by Rebecca Lim
We plunge into that pit of bones that so disgusted Ryan before, and this time the bones seem alive. They grasp at our legs, seeking to drag us down. Ryan goes wild at their touch, leaping and swearing and twisting until we are back on solid ground again. There’s sweat streaming off his face and down his neck, every muscle in his tall frame poised for flight.
The passageways rise and rise, until ahead of us we see the concrete barrier with the drill hole at its base, just large enough to accommodate one man.
‘What do we do?’ Ryan almost howls. ‘We’ll never get him through there. It’s impossible.’
I seem to catch a dense plume of roiling, smoky vapour passing overhead, then another flees by. Selaphiel’s eyes suddenly flash open as the last of the smoke hits the concrete wall beside us, high above our heads, vanishing instantly. His gaze settles upon my human guise without recognition. Joy turns instantly to fear; his eyes — once such a crystalline blue — seem sunken and cloudy and racked with pain.
‘Selaphiel,’ I gasp sorrowfully.
Ryan looks down at the being in his arms, doing a double-take when he sees that Selaphiel is conscious. Selaphiel’s eyes move slowly across Ryan’s face, the way clouds will pass across the face of the sun, touching nothing, altering nothing. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t struggle.
As we set him gently down against the wall, there’s a distant rumbling sound that grows louder, moving up the corridor towards us with a low roar, like an approaching train. The stone beneath our feet begins to buck and ripple, the air filling with a choking dust, and Ryan and I are thrown to the ground.
‘The stone!’ I cry in horror, feeling it shift and protest beneath my fingers. ‘It’s coming down behind us!’
Selaphiel burns now with an almost blinding light. I push up off the tunnel floor and crouch before him, placing my hands upon his face to make him see me, for an instant, the way Jegudiel had. As he catches the shift, the shift back, his blue eyes widen, his mouth parting as if he would speak. But no words come.
‘There’s a way out!’ I shout over the sound of rending stone, pointing at the concrete seal across the passageway. ‘It’s close, and this human, Ryan, will help you reach the surface, reach the light.’ I indicate Ryan sprawled beside me on the floor, his eyes, wide, on both of us. ‘But you need to do one last thing, brother, you need to shift as I’ve done. Do you understand what I’m asking of you?’
In reply, Selaphiel’s eyes close and his form seems to slump and shimmer. For a moment, I think I see the surface of the rock through the outline of him.
‘No. You. Don’t,’ I say fiercely. ‘You don’t give up. You don’t get to. You’re too important.’
I grab him and pull him close, cradling him against me, letting him feel the terror seeping out of me: for him, for Ryan, for all of us. The sound of falling stone buries my words, but I know that Selaphiel can hear them through my skin as I speak them.
‘Don’t let it be true, Selaphiel! Don’t let it be said that I was responsible for the destruction of everyone who ever loved me. Shift if you want to live. It’s the only way we can help you. If that boy dies, it will be my death sentence, too. I love him. Please, I beg of you. Shift that we may all live.’
‘Mercy!’ Ryan cries again, torn between wanting to run and wanting to stay with me, always with me.
Selaphiel suddenly struggles feebly in my arms, pushing me away. He raises a shaking hand, like a gesture of benediction, mouths a single word I cannot catch.
Instantly, the concrete barrier tumbles into pieces, falling outward, away from us. Ryan and I act like a single organism: we don’t look at each other or even speak, we just each take one of Selaphiel’s arms and haul him off the ground at a run, fleeing before the advancing rockfall. Lumps of stone — each big enough and deadly enough to end a man’s life — erase the passageway behind us.
As we stumble forward through the choking dust, Selaphiel does what I begged him to do — he shifts so that he’s scaled along more human lines, so we’re able to hoist him higher across our shoulders and run. But the brilliant light he gives out keeps intensifying, until he’s so bright, he’s only discernible in a kind of numinous outline. It’s like we’re cradling a dying star between us. Ryan can barely stand to look at him.
‘What’s happening to him?’ Ryan gasps, as we reach the narrow crevice in the wall we’ve been searching for.
I don’t answer, catching a flare of light to my right. Digging my heels in, I turn my head to see what’s causing it. It’s Jegudiel in the distance down the passageway, grappling with a shining, winged female figure that can only be Neqael.
I can’t see her face, but her trailing russet hair, her wing feathers, every inch of her, gleams with that foul, grey-tainted light. The folds of her diaphanous, long-sleeved gown billow around her as they struggle. I know that the other, Turael, can’t be far behind. Demons seem to hunt in pairs, and if we leave now, Jegudiel will have to face them both alone.
‘Mercy!’ Ryan cries, indicating the rungs of the rusty ladder behind him that are mounted directly into the stone wall. ‘Move it!’
I’m still standing in the entryway, my figure blocking both Selaphiel and Ryan from sight.
‘Go. Climb,’ I implore Ryan, entrusting Selaphiel to him completely, trying to push them both deeper into the cleft. ‘Keep yourself alive, keep Selaphiel safe. Find Henri, do whatever it takes. Get to the plane. I’ll find you. I’m not leaving without Jegudiel. No matter how much I’ve provoked him in the past, he would do the same for me. I get that now.’
Ryan gives me a hard, searching look, his heart in his eyes.
‘It used to be all about how much I could take out of every situation,’ I tell him in a rush of words. ‘Individual liberty — it was always my paramount consideration, my guiding principle; Luc’s. Hers.’ I point at Neqael’s gleaming figure in the distance. ‘But I’m not alone. None of us is truly ever alone. We may feel as if we are, but our actions matter. Every single act impacts on this web of souls we form part of, and it’s a web that stretches backwards in time, forwards. I could never see that before, but now I do. It’s not ever just about you, or the person you … love above all others,’ Ryan’s eyes darken with emotion, ‘it’s about awareness and respect and gratitude. Everything in its place or it is chaos. That’s our creed — the creed of the elohim. I used to think it meant “know your place”, don’t get ideas above your station, and it used to infuriate me beyond measure to have that continually thrown in my face — but I was wrong. What Gabriel was trying to tell me is that liberty is important, but it has to take place in a context: of others, of a community. Evil has no community, Ryan. It feeds itself, upon itself, it considers itself above all. I have to help him,’ I finish desperately. ‘Don’t you see? It goes beyond what you and I want. It always has, and I was too blind to see that.’
Ryan bends and kisses me, swiftly, then he and Selaphiel are gone, out of sight, and I hear his boots striking the first rungs.
And even though I told him to go, I can’t help feeling utterly bereft without him.
I turn back to see Jegudiel in the demon’s embrace. They could be lovers, they could be dancing — though Jegudiel’s profile is tight and hard, like granite — for she has her arms around his neck, and I see her lay her head against the side of his face, turning him giddily, laughing. She’s wreathed in a robe that is gleaming with light, but also tattered, crepuscular, like a moth-eaten shroud. As she turns again, with Jegudiel held fast in her arms, I see the mark of the exile shining across her shoulderblades, between her wings.
She’s facing me now, over his shoulder, and I’m shocked to see dark markings crawling across her face, her neck, her arms and hands, like tattoos rendered in acid, or poison. Her hair and form are alive with a dark electricity, a tainted light, that serves to make her cornflower blue eyes — the only part of her I truly recognise — seem unhinged and feral. She meets my eyes and grins, and I reel back in horror from her teeth — each one wi
th the appearance of having been filed into a point, resembling the canines of wild animals.
I see recognition in her gaze as the ground below me ceases to shake and the sound of falling stone stops. The corridor is as silent as a grave now and she purrs into that silence, ‘Did you truly think that your passage through the underworld would go unnoticed … Mercy?’
So quickly I barely have time to register the movement, there’s a short, flaming blade in her hand and she pushes the tip of it into the smooth column of Jegudiel’s throat from the side. He cries out in agony. She keeps the blade there, deliberately holding its point inside him, inside his throat, and I see light leaching steadily out of the wound as he struggles to hold his head high, his bright hair flowing down his back, down between his wings, like a torrent of gold.
‘Let him go,’ I say quietly. ‘If you want me, if it’s true, as Luc has said, that I have always been the prize, then let him go.’
‘The way we let that eunuch Selaphiel go?’ She laughs. ‘We can always pick him and the boy up later, can’t we, Turael?’
A chill moves through me at her words and I turn to see a gleaming male figure standing before the rockfall at the other end of the passageway. He’s at least eight feet tall, the end feathers of his grey-tinted wings trailing in the dust on the floor, and there’s a burning scar on his chest as large as an archangel’s handprint. He has the dark eyes and dark hair that I dimly recall, but all else about him has changed, and changed utterly. He bears an intricate flowering of black markings around his left eye that only heightens his wild, male beauty.
Maybe he was standing there the whole time and saw the way Ryan and I looked at each other — the way everything we are to each other was in our eyes — because there’s an ugly expression on his beautiful face, a promise of pain.
‘Turael,’ I say evenly, trying not to betray my fear, ‘why on earth do you still affect to wear wings when all you and Neqael do these days is crawl in the earth like worms?’
He opens his mouth and hisses at me like a snake, and I see that his teeth are also sharp in appearance, like the canines of wild dogs.
‘Shall I bring you his head?’ he says, flexing his powerful hands. I go cold at his words. ‘Or would you rather not know the manner in which the boy dies?’
Neqael swings Jegudiel around to face me. I see the dark talons of one long-fingered hand stretched down across the front of Jegudiel’s torn robe like the claws of some predatory bird. She holds her short, flaming blade hard up against the front of his throat with her other hand.
‘It’s impressive,’ she says, ‘how ordinary and insignificant you’ve managed to make yourself. Even more ordinary and insignificant than you once were. It’s a mystery to us all what our Lord Lucifer saw in you. None of us could ever understand it. You had no more to commend you than any of us did.’
‘He saw her fire,’ Jegudiel snarls. ‘He saw her strength and her indomitable will. She is worth an infinity of you, and there will be a reckoning. It is coming.’
He inhales sharply as Neqael pushes the edge of her burning blade into his throat so that it bites deep.
‘Reminiscences bore me,’ she snaps. ‘Take her, Turael. Let us be celebrated, let us be raised up at last, for I am sick of playing gaoler, of being a keeper of bones and dead artefacts and dust. She shall restore our fortunes, and the order of all things will be remade in our image. It has been too long in the execution, our homecoming. Let her see for herself what Hell is like.’
I feel Turael moving closer behind me, feel the dark shirring of his energy, am nauseated by it.
‘I will hold them off for as long as I can,’ Jegudiel says, regret in his dark eyes as he looks at me.
‘That won’t be necessary, my friend,’ I murmur, as Turael’s weapon springs into his hand at my back. I hear the sizzle of the blade as it pulses with that tainted light and heat peculiar to the fallen. ‘Just remember to duck.’
A fleeting look of puzzlement crosses Jegudiel’s face as I slowly pivot so that I’m side-on to Neqael, to Turael. I take a small step back so that I have a perfect line of sight in both directions.
‘You know what?’ I say conversationally. ‘You’re antiques, you two. You’re stupid. And you know why you’re stupid?’
Neqael’s laugh is discordant and derisive. ‘This coming from you, who could not resist showing off your “cleverness” to Jegudiel, to Selaphiel. Turael saw you. You’re as dimwitted as the humans you consort with these days.’
I continue softly, as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘You’re so consumed by malice, so focused on universal domination, that you’ve completely missed the point. You bring out the very worst in humankind, but you don’t see them, you don’t comprehend what they’ve done, what they’re capable of.’
‘Oh, I see well enough.’ Neqael laughs, exposing the sinuous line of her throat that is wreathed with dark markings. ‘They possess a fine capability for depravity of every nature, but beyond that, they are animals. And now you consort with animals — and therefore you are their whore, the way you were once Lucifer’s whore, H—’
I see her tattooed mouth begin to form the first syllable of my name, I feel Turael grasp me by my long, curling hair, lifting me off the ground easily, and I have no choice. They leave me no choice, and I’m almost glad as pain begins to explode in me.
I let Turael swing me towards him, and I turn my face as if I would place one last kiss upon his cheek. Then, like a reflex, like the speed of thought, there’s a gun in each of my hands: sleek and heavy, with the look of the semi-automatic, a single lick of blue flame passing across the surface. They require no strength, no finesse to wield, just proximity and dumb luck.
I feel the muzzle of the gun in my blazing left hand connect with Turael’s jaw as the gun in my right rises towards Neqael as my eyes meet hers. My wrists are crossed before me, and it happens so fast that I’ve already pulled the trigger of each weapon simultaneously in the time it takes for Neqael’s eyes to widen in recognition of the things I hold in my hands.
Her mouth falls open and I see her thinking: But guns are stupid things; human things that humans use upon each other. They have no bearing upon angels, or upon demons.
Until now, until me.
It’s just a single shot from each weapon — small and insignificant against the majestic, blazing blades of my enemies — but the bullets are as deadly as any cutting surface, sped by thought, infallibly accurate, because I am the scope, I am the accelerant.
Just a small sting, like the bite of a mosquito.
But I imagine I see Jegudiel wrenching himself to the right as the blast wave of heat and dark energy that once was Turael knocks me to the tunnel floor. I’m deaf and blind to everything, my entire being resounding with pain as if my body were a tolling bell. So I don’t see the second bullet connect, I don’t see Neqael die. But I feel it. I feel the atmosphere compress then expand almost beyond bearing as the passageway is filled with the roar of her dark matter returning to God.
Then Jegudiel and I are all that remains in this silent, tomblike place.
I crawl across the cold and filthy floor towards him and say into the still place inside his head: Brother, you’re hurt.
Jegudiel sits up slowly against the wall and his damaged wings shred into nothingness. He just looks at me with his dark eyes. I kneel before him, almost in an attitude of worship, dwarfed by his scale.
Raphael kept insisting you’d changed. His voice in my mind is very quiet. And I confess, I did not believe it possible.
Raphael is missing, I reply. He was not in Milan. He has been taken, too. But not here. Taken somewhere else.
Jegudiel seems to slump at the news. Then he gestures in the air, making the fingers of his hands into unfamiliar weapons, into guns. How …?
The smile I give him is sad. When you have lived long enough in this world, you will understand how I am able to manifest something so utterly foreign to everything we are.
I reach out to him
, and as my small fingers connect with his, he takes both my hands gently.
‘You do me good,’ he murmurs aloud. ‘To have you restored in this way — it gladdens me beyond measure.’
‘My memory is still riddled with holes,’ I mutter, ‘like this place. I’m not complete, not the creature I was. I may never be whole again.’
‘You don’t need those memories,’ he replies firmly. ‘You no longer have them — whether by your own doing or Raph’s — for good reason.’
His gaze grows distant. ‘Selaphiel can’t remain here — you know that, don’t you? This world will only kill him. I need you to do something for me …’
It’s probably something impossible, but I say anyway, without hesitation, ‘Yes, of course. Name it.’
Jegudiel refocuses his gaze upon my face, and his smile, now, seems sad. ‘Do you know how he does it?’
I shake my head, knowing that he speaks of Luc. ‘Fault lines and surface weaknesses: those are what he uses to move himself and his forces around the human world unseen. He’s had years to work out where the pressure points are; he’s also more than adept at creating new ones.’
Jegudiel shifts uncomfortably against the rough stone at his back and I know he’s wounded inside, too. Perhaps badly.
‘Go on,’ I say softly.
‘We Eight also have our meeting places, our secret haunts. Michael will not thank me for telling you this, but the Majlis al-Djinn is one such place; also the crypts of ancient Carthage, the peak of Mount Pilatus, the limestone terraces of Pamukkale, and many others. After Milan …’ his gaze shifts inward again, ‘… we were to regroup at a place mortals know as SMfu-iwa or Lot’s Wife. Do you know it?’
I shake my head. ‘Where is it?’
‘It’s part of a chain of isles, the Izu-shotM,’ he murmurs, sitting straighter against the wall. ‘Hundreds of miles south of the city known as Tokyo, Japan.’ He gives me a wry, sideways glance. ‘You’ve seen that city … in another life. SMfu-iwa is the southernmost of them all. An isle so sheer and uninhabitable, and located in such rough seas, that it is virtually impossible for any human to disembark there. Perfect for our purposes. Whoever survived Milan was to go there immediately and wait. And plan.’