by Rebecca Lim
‘While Luc lives,’ Jeremiel says quietly, ‘she remains the catalyst and the key. As powerful as we are, he is nearly untouchable here on earth, able to hide himself indefinitely, like a worm, or a snake, crawling beneath the earth. Once our most perfect son; now our paradigm terrorist. If we could “finish him off”, we would have done it years ago. We all,’ Jeremiel’s eyes move over me before he returns his shimmering, argent gaze to Ryan, ‘must play our part, do what we can.’
Barachiel takes up the argument in his rumbling voice. ‘With Mercy gone, the threat is not gone, but it is reduced. As is the arena of battle that we must defend. It is the only way.’
I place a stilling hand on Ryan’s arm before he can say anything more, and address my brethren harshly through my tears.
‘I may not accept it, but I understand, and I will do as you ask. Evil has no community, and I am no longer evil. Though the free will that was supposedly gifted to our kind alone has proved a most bitter thing to swallow. I am free, but not free. Constrained always by what is greater than me, better and more selfless than me. There’s no possibility of balance, of compromise, but how I wish there were. How I wish …’
Even Ryan can feel the force of the longing and desperation blazing out of me.
My four kinsmen regard me sorrowfully for a moment. Then Gabriel draws me to my feet, also helping Ryan to stand, before linking our hands together. Ryan looks down for a moment, unable to speak for sorrow.
‘Come,’ Barachiel says, his mighty visage grim once more. ‘Let us keep company with you along the coast until you must turn for “Paradise” — that most incongruously named place — and we make for Panama, and for Raphael and Michael.’
I glance at Uriel, stricken. ‘So soon?’
He says softly, ‘You knew this was only temporary, a reprieve. A small measure of time out of time. It is kinder this way, sister. Let him go. Let it all go. You have earned a measure of peace. Some day, you will be together again.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Ryan says bitterly, still staring at our joined hands, gripping my fingers so tightly that his are white with constricted blood. ‘How can you really be sure that we’ll ever be together again? What if I want to take now over later? What if I don’t believe?’
‘Then you are already lost,’ Barachiel murmurs. ‘And there is no later.’
‘Bear him home, Mercy,’ Gabriel says quietly. ‘Do not delay, do not linger. As soon as Michael and Raphael are secure, we will return for you.’
‘How long do we have?’ Ryan asks, looking up at Gabriel, his dark eyes shining with unshed tears.
‘Not long,’ Gabriel murmurs. ‘You will know when it is time.’ He places a hand on my shoulder. ‘His care of you — his love — will be repaid in ways that cannot be measured.’
Then Uriel, who was my watcher when I was Carmen, grasps my hand tightly and lets me into his thoughts, showing me the way. I see the approach up the coast to Ryan’s home town of Paradise; see it from above, from the ground; the main street, Ryan’s house, even the tree Ryan set fire to. All through Uriel’s eyes. It’s no longer a mystery to me, where Paradise is.
‘You saw it?’ Uriel murmurs.
I hang my head, nodding, bright tears spilling down my cheeks onto the stone at my feet. Then, still weeping, I embrace Ryan in my arms — for he is and always will be my burden — and we six leap off the solid surface of the world into the lowering skies above Machu Picchu, and turn west for the coast.
The sun is setting as we pass through the heavy skies over Chiclayo. We travel in silence, each buried in our own thoughts, our own agonies.
Without warning, as we begin to cross over open sea, Gabriel, Uriel, Barachiel and Jeremiel splinter into light; they are already halfway to the Gulf of Panama before we’ve even registered they’ve gone.
‘Now that it’s just the two of us,’ Ryan says suddenly, trying hard to smile, ‘I have to confess that this is one thing I won’t miss, flying.’
I spiral slowly to a stop, and as I do, I shift, so that Ryan is looking at me. At my wide-set brown eyes, my long, straight, dark brown hair, my strong-featured face that I’ve always thought suits Uriel so much more than it suits me. We’re alone. It may be the last time I can truly be myself with him. Though I know I should be careful — careful every moment I’m still in this world — I want him to remember me like this, no other way.
Ryan’s eyes light up as he takes me in. He runs a finger down my luminous bare arm in the way that always makes my soul shiver. My robes flare and shift of their own accord, as if carried by ghostly winds, curls of energy lifting and curling into the night air.
Ryan cups the side of my face gently as I hold him braced in my arms. ‘Welcome back from wherever you’ve been,’ he says.
‘I’ve been here all along,’ I murmur. ‘And we’ve had fun, right? Hasn’t it been fun? A blast?’
My laughter has a ring of desperation to it as I try to make light of everything that has happened. Already gone forever, already memory.
In reply, Ryan captures my lips with his, his mouth opening over mine, searching and hot and sweet. But he releases me before we hit the invisible barrier that will always separate us.
‘We’ve been hurt enough today,’ he whispers raggedly, resting his forehead against mine. ‘We don’t need to hurt each other, too.’
Suspended together, we gaze down at the darkening sea below.
‘Seeing the world with the girl you love,’ I say despairingly. ‘What more could any guy wish for?’
‘A whole lot more,’ Ryan says harshly. ‘A whole lifetime.’
My voice is very quiet as I reply. ‘You say that now, but I’ve lived enough lifetimes to know that you start off with love and then everything hits you, everything swamps you, and you can’t help it, you change — or those around you do — and you have to bear the consequences. I’ve been beaten, cheated, abused and left for dead, Ryan. Not a great track record. Those are some of the things I will remember from this world. That’s what I’ve learnt about life.’
‘But none of that is me,’ Ryan replies hotly. ‘It won’t ever be, and I won’t let anything like that touch you again. I can’t promise you that life won’t ever be boring, or a grind, or just plain hard, because that’s what it’s like for us down here, but I will always love you. If you remember anything, remember that.’
The words tumble out before I can stop them. ‘Luc said the same thing, once.’
Ryan’s eyes blaze dangerously. ‘Luc is the biggest asshole in the history of assholes. The only thing we have in common is you, and he blew it. Which just goes to prove he’s an asshole.’
‘Why are we even talking about this?’ I mutter. ‘This is it; this is all we’re ever going to get. Of course, we’ll have “some day”,’ I add bitterly, ‘but who knows if you’ll even remember me by then? You’ll have moved on, with your nice life, your nice family. While I will be exactly the same. Frozen in time. Sifting through shattered memories, living through them.’
‘You think it’ll be any easier for me?’ Ryan yells. ‘That’s me you’re talking about. You’ve just described what it’s going to be like for me. You blow through my life like a hurricane, and then you leave me?’
We stare at each other, seeing no way out.
‘It won’t last, this feeling,’ I murmur, trying to convince myself it’s true. ‘It’s just a feeling, chemicals. You’ll get over me. Soon, it will seem like a dream. To both of us.’
Before Ryan can say anything more, make any more of a case for the impossible, I grip him tightly in my arms and dive down towards the surface of the ocean. And for a moment, that terrible feeling — of falling, falling as if I will never stop — returns.
We soar above the heavy, boiling sea in silence. Me keeping Ryan warm; imprinting every line of his body, every quirk, every expression, into my consciousness, for later.
As we turn back towards land, the Gulf of California streaming away from us to our right, we begin to s
ee lights in the darkness.
Ryan says suddenly, ‘What is that? Can you see it?’
From the air it looks like a thick slurry of sticks and debris, just sludge. But as I change trajectory, moving lower, I make out shapes in the darkness: tiled surfaces and window frames; the roofs of houses, pancaked so they resemble books laid down flat, their spines facing up. Just floating out to sea.
‘My God,’ Ryan murmurs, sickened, as we skim low over a bobbing soup of submerged boats, broken-off pylons, oil drums, corrugated iron, sections of road and jetty. ‘What happened here?’
Then we smell burning, and see the glow of fire, a mile or so inland, amongst the electric lights of evening. There are unimaginable things in the water. Cars, bobbing like bath toys; the tail of a light aeroplane pointing upwards; the smashed hulls of maxi yachts; overturned freighters and shipping containers just lying in the shallows as if a giant hand reached out of the sea and pulled them over. Or a giant wave. And bodies. So many bodies.
Ryan and I look at each other in horror. ‘Lauren,’ we both say, as I put on a burst of speed and the lower edge of the wild Coast Ranges are suddenly beneath us.
22
We pass over Port Marie in near darkness. Up the coast road, Paradise gives off the same eerie feel of neglect and abandonment. The small, dusty-looking town is laid out in a strict grid on the edge of a swampy peninsula that just seems to peter out into the ocean. It looks as if only the streetlights are still working.
When we move lower, skimming over the main drag, we see that it’s deserted and there are very few lights on in the houses, so neatly and regularly spaced. There are crazy Christmas decorations on the rooftops of some, but none are lit up. Many driveways are empty of cars.
Ryan looks at me enquiringly as I head south, intending to approach his place from another direction.
‘Someone’s watching the house,’ I remind him quietly.
I come in over the back fence, land lightly near the steps by the back door. There’s a light on in the kitchen, and one somewhere upstairs, but otherwise the house is in complete darkness.
Ryan mounts the back porch and opens the screen door, but before he can raise his hand to knock, something comes charging out of the darkness at our backs. The Daleys’ three Dobermans — all sleek and vicious and bullet-headed — howling and frothing like dark-hearted demons.
‘Stay!’ Ryan roars, but I move back down the stairs into the garden and say grimly, ‘Let them come, let them do their worst.’
I am ready for them, ready to stop them in their tracks; for if they dash themselves against me, as they long to, they will die.
But when they see me, see the luminosity coming off my skin, they begin to whine, circling me at an uneasy distance, before all three lie down in the grass at my feet, as if exhausted.
A faint glimmer begins to coalesce upon the black and tan coats of the panting, shuddering dogs. It pools and lifts, shifting away from them, and now I see the dogs through a veil of light that grows and changes and becomes the outline of a young girl. She’s just a sketch, a suggestion, grey and ghostly. But I know her, though I have never known her name. Behind me, I hear Ryan gasp.
‘Malakh,’ I say, ‘you have followed me through life after life. What is it that you wish me to know?’
The apparition raises her eyes to me and I see that she would have been very beautiful, once, like a doll. ‘Come closer,’ she whispers. ‘Listen well, for I am dying.’
The dogs whimper. I hear the back door to the Daleys’ house open, but I don’t turn around, too intent am I on hearing the creature’s message. ‘Speak,’ I urge her, ‘for I am listening.’
‘Lord Lucifer wishes to parley,’ the malakh murmurs. ‘Raphael for you. At sunrise, at the beach named for that reef shaped like a devil’s crown. If you come quietly, he will be just. Even with the Eight. But if you do not …’
For a moment, her outline wavers, and the dogs lift up their heads and howl in terrible anguish, as if she speaks through them.
‘If you come armed for battle,’ she gasps finally, ‘or with deceit, then he will remake the universe as he sees fit.’
I see that she had long, pale, curling hair once, and large eyes, like a greeting-card angel.
‘How credulous you are,’ I say pityingly. ‘At sunrise, no matter what I do, he will destroy us all. It has already begun.’
The malakh shakes her head in denial.
Anger explodes in me: that my last hours with Ryan should still brook interference from monsters I’d thought well behind me.
‘Double-dealer,’ I hiss. ‘It was you who betrayed my presence in Milan to Luc, wasn’t it? You ran messages between Michael and K’el, between those that remained of the Eight, and then you betrayed us all. Why? What did he promise you?’
When she raises her own eyes to look at me, I see an answering, ugly fury in them. ‘You dare to ask why?’ Her voice is like a death rattle. ‘I owe you no loyalty. I begged you, and you would not help me. He will give me what you elohim will not — a living body in which to end my days. I have suffered, how I have suffered!’
She shrieks, and the dogs scrabble at the grass and dirt at her heels, in agony.
‘Sunrise,’ she screeches, raising a pointing finger, ‘or he dies, she dies. Everything you ever loved or touched in this world will be slaughtered, damaged, despoiled.’
I turn to see what the malakh gazes on with her empty, shredding orbs. Lauren and Ryan are framed in the doorway — one so tall and dark, the other so slight, so pale, both scarcely daring to move or breathe.
When I turn back to face the malakh, she is gone, and the dogs are dead.
It’s surreal to be helping Ryan bury his dogs under a moonless sky in a ghost town. Surreal to feel grief for creatures that so feared and hated me. But I do.
When we finally get inside, we watch in numb silence as Lauren deadlocks the back door and draws the chain across. It’s so strange to be back inside the Daleys’ white-on-white house. The ceilings seem too low, everything too small, as if the house was built for children. But it must be an illusion of my shattered mind, for everything is exactly as it was, and I am no taller than I was as Irina. But that feeling that I might dissolve, might blow apart at any second, seems to have returned. The world feels as if it is pitching beneath me; any moment, I might fall off and never find my way back.
As we trail through the kitchen, through the hallway and up the stairs, everything is exactly as I last saw it; save for Lauren’s bedroom, which I hardly recognise. There’s colour everywhere, lights, softness, warmth, as if the room is a bright, downy cocoon from which she might one day emerge, whole again.
Lauren sits on the edge of her bed and beckons me to sit, too, her blue eyes wide with wonder. But I’m too wired to do anything but pace, and I catch her eyes following me around the room.
Ryan’s leaning against the dresser, almost asleep on his feet. He looks tired and rumpled and sexy, and he will never, ever be mine. I’m suddenly swamped by so much pain that I stumble and almost fall to the ground.
‘What do I do?’ I wail.
Ryan just reaches out and catches me, pulls me close. And all I let myself hear for a while is his heartbeat, the murmur of blood beneath his skin. The last thing I want to hear at night; and, in the morning, the first. But it’s never going to be that way.
There’s a loud knock on the half-open door and Ryan and I look up, startled, as a male voice calls out belligerently, ‘Lauren? Who’s in there? Are you okay?’
The door’s shoved open and Richard Coates is standing there. He’s wearing blue jeans and nothing else but tatts, and his dark blond hair is still wet from the shower. It’s longer than I remember it, falling into his extraordinarily pale, ice-blue eyes. When he sees me, he just freezes; the blood runs right out of his face. It takes him a little while to work out who else is in the room, because I’m all that he can see. I can tell that even though he’s never seen me like this before, like a being carved out
of titanium, wreathed in light and sorrow, he recognises me. Our minds met once, when I was Carmen and searching his memories for traces of Lauren.
‘Hey, Rich,’ Ryan says tightly.
I see that he’s looking at the way Richard is dressed, then at his sister on the bed, her long, ash blonde hair unbound, her emaciated frame draped in a shapeless blue tracksuit, like something a child would wear, her bird-like legs tucked beneath her.
‘Ry,’ Richard whispers, his eyes still welded to me leaning against Ryan. ‘When did you … get back?’
‘Just now,’ Ryan says shortly. ‘This is Mercy.’
‘I kind of figured,’ Richard replies.
He tears his eyes away from me at last, then takes a seat on the other side of the bed from Lauren, his head up proudly, refusing to feel ashamed.
‘What are you doing here?’ Ryan growls.
Richard and Lauren exchange glances, before she looks down at her new, bright red coverlet. Her thin hair falls forward over one shoulder, hiding her ruined face and haunted eyes.
‘Tsunami warning system’s been activated,’ Richard replies when Lauren doesn’t speak. ‘The epicentre was nowhere near us, but they evacuated everyone to Little Falls Junction anyway. Lauren was desperate to come back when it didn’t look like anything was going to happen. She couldn’t handle the crowds. Said people were staring and talking. And they were — it was a circus when word got out she was there. I couldn’t let her stay here on her own.’
‘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.’