by Paula Weston
Rafa pauses, changes tack. ‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen.’
A smile. ‘You don’t really care about this stuff, do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Why?’
‘God has chosen us to protect the world from the Fallen and their bastards.’ She says it without irony. She believes it.
‘Protect the world how?’
She looks at Rafa, her eyes travelling over his face as though she’s memorising him. She swallows.
‘I can’t say.’
Rafa gestures to the almost empty room around us. ‘So, what’s this place—the Church of the Righteous Corn Farmers?’
Sophie’s eyes flit past him again and I notice a door slightly ajar beyond the stairwell, a sliver of light. Rafa follows her gaze. ‘What else is up here?’ He moves away from the couch, towards the door.
‘Nothing. Jason…He can’t…’ She presses her palm against her breastbone, her fingers clutching at something beneath the silk.
‘I’ll get him.’ I pass the pot-bellied stove. Rafa is almost at the door.
‘Hey, Matt, wait up.’
He doesn’t break stride as he enters the room.
‘What the hell…’ he says.
I stop short of running into him. It takes me a second to register what he’s staring at. The windowless room has an architect’s drawing board against one wall, a stool, a filing cabinet and a lamp. All four walls are plastered with photographs of people. It’s odd, but I don’t understand Rafa’s reaction until he walks over and stabs his finger at one of the images. My breath catches. I’ve seen it before, on his phone. It’s of him and Jude at a football match.
‘I don’t understand.’ I peer at the photos around it, all held up by thumbtacks. There’s one of a broad-shouldered man with curly black hair, jogging along a road. It can only be Zak. I run my finger over image after image, faces of people I’ve met this week: Daisy, Ez, Micah, Uriel, Daniel, even Nathaniel. Most of them have been taken from a distance.
Rafa is still staring at the picture of him and Jude.
‘Do you think she recognised you?’
Before he can answer, there are three rapid beeps behind us and a door shuts. Not the door that was open—a sliding door, hidden in the wall cavity. Made of metal. Without a handle. ‘Hey!’ My fist thuds on the cold surface. It sounds like we’re inside a bank vault. I press my ear against the door. ‘Jason!’
‘If she recognised me, she’d know there’s no point shutting us in,’ Rafa says. ‘Come here.’ He signals for me to join him in the middle of the room. ‘Enough of this bullshit.’
I put my arm around him and the floor drops away almost immediately. And then my right shoulder explodes with pain, just before we smash into the hard floor.
‘Ugh,’ I grunt and open my eyes. We’re still in the photo room. ‘What happened?’
Rafa disentangles himself from me and climbs to his feet. Without speaking, he shifts again, disappearing like a light going out. And just as quickly, he materialises across the room, slamming into the wall and landing heavily.
We can’t get out.
THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE…
‘Rafa, what the hell?’
His eyes are blazing. ‘It’s a trap.’
‘What? How?’
Rafa paces the room. ‘I don’t know, but that prick out there does.’ He shifts, and slams into the wall again.
I rub my shoulder. ‘Oh, come on, Rafa, he—’
‘Wake up,’ Rafa snaps. ‘He brought us here.’
Shift, crash. At least now he braces for the impact, although it doesn’t stop the wind being driven out of him each time.
‘I’m going to kill him. I mean it. I’m going to rip his head’—shift, crash—‘off his fucking shoulders.’ He doesn’t bother standing up before trying again.
Shift—I wait for him to hit the floor, and then I pin him down, gripping his arms, my knees around his hips. ‘Stop it. This isn’t helping.’
His chest rises and falls beneath me in short, sharp breaths. My own pulse races. Rafa can’t shift out of here. We can’t shift out of here.
‘Just stop. We need to work out what’s going on.’
He pushes back against me, trying to move me. I tighten my legs around him so he can’t. My hair is loose, a curtain that touches his face.
‘I know exactly what’s going on. That little shit out there betrayed us—’
‘You weren’t even supposed to be here, Rafa.’
‘Which only means he was willing to sell you out.’
‘Jason didn’t sell anyone out.’ I can’t accept that. Not after everything we’ve been through. Not after the risks he’s taken for Maggie. For me. Rafa stares at the ceiling, his jaw working. He’s barely noticed I’m straddling him.
Oh. I’m straddling Rafa.
I lose focus for a split-second and then I land on the hard floor at his side.
‘Not everyone is your friend.’ He gets to his feet.
‘Nobody forced you to come in here,’ I say, and sit up. The smooth board of the ceiling feels way too low. The room smells like stale coffee.
‘Oh, so this is my fault? Fucking typical.’ Rafa is pacing again. ‘It’s always me. Never anyone else. Never you.’
His entire being seems to expand and contract with his rage. This space is way too small for him.
‘You know,’ I say, ‘I’m not convinced this is the best time for that argument.’
He prowls the room twice more before finally stopping. I can see he’s not coping with being trapped—it’s probably the first time in his long life he’s experienced the sensation—but taking it out on me isn’t helping. And Jason’s outside, so we’ll be out soon.
‘Truce?’ I say to Rafa.
He cracks three knuckles and then holds out a hand to me. I let him help me off the floor.
‘Thank you.’
I wait for him to say something, but he doesn’t. I go to the drawing board. It’s covered in floorplans and sketches. I pick up the top sheet; there are more underneath but I can’t make out the faint lines in the lamplight. I go back to the door and run my hands over the photos either side of it. There. A switch, hidden under a picture of a woman I don’t recognise.
A fluorescent light sputters and comes on. Rafa leafs through the drawings, flipping back and forth. His eyes are constantly straying to the door. ‘That’s the Sanctuary,’ he says without looking at me. I move closer. It’s the first time I’ve seen the Italian monastery from the outside. If these drawings are even remotely to scale, the Rephaite headquarters are seriously impressive. I glance over half a dozen pages, each showing a different angle of the mediaeval compound. Some are technical floorplans, others rough pencil sketches. Piazzas surrounded by cloisters and three-storey wings, dome-roofed chapels, an imposing façade with Corinthian columns. Hand-drawn arrows with scribbled notes beside them: Nathaniel’s private chambers, infirmary, library.
‘And these photos…’ Rafa moves to the nearest wall. ‘Some are surveillance shots of missions. Others are from personal collections.’ He taps the photo of him and Jude.
‘How’s that possible?’
Rafa points to an image not far above his. ‘Look.’
The blood drains from my face. It’s a photo of me.
I’m somewhere outdoors. I’m wearing leggings and a black singlet. My feet are planted apart and I’m holding a katana over my head as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. My hair is pulled back in a plait that hangs halfway down my back.
I’m grinning at my training partner. He’s blurry, but it looks like Micah—Maggie’s guard on the mountain—and his pose matches mine. I’m never going to get used to seeing these photos of me.
‘When was this taken?’
Rafa steps closer. I can feel the heat in his skin. ‘It’s hard to tell. No landmarks. Could be two years old, could be thirty. It’s not like we age.’ He goes to the door again, presses his ear against it.
>
I pull a few prints down and turn them over. They’re all on the same kind of paper, home-printed, without date or brand. None are originals.
‘How do you think they got them?’
Rafa looks through the photos I hand him. ‘Someone inside the Sanctuary.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Someone had to access computers, phones and albums to get some of these.’ He points to a picture of Ez and Zak sunbaking on a beach. Ez’s skin is flawless: the shot was taken before a hellion clawed her face. ‘I took that. It’s at least a decade old. So are these surveillance shots. All they had to know is where we’d be.’ He moves on to a grainy photo of a restaurant, taken from a distance. ‘This was about a year before the big split.’
There’s a crowd around the table. Rafa, relaxed, beer halfway to his lips. Jude beside him, head thrown back, laughing. Next to him is…me. That other me. Watching Jude, grinning. Something stirs in my chest.
The back of someone’s head blocks the person next to me, but they’ve got straight red hair so it’s probably Daisy. And then…Malachi. He’s smiling—and not even in a smartarse way. I’m drawn to a blonde woman at the end of the table with dark kohl-rimmed eyes. At a table filled with beautiful people, she stands out. I tap her face with my finger, not sure if I want to ask the question or not.
‘That’s Mya,’ Rafa says and walks away. His voice sounds deliberately empty.
I look for other images of her. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. There’s something about her. Wild. Defiant. Alive. In every photo, her long hair is messy, as if she’s just woken up. I have a flash of her and Rafa in bed and immediately shut it down.
Whatever happened to tear apart the Rephaim a decade ago, she was in the middle of it. Daisy says she was the reason Rafa and Jude challenged Nathaniel’s rule and left the Sanctuary. But Ez says it was Jude who caused the split, though Mya liked to take credit for it.
Shit, this mess never gets any clearer. Even with pictures.
I take down the group photo, look around for others of Jude. But it’s not Jude my gaze falls on. It’s Nathaniel. The fallen angel is alone with his arms folded, his attention fixed on something in the distance. He’s standing among blackened ruins in a forest, his fair hair damp from rain. In real life, his irises flicker icy blue; in the image they simply look odd, glassy. He’s in old jeans and a jumper that hints at muscle underneath. Again, the contradiction surprises me: by all accounts the angel who raised the Rephaim is a tough disciplinarian, but he looks more like a footballer. I lean in closer. The image is crisp. It doesn’t look like it was taken with a telephoto lens. How did someone get close enough to take this shot?
‘You really think someone at the Sanctuary has been handing over these photos—for years?’ I ask Rafa.
He pulls the stool out from under the desk and sits on it, surveys the room. Taps his foot: a quick, impatient beat. ‘Why is that so hard to believe? Because everyone there is so obedient?’
‘No, I mean—that photo of you and Jude at the footy, how old is that?’
‘About eighteen months.’
‘Right. So it can’t be someone from the Sanctuary. You don’t see any of them any more.’ I find another shot with Jude in it, add it to my collection. As well as a couple featuring me.
‘That’s not totally true. Occasionally we follow the same lead on the Gatekeepers—paths cross. And Daniel or Uri try to guilt us into going back. What’s to say someone didn’t help themselves to my phone when I wasn’t paying attention.’
‘You wouldn’t drop your guard long enough.’
‘Obviously I did.’
My shoulder is still throbbing. I lean against the wall for a moment, close my eyes.
‘Oh, that’s great,’ Rafa mutters.
I find him jamming his phone back in his pocket. ‘What?’
‘No signal.’
I try mine. Typical. I finally get a phone with international roaming and it’s still useless in a crisis. I rub the soreness out of my shoulder. Rafa must be aching all over after hitting that wall half a dozen times.
It’s been at least ten minutes now. What’s Jason doing out there? I take a slow breath. No need to panic. Rafa’s here. Just keep busy.
‘Maybe there’s something useful in here.’ I go over to the filing cabinet and open the single drawer. It’s empty except for an old leather-bound book held together with fat rubber bands.
‘What is that?’ Rafa says over my shoulder. ‘An old family bible?’
‘I don’t think so.’ The red leather is soft under my fingers, rubbed bare at the corners, the spine flaky like dead skin. There’s no writing on the cover. I sit down and take off the rubber bands, careful not to tear the loose pages poking out. A photo drops to the floor.
Rafa picks it up. He frowns and turns it towards me. ‘What the…?’
A cornfield. Six men, grim-faced in black tailcoats, top hats, cravats and pocket watches. They’re standing around a hole that looks like a freshly dug grave. The photo is sepia, antique. It’s strange enough to keep Rafa’s attention from the door for the moment. He flips it over. A date is scrawled in ink: 1874.
I gently open the book and find more images of the same scene. In the first, there’s something rolled up in a sheet at the men’s feet to the side of the hole—something the size of a person—placed on a low stack of logs. A coldness trails up my spine. In the next image, the bundle is in flames. And then the hole is nothing but a mound of dirt, no trace of the bundle or the ashes from the fire. It’s beyond creepy.
‘Well, that’s disturbing.’ Rafa does another lap of the room, thumps the door twice as he passes it, as if it might miraculously open.
I can’t tear my eyes from the photos; the resolute expressions of the men in each image. I make myself keep flicking through, find handwritten pages of spidery writing. It’s a journal.
Carefully, I leaf through notes and diagrams, find more photos tucked between the thick pages. Images of an old wooden church, first in its prime and then burned to its stumps. The cold reaches my neck and face. Every page is crowded with words and it takes me a second to realise why I don’t understand them.
‘Is that German?’ I hold it up for Rafa to see.
He barely glances at the page. ‘Looks like it.’
‘Can you read it?’
‘My German’s a little rusty.’
‘Give it a go.’
He sighs, creases his forehead in concentration. ‘I know a few words: blood, ritual, sacrifice…bastards.’ He presses a finger to the page. ‘Here’s a mention of the Fallen and Verdammt…I think that means damned.’
‘I guess Sophie was telling the truth about how long the family’s known about the Rephaim.’ I rub my eyelid. ‘It looks like the men of the family used to be in charge. I wonder what happened to change that?’
‘Burning a body in a cornfield?’ Rafa says, only half-joking. He hands me back the journal. ‘Ez will be more useful at translating this—if we ever get out of this rat trap.’
‘Do you think…?’ The chill is all through my body now.
‘What?’
‘Do you seriously believe the family is tied up with demons? With Zarael?’ I haven’t seen the leader of the Gatekeepers. I never want to.
Rafa opens his mouth to reply but sees something in my face that makes him pause. He rethinks what he was about to say. ‘Look, I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, but it’s not likely the Gatekeepers are involved.’
‘Why?’
‘For a start, if they had a place that could trap us, they wouldn’t be leaving it unguarded. And trust me, if Zarael or Bel had been here, little miss let’s-do-a-deal wouldn’t be in one piece. Demons aren’t renowned for self-control when it comes to humans and confined spaces.’
This place is getting claustrophobic. I’m drawn to the door. ‘What do you think this is made of?’ I run my palm over the rough surface. ‘It doesn’t feel like steel. Maybe it’s the same thing Sophie’s
trinket-thingy is made from—something powerful enough to block a Rephaite from shifting.’
‘Nothing can do that.’
I give him an even look. He begins to examine the photos again.
‘What about iron?’
‘No,’ he says absently. ‘I’ve shifted into planes and they’re full of iron.’
‘You shifted into a plane? While it was in the air?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did I ever do stuff like that?’
‘Frequently.’
I let my hand drop from the door. ‘Jason wasn’t lying about Sophie having a trinket that protects her. She grabbed something through her dress when you headed for this room.’
Rafa stares at the wall, not seeing and not listening. Then he grabs a pencil and a scrap of paper.
‘What are you doing?’
He peers at an image and writes something down. ‘Listing everyone in these photos to see who’s missing.’
‘Why?’
He meets my eyes, taps the pencil against a photo, then trails it across several others.
‘Because, Gaby, I’d like to talk to whoever is selling us out to these bitches.’
IRON WILL
‘I’m thirsty.’
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘How can I not think about it? I’m thirsty.’
Nearly thirty minutes have passed. It’s getting colder, a bone cold that even Rafa is feeling. I can’t stop thinking about what’s going on outside this room. Where the hell is Jason? Why hasn’t he got us out of here already? Did Sophie do something to him? Has he left us here?
I look through my photographs of Jude. Some I’d seen on Rafa’s phone, but there are new ones. Of the two of us jogging side by side on a dirt road next to a field of wheat, of him saying something to a small group of Rephaim in a training room, all of them listening intently. Of him with people I don’t recognise.
My throat feels cracked. I swallow.
He could be out there somewhere. And we’re here. I see Rafa’s eyes flicker to the photos of Jude and I wait for him to say it: that if we were looking for my brother like we were meant to be, we wouldn’t be here. But he doesn’t. And then I think about the place on Patmos in Greece, the island cottage where Rafa and Jude hung out. It was there Rafa pulled me to him when I was crying over another photo of Jude.