Fury

She’s bleeding light, scarcely alive, and I’m so shocked, I can’t think or speak or move.

She rears up and grabs hold of my upper arms, her self-loathing so evident and so potent, I wish I could take it all upon myself.

‘I want to die,’ she pleads. ‘Die. Or at least be granted the kind of mercy you’ve had to endure — freedom from memory, from all comprehension. Teach me how it’s possible to forget, for I can no longer heal myself. I have lost the art. I feel no forgiveness, no love. I’m empty.’ Harsh sobs rack her gleaming, bleeding form in earnest as she falls back from me.

I place my hands on either side of her face and feel her wildness slowly begin to abate. ‘I’m a strange hybrid these days,’ I whisper. ‘Corrupted, debased, weakened. Luc said so himself. You don’t want to be like me.’

‘And yet you slew Ananel,’ she murmurs, almost accusingly. ‘I saw you do it.’

‘And Remiel, too,’ I reply fiercely.

Her eyes fly to mine.

‘He is finished,’ I say. ‘He will never trouble you again.’

Her gaze grows unfocused. ‘Except in nightmare,’ she whispers, ‘for he will always be alive there.’

‘Stalking the corridors of your dreams?’ I murmur. ‘Yes, I know. But that is all they are: dreams. Just distant echoes.’

I speak more confidently than I’m feeling, for my dreams have always troubled me, have always seeped beyond the boundaries of unreal into real.

I stroke her dark, curling hair away from her forehead. ‘I can’t heal those kinds of wounds,’ I say softly. ‘Only time can do that. To be in this world is to suffer cruelty and beauty every minute of every hour. But you just hold on to the beauty and try to let the rest of it … I don’t know … wash away. That’s what I’ve learnt. You need simply to be. You need beauty and stillness and time. That’s all the wisdom that I, who was never wise, can offer you.’

She closes her eyes and, little by little, as I continue to comfort her, the physical marks of her suffering melt away, until, on the outside, she seems as glorious and perfect as she ever was. But underneath, something’s shifted, something’s given way, and she will never be quite the same again. It’s a feeling I myself know only too well: how life itself is an affliction that can harden you like a diamond.

‘How I’ve missed you,’ she says raggedly. ‘You should never have left us, left me. Not like that. It changed everything.’

She opens her eyes and they seem a little clearer now, a little calmer. ‘As damaged as you claim to be, you’ve done what few elohim have achieved while sane, whole and in the fullness of their power: you’ve taken down two of Luc’s inner circle. While the lower-order daemonium can always be … replenished,’ her mouth twists in revulsion, ‘in a way that the elohim and malakhim may not, Remiel and Ananel were irreplaceable to Luc. Pray he does not know it yet, but you’ve hurt him, you’ve struck back.’ She sits up slowly, the shadow of a smile upon her lips. ‘You are a force for good these days, whether you like it or not.’

She grasps my hands tightly, her voice urgent. ‘Free Selaphiel. He was the first to be taken. I saw the place in Remiel’s mind, in Ananel’s — they could not keep it from me when they, when they …’ She grips my fingers harder. ‘It was the place you took yourself to … to die. That is where they hold him. In an empire of death, ruled by bones. Underground. Do you remember it?’ she finishes hesitantly.

I recoil from her, horror-struck, as I get a flash of that place, located far, far beneath an old human city. Above ground, the living had scratched out a mean, jammed existence, infecting each other with their uproars and grievances and foul pestilences. Below ground, there had been a blessed, blessed silence, but also chambers and passageways filled with water and putrescence, piled high with the jumbled bones of the human dead: skulls and femurs, finger bones and vertebrae, fat, hair, skin, gristle, all mixed and intermingled. The worldly remains of thousands. The scent of death that lay so heavily upon me, it lay upon that place, too. The carrion stench of it had seemed to reach its fingers up through the city and beyond. It was what drew me there in the first instance, that smell of death. To the creature of nightmare that I was — a burnt and blasted thing, barely alive, a being composed solely of ash and anguish — it had seemed a fitting place to end it all.

But the Eight had run me to ground there, at long last. And They’d forced me to live.

‘I see it even now,’ I whisper. ‘If Hell had a gateway, it would be that place. But I cannot recall the name of the human city it formed part of. It’s as if the name has been burnt out of my memory … by me? By others? Who can say?’

‘Paris,’ Nuriel replies harshly. ‘The Eight found you in Paris. At Cimetiere des Innocents. Ananel and Remiel were with Luc when he located the burial chamber where you’d lain only hours before. But nothing of you remained, and Luc’s fury was terrible as he tore apart gravesite after gravesite, chamber after chamber, looking for traces of you, unleashing a powerful plague into the ground water, into the very soil, to sicken all of Paris itself. It is what he does best, after all — come at us from below, from the dark.’

I try to pull away from Nuriel, but her grip is surprisingly strong and she will not let me go.

‘Selaphiel is held in a place bound by bones,’ she tells me. ‘If I am any measure, he will have suffered even more terribly. I would do it, I would save him, but I am a husk. I am spent. Free our brother. Call it your debt to me. And if, in so doing, you are able to hurt Luc further, then all to the good. Thinking you almost within his grasp, vengeance has driven Luc to move against the Eight now, after all these years. Punish Luc in the same spirit. Avenge me. But also yourself.’

There’s a loud sneeze above us, a muffled curse, and Nuriel makes a startled movement, eyes wild again, as if she would draw a weapon, or take flight. I turn to see Bianca’s and Ryan’s shadowy outlines huddled high above us, on the stairs, listening intently.

Nuriel turns back to me. ‘Free him,’ she insists. ‘And if you see Michael, tell him I broke when I could not bend; that I could do no more, and I am sorry. It may yet turn out to be true …’

I and the mortal watchers on the stairs are buffeted by a blast wave of heat and energy as Nuriel grows brighter than the stars for an instant, before scattering into a billion pieces. And then she’s gone, like a vision, or a dream.

Ryan drops down onto the couch first, then Bianca lowers herself, cautiously, on my other side, her arms crossed tightly against her chest.

‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help … eavesdropping,’ she says. ‘Don’t blame Ryan — he tried to stop me, but I couldn’t stay away. You have no idea what you look like together, do you? You seem so powerful, so beautiful …’

‘And if I hadn’t sneezed,’ Ryan says, disgusted with himself, wrapping his arms around my frozen form and pulling me to him, ‘maybe I wouldn’t have scared her away like that. She probably had a lot more to tell you.’

‘She had to go,’ I murmur into his shoulder. ‘She needs to heal. And you probably overheard what she wants me to do. Go to Paris, kill more demons.’

I start to shake then.

Ryan tips my face up to his, saying gently, ‘I’m sorry I gave you a hard time when you came up out of the water. It’s hard for me to understand that other side of you, the, uh, freaky side. Whatever you did tonight, down there in the lake, it was justified. Seeing Nuriel that way reminded me so much of Lauren when you found her, of how helpless I felt. You’re not helpless.’

‘I’m a killer,’ I whisper, appalled.

‘A demon killer,’ Ryan clarifies, struggling to sound as if he’s entirely unfazed by the idea.

‘Which, by definition,’ Bianca interjects hesitantly, ‘is entirely acceptable.’

She draws her legs up onto the couch and sits cross-legged, facing us. She takes a deep breath before meeting my eyes. ‘Ryan’s already filled me in on a little of your … situation. You and he need to get to Paris, and I’ve got a way of getting you there quickly and discreetly. As stupid as it may sound to you, I want to help, if you’ll accept it.’

‘You’re not coming to Paris,’ I tell Ryan immediately, looking up into his face.

‘Am too,’ he retorts. ‘I want to see Paris. Thanks to you, I finally left home, left that little box I’d carved out for myself, and I don’t want to go back.’ He grins at me. ‘Plus, I’ve decided, after