Fury

could’ve been describing you.’

‘Free to bail,’ I remind him quietly.

He coughs a little as he opens his eyes and I see that they’ve grown unfocused. ‘Can’t,’ he slurs. ‘Can’t escape fate.’

I give him a shake, appalled at his words. ‘I’m not your fate, Ryan. I’m your choice. Remember that when everything is going to hell around us.’

I’m not sure if he can hear me any longer. I pull his arm across my shoulders again and we stagger forward, trailing that lone woman who shoulders her stripy tote as if it contains all of the sorrows of the world. I don’t get any sense of what she’s thinking, and I’m glad of it, because all I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste is Ryan’s bone-deep exhaustion. His eyes are fixed on the ground below his stumbling feet and he can’t stop shaking. If it weren’t for me, he would already have fallen. He needs things I can’t give him. We have to hurry, though doing things Ryan’s way — the human way — is always going to take longer.

I march him on ruthlessly while I warm his icy hands in mine. I describe all the buildings we’re passing in a low, cheerful voice while I scan the rooftops continuously for any hint of demonsign. Ryan eventually ceases to respond, and my sense of quiet desperation grows.

As we turn right into Via Ulrico Hoepli, I catch glimpses of faces and forms moving about at upper-storey windows. This late-rising city is beginning to stir. I get the sudden buzz of a middle-aged man in an elegant overcoat, scarf and suit exiting a coffee shop just across the street, something about the end of the world in his thoughts. Then I pick up the ambient thoughts of a couple of men wrangling a new armchair into a delivery van outside a furniture store we’re passing. They hate each other, hate the armchair, and can’t understand why, after everything that’s happened in this city, they still have to deliver it. Today.

I turn left up Via San Paolo, with Ryan braced tightly against me, his every footstep dragging. As we move along the upper edge of the Piazza della Scala, I begin to pick up a tangle of human energy: thoughts expressed in a multitude of languages, emotions that grow louder and more insistent the closer we get, amplifying in timbre, volume and complexity, all the time.

Then I see the crowd of shouting people gathered around a police roadblock at the southern end of the square, a larger crowd milling around another roadblock on the western side.

Something else across the square makes me freeze in my tracks. Ryan sways against me, exhausted, his fringe of straight, dark hair falling forward over his eyes, body on autopilot. I’m staring directly at the northern face of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the building we’ve been trying so hard to go around. Two banners hang one on either side of the giant archway that serves as an alternative entry point to the vast shopping arcade. The left banner is badly damaged; you can barely make out the playful model with the striking eyes and sky-high beehive wearing an evening gown from the 1960s in Giovanni Re’s signature red, rosso Re. But the right banner is largely intact, and I stare at the mesmerisingly powerful image of a warrior-sorceress with her burnt caramel-coloured hair wild and loose, wearing a long, flowing gown of molten gold, her hands wrapped around the pommel of a bejewelled sword. I gaze into Irina Zhivanevskaya’s huge, smoky, smouldering eyes and feel for a disorienting moment as if I’m staring into a giant mirror, so recently have I fled her body.

I’ll take it as a sign that I’m doing the right thing.

The air smells of burning. If I concentrate hard enough, I can actually taste ash on the air. As Ryan and I stagger on past the roadblock facing onto Via Santa Margherita, the handsome, copper-skinned, hard-faced policemen behind it wave their arms dismissively, shouting, ‘Go back! Go back!’ in Italian, in English, as people try to argue their way into the restricted zone.

The street we’re moving down now is packed with banks and insurance houses that occupy elegant, towering mansions standing shoulder to shoulder. A few people begin filtering past us, afflicting me with their thoughts, their random energies. The dark-haired woman is only a little ahead of us now, and her gait has grown so slow and torturous that we finally overtake her.

‘Not much further,’ I tell Ryan distractedly as I glance at the woman’s shuttered face in profile, note her youthful features and strangely clouded blue eyes.

It hits me a few feet later. The wrongness about her. The way her old-woman shuffle doesn’t sync with her smooth skin and shining hair, her robust frame and fashion-forward clothes. I stop and look back at her over my shoulder, wondering why I get no sense of her at all: of what she’s thinking, or feeling, or even any sense of her peculiar life force, her human energy. What I do feel is something incredibly faint, but insistent. Almost … familiar, that’s setting up a distant, almost painful hum in my bones.

Then, without warning, the woman crumples forward onto the footpath. The palest, gleaming blur, like a mobile patch of sunlight, seems to shriek away from her still figure — as if ejected, or rejected — darting and rebounding off all the faces of the buildings, the street signs and manhole covers, before fleeing back in the direction we’ve just come from. It’s rapidly lost to sight.

What I want to do is run, but I don’t. Not yet, because I need to be sure.

I tell Ryan to wait, and force myself to walk calmly towards the woman lying facedown on the pavement. I kneel beside her and turn her over, relieved to see she’s still breathing. I place my hands against her chalk-white face and she gives a great choking breath, her eyes opening. I’m sure that the fear and panic in her eyes are mirrored in my own.

She looks up at me as I cradle her head off the ground. Her blue eyes are clear again, though huge, in her pale face. ‘Where am I?’ she asks in Italian, and when I answer her gently in her own language, she says, bewildered, ‘But what am I doing here?’

People have seen us; they hurry towards us from both sides of the street. I leave the woman in the care of a small, gesticulating crowd and return to Ryan, who is standing exactly where I left him, with his head bowed, hands in the pockets of his jacket, feet planted shoulder width apart to stop himself from toppling over. All I can do is hug him to me tightly, in horror.

The malakhim are blunt-force instruments with none of the subtlety of the elohim about them; so-called lesser angels, they were created to do our bidding, and they will always leave signs that my kind can read. That woman’s flesh contained a signature, and I am certain it was left by the same tormented creature I came across when I was Lela, and again when I was Irina — something that was once angelic, but is now no more than a shattered remnant. Weak as it is, can it somehow still sense me? It came to Milan with a warning for me from Michael, about Luc. What warning does it bring me now?

As Ryan and I enter Via Victor Hugo, a sense of deja vu returns so strongly that my eyes fly at once to a three-storey, grey stone building across the road. I study its graceful Palladian roofline intently, half-hoping to see K’el still outlined there by storm clouds of such brilliance they could be a portal to another world. But of course he’s not. The pale blue sky is cloudless from end to end and I have to take the sudden anguish I’m feeling and drown it deep within me, like the light I have hidden away, that is the essence of being elohim.

I see her before she sees me. She’s standing beside the bonnet of a familiar-looking black limousine that has more doors than a normal car and rides a little too low to the ground because it’s armoured. She’s arguing fiercely with someone, as usual, because she’s tough and resourceful and it’s her job to stand up to tyrants and crazies on a daily basis. The bruising along one side of her face is still a livid purplered, and there’s a nasty red weal on her neck, like a burn, but she looks surprisingly well for someone who somehow survived a celestial firefight inside the Galleria.

A passing car draws her gaze, and her eyes widen when she takes in Ryan and me standing still and silent across the road. She recognises him first, of course, because I’m a stranger to her. She’s never seen me before, not like this.

She steps without hesitation around the front of the limo in her artfully studded, black patent-leather biker jacket, her precision-cut, glossy China-girl hair blowing across her eyes in the stiff breeze. She shoves it back impatiently and shouts, ‘Ryan? Ryan Daley?’

When he doesn’t answer, doesn’t even lift his eyes to acknowledge her, she looks at me, really looks at me, and says, tentatively, ‘Mercy?’

We cross the road towards her, and she tells the scowling, balding, suit-wearing gorilla she was arguing with that he just has to wait, she’s got no orders. ‘It’s just too bloody bad.’ Then she moves towards me briskly and slings Ryan’s other arm around her shoulders without me having to tell her to.