by Rebecca Lim
‘He may be the Devil,’ Ryan growls disbelievingly, placing his lips against my hair and binding me to him so fiercely it almost hurts, ‘but he’s still a moron. There’s no getting over someone like you.’
I almost say them aloud then, the words Ryan longs to hear.
And I do love him, with every particle of my being, but it’s a love complicated by so many things. And the words can’t change the fact that we’re already out of time; that it was too late for us before we even got started. So I choke them back and they remain unsaid.
‘You deserve so much more than I can give you,’ I whisper raggedly.
‘Shut up,’ he says fiercely, and the short, hard kiss he uses to silence me is almost brutal.
‘What’s the plan?’ he sighs finally against my skin, the tone of his voice more normal, more gentle.
‘I need to get my bearings,’ I murmur thickly through the lingering vestiges of my grief and shame. ‘Nuriel’s close, I can almost feel her. Luc couldn’t have had time to move her; he was in such a hurry to get to me. I want you to take the dresses to Bianca, tell her I stopped to look at a bunch of statues on the way. And while you’re distracting her with your wit, charm and superficial good looks,’ I feel his lips curve against me, involuntarily, ‘I’ll take a look around.’
Ryan pulls back from me and looks down into my eyes. ‘I can’t tell you what you can or can’t do,’ he says gravely, ‘because you’ll do it anyway. You always do exactly as you please. But don’t just vanish again because it’s easier than trying to work things out. Stay safe. Come back to me as quickly as you can. My, uh, charms are a little rusty these days.’
He retrieves his fake spectacles and shoves them onto his face, blinking, and it startles a laugh out of me. I flick the bill of his cap so that it falls backwards off his head and he has to bend to retrieve it with a grunt, jamming it back onto his buzz-cut scalp.
‘When you reach her, lose the cap, lose the glasses,’ I say with a grin, ‘and you’ll soon have one of the world’s most eligible rich girls eating out of your hand. She’s beautiful, too. Stunning. It could be love at first sight.’ I bite my lip. ‘Which could be a good thing, in the circumstances … a merciful thing.’
Ryan gives me a crooked smile. ‘Good try, but I’m not biting. Lightning never strikes twice, not with me.’ He pulls me close again. ‘Come back?’ he breathes against me, so tentatively that I wrap my arms around him tightly to contain his fear.
‘You know I will,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’m not Carmen any more, I’m not Lela. It’s not going to play out the same way.’
I turn and pick up the pretty dresses, then hand Ryan the backpack, which he puts on without even registering he’s doing it. Then I take him by the hand and lead him out of the folly. Low lights set into the edges of the driveway point the way down to the guesthouse, and I feel time recommencing, reeling out of my hands the way it always does, like an angler’s line.
Ryan’s worn-down boot heels slip a little on the steep, slick surface. Below us, I see the front door of the guesthouse open, and there’s a slender silhouette of a girl in the doorway, surrounded by a halo of electric light, looking up at us, just waiting.
As the driveway switches back and the guesthouse is momentarily lost to sight, I thrust the dress hangers into Ryan’s hands and whisper, ‘Be seeing you.’
Before he can frame a reply, I let my outline shred into a pale white mist, let myself break down, dissolve. Then I am ether, scattering into a billion pieces, soundlessly.
I see him step back in shock, looking around him wildly. ‘God, Merce, I hate how you do that!’ he exclaims.
It makes me laugh, and he flinches at the low sound that seems to come at him from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Trailing faint motes of light, I circle him once, twice — lighter than an embrace, than a kiss — before slipstreaming away into the night, down through the gardens of Villa Nicolin and through the bars of the tall iron gates that mark the lower boundary of the estate.
Down, down, to the waters of the lake.
I flow along the length of the narrow, private jetty, unseen and soundless. The boats moored there bump and creak as I head out over the water, skimming low, slicing through the rising wind that howls like a live thing and buffets the tall trees lining the shore. It’s so very dark, but I’m still able to discern the clouds that are once more building in the sky — massive, unnatural, like the sails of ghostly galleons.
Something wicked this way comes. The elements herald its very progress. I can feel in every particle of my being that dark forces are on the move.
I need to find Nuriel before Luc discovers I’ve already left Milan.
When I’m out over the water, I turn, a disembodied zephyr, and scan my surroundings. And that’s when it becomes obvious that I’ve seen this place before; I once dreamt of it so vividly I’d imagined that Luc and I inhabited one body, and that all the evil he committed that night was wrought by my own hand.
Luc was on the point of cutting Nuriel down with his sword when she made one last, desperate, spiralling attempt to pull away from him. In my mind’s eye I see them again — how her feint caught Luc by surprise. How he lost precious seconds before turning and pursuing her. They had exploded through the physical world — hunter and hunted — leaving destruction and incandescence in their wake. It makes sense to me now, how the main street of Moltrasio was destroyed; all those people turned to ash. When angels and demons collide, collateral damage is the only certainty.
In my dream, there was a vast estate by the water’s edge. A great house atop a hill, with a smaller outbuilding, a private pier, at the base of the property. From the water, it’s clear that Villa Nicolin is the house I glimpsed at the moment Nuriel dove down out of the sky. If Luc was acting in haste that night, if he’d wanted to secure her, but also lay a trap for anyone bent on saving her, the only place he could have hidden her would be in the lake itself.
I rise high into the air and gaze down at the black body of water below without fear, without sickness, and see immediately where Nuriel is being held. There’s a glow deep below the lake’s surface, so faint it would be undetectable to human eyes. Though I’m as insubstantial as air, no more than a faint pocket of turbulence in the night, it still makes my soul shudder to see the quality of the light. It’s numinous, incandescent, but subtly tainted. Not the pale blue luminescence of holy fire at its heart, but the creeping grey of corruption.
Demonlight.
It flares and subsides, pulsing within the dark waters of the lake like some monstrous, beating heart. Strange eddies play upon the lake’s surface, as if the tide beneath runs counter to nature; is being moved by inexplicable forces.
I don’t hesitate. I begin to narrow, to spin, funnelling all of my energy, my anger and fear, into a weapon that may be wielded. I make of myself an arrow, a spear, and fall towards the black surface of the water, piercing its dark membrane without sound, without raising so much as a ripple.
As I cleave through the water towards the depths below, all I can hear, with every fibre of my being, is screaming. It is the voice of a living soul in agony, in its death throes.
8
I follow the sound of unspeakable anguish to its source, driving swiftly down through the water until the darkness begins to give way, begins to roll back at this crushing depth, as if the world has been drowned and the sun has been shackled to the filth upon the lake bed.
But what I find shackled there instead — to a tall, obelisk-shaped rock over a thousand feet down — is a bright, winged figure, her cloud of long, dark, wavy hair shifting loosely with the strange currents in the water. She’s bound in chains of bright fire that crisscross her torn and bleeding figure. Her sleeveless robes are rent and despoiled, and the surface of her skin is marked by deep wounds that continually bleed light into the water.
I settle silently upon the lake bed at Nuriel’s feet, stretched tauter than a membrane, just a collection of particles ind
istinguishable from the lake-bed ooze. An archangel usually comes wreathed in light and anger, like a thunderclap, a clarion call. But not me. The human world has taught me wariness and subtlety. I must take my sudden, murderous fury — that urge to transform into something vengeful, something monstrous, blazing with fire — and bury it deep within the mud and silt and sand that I’ve become.
Nuriel’s entire figure is rigid, as if electrified. Her head is thrown back at an unnatural angle, eyes blank with anguish, her mouth stretched wide in that terrible, endless, wordless scream.
Though every part of me aches to release her immediately from her bonds, I know there’s more to this than I’m seeing. It seems too easy that she’s alone here. And I know what I saw through the water — demonsign. To know your enemy is to have some measure of control over that enemy: Luc himself taught me that. It’s an irony that I’m using his own wisdom against him now.
Above me, Nuriel suddenly convulses. Light begins to stream out of her, off the surface of her skin, building around her in a dense cloud, and I almost rise, thinking in horror that it’s her death I’m witnessing, that the energy of which she’s made is dispersing, never to return. That I’m already too late.
But my inner voice, which is always one beat ahead of my waking self, whispers: Wait, watch. It is demonlight.
I freeze, waiting to see what form that light will take.
Nuriel’s head falls forward suddenly, her body slackening within its fiery bonds, her screams choked into a fearful silence. The light coalesces rapidly, taking the shape of a winged man of such pale and mesmerising beauty that I can see who and what he once was: Remiel, one of the elohim.
He had worshipped Luc, been part of that pack of beautiful creatures that had hung off Luc’s every word, lauding every crazy stunt he pulled. I know, because I was one of them myself, and I remember Remiel well; remember, too, his strange ability to sow discord wherever he went.
I see that Remiel worships Luc still, and that it has transformed him irrevocably. If anything, he’s more beautiful, more otherworldly, than I remember him, with his pale skin and silver eyes, his long pale hair, also like spun silver. His heavily sculpted torso is bare to the waist, and he rolls his powerful shoulders as if they ache, his gleaming wings trailing curls of tainted energy into the water. He turns and scans his surroundings as if he can sense something, and I see that he is … shaking. It’s faint, but noticeable, the tremor in his formidable hands, and I wonder at it, for the cold should not trouble him as it does not trouble me.
There’s a flaming mark at the base of his throat, like a scar. I realise what it is, because I carry something similar upon my left hand. It is the mark of the exile, the place where judgment was administered. Someone — perhaps even the Archangel Michael himself — once placed a hand at the base of Remiel’s throat, a long time ago, and cast him down. Down to earth to be a demon.
Seeing nothing but rocks and mud, weed and silt, for miles in every direction, Remiel encircles Nuriel, his voice taunting. ‘She’s not coming for you; no one is. It’s likely Luc already has her. Ananel returns now to finish you. And if you survive the punishments that await you at his hands, then I will return, and return, and return, until all that remains of you is a scream.’
He slurs the words, as if he’s drunk. Then he launches himself slowly away through the water, almost clumsily for someone so lethal and beautiful. Immediately, everything seems darker.
When Remiel is finally lost to sight, I surge out of the filth at Nuriel’s feet in my true form, mud cascading off my blazing figure, my blazing broadsword in my hand. And I cut her free, her bonds shrivelling, blackening and dissolving the instant my weapon meets them. She falls forward into my arms as my sword vanishes into the palm of my hand. Her wings, like mine, instantly shred into nothingness. She lacks even the energy to remain upright in the water. Her open wounds seep a constant light, like blood.
The instant I touch her, I know what has been done to her. Possession; a sustained possession of the worst kind that has infiltrated every particle of her soul, assaulted even her consciousness. First Remiel, then Ananel, the cycle repeated over and over until all Nuriel craved was death, or the death of time itself.
It is the pattern that Luc himself must have set so long ago when he first came across this Eden; the pattern that repeats itself in the world he walks today: human and demon continually feeding each other’s worst impulses. When we elohim were created, there was no rape, no torture, no enslavement, no war. But Luc saw the thing in our design that was both gift and curse: that some of us were created male, some female — the pattern repeated in angel, in man, in beast. And he exploited that flaw for his gain, pitting man against woman, against beast, against world, from the very first.
Nuriel has been missing for days. Days in which Ananel and Remiel have tortured her to the point of death with every means at their disposal. For angels and demons do not abide by treaties of war; we follow no accords regarding the welfare of our hostages. We are black and white, all or nothing. And this is the result: broken angels, like broken people. In everything, a dark symmetry.
I gather her tenderly to me, preparing to bear her swiftly back towards the surface. But she’s like a wraith in my arms, impossible to keep hold of.
Mercy. I feel the ghostly whisper of her voice in my mind. They cannot abide the cold, having turned away from first light. Avenge me.
I tilt her face towards mine, but her eyes are closed and her outline is wavering. She seems like a creature of mist, more insubstantial than the water we’re suspended in. I know that she’s succumbing to her wounds, unravelling. It would have been kinder if her captors had killed her outright.
Desperation makes me roar, ‘Nuriel, if this is some kind of ploy to get me to do your dirty work, I’m done taking orders. Avenge yourself. You stood by and watched as Luc and Michael used me as some kind of live bargaining chip. You stood by and watched as Luc cast me out. You owe me. You want to take Remiel and Ananel down? You do it yourself.’
At my words, a small frown appears between her straight, dark brows. Her wide-set eyes flicker open, her outline solidifying in my arms. ‘I don’t owe you anything,’ she replies, struggling out of my grasp, focusing with difficulty on my face. ‘Not a damned thing!’
She drifts before me, skin palely gleaming, her long, wavy hair a dark cloud about her face, like a drowned girl. Her voice is very faint as she says accusingly, ‘I warned you about Luc. I warned you, and you ignored me.’
‘He was a shit,’ I agree mildly. ‘He’s an even greater shit now. I really should have listened.’
My words cause her to blaze suddenly incandescent with rage and pain, the way I mean her to.
‘Should have listened?’ she shrieks. ‘You’re responsible for what was done to me. You. All your doing. No degree of friendship is worth violation.’
I shrug. ‘It can’t have been worse than what I’ve had to endure over the past few centuries. You’re alive, aren’t you? It was nasty and brutish, but at least it was short.’
I hate hurting her like this, but the Archangel Michael himself taught me that anger can be channelled; it can be used when there’s nothing left in your soul to draw upon.
Nuriel launches herself at me through the water, screaming like a banshee of myth, her fingers curled into talons, blazing bright.
I catch her by her narrow wrists before she can take out my eyes, and murmur into her face, ‘Now that you’re feeling more like yourself again, what do you mean they cannot abide the cold, having turned away from first light?’
Nuriel seems to sag beneath my hands, and the light of her grows more tolerable to my eyes.
‘I meant what I said,’ I challenge softly. ‘I’m done with riddles, with being pushed around. You want vengeance? Then tell me what I need to know. The rules have changed since I’ve been gone. Give me something I can use against them.’
Nuriel hugs herself tightly, her eyes wide and unseeing. ‘I think it was
the only thing that kept me alive,’ she says, her voice thready and strange. ‘Luc set two of them to watch over me, but it was always only one of them … at a time …’ Her fingers fly up to her face in horror and she whispers through them, ‘They cannot withstand the cold for long, not like we can, because they chose to turn away from first light …’
I feel my eyes widen in comprehension. ‘In a way that I did not; for the cold troubles me not at all.’
Nuriel nods, hanging her head, her hair drifting ghostly about her in the water. ‘It felt like a lifetime before I worked it out. While one of them took me apart, piece by piece, from the inside,’ her voice flies up the scale in anguish, ‘the other always went away for a time, weakened by the cold of the lake water, but always returning …’
‘Strong again,’ I finish. ‘Renewed.’
It makes sense now, how Remiel seemed so clumsy, almost punch drunk, as he veered away through the water.
Nuriel glimpses something behind me. ‘Ananel,’ she gasps, and I see death and madness in her gaze. ‘He returns. He returns.’
I spin in the water and see a pinpoint of brightness in the distance, growing larger second by second. He’s moving swiftly. We don’t have long, if he hasn’t seen me already.
‘Hide,’ I tell Nuriel, pushing her down towards the murk of the lake bed. ‘For once in your life, don’t stand there clothed in glory, the way all of you do, dazzling each other with your rank, your pomp, your powers. Be like the water, be like mud — invisible. I’ll take care of the rest.’
Her expression is wild as she scatters into motes of light, fading away almost instantly. One second I’m there, too, and the next I’m gone, indistinguishable from my surroundings.
Ananel surges towards me, bare-chested and heavily muscled, sleek and predatory, a gleaming dagger with a short, lethal blade clenched between his teeth. Silver bubbles slipstream through his long, midnight hair, the ends of his luminous wings, past the burning scar that lies along the top of his hip, as he sweeps overhead. I see him freeze in disbelief when he spies the rock to which Nuriel was bound, now empty of all life.