Fury

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?’