Fury (6 page)

‘It doesn’t matter, Ryan,’ I whisper, reaching out and taking his hand unerringly in the darkness. ‘Right now, I couldn’t do this “magic” without you, and that’s the truth.’

He gives my hand an answering squeeze, and I feel his relief.

‘So you’ve still got my back?’ I remind him sternly of his words.

‘Always,’ he replies without hesitation. ‘Even when I can’t see a damned thing.’

I laugh and pull him to his feet, and he’s suddenly
take charge
, like the Ryan I remember from Paradise.

‘We need to get our bearings,’ he says, gripping me tightly, not letting me withdraw. ‘Work out how we’re supposed to get out of here without attracting any attention. But this place won’t open for hours. So, first, I want to see how far we’ve come, where we crash-landed.’

‘
You
crash-landed,’ I say sheepishly, turning him in the direction of the roof.

Ryan’s usually possessed of a natural, athlete’s grace; strength in every sense of the word. But the darkness has robbed him of any certainty and he stumbles as we begin to climb up the winding, uneven staircase in the dark. Even our linked fingers, my own unfaltering eyesight, can’t make him see where the handholds, steps and landings begin and end. In the light, the staircase defies logic. In the dark, to human eyes, it’s an impossibility.

‘We need to get back to the lakeside town I saw in my dream,’ I say over the laboured sound of Ryan’s breathing, the scuff of his boot heels on the stone. ‘I think I know where she is; there was a villa there, a large estate, with a smaller outbuilding of some kind, and a pier, on the water. I can still see it all in my head. We’ll work our way from there, okay?’

The plan sounds better than it is. Ryan can’t know that, at this point, there are way more holes than plan. What town? What villa? Where do I even begin to locate them when all I have are visual cues I picked up in a dream in the dead of night?

I’m pounded by another sudden wave of dizziness, and am so shaken, overwhelmed and nauseated that I think I will pass out. I don’t think I’ve ever been more afraid of the task ahead, and it makes me miss a step.

Even sightless as he is, Ryan catches me before I fall, his strong hands grasping me around the waist unerringly.

He turns me to him clumsily. ‘Forget what I said before,’ he breathes, feeling for the contours of my face. ‘Glow or no glow, whatever you look like, you’re still beautiful, and I’d know you anywhere.’

In the dark, Ryan can’t see me searching his face. He can’t see in my eyes all the fear I feel for him. Before I can change my mind, I reach up and pull his head down to me, kiss him lightly, lingeringly, upon the lips, before drawing back.

I ignore the lick of fire that thrills through me like live current that seems to whisper:
Forbidden
.

It’s just a kiss
, I tell myself fiercely. I must have done so much worse, in my time.

Beneath my hands, Ryan is shocked into stillness.

What I feel for him is so different from what I felt for Luc. Loss, sorrow, regret: these things are already built into every word we utter, every glance we share, accompanying us moment by moment, like spectres at a feast. They only serve to heighten the complex, hard-won love that has somehow flowered between us. People say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But I
do
know. What we have is precious and rare, and so utterly terrifying.

I can tell that Ryan hadn’t really expected me to kiss him again. Not after what happened the last time. He’d actually meant what he’d said about crumbs being enough. He’d been teasing me when he talked of
tolerance levels
and
comfort zones
.

His love is so humbling that I’m suddenly glad he can’t see me.

‘Maybe that’s the secret to working “us” out,’ I laugh awkwardly to cover my terror, ‘taking it one tiny step at a time.’

‘Here’s to more steps like that one,’ Ryan answers shakily.

‘You deserve so much more than this,’ I murmur. ‘Than me.’

I can’t bring myself to tell him I love him, for fear it’ll all go to hell the way Luc and I did. I’m cursed, and maybe I always will be.

‘I couldn’t even dream up someone like you,’ Ryan mutters, his hands tightening on me, drawing me closer, wanting more, in the human way of things.

But then I hear the sound of something mechanical, far, far below us. A noise so faint it could be the sound a pebble makes hitting the bottom of a dry well.

‘What is it?’ Ryan says, confused, as something primal flares in me, some instinct for danger.

Fear propels me instantly into motion. I start moving upwards again, hauling him along by the front of his leather jacket.

‘
C’è qualcuno?
’ a man says below, faintly but clearly in Italian.
Is anyone there?

‘
Cosa c’è?
’ another voice replies sharply, also in Italian, also male.
What is it?

‘Noises — listen,’ the first man replies.

Ryan’s footfalls, his laboured breathing, sound so terribly loud.

‘I hear nothing; you’re jumping at shadows,’ the second voice says dismissively after a pause.

‘I tell you, I heard something,’ the first man insists.

‘Pietro’s voice is loud enough to wake the dead,’ comes the reply. ‘He’s probably on his way to meet us with the others.’

There’s the faint sound of tapping. The noises move steadily closer, and I’m starting to pick up the interior buzz the two men give out, as if each carries a hive inside him: of thought, feeling, imagery, energy.

‘Ryan,’ I say, my voice low and desperate. ‘You have to
hurry
. We can’t be seen here. We can’t be questioned.’

‘By who?’ Ryan says, exasperated, unable to hear the echo of footsteps from below. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I tell you, there’s someone up there!’ The first voice is insistent. ‘
Pietro
?’ he calls.

‘We can’t be found here, Ryan!’ I hiss, exploding back into motion. ‘I won’t allow myself to be trapped again.’

We stumble towards the doorway that leads out onto the lower level of the roof. As we exit beneath the stone lintel onto the north-facing walkway, I’m immediately hit with a sensation of vertigo so powerful, I have to lean against the inner wall, let Ryan take in the jaw-dropping view on his own until the world ceases to buckle around me.

When my sight grows clearer, I see a faint pink line streaking the far horizon, growing steadily all the time, eating away the edges of night, the roofline of the Galleria smouldering to our left. Though there are miles of open sky all around me, I feel like a rat in a cage.

‘We have to hide!’ I tell Ryan pleadingly.

Ryan doesn’t turn, still awed by the whole of Milan spread out before him. ‘Not before we get our bearings, Merce, there’s still time. There’s no one up here and a million places to hide.’

He tries to draw me towards a double row of intricate stone lacework, the stones set one behind the other like shark’s teeth, that forms a kind of natural barrier to the dizzying drop below.

‘Come see,’ he says, leaning out, looking down. ‘It’s so beautiful. You’re never going to fall. Not when you’re with me.’

I shake my head, look back fearfully at the doorway we just came through. But Ryan takes me by the hands and draws me in front of him, crossing his arms around my waist, pulling me against him so firmly that I cannot move, cannot fall.

His cheek is against mine as he says, ‘Look. Just look. It won’t erase what he did to you — nothing could ever do that — but every time you face down your fear is an act of
defiance
.’

Just for a moment, against my better judgment, I let myself lean into Ryan. And though I must close my eyes briefly to overcome a chill horror at the distance we are from the ground, little by little I find myself gazing further outward, taking in the march of rainwashed streets and buildings that appear to crowd right up to the horizon in every direction. Milan seems to radiate outwards from the Duomo as if the cathedral is the city’s literal heart.

I turn in his arms and point shakily to the north, at the line of hills I see there, purple in the wintry light, the jagged line of mountains rising behind them. ‘That’s where we need to be.’

I peer down at the northern edge of the Piazza del Duomo so far below. Immediately to the Galleria’s right, opposite us, stands an undamaged stone building roughly the same height, with a series of imposing arches marking the ground-level entryway. Solid and austere, it has a modern rooftop terrace with a curve-fronted glass and steel structure rising behind it. Both are deserted at this hour. A barrier of live greenery about chest height runs along all three sides of the terrace, and there’s a head-high barrier of glass and steel that stands between the hedge and a collection of outdoor umbrellas and groups of matching tables and chairs, set out in neat rows.

‘Seems close enough to touch, doesn’t it?’ Ryan says, echoing my own thoughts. ‘It’s like we could just step down and take a seat. If you ignore the, uh, massive drop.’

Then time seems to slow, and speed up, at the same time
.

For I see three men appear on the stairs at the far end of the walkway, all dressed in plain, black, heavy robes and shapeless black overcoats, a small stain of white at the base of each man’s throat. They are framed in a succession of flying buttresses with identical rectangular doorways set beneath them, each doorway cut to the exact same dimensions as the next; the whole vista so detailed, so dreamlike, it could have been lifted from a work by Escher. The old men stop dead at the sight of us, just standing there. The one in the lead gives a shout.

I feel Ryan’s arms go rigid around me as he sees them for the first time.

‘
State lì
! Stop! We would talk with you!’ the priest says, flinging one hand out towards us.

My head fills with the sound of their distinct energies, their peculiar human signatures, drawing closer and getting noisier as they move towards us along the walkway. I take in the terrifying drop before me — almost one hundred and fifty feet down — and feel the chill wind of vertigo sweep through me, that sensation of falling as if I will never, ever stop.

The elderly priest, arm still outstretched, shouts from the other end of the narrow corridor of stone, ‘
Che vuole con noi?
’
What do you want with us?

‘Pietro? Is that you?’ I hear from inside the stairwell.

I feel that sense of convergence strengthening, the cacophony of five separate living beings moving towards me, all set at different frequencies, concerned with vastly different issues, their thoughts a mixture of the alarmed and the mundane.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan gasps, turning his face in the direction of the new voice, then back towards me. ‘What do we do?’

I turn to face him, grip him fiercely by the arms. ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ I say feverishly. ‘You and me?’

‘You know it is,’ he gasps, ‘but why do you ask?’

His last word turns into a yelp as I grasp him tightly beneath the arms and vault onto a carved stone finial that forms part of the first of the stone barriers. We teeter for an instant as I take in the way the tiled roof drops away from me into the second barrier and then into empty … space.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan yells, unable to process what he’s seeing: the ground so far below. I’m doing the impossible, balancing here, taking the whole of his weight easily when there’s no solid ground beneath his feet, or mine.

But Ryan’s with me, and if he’s with me, I won’t ever fall. That’s what he told me and it’s what I tell myself now.

I turn my head for an instant, the chill breeze lifting the curling ends of my dark hair, my eyes narrowing first on the astonished trio of men clustered at one end of the roof, then on the young man with dark eyes and close-cropped dark hair just emerging from the stairwell to my right.

Then I snap my eyes forward. Look at the place I need to get to, where I need to be. It’s funny how desperation feels a little like love. Makes you do things your conscious mind would never countenance.

But I am what I am, and that means I will always have a choice
.

And then I throw myself into thin air, Ryan held fast in my arms.

‘Mercy!’ he yells again, feeling the magnetic pull of the world beneath us.

Though I am beset by fears that none of my kind has ever faced before, I soar — against gravity, against all reason.

Freedom is all that matters. Freedom, and Ryan.

As I cross the abyss that lies between one solid surface and another, I know that I am power, and that I’m
back
.

I land badly as usual, on the rooftop terrace beyond the double barrier of greenery, glass and steel I’d glimpsed from the roof of the Duomo, almost taking out a row of chairs and tables. One seat teeters for a moment, then makes an iron clanging sound as it falls over. It sounds like an explosion.

We were there, and now we’re here, and it’s only taken seconds. I’m exultant, half-disbelieving, yet also strangely clear-headed. Ryan was right. Every time I face down my fear is an act of defiance that can only make me stronger.

I release my death grip on Ryan, who sways a little on the spot, wordless at feeling a new surface beneath his feet. I look back at the Duomo and see five figures in black gathered beyond the barriers of stone that resemble shark’s teeth. They’re waving their hands, discussing us heatedly. I see the younger one, the one from the stairs, run back up the walkway and disappear. The old priest stares down at us across the chasm, awe and astonishment on his lined face.

‘Where …
are
we?’ Ryan slurs, feeling around for a chair and sitting heavily. ‘When my brain is … working again, you’ll have to tell me what the hell just happened. You have this way of making me … lose my grip on reality. Being with you is like being in a dream —’

‘You can’t wake from?’ I finish softly. ‘Welcome to my world.’

Ryan looks up at me for a moment, as if he’s imprinting my new face, my travelling face, upon his memory, or making his peace with it.

‘Ready?’ I say quietly. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’

Ryan blinks, taking in the silent terrace around us, the overturned chair, his eyes widening as he spies the watching men gathered on the roofline opposite. ‘What are we still doing here!’ he exclaims. ‘Let’s go.’

There’s the sudden wail of an alarm being triggered, then the
snick
of a lock or bolt, a door opening.

I turn my head sharply to see a man in uniform emerging out of the curved structure of steel and glass behind Ryan. The young man is of average height, with a slight frame and receding jawline that makes him seem even younger. Beneath his peaked cap, he’s breathing heavily and nervously training a handgun on me.

Between us, there’s a sea of rain-speckled tables and chairs. He takes in our clothes, our builds, weighing us up. I get snatches of the panicky argument he’s running against himself in his head:
thieves
? he’s thinking.
Or … terrorists
?

Ryan stiffens as I murmur aloud, ‘They’re saying maybe the Galleria was a “terrorist attack”, he thinks we’re armed.’

This is some kind of high-end department store, I realise suddenly, getting a flash of the building’s interior as the man relives the heart-stopping moment he spotted us from the inside, through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

‘Police!’ he calls out shakily in Italian-accented English over the blare of the alarm. ‘Raise the hands.’

I feel his intense fear. He’s only a few months into this job, and he was supposed to go off duty in twenty-two minutes precisely until his commanding officer ordered him to respond to some nonsense from a bunch of priests about people on the roof. I skim all that out of the white noise in his head, and his name, too, because he’s yelling at himself in the third person. Humans are like radio transmitters; it’s hard to think with the air jammed so full of their noise. I know I should be afraid, but for the first time in a very long while, I feel an absolute calm.

‘Vincenzo,’ I say loudly, and the young man gives a start, goes pale, at the mention of his name. ‘You need to let us leave.’

His eyes widen and he shouts, ‘Impossible,
signorina
. Raise the hands.’

Without taking my eyes from Vincenzo’s face, I draw Ryan to his feet. The chair legs scrape a little as he straightens up and turns around slowly. Vincenzo’s expression flickers fearfully as he looks from me to Ryan, now standing side by side. We both have our backs to the barriers now.

Vincenzo moves closer. ‘There is nowhere to run,’ he says anxiously. ‘Raise the hands, or I will be forced to shoot you. Not to kill, you understand,’ he adds almost pleadingly, ‘only to wound.’

Still holding his gaze unwaveringly, I take another step backwards towards the head-high glass wall, the screen of trees behind it, one hand on the sleeve of Ryan’s leather jacket.

‘What are you going to do?’ Ryan mutters, sounding panicky. ‘He’s got a gun. You know what happened last time.’

‘What happened last time happened to Lela,’ I say fiercely. ‘It’s not going to happen to us. I need you to go with whatever I ask you to do. I need you to trust me.’

Before Ryan can reply, a burst of static issues out of a black device clipped to Vincenzo’s belt and I catch the word ‘
localizzato
’; located.

Vincenzo fumbles for the receiver, his gun hand wavering a little. While he’s distracted, Ryan and I keep inching backwards.

‘Not far now,’ I say. ‘When you feel the glass screen behind you, move right. Whatever you do, even if we’re separated, just aim for that corner.’ I see Ryan nod out of the corner of my eye. ‘Wait for me?’

Ryan’s eyes fly to mine, and I remember:
wait for me
were the last words I ever said to him when I was Lela.

A second man in uniform suddenly charges through the door Vincenzo left open. He’s stocky and tall, with a dark, even tan, massive shoulders and arms like sides of beef. One of his big, broad, black-gloved hands is wrapped around a semi-automatic identical to Vincenzo’s. He thrusts Vincenzo aside and snarls: ‘Get down! Get down! Or I shoot the boy first, and then I shoot you.’

I let the flow of his thoughts wash through me and I know he’ll do it. In his world, everything can be solved with guns, with beatings, with violence. He’ll take Ryan down first, because he’s bigger, more of a threat. Then me.

I feel Ryan’s fingers tighten around mine, his palm slick with apprehension. Something dangerous rises in me and I push Ryan back behind me, the fingers of my right hand still linked through his.

‘We’re leaving,’ I say loudly and slowly. ‘We don’t want any trouble. We’re just going to walk away and disappear. You won’t ever see us again.’

I feel Ryan pause for a moment before beginning to move slowly to the right between the glass screen and the outermost row of chairs and tables.

The second officer narrows his eyes, not bothering to reply. Then he points his gun up into the air and pulls the trigger. One shot, skyward. A flock of pigeons explodes upwards, scattering and wheeling in all directions. Even over the shrilling alarm, the gunshot is very loud and seems to reverberate in the air for the longest time. This place will soon be swarming in uniformed men.

‘Ryan!’ I say sharply, looking back at him. ‘Go!’

I see his unwillingness to leave me: it’s in his eyes, in the tense line of his body. Then he releases my fingers, bends low and sprints full tilt towards the eastern corner of the terrace without looking back. In that single, telling gesture is all of his faith in me.

I keep drifting slowly in the same direction, my eyes never leaving the faces of the two policemen, the gap between Ryan and me widening all the time, making myself the target.

‘Get down!’ the bigger one screams, his neck muscles cording, the ropy surface veins along his temples swelling with angry blood. He points his gun at Ryan’s fleeing figure, then at me, uncertain who to take aim at now. ‘Get down!’

From the peripheries of my sight, I catch the outline of my left hand … a flicker. As I raise it to my face, it begins to ache. An argent bloom moves over the skin, envelops the fingers, and that voice inside me, my inner demon, whispers:
Cave. Beware.

The instant I raise my eyes to the second officer’s face, I register the tiny muscles around his eyes tighten, see the sudden flare of his nostrils, his lips go white. As my eyes widen in realisation of what he is about to do, he pulls the trigger — not to wound, but to
kill
— and the air in front of me seems to displace with the heat of a thousand suns.

Both men cry out, fall back. There’s a long, flaming broadsword in my left hand, its blade rippling with a pale blue luminescence. Giant, gleaming wings unfurl across my back, catching the light, intensifying it. As if the shot itself were a call to arms. I look down at my burning left hand upon the sword’s grip, study the elaborate pommel and cross-guards of its double-edged blade, uncertain if I can remember how to wield it. The sword weighs nothing at all, yet it is absolute power, a physical manifestation of my anger, indisputably mine.

As I gaze at its blazing hilt, I see the bullet enter my abdomen almost in slow motion, slicing neatly between two press-studs on the front of my black, goose-down jacket. The surface of my jacket seems to swallow the small, superheated projectile before growing smooth once more. The bullet leaves no trace, makes no impact upon me. But if I were the ordinary human girl he believes me to be, I’d be dead now, dead like Lela. I suffer a genuine moment of
déjà vu
, so terrible, so chilling, that I have to remind myself that this is a different time, a different place, altogether.

I level the tip of my flaming sword blade at the man who shot me as if it were an extension of my arm. ‘On your knees!’ I roar, and my words ring with a sonic after-bite that causes the men to fall to the ground, dropping their weapons, clutching at their ears in agony.

‘Use violence against me again,’ I snarl, ‘
and you will suffer violence
.’

The sword vanishes into my palm, the shining wings dissipating with a shredding, swirling afterglow of energy. I turn towards Ryan and see the black-robed men on the Duomo roof lined up like gaping crows, their hands clasped before them as if in prayer.

I cover the distance to Ryan in seconds, and before he has time to speak, I slide an arm around him and take us up and over the barriers, over the edge of the terrace, across the entire breadth of the Via Santa Radegonda.

This time Ryan just yells in the kind of visceral terror that goes beyond words as I throw us almost blindly through space. We land badly on the rooftop adjacent to the department store, Ryan crying out as I skid over the edge of the stone railing, losing my footing, almost pitching us both headfirst onto the narrow, open walkway running along the front of the building.

As I haul him upright by the hem of his leather jacket, Ryan chokes, ‘Being with you is going to
kill
me!’

I don’t trust myself to answer; it’s the very thing I fear. I just touch his face reassuringly and keep moving, knowing he’ll follow.

There are loud sirens on the Piazza below, as if we have stirred up a nest of wasps that are now questing in our direction. The facade of the building we’re crossing is longer than the one we just left, and irregular. Looking back over one shoulder, I can no longer see the watchers on the Duomo roof. We’ve left the cathedral behind, as we’ve left behind the Duomo Square and its sea of milling officials, flashing lights and cordons.

I’m debating whether or not to just keep going across the rooftops of the city when Ryan passes me unsteadily, heading left around the corner of the building. Surprised, I swerve left, too, almost running into his back.

He turns to me, eyes wide and bloodshot, face pale from exertion. ‘There’s no way down from here,’ he mutters, a clear note of panic in his voice. ‘No way down. I can’t, Mercy, I’m not like you. I don’t think I can keep doing this.’

His eyes dart fearfully across to the next building, his sides heaving. I can see he’s reached some kind of physical limit. He’s only holding himself together, only submitting to the crazy things I’m putting him through, for
me
.

There were always more holes than plan, anyway.

I make my decision almost the instant I say gently, ‘There’s always a way down.’

Though I wish there were an easier way for me to return us quickly to solid ground, I pull Ryan to me tightly with my left arm, cover his mouth with my right hand, and take us up and over the edge of the roof. Down, down, into Via Agnello. I can feel him bellowing through my fingers as we plummet to earth, making no sound as we fall from the sky.

I count six floors on the way down. The windows we pass show rooms full of merchandise, mannequins, furniture, but are otherwise empty of life. It still isn’t opening time in central Milan, luckily for us. But in one hour, two at most, people will be clamouring to be let into the Duomo, the Piazza, into all of the surrounding shops and buildings that remain undamaged by fire, untrammelled by tragedy or death, because life goes on. It can do nothing else. We have to hurry.

The only person on the street below is a woman with a dark, wavy, shoulder-length bob, wearing a fashionable tweed overcoat, skinny jeans and slouchy tan boots, a striped tote bag on one shoulder. She’s heading away from us to the northwest, past a couple of parked cars pointed in the same direction. But as I land, I stumble against a stationary bicycle that’s been leant haphazardly against a parking sign located right by the wall. The commotion as it falls over causes the woman to turn and look at us. We’re clasping onto each other like drunks, Ryan and I, and she stares at us for a while, before turning and moving away again, slowly, jerkily. There’s something awkward about the way she walks, as if she’s in the grip of some kind of degenerative disorder, though she can’t be more than thirty, thirty-five.