Fury (4 page)

Who could love me the way I am? Nameless, stateless, flawed.

‘I have no name,’ I say, my voice bleak. ‘And there is a legion after me who would reduce you to blood. For what it’s worth,’ I whisper, ‘I feel it, too. Felt it, almost from the moment I met you. When we’re together, I feel so much less … alone. And I would like nothing better than to lose myself in the human world with you, but that’s a dream, Ryan. And I’m done dreaming. I’m awake now. Now and forever. And where I’m going, you cannot follow.’

A demonic shriek shatters the night, so close beside us that I surge upright in fear, only to have the entire world tilt through its axis as I struggle to retain my balance.

Ryan is on his feet immediately, steadying me.

He’s so tall, taller than me, built like a line-backing angel.

I’m still Irina’s height, still mortal-sized. I can’t seem to find the energy, or the will, to dominate the space I occupy, to reclaim my true nature. There doesn’t seem any point. I’m no “better” than he is. Not any more.

I struggle in Ryan’s arms, but he won’t let me push him away. Maybe I imagine it but, for a second, it seems as if my outline ripples, like Ryan’s clasping a creature made of fog, I can see the ground below my bare feet, through them.

‘Don’t you
dare
!’ Ryan cries, his grip momentarily tightening on emptiness as I struggle to draw myself together. ‘Don’t you dare disappear on me again. I know what we have is impossible to rationalise, but once I met you, my old life was over anyway. I was dead inside. All that stuff, that Ryan, they were already gone, already past. Only
this
matters.
Don’t leave me
.’

I want to lean into him and draw upon his solidity, his indescribable, peculiar energy that I could pick out in a crowd, anywhere, but I’m falling again, falling.

I’m caving in, I’m vertigo.

‘All that exists,’ I gasp, as if saying the words will somehow protect me, ‘is this present.’

It’s something I told myself when I was Irina and believed that Luc was dead, and I’d never see Ryan again. Maybe it’s the only thing capable of being true in a world like this one; that the moment we inhabit, is all we can ever really be sure of.

‘That’s it, that’s it exactly!’ he pleads. ‘All I want from you is more
time
.’

The laugh that escapes me has the quality of hysteria. ‘We need to carve something out for
us
,’ Ryan exclaims. ‘The big guy with the big sword said so himself. He ordered me to take care of you in the human world, which tells me that your time on earth is nowhere near over. And he thinks I can help. Somehow.’

The screwed up look on Ryan’s face is almost comical and it hits me that he’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever known. Then the world begins to spin in earnest and I feel his hold on me slip again.

‘We take this moment, this
now
, and we draw it out, we turn it into a chain of time that will keep us together,’ Ryan insists.

When I reply, my voice is almost inaudible. ‘The “big guy with the big sword” is the Archangel Michael, and he overestimates his jurisdiction where I’m concerned. I’ve been taking care of myself in the human world for a very long time without recourse to anyone. Every time They put me into someone new? It all came down to
me
: me doing the starting over, me making things up as I went along. Being with me will only get you killed. I can’t be responsible for losing you, the way I almost lost you tonight.’

The sense of vertigo is so bad now that Ryan seems fuzzy, as if I’m seeing him through a veil of light.

‘You’re already responsible,’ Ryan implores. ‘I’m a marked man. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. With you, or without you, I’m marked for death. And I’ll take my chances
with
you. In any life, given the same choice,
I would choose you
. Are you hearing me?’

Ryan could be a being of fire, light is scattering off his skin. I reach out and touch his face with my fingers, feeling the energy spike beneath the surface of him, his iron self-control wavering. So much passion in him, so much life, all for me.

‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ I whisper through the pain sweeping through me. ‘And it won’t work. This isn’t a game, Ryan.
Run
, or
die
. Those are the choices. Am I worth that much to you?’

‘I’ve got your back,’ Ryan vows fervently, ‘if you’ve got mine. You know it.’

He wraps his arms around me as if he would bind my energy to him. And the bright glow that my skin gives off seems to bleed into him, or draw tight around him, so he glows brighter to my dazzled eyes. It’s as if we are bound together by light. Light is refracting off us onto the walls, the worn handrails, the uneven stone stairs, like some kind of chemical reaction is happening.

Ryan’s breath is warm upon my face. ‘Now, are you done throwing out challenges?’ he asks. ‘Maybe I lied a little when I said that all I wanted was your time, because I’m greedy for whatever you can give me. I’ll steal what I can. Because there’s something I’ve had to wait more than one lifetime to do, and I’m not waiting any more …’

Before I can divine his intention, shore up my defences, Ryan tips my face up to his, curving me into the hard line of his body, lowering his lips swiftly to mine.

My eyes fly wide then shiver closed.

I am love, and desire, and fear.

I’m suffused with a roaring heat
.

Those things are inside Ryan, too, surging beneath his skin.

We are two disparate energies colliding and the light around us, in us, through us, seems to build and build.

So potent a mix are we that the mere act of being, of holding myself together, becomes untenable and I shatter into a billion pieces, into ragged motes of light, like an exploding star, instantly dispersing.

Ryan is buffeted by a blast wave of heat and energy, it ruffles his dark hair, his clothing, and he’s left to grasp the empty air, howling just one word, ‘
Mercy!
’

Thinking me already fled, gone, departed, as I have done so many times before.

I am the hurricane that was promised.

I am boundless.

There’s nothing to stop me penetrating these stone walls and go slipstreaming into the night.

I am insubstantial, yet indivisible.

I feel inviolate, all-powerful.

It is as it should be. It is as it was
.

But something holds me here. It’s like an itch, a small and nagging cut dragging at my attention.

I know it. I can almost taste it: some messy human emotion I should put behind me forever, but cannot now ignore.

It’s grief, Ryan’s grief radiating into the icy air.

To every action, a reaction; it’s something my people dismiss. We look down on all those below us and think that our actions, our inactions, have no consequence.

But mortals live in a storm of consequence, and Ryan has been hurt enough for one lifetime.

Somehow, that thought draws me back.

I am clumsy and unpractised, and my whole being yearns to be and remain weightless light, but still I pull my fractured energy together like a swarm of angry bees. I force myself to become a perfect simulacrum of a human being once more: fleshy, dense, solid.

Then I’m facing him again, and Ryan’s eyes are still wide with horror and sorrow. He’s close enough to touch, but neither of us makes a move towards the other. Now he knows what I have known all along: that touching is dangerous. It invites the unwanted.

I see suddenly, blindingly, how love and loss are two sides of the same coin. To know one is to know the other, even before it has come to pass.

Ryan pushes his hair out of his eyes. ‘I thought you were … gone.’ His voice cracks on the word. ‘This time for good. It’s never going to be easy for us, is it?’

I shake my head.

‘You scare me, Ryan Daley. Even more than those demons outside that scream for my death. How is it that I want what you want? I’ve spent an eternity feeling powerless.
Love
did that to me — robbed me of all control. I never expected to feel this way again. I don’t want to
feel
.’

‘Neither did I,’ Ryan rasps, ‘because feeling anything at all was dangerous. If I let myself feel, then maybe I’d have to believe what everyone was saying — that Lauren was dead. But from the moment I laid eyes on “Carmen”,
you
kept getting under my skin. At first, all you did was irritate the hell out of me, bailing me up that way outside my house, inviting yourself along for the ride when all I wanted was to be left alone. But that irritation turned into curiosity, which turned into something else, becoming this chain of, of … feeling that brought me here. I dropped everything for you. I veered left. And I’d do it again in a second. That’s what “feeling” does. It tells you you’re
alive
, it gives things … I don’t know, proper
meaning
. You’re still trying to maintain some veneer of independence? Toughness? Do words like that even apply to you? But I see through it, Mercy. I see through
you
. You’re not that different from me after all, under your armour. Crumbs, Mercy, that’s all I’m after. Just crumbs. It’s not a lot to ask for.’

Ryan steps forward and tries to catch hold of me again and it’s reflex what I do next.

I slam up a force-field between us, a seamless web of energy the way K’el reminded me was possible. And Ryan hits it with just his outstretched fingers. A crackle of intense, blue-white light is thrown up at the point of contact and he rocks back on his heels, cradling his stinging fingertips in his other hand.

He stares at me, wounded, before laughing ruefully. ‘No sudden moves from now on, I promise, if you promise me something back.’

‘What?’ I say warily. ‘I suck at keeping promises, remember?’

‘Just promise,’ he says, ‘that you’ll take me with you this time. You won’t just fade out and leave me behind again. Just let me be with you, just stay for a while, that’s all I’m asking.’

It hits me once more, that he’s the sweetest thing. But I don’t move any closer, though I want him more than anything.

What I want is impossible. And Ryan’s given me the answer to this mess, the only answer that makes any sense.

The thought of what I’m about to say fills me with an ache so powerful that a terrible sense of dissolution returns.

‘You might not need me,’ he insists hotly. ‘You might not want me, but you’ve got me.’

That force-field, that protective shell I’ve cast about myself, I let it drop. I hold my right hand out to Ryan, and both of us can see that it’s shaking.

Hesitantly, he takes my fingers, then grips them tight, as if he will never let me go. I have to tune out everything I can feel beneath his skin, everything about him that unsettles every particle of my being, in order to speak.

‘It’s the one thing I can’t do, Ryan:
stay
.’

He shakes his head violently and I whisper, ‘Hear me out,
please
.

‘I never took Luc’s side in his rebellion against God. I was exiled before I could be forced to choose. So now — call it luck, call it chance, call it accident, because I will
never
call it fate — I remain
elohim
. Not demon. I still have a choice. And there’s a way to keep Luc in Hell forever; a way that will mean placing duty before desire the way the Eight always have, and always will. I have to leave, don’t you see? It’s something that part of me yearns for. I’ve been stumbling towards the light for the longest time, and now?
I might actually return
. I might actually be able to go home. If Luc can’t find me, he’ll always be contained here.’

Ryan releases me, shocked. ‘You’d just abandon us to him? Aren’t we worth saving?’

Such a tiny word,
us
, conveying so many things. ‘But Luc would be trapped forever,’ I say pleadingly. ‘He’d never be able to leave, never be able to turn everything beyond your world —’

‘Into a wasteland,’ Ryan says fiercely, ‘the way he’d do here if he ever discovered you were gone.’

‘This place is already a wasteland,’ I murmur. ‘
One law for the lion and the ox is oppression
. That’s just the way it is. How things were laid down.’

The words slip out before I realise I’ve uttered them.

Ryan reels back from me as if I’ve punched him in the throat.

‘So just
go
,’ he chokes. ‘Throw us to the lions, or whatever. Save yourself, your home. Just forget I laid myself on the line. Forget I spoke, that I pleaded with you on behalf of my entire
species
.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I say quietly.

‘Oh, I understand very well,’ he replies. ‘
The greatest good for the greatest number
, right? They hammered that one home in sociology one year. We humans are … what, just one rung above the animals? But when Luc takes out his vengeance on all of us because you slipped through his fingers, just remember what
you
sacrificed, Mercy, because it will all be your doing. Having more than a little personal experience of sacrifice, I’m guessing you won’t want that on your conscience. It’s a coward’s way out. And you’re no
coward
,’ he spits. ‘Or do I have that wrong?’

Every word hits me like a blow, and I’m hardly surprised when we are rocked by another blast wave of heat and energy that knocks us both off our feet.

Sprawled where I am on the ground, I only have enough time to raise my head before the Archangel Nuriel steps out of a vortex that seems to have opened upon the stairs just above us.

She’s so beautiful.

Her long, dark, wavy hair snakes out around her shoulders as if she’s a living Medusa. Her dark eyes are wide and unseeing, and she seems made of lightning; so bright in outline I can barely discern her form, the sleeveless garment she wears. She’s weaponless, and there’s an expression on her face that looks almost … vulnerable. All of the joy I’ve always associated with her, is missing.

Ryan’s face is tilted up towards her, enraptured, and I know the same look is upon my face.