Fury (26 page)

The man looks Ryan up and down with his jet black eyes. ‘The Camino Inca takes many forms,’ he says in heavily accented English. ‘The Mollepata is the longest and hardest route. It would not suit everyone,’ he adds diplomatically. ‘But there is a trek that can take four days, and a trek that can take one. My cousin’s son is a guide. He can better answer you.’ He turns and says to his father in Quechua, ‘Go and fetch Mateo.’

The toothless old man snorts. ‘
You
go and fetch Mateo, if Mayu has not already brought every one of our friends and relatives back with her. See, she returns now.’

More people spill into the room: handsome, black-eyed women, pretty children in colourful dress, work-worn men and older folk, until we are ringed around by their energy, by their curious faces. Several people touch their hands to Uriel’s briefly, almost reverently, and I hear someone exclaim, ‘How beautiful he is!’

Uriel smiles and accepts their greetings politely, but in my head his voice is blunt and impatient.
We need to move. Now. We cannot waste another moment in idle talk
.

I disagree
, I reply, nodding and bowing in all directions as he is doing.
Ryan is right: the only way to combat Luc is not to behave as he would expect. It would probably never occur to him that the great Uriel would approach on foot. We will infiltrate the site as human trekkers — it will be slower, but may tip the odds in our favour.

‘What are you two up to?’ Ryan rasps suspiciously, looking from Uriel to me, intercepting the silent exchanges we make with our eyes.

Abruptly, the room, the building, begins to shake: a long, low tremor that shivers the dust from the ceiling, rattles the light fixtures and the bright ornaments and colourfully painted pottery on the wooden shelves. I almost expect Luc to hit me with all he has; to burst into my head and hold my consciousness hostage while he tears the knowledge of my whereabouts from inside me.

But the shaking suddenly stops, and Ryan staggers, almost falling over. A giggling woman in a brightly striped shawl pushes at him with her hands to steady him.

‘Earthquake,’ Uriel says, shooting me a worried glance.

I’m so relieved it’s just an earthquake that I almost shrug.

The man whose home we’re in says quietly, ‘For three days it has rained. The guides speak of landslides near Llaqtapata, heavy fog and tremors on the mountain, injuries, cancellations. If you wish to trek, as the
gringo
says, there are permits. We can get them for you, no passports, no waiting, if that is what you want.’

The whole room suddenly seems to be watching Uriel to see how he will respond.

‘Don’t do that thing with your eyes again,’ Ryan finally says, exasperated, looking from Uri to me. ‘My advice is that you go in on foot and get the flaming swords out only when you need to. But I’m just the half-dead
gringo
,’ his voice is bitter, ‘so what would I know?’

Our host pushes a new man forward — younger, moustachioed, fit-looking, dressed in khaki and rubber slides. ‘I am Mateo,’ he says, studying the three of us keenly. ‘My uncle tells me you need a guide and permits?’

‘Please,’ I urge Uriel quietly. ‘Let’s do this the way Ryan suggests. He’s done as Michael commanded — he’s kept me alive in more ways than you would ever understand. None of you has
ever
had someone like Ryan on point guard. None of you would even consider taking direction from anyone remotely like him. To be cast adrift in
this
sea and still find someone to anchor me like he has — you couldn’t even begin to calculate odds like those. You’d do a lot worse than to listen to him, Uri. We can reassess the terrain once we’re there.’

Uriel regards Ryan silently for a moment before nodding tightly.
One day
, he says grimly in my head.
We do it in one day, or we don’t do it at all
.

Then he smiles at the people gathered about him and it’s like the sun coming out. The women all around us, young and old, clasp their hands together and sigh.

‘Sit, sit,’ our host tells us, and a path is immediately cleared for us to the round table in the corner of the room, now groaning with platters of food people have brought from their own homes.

Ryan leans on me a little as he shuffles along like an old guy. ‘Can you hear that sound?’ he whispers, as I help him into one of the bentwood chairs.

A middle-aged man in a dark shirt and black woollen waistcoat places a warm glass of milky-green liquid with leaves floating in it into Ryan’s hand, closing his fingers around it. Ryan’s still sweating heavily as he takes a sip and grimaces.

‘What sound?’ I reply curiously.

The air is alive with sounds, both exterior and interior to all the people here. There’s a clock ticking somewhere, voices on the radio, the sound of female laughter coming from the room behind us. People are shoving furniture to one side of the room as an older man tunes a guitar.

Ryan drains the glass and closes his eyes, mumbling sleepily, ‘The sound of the clock restarting. We’re back in penalty time, you and me.’

He smiles, swaying against me a little in his seat, his eyes still closed. And the happiness that suddenly overtakes me — to be here, beside him still — makes me grasp his left hand in my left and pull his arm across my body. I lean into him, feeling the beat of his heart like bird’s wings inside his chest, as Mateo describes how it’s possible to get a one-day trekking permit without a passport, and what we’re likely to face in the morning.

After we rise from our discussion with Mateo, the children surround us, begging us to try the pumpkin soup and
lomo saltado
, the
buding de chocolate
and a sweet dish made from a kind of stewed purple maize that they fall on excitedly called
mozamora morada
. And we do, we do try. But though it all smells delicious, to Uriel and me the food tastes like ashes. After a while, we discreetly push it away.

Ryan only manages a tiny portion of dinner before he curls up and goes to sleep on the low settee. I beg a blanket from Gabino, our host, to cover him, then hang up his wet jeans to dry. I kneel on the floor beside Ryan’s sleeping form and move our belongings from the broken backpack into the replacement Gabino pushed into my hands earlier, made of thick felted wool and crawling with bright Peruvian needlework.

‘What’s wrong with him? What’s the “
gringo
sickness” they were talking about?’ I ask Uriel, who’s standing there with a strange look on his face.

‘We’re over eleven thousand feet above sea level,’ he murmurs, watching me buckle the bag shut. ‘Everything in Ryan’s body is working overtime to keep him alive. He’s not yet acclimatised to this atmosphere, and, I confess, neither am I. Explain to our hosts that I needed some air? I’ll be back before first light.’

As silently as a cat, Uriel leaves the room without drawing anyone’s attention — a feat that would be impossible for anyone else in this tightly packed space. It hits me suddenly that this may be the most time Uriel has ever spent in the company of humans. The colour and movement that so delight me must be spinning him out.

A long while later, Mayu, Gabino’s shy wife, offers me a place to sleep.

I shake my head. ‘I don’t need it,’ I whisper in Quechua with a smile, ‘but I thank you, lady. I’ll stay and watch over the
gringo
.’

She inclines her head at me before sweeping away in her beautiful red skirt. When I look up again, Mateo is regarding me with a strange expression in his eyes.

‘You need to get some rest,’ he says in Quechua, looking around before asking, ‘Where is your brother?’

Gabino’s father calls out, a little drunkenly, ‘Ayar Awqa cannot be caged! He has flown away into the night sky. To speak with the stars!’

‘No, really,
señorita
, where is he?’ Mateo says worriedly. ‘I come back for you in only a few hours. The train leaves Cusco at six, and from Kilometer 104, the trek is short but still difficult for people who are not used to our conditions.’

I look up into Mateo’s face with a smile. ‘Uriel finds the modern world a little … claustrophobic. He’s not very good with crowds, but he’s strong and sure-footed and he can walk forever. He’ll be fine, and he’ll be back before you are.’

‘Then he will feel at home tomorrow.’ Mateo looks relieved. ‘It is wild, high country where we are going: the country of gods.’

And of demons
, I think, shivering despite the light and warmth and music in the room, imagining Gabriel chained by fire, in darkness, in the heart of a dead city.

The apartment is quiet around me — just the creaks and groans of timber settling, breathing out — when Uriel returns. One minute I’m sitting there, gazing into the darkness, peering into those of my memories I can gather together, trying to puzzle out some kind of chain, some kind of workable order — but it’s a chain that keeps collapsing, because there are more holes than chain — when he’s suddenly just there.

Ryan’s still sleeping on the settee, his breathing shallow and hoarse. Uriel kneels beside me, brushes a long curl of dark hair back from my face.

You will never see so many stars as in the skies above Cusco
, he says inside my head.
Not unless you are home. Don’t you miss it?
he continues.
How could you not yearn to return? Every moment I am away I feel it in my soul, as if I am somehow … unravelling
.

I don’t tell Uriel that he’s almost described the way I feel around Ryan. It’s like we’re bound together now; as if the notion of home that I used to carry around inside me has been transposed, somehow, into
him
. And if we were not together any more, maybe
I
would unravel. It’s something I can’t bring myself to think about until all this is over — and that day is coming, I can feel it.

Uriel sits down beside me, resting his back against the sagging couch, takes my hand in his. His skin is so warm, seething with his peculiar, living fire.

I’m tired
, he says.
Tired of planning and plotting, protecting, fighting, moving. So tired. Am I allowed to say that?
His laughter is ghostly.

I think a little honesty is permissible
, I reply wryly.
And you’ve never been one to hold back.

Nor you
, he says.
How we used to fight.

I hadn’t realised we’d called a truce!
I say, before grinning.

He looks at me, really studies me in the darkness.
It’s good to have you back. Even this way.

Don’t sound so delighted
, I say dryly.

His expression grows embarrassed, even ashamed.
When Raphael first devised a plan to find you and preserve you, I admit to being against it. I thought you were dead the instant you were cast down. All of Luc’s intent towards you was there in his face. But Raph kept insisting you were alive, and that Luc would throw everything he had into looking for you because of that vow he made, word of which had already spread to us. Even for creatures as we are, there are no secrets. Someone always hears, always knows.

To be honest, we didn’t know what condition you’d be in if you ever ‘woke’ again. Of us Eight, I think Gabriel missed you most. He missed your friendship and your singularly opinionated take on every aspect of every thing. Raphael’s idea of you is clouded by too much dangerous emotion, but Gabriel just missed you. He said you used to make him
laugh — and very few things in life make Gabriel laugh. He will be glad to see you again
.

If he’s still alive
, I think fearfully, and Uriel squeezes my hand before releasing it.

We’ll find him alive
. His reply is too quick, too certain, as if he’s trying to convince himself of the truth of his words.

We sit in the darkness for a while, shoulder to shoulder. And it may not be a feeling with any basis in reality, but I’m somehow connected again, to my people, if only for a moment. I’m part of something far greater than I am, which goes beyond merely existing, merely surviving. I hadn’t realised how much I needed to know that. Just sitting in the dark, with Uriel beside me, Ryan breathing at my shoulder, has a healing quality.

But time marches, we two can feel it. We are its keepers, its historians; it beats in us, can never be denied.

We should wake him
, I say finally, reluctantly, indicating Ryan.

It is time
, Uriel agrees.

He rises silently, holding out his strong hand to me, and I take it.

We’re on a tourist train bound for ‘Kilometer 104’, a station at Chachabamba, about sixty-four miles from Cusco.

Watching Uriel pick a carriage, pick a seat, had reminded me of me: he’s sitting with his back to the wall right beside the exit to the next compartment, in an aisle seat that gives him an unimpeded view of the entire carriage, which is empty save for us. I’m between Uri and the window, my back to the wall, too, because old habits die hard. Across from us, Ryan’s staring, awe-struck, at the rain slicing down the sheer faces of mountains that drop away into deep ravines, wave after wave of them.

Just before the train left, Ryan had tactfully suggested that maybe Uriel wouldn’t want to be seen climbing the Inca Trail in a cashmere sweater, chinos and leather loafers with tassels. A blistering silence had ensued, but Ryan and I had exchanged covert glances when we’d looked up from counting the stash of money in our pack to see Uriel dressed in an anonymous-looking, red and navy hip-length hooded parka with a drawstring waist — like one we’d seen on some other
gringo
at the station — a heavy rollneck sweater, kind of like mine except in navy, and black trousers with cargo pockets, heavy boots, sunglasses, and a black beanie.

Okay?
Uriel asks inside my head, when he catches me staring at him, and I give him the thumbs-up.

‘Though you could lose the sunglasses,’ I say. ‘We’re inside.’

Ryan’s mobile phone rings, drawing Uriel’s gaze immediately. Ryan puts his hand inside his leather jacket and pulls it out, surprised.

‘Lauren?’ he says suddenly.

Across from him, Uri and I are instantly still.

‘What is it?’ Ryan asks anxiously into the screen. ‘What’s wrong? I just checked in yesterday, right? From Tokyo.’ He looks at me for confirmation.

I nod. It feels like a lifetime ago to me, too.

Lauren’s voice comes across loud and clear and frightened, ignoring his questions. ‘Ryan, is Mercy there? I need to ask her something. Can you put her on?’

I swing across to the window seat beside Ryan and we put our faces together in front of the screen. ‘I’m here, Lauren,’ I murmur. ‘Shoot.’

‘There’s a man standing outside our house, right now,’ she says, her voice high and panicky, ‘and I think I’m the only one who can see him. Whenever I look out the window, he’s just … there. He raises his head when I do it — like he’s looking into my eyes.’

I go cold at her words. ‘Describe him,’ I say.

‘I can’t, not really.’ Her words tumble out in fits and spurts. ‘It’s, like, when I look at him I can’t make out the details because he’s, like,
glowing
in this robe thing. Maybe he has dark eyes and dark hair, but I can’t be sure. When I look at him, I feel sick. It’s like I can’t focus. He’s there, but he’s not there. I can’t explain it.’

Uriel says suddenly inside my head:
The colour of the light. Ask
.

I lower my voice, trying to sound as calm and normal as possible. ‘It’s okay, Lauren, it will be okay. Just tell me what colour the, uh, aura, he’s giving out is, if you can.’

Lauren’s almost crying. ‘It’s bright, bright but kind of grey. It doesn’t make any sense … God, I know I’m not making any sense. I can hardly stand to look at him, but when I asked Dad whether he could see anything through my bedroom window he said there was nothing there. But he’s there all the time. Not Dad, the watcher. Even when I sleep. When I wake up, he’s there. When I look out, he’s there.’ Her voice has risen rapidly, like a scream.

‘How long?’ Uri asks sharply.

‘Lauren,’ Ryan says soothingly, as his sister holds one hand over her mouth and weeps. ‘
Lauren
. How long has this been going on? How long?’

‘Two days, three?’ she sobs. ‘I’m not sure when I first actually noticed. What do I do?
What do I do?
’

Ryan says fiercely, ‘You get our parents and get the hell out of there. Take Rich with you, too, if you have to, just get them out of town. Tell them anything.’

Uriel and I exchange worried glances, and he murmurs, ‘I’m not sure that’s the best idea, Ryan. Away from Paradise, they might be even more vulnerable to —’

‘Luc’s having the house
watched
,’ Ryan explodes. ‘We’re not like you.’ He jabs at the air. ‘You can’t expect me to tell my family to stay there like, like
targets
!’

I go cold as I remember what Luc said in Milan, inside the limousine, when he’d appeared like a vision to me:
Come to me. Only then will you be safe. Flee the Eight and their legion at whatever cost. But if I should somehow fail, then locate that human boy and return with him to the place where he lives, to Paradise. 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
.

‘Send help!’ Ryan says violently, glaring at Uriel. ‘You could do that, right? If you wanted to.’

Uriel frowns. ‘All the
elohim
and
malakhim
that can be spared to fight Luc are massing somewhere only Michael knows of, awaiting his orders. He is our Viceroy, the one who commands us in the name of our Lord. But now he’s missing, and I am
just one
upon this earth; alone except for Mercy, with no word of where the others are. As soon as we locate Gabriel, we’ll send what help we can. But we need to free Gabriel first. It’s imperative.’

‘How is Gabriel more important than the people I love?’ Ryan thunders.

He says into the screen, ‘Get out of town, Lauren, get them out of there. If they don’t know already, don’t tell them why, just make it happen.’

Still weeping, Lauren doesn’t reply, she just hangs up.

Ryan throws his phone at the back of his seat, then strides down the length of the carriage to get away from us, his arms folded around his head in anguish.

He doesn’t come back, not until the train pulls into the station known as Kilometer 104, and he’s forced to get out with us.

Ryan doesn’t meet my eyes, and he won’t look at Uriel at all, as we pull up our hoods against the downpour and walk the four hundred or so feet to a small guardhouse by a narrow suspension footbridge over the tumbling, swollen Urubamba River. The ground is slick and heavy with mud, but I think I’m the only one who notices how Uriel seems to glide across it without stumbling, how the rain and dirt don’t seem to touch him at all.

We line up with all the other trekkers and their local guides and porters — about twenty people at most, some of them clearly having second thoughts about pressing on. Mateo makes his way over to us, his head bent. He’s wearing a hooded, heavy-duty khaki parka over dark pants, a pair of battered shoes in place of the rubber slides he’d been wearing the night before, and a large backpack as wide and almost half as tall as he is. We’d requested no porters the night before, and Uriel looks at the large pack enquiringly as Mateo reaches us.

‘Food, water, rain ponchos, blankets, first-aid kit,’ he explains.

Uriel gestures at him to hand the pack over, offended to see anyone carrying anything on his behalf. Mateo hesitates for a moment, before shrugging it off and passing it to him. Uriel slings the pack over his shoulders, ignoring the waist and chest straps because it weighs nothing to him.

I get the wad of euros Gia gave us out of my pocket and shove them into Mateo’s hand. He hasn’t yet mentioned any kind of payment.

‘This is for you,’ I say. ‘Thirteen hundred and seventy euros, to cover the three of us. It’s everything we’ve got.’

Mateo shakes his head, tries to push the money back into my hands. ‘I can’t take it,
señorita
,’ he says earnestly. ‘It is too much. It is only a few hours of walking — you tell me no porters, no bus, no overnight hotel. I would do it for nothing. It is my pleasure.’

‘Please,’ Ryan shouts, over the sound of the rain, ‘take it. If you can’t use it all, share it with Gabino and his family. To thank them for taking care of me, for giving me help exactly when I needed it.’

His voice is bitter and I know he’s thinking of his own family.

Mateo nods, finally, and zips the money away in his jacket. He retrieves some paperwork from another pocket, enclosed in a battered plastic sleeve, and blinks at me, at Ryan, through the rain. ‘Remember that today you are Estelle Jablonski of Mississauga, Canada, and you are her boyfriend, Clive Butler, also of Mississauga, Canada.’

Ryan looks away without replying.

‘And you,
señor
,’ Mateo says to Uriel, ‘are Gerry McEntee Junior from Johannesburg, South Africa. Okay?’

Uri shrugs, and Mateo hands out the three permits that bear no relation to any of us. The two bored guards at the checkpoint barely lift their eyes to look at them, and then we’re on the swaying Chachabamba footbridge, white water roaring below.

Ryan’s already in trouble as we begin our ascent up a steep, grassy hillside surrounded by a vast mountain range on all sides, snow lying on distant peaks. From valley to valley, I see dark storm clouds, the occasional flash of lightning. It’s only just after nine in the morning, but we’re moving through a strange kind of grey half-light and even
I’m
having trouble making out Ryan below us. He’s fallen so far back that another tour group coming up behind has almost overtaken him.