Fury

see immediately where Nuriel is being held. There’s a glow deep below the lake’s surface, so faint it would be undetectable to human eyes. Though I’m as insubstantial as air, no more than a faint pocket of turbulence in the night, it still makes my soul shudder to see the quality of the light. It’s numinous, incandescent, but subtly tainted. Not the pale blue luminescence of holy fire at its heart, but the creeping grey of corruption.

Demonlight.

It flares and subsides, pulsing within the dark waters of the lake like some monstrous, beating heart. Strange eddies play upon the lake’s surface, as if the tide beneath runs counter to nature; is being moved by inexplicable forces.

I don’t hesitate. I begin to narrow, to spin, funnelling all of my energy, my anger and fear, into a weapon that may be wielded. I make of myself an arrow, a spear, and fall towards the black surface of the water, piercing its dark membrane without sound, without raising so much as a ripple.

As I cleave through the water towards the depths below, all I can hear, with every fibre of my being, is screaming. It is the voice of a living soul in agony, in its death throes.

8

I follow the sound of unspeakable anguish to its source, driving swiftly down through the water until the darkness begins to give way, begins to roll back at this crushing depth, as if the world has been drowned and the sun has been shackled to the filth upon the lake bed.

But what I find shackled there instead — to a tall, obelisk-shaped rock over a thousand feet down — is a bright, winged figure, her cloud of long, dark, wavy hair shifting loosely with the strange currents in the water. She’s bound in chains of bright fire that crisscross her torn and bleeding figure. Her sleeveless robes are rent and despoiled, and the surface of her skin is marked by deep wounds that continually bleed light into the water.

I settle silently upon the lake bed at Nuriel’s feet, stretched tauter than a membrane, just a collection of particles indistinguishable from the lake-bed ooze. An archangel usually comes wreathed in light and anger, like a thunderclap, a clarion call. But not me. The human world has taught me wariness and subtlety. I must take my sudden, murderous fury — that urge to transform into something vengeful, something monstrous, blazing with fire — and bury it deep within the mud and silt and sand that I’ve become.

Nuriel’s entire figure is rigid, as if electrified. Her head is thrown back at an unnatural angle, eyes blank with anguish, her mouth stretched wide in that terrible, endless, wordless scream.

Though every part of me aches to release her immediately from her bonds, I know there’s more to this than I’m seeing. It seems too easy that she’s alone here. And I know what I saw through the water — demonsign. To know your enemy is to have some measure of control over that enemy: Luc himself taught me that. It’s an irony that I’m using his own wisdom against him now.

Above me, Nuriel suddenly convulses. Light begins to stream out of her, off the surface of her skin, building around her in a dense cloud, and I almost rise, thinking in horror that it’s her death I’m witnessing, that the energy of which she’s made is dispersing, never to return. That I’m already too late.

But my inner voice, which is always one beat ahead of my waking self, whispers: Wait, watch. It is demonlight.

I freeze, waiting to see what form that light will take.

Nuriel’s head falls forward suddenly, her body slackening within its fiery bonds, her screams choked into a fearful silence. The light coalesces rapidly, taking the shape of a winged man of such pale and mesmerising beauty that I can see who and what he once was: Remiel, one of the elohim.

He had worshipped Luc, been part of that pack of beautiful creatures that had hung off Luc’s every word, lauding every crazy stunt he pulled. I know, because I was one of them myself, and I remember Remiel well; remember, too, his strange ability to sow discord wherever he went.

I see that Remiel worships Luc still, and that it has transformed him irrevocably. If anything, he’s more beautiful, more otherworldly, than I remember him, with his pale skin and silver eyes, his long pale hair, also like spun silver. His heavily sculpted torso is bare to the waist, and he rolls his powerful shoulders as if they ache, his gleaming wings trailing curls of tainted energy into the water. He turns and scans his surroundings as if he can sense something, and I see that he is … shaking. It’s faint, but noticeable, the tremor in his formidable hands, and I wonder at it, for the cold should not trouble him as it does not trouble me.

There’s a flaming mark at the base of his throat, like a scar. I realise what it is, because I carry something similar upon my left hand. It is the mark of the exile, the place where judgment was administered. Someone — perhaps even the Archangel Michael himself — once placed a hand at the base of Remiel’s throat, a long time ago, and cast him down. Down to earth to be a demon.

Seeing nothing but rocks and mud, weed and silt, for miles in every direction, Remiel encircles Nuriel, his voice taunting. ‘She’s not coming for you; no one is. It’s likely Luc already has her. Ananel returns now to finish you. And if you survive the punishments that await you at his hands, then I will return, and return, and return, until all that remains of you is a scream.’

He slurs the words, as if he’s drunk. Then he launches himself slowly away through the water, almost clumsily for someone so lethal and beautiful. Immediately, everything seems darker.

When Remiel is finally lost to sight, I surge out of the filth at Nuriel’s feet in my true form, mud cascading off my blazing figure, my blazing broadsword in my hand. And I cut her free, her bonds shrivelling, blackening and dissolving the instant my weapon meets them. She falls forward into my arms as my sword vanishes into the palm of my hand. Her wings, like mine, instantly shred into nothingness. She lacks even the energy to remain upright in the water. Her open wounds seep a constant light, like blood.

The instant I touch her, I know what has been done to her. Possession; a sustained possession of the worst kind that has infiltrated every particle of her soul, assaulted even her consciousness. First Remiel, then Ananel, the cycle repeated over and over until all Nuriel craved was death, or the death of time itself.

It is the pattern that Luc himself must have set so long ago when he first came across this Eden; the pattern that repeats itself in the world he walks today: human and demon continually feeding each other’s worst impulses. When we elohim were created, there was no rape, no torture, no enslavement, no war. But Luc saw the thing in our design that was both gift and curse: that some of us were created male, some female — the pattern repeated in angel, in man, in beast. And he exploited that flaw for his gain, pitting man against woman, against beast, against world, from the very first.

Nuriel has been missing for days. Days in which Ananel and Remiel have tortured her to the point of death with every means at their disposal. For angels and demons do not abide by treaties of war; we follow no accords regarding the welfare of our hostages. We are black and white, all or nothing. And this is the result: broken angels, like broken people. In everything, a dark symmetry.

I gather her tenderly to me, preparing to bear her swiftly back towards the surface. But she’s like a wraith in my arms, impossible to keep hold of.

Mercy. I feel the ghostly whisper of her voice in my mind. They cannot abide the cold, having turned away from first light. Avenge me.

I tilt her face towards mine, but her eyes are closed and her outline is wavering. She seems like a creature of mist, more insubstantial than the water we’re suspended in. I know that she’s succumbing to her wounds, unravelling. It would have been kinder if her captors had killed her outright.

Desperation makes me roar, ‘Nuriel, if this is some kind of ploy to get me to do your dirty work, I’m done taking orders. Avenge yourself. You stood by and watched as Luc and Michael used me as some kind of live bargaining chip. You stood by and watched as Luc cast me out. You owe me. You want to take Remiel and Ananel down? You do it yourself.’

At my words, a small frown appears between her straight, dark brows. Her wide-set eyes flicker open, her outline solidifying in my arms. ‘I don’t owe you anything,’ she replies, struggling out of my grasp, focusing with difficulty on my face. ‘Not a damned thing!’

She drifts before me, skin palely gleaming, her long, wavy hair a dark cloud about her face, like a drowned girl. Her voice is very faint as she says accusingly, ‘I warned you about Luc. I warned