of the hail and of the sirens also masks Felipe’s reply. ‘¡Demonio!’ he shrieks, making the sign of the cross in my face, his eyes wild, the whites showing.
Demon.
He’s still screaming ‘¡Demonio!’ at me as I shut the door.
Jürgen holds the umbrella over us all as he, Carlo and I run for the cover of the third limo. Gia throws the door open and holds her arms out for Irina’s bundle of wet possessions. I clamber into the seat opposite hers and she leans across and slams the door closed behind me. But not before there’s a couple of bright flashes outside. Cameras. Someone’s taking photos.
Through the streaming windows, I see Carlo and Jürgen making a beeline for the nearest policeman in full wet-weather gear.
I stiffen as Gia grabs me by the upper arms, and turn warily. She doesn’t let go of my arms, just leans forward and stares into my face.
‘I thought you were going to die,’ she says sombrely. ‘I really did. I thought that the bad luck you carry around with you and sprinkle all over people like a bad fairy had turned on you this time. We saw Felipe suddenly accelerate and I thought he was going to flip the car. You couldn’t get any traction. You must have been so scared.’
I shrug. Time had seemed to slow while the car had carved imperfect circles through the sleet on the road. But it hadn’t been nearly as terrifying as anything I’d seen and experienced while I was Carmen, while I was Lela. And it hadn’t been nearly as frightening as my dreams can be. But I don’t tell her that.
Gia’s laugh is shaky as she finally lets go of me and sits back. ‘All I could think was — it’s the drugs that are supposed to kill you. I hadn’t even seen this coming.’
One of the passenger doors across from us is wrenched open and Carlo gets in, smelling of wet wool and leather, followed by Jürgen and the streaming umbrella. The interior of the outsized car suddenly seems too small to hold us all, and I shrink back against the door on my side so I won’t inadvertently touch someone’s bare skin and invite in the unwanted. I don’t want to know what’s running through their minds, I don’t want a potted history of their lives. I have enough going on in my head.
‘Drive!’ Carlo roars at the dark-haired man in the driver’s seat whose name I don’t know. ‘Drive!’ Then he levels an apologetic gaze at me. ‘One of the Agence Habituelle photographers got your picture. I’m sorry, but it begins.’
The limo weaves slowly out of the gathering crowd of emergency personnel and onlookers. Past Felipe, who is standing beside the wreckage of the black car gesturing wildly at a policeman. Only he and I know the truth, and he won’t be sharing it with anyone. Something he saw in my face scared him so much, he lost control of the car.
Gia nudges me and points out the back window and I see a helmeted man in a rain slicker, with camera equipment slung around his neck, following us doggedly through the rain on a navy blue scooter. A few moments later, a couple of men on a bright blue and white Kawasaki motorcycle swerve up alongside the windows, tapping on the tinted glass. ‘Irina!’ they call. ‘Irina! Any words for us?’
‘Just ignore them,’ Gia says disgustedly. ‘It’s Felipe’s fault everything’s gone to hell. No one will even be looking at Natasha in the decoy car. What a monumental waste of time and money.’
The hail’s getting heavier as we turn into a narrow one-w
ay street lined with three-and four-storey stone buildings that stand shoulder to shoulder, some with balconies, some flying the Italian tricolour flag. There are parked cars, scooters and bicycles packed in tightly on both sides of the road, and one of the buildings bears a sign reading: Via Borgonuovo. We cruise up to the grand front entrance of a four-storey, honey-coloured building with iron grillework covering each of the tall, deep windows.
The already narrow street is pretty much impassable now that we’re here, because an armada of scooters, motorbikes, Fiats and Mini Coopers is following us. Further up the road, Vladimir’s car is already double-parked and blocking traffic with more scooters and motorbikes and cars banked up behind it. A sea of onlookers under umbrellas is lining the footpath on both sides of the street, despite the hail.
It’s pandemonium as the limo comes to a stop. People seem to surge forward from everywhere, surrounding the car. None of the car doors are open, but already flashes are going off and it’s suddenly as bright as noon outside the car’s tinted windows. We could be trapped in a field of falling stars, of fireflies.
Gia sees the expression on my face and laughs softly. ‘It’s not as if you’ve never seen this before!’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Get ready to hustle. Just make for that portico with the sliding glass doors — Vladimir and our guys will try to clear a path and flank you. Don’t stop, don’t turn around. Once you reach the sliding doors, you’re home free. I’ll see you on the inside.’
Jürgen and Carlo exchange glances, then Jürgen opens his door, battering the milling group of men and women with his black umbrella. People are screaming in his face, tearing at his clothes, pushing him aside, trying to get their hand-held mics and camera equipment, video-enabled mobile phones and camcorders, in around the half-open limo door. They indiscriminately fire off shot after shot as Gia tries to shield me with her body.
‘Is bad, today, very bad,’ Carlo mutters before launching himself after Jürgen and slamming the door closed. Outside the car, he signals frantically over his head for help.