Fury

remember? You’ve got cover, whether you like it or not.’

10

The house is quiet now, with all the phone calls made, details exchanged.

Earlier, Bianca paced the dining room, working a telephone, laptop and scanner furiously, while Ryan trawled through the contents of her industrial-sized refrigerator, answering her questions between bites.

Excluded from talk of permits and clearances, flight-plan filing, catering requirements and ground handling procedures, I drifted through all the elegant, expensively furnished rooms of the house like a restless ghost, beset by a formless fear, struggling to remember the shape and contours of the ancient, sprawling city I’d once gravitated to to die. But though I dug and dug, my memories were chaotic and fragmentary — no more than snatches of sound and colour, a stench, vague impressions, a glimpse of a woman’s face, mouth stretched wide in a scream, eyes fixed in terror on something. Me?

The only clear memory I possess of that time is waking with the Eight standing over me, deep within the putrid heart of Cimetiere des Innocents. It would have been my eternal resting place, too, but for Their interference.

When the planning was done, Bianca retreated to her rooms near the front of the house, exhaustion shadowing her blue eyes. ‘Tomaso will have the car brought around at six,’ she’d said. ‘He’s arranged for a police escort to take you from the police blockade to Malpensa airport. There’ll be a full VIP meet and greet at the hangar, Ryan, that will speed you onto the plane. And when you reach Paris,’ she’d added quietly, ‘I promised you point to point, exactly as if you were family, and I meant it. One of our drivers will be waiting on the tarmac at Le Bourget; he’ll meet you straight off the plane. Customs and immigration will happen onboard, Mercy, so make yourself scarce at that point. If you’re seen, and your presence can’t be explained, I’ll have no choice but to deny any knowledge of you.’

She’d refused to accept our thanks before turning and hurrying down the hall.

Now, I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lamplit master bedroom, waiting for daybreak. I am looking across the troubled, black waters of the lake when Ryan emerges from the en suite bathroom, the light streaming out behind him, his hair still wet from the shower, a half-eaten apple in his hand. There’s a pale blue towel knotted tight and low around his narrow hips. Droplets of water gleam upon his broad shoulders, catching the light like faceted gemstones. I don’t think I’ve seen anything more beautiful for a long time.

He smiles instantly when he sees me, dropping the apple onto a nightstand and holding his hand out to me. But before I can move towards him, I get a disorientating flash: of Luc, bare-chested, similarly wreathed by light, holding his hand out to me in the same way. I shake my head, stepping backwards, genuinely frightened and confused.

The dark versus the light, though the dark and the light are inverted and distorted.

I see confusion grip Ryan, too, at my weird reaction. Then a deep anger flares in his expressive face, which is rapidly overcome by a bemused tenderness.

‘This is so messed up,’ he sighs, bending down and grabbing one of the large, overstuffed pillows off the top of the bed, punching it a little before leaning it up against the wall. He sits with his back against it, on top of the coverlet, watching me steadily as he finishes his apple.

‘I’m messed up,’ I correct quietly as I move across the room towards him.

When I reach him, I look down into his face. And it’s both familiar and unfamiliar, a signifier I have neither the wit nor the talent to read.

Ryan doesn’t hesitate; he does what he always does when I get close — pulls me into him like we’re two halves of the same whole, though we can’t be, it’s impossible. I’m falling again, but this time I feel no fear. I end up half-sprawled across his lap, the towel between us damp from being drawn across his skin, laughing as I try to keep some semblance of balance, of distance. The skin of his chest is warm and yielding beneath my fingers. I feel the play of his muscles as he draws his arms around me tightly and just breathes me in, for a time.

‘Why is it,’ he murmurs wonderingly, ‘that you smell of snowfall?’

He is a jumble of contradictions, every part of him like velvet-wrapped steel.

He tips me over, suddenly, onto my back, catching me unawares the way he has done from the very beginning, somehow getting in under defences that were wrested in place by the hands of archangels. He lays a line of fiery kisses from the hollow at the base of my neck up to my jawline, and I arc up to meet him. He only pulls away when he reaches my mouth, and I feel his reluctance to do it.

‘Now you know how it feels to be me around you,’ he murmurs, his mouth breaking into amused and sensual lines as he braces himself over me. ‘Jittery, psyched, out of control, out of my mind. We’re right back where we started, you and me. All that separates us is a damned towel.’

My eyes widen, grow dark with my desire, and he sees how devastated I am by his actions, his words, exactly the way he intended me to be.

He opens his mouth over mine, kissing me, moulding me to him, flesh to flesh, energy to energy, until I feel the heat bloom under his skin of steel and velvet, an answering rush of heat rising in me. He tastes of apples and mint and the salt-sweet, roiling sea. There’s that thrill of fire, of warning, along my nerves, but I dig my fingers into the muscles of his shoulders, his back, unable to pull away, because we are magnetic. We are two disparate energies colliding. And I grow so hot beneath him that he gasps out loud and has to push away from me, shield his eyes because I’m wreathed in light.

He shudders and drops back onto the bed, covering his face with his hands. He gives an involuntary groan.

‘Why do you persist,’ I say, accusing and anguished, ‘when loving me is a kind of hell? K’el, Raphael, even Luc — they’re proof that I bring the darkest end upon all who claim to have loved me. I am the siren’s empty call, Ryan, I am a plague. I’m cursed, and I will drag you down the way I did those others. Why, why do you persist?’

He uncovers his face and looks at me, his expression unreadable.

‘Give me up,’ I whisper brokenly, as the light within and around me fades until it is tolerable once more. ‘Renounce me utterly, so that I might come to my senses and set you aside, too. I don’t have a heart, Ryan. I can pretend that I do, even fashion one for myself as the circumstances require, but I don’t need one. I don’t need food or water or air, sunlight or rest, to keep me alive.’

I see his shock as I add, ‘I want you more than anything, but I can’t give you what you want. In all my “lives” upon this material earth, you’re the one thing I’ve reached out to, again and again, against all reason, every obstacle. But this could never be enough for you. How could it?’

Ryan suddenly launches himself off the bed without looking at me, and I’m too afraid to reach out and read the turmoil in his mind for fear of what I will see there. He hooks a tee-shirt and a pair of sleek, black boxer briefs off the back of a chair before striding into the bathroom, and emerges a few seconds later, dressed and without the towel.

‘This is not Hell,’ he says, and his voice is shaky with emotion. ‘Hell is keeping vigil in a hospital room at the bedside of a weird, prickly girl you think you’ve fallen for, only for her to wake and deny ever meeting you before in her life. Hell is thinking I’d found you again and then watching you “die” right before my eyes. If you think the only thing that’s keeping me here is the prospect of some hot sex,’ a faint flush appears high on his cheekbones, ‘then you don’t know me at all.’

He throws himself down on the bed beside me and turns his back to me.

‘I need to sleep,’ he growls softly. ‘You can keep insulting and cheapening this thing we’ve got going on, so long as you do it quietly. I’m beat.’

I don’t move, don’t speak, until I see the hard lines of his body slacken into sleep. Then, and only then, do I move up beside him and mould my form into the sweet shape of his, placing my cheek against the back of his neck, hooking one arm around his waist to keep him close, to keep him safe.