Fury

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 deja 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.

I take my hand away from Ryan’s mouth and he starts yelling. ‘Don’t you ever —’ Then his shoulders sag and he mumbles, ‘“Don’t” isn’t really a word that applies to you, is it?’

‘It’s all new to me, too,’ I say softly into his exhausted face, ‘just having you here. Till now, it’s always been me fighting some impossible corner on my own. I’ve been battling my own set of major …’

‘Adjustment issues?’ Ryan mutters.

‘Something like that,’ I say ruefully. ‘You’ve noticed?’

‘And I thought it was the effect I was having on you.’ His laughter turns into a fit of coughing.

I shake him gently. ‘We’ll try and do things your way for a while, okay? We’re going to find you somewhere safe to rest.’

It starts off as an empty platitude, but then a tiny idea takes root in my head. It seems so outlandish at first that it couldn’t possibly work. But if it did? It could mean help for him and help for me. And I’m more than willing to take advice these days, provided it’s solid. I’ve been on my own for long enough.

Ryan shivers, weaving a little on the spot. ‘So cold,’ he says absently.

There’s a deserted underpass across the street, bisected by a zebra crossing; an empty bar beside it with a torn, maroon awning flapping a little in the breeze. Melted run-off thunders through subterranean pipes somewhere far below our feet. I look into the distance. Via Agnello, with its pizzerias and public car parks, cheap souvenir shops and menswear stores, didn’t look like this when I was last here. But I know with unerring certainty where we are and where we have to go. I point up the narrow, one-way street in the direction the woman is walking.

‘Think you can go just a little bit further?’ I say brightly.

I’m lying through my teeth, of course. We’re going to have to go the long way around to avoid the mess around the Galleria, but Ryan doesn’t need to know that. And we have to hustle. The streets around here are an illogical warren laid down over centuries, but people will still come looking for evidence of the crazy turisti who leapt off the terrace of one of the most prestigious department stores in town. They’ll be looking for body parts. It’s only a matter of time.

Ryan closes his eyes, and I feel him shivering uncontrollably inside his clothes. ‘You’re like some kind of learner archangel,’ he mutters. ‘Like that guy who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. That’s you. They