Fury

our car, as if pleading for help. And that’s when I see it. The shape of him. The shape of the shadowy stencil rendered on that shopfront wall.

‘Did you see him?’ I whisper to Ryan. ‘The streets are filled with people just like him.’

I turn and kneel up on my seat to look out the rear window at the man standing by the wall, as if anchored there by his pain. His eyes follow our car in numb supplication. I point him out to Ryan, who is kneeling on his seat, too, scanning the war zone we’re leaving behind us.

‘What people?’ he asks. ‘All I can see are search crews. But it doesn’t look like there’s anyone left alive to find out there.’

And then horror seizes me fully and I understand what that man is. What all those drifting, dazed and voiceless people are, so divorced from all the frantic activity around them. They are those that Azraeil had no use for, those who were not blameless. And that mark on the wall? It was the agony of one man’s passing, caught there in his own life’s blood.

It’s a ghost town, I think, sickened. As it was in Hiroshima, as it was in Nagasaki.

And it is Luc’s doing, all of it.

I will bring you down, I hear him say again in that dark and smoky voice that used to play havoc with every sense I possess. Believe it.

7

The back wheels of our limo grind and scream uselessly, unable to get traction as the driver crunches the gears, trying to accelerate out of a giant pothole within sight of the towering gates that guard Villa Nicolin.

Our police escort salutes us from his motorbike and roars away.

I pop the lock on my door and tug on Ryan’s hand. ‘Come on,’ I say, jumping out of the shuddering limo, the elegant dresses upon their padded hangers hooked over the fingers of one hand.

The pothole looks recent. When I stare at its clean edges, I imagine that I see the faintest trace of phosphorescence, of melted, cauterised earth. Nuriel must have fought Luc so badly.

Ryan shoulders the daypack and we walk up to black wrought-iron gates. They are at least twenty feet high and set into the centre of a towering stone facade built to resemble the entry to a medieval keep. Dusk is falling, and as we draw closer, automatic sensors flood the area immediately around us with a dazzling light. Four sleek, fine-boned shapes materialise out of nowhere and throw themselves at the gates, thrusting their muzzles at us through the bars, teeth snapping, foaming and yowling.

Ryan yells, ‘Holy crap!’ and leaps backwards, but I remain where I am, watching the light strike the glistening, bared fangs only inches from my fingers.

‘Italian greyhounds,’ I say absently as I turn and press the buzzer on the intercom panel set into the gate. There is no nameplate on it, no address.

A faint metallic chiming sound comes back at us from the built-in speaker. The camera lens that’s set into the centre of the panel swivels minutely in my direction. From the corner of my eye, I see Ryan slip on the fake spectacles, adjust the cap on his head so that it sits low over his eyes.

The intercom speaker suddenly crackles into life. ‘Business?’ a woman’s voice says pleasantly. I place the accent a second later as Irish.

‘Juliana Agnelli-Re sent us with the gowns for Miss St Alban,’ I say smoothly, holding the dresses up in front of the lens.

Ryan and I turn as, with a squeal of tyres, the limo shoots out of the pothole and does a rapid U-turn before burning back the way we came. Ryan runs the fingers of his right hand through the ends of my loose hair, and I give him a stern look, twisting it back into a knot behind my neck with my free hand. It stays there.

He grins. ‘Neat trick.’

‘Focus,’ I reply repressively.

The intercom remains silent, and I look over the heads of the baying, scrabbling dogs at the estate. The wide driveway — paved in smoothly rounded, dark and light stones that mark out an intricate pattern — seems to go for a mile past gently playing fountains and manicured lawns before curving around the side of an imposing three-storey Palladian-style villa with cream-coloured walls and dozens of windows framed by forest green shutters. It’s a house with scores of rooms and chimneys, entered by way of a grand central portico supported by stone pillars. The huge carriage lamps on either side of the front door suddenly come on, as do all of the floodlights lining the driveway. Immediately, the sky seems darker, heightening the impression of Villa Nicolin being a kind of fortress against the outside world.

‘Tomaso will be right with you,’ the woman’s voice says through the speaker.

Minutes later, an olive-skinned man built along the lines of a silverback gorilla, taller even than Ryan, in a sleekly fitted three-piece suit, with short, greying hair and an earpiece, approaches the gate. He looks us up and down expressionlessly, before looking at the dogs going mad at his heels, drenched in sweat.

He drags the dogs away by their collars around the side of the house, then returns and points some kind of remote unlocking device at the gates. They swing away from us almost soundlessly, and as we enter, the man indicates wordlessly that we should submit to a search. He sets the gates closing again with the remote, before pocketing it and patting Ryan and me down individually for weapons, the touch of his hands feather light and impersonal. Beckoning for the dresses, he wrings each one lightly, then rummages through the daypack. Finally, with a jerk of his head, he indicates that we should follow him up the drive.

As we walk along the pebbled roadway towards the villa, we can still hear the faint howling of the dogs. I know they will continue until they are hoarse from screaming, or can no longer sense me. Ryan’s dogs had reacted to me in exactly the same way. It must be my essential inhumanity that they discern, my utter alien-ness.

‘I bet they’re jumpy from the fires,’ Ryan says hastily, but Tomaso doesn’t even turn his head to look at us. Just keeps walking swiftly, almost silently.

It’s almost second nature to me now to try to tune out any trace of mortal energy around me, and little by little I’m getting better at it — I can choose to accept what I wish to accept and discount the rest. But I let myself see, for a moment, how this man must see us. I get no sense of alarm, no curiosity as to why the dogs are behaving so out of character for their breed. He believes we are what we appear to be — troublesome young foreigners on some frivolous errand — and I relax a little as I take in my surroundings.

The villa is set on a steep hill above a vast garden that runs down in immaculately maintained tiers to the lake’s shore far below. The level below the forecourt features a formal parterre garden built around a series of small circular ponds. Below that, there’s a grove of miniature citrus trees scattered with curved stone benches. Below that again, a classical statuary garden filled with the frozen forms of nymphs and satyrs. Running water features cascade down either side of the wide central staircase that leads to the portico of the main house and bisect the top three tiers of the formal garden. There’s also a cleverly concealed winding driveway that connects the main house to a much smaller, sleekly modern one-storey guesthouse of glass and steel at the foot of the hill. A high stone wall with another pair of tall, black, wrought-iron gates set into it separates the property from a narrow street that runs along its lowest boundary.

‘Holy crap!’ Ryan mouths again, looking around. He points out a long, narrow jetty jutting into the lake opposite the lower gates of the property. A large cruiser and a couple of smaller motorised runabouts are moored to it. The jetty had caught my interest, too, almost immediately.

‘Worth checking out,’ I mouth at him behind Tomaso’s broad back.

He nods to show he’s understood, reflected light glinting off the lenses of his fake glasses.

As we step onto the large, complicated, Renaissance-style symbol picked out in polished black and white stones just below the front portico, a slight woman in a long-sleeved white dress and white bib-fronted apron, with curly, jaw-length blonde hair and ruddy cheeks, opens the tall, heavily carved front door to the house. When she sees us, a smile lightens the anxious expression on her thin face. She walks towards us, hands outspread in welcome.

‘Thank goodness you’ve reached us safely,’ she says in her lilting voice. ‘When Signora Agnelli-Re’s office called to let us know you were already on your way, well, I …’ A shadow crosses her face before she adds