Fury

could.

‘Jegudiel,’ I whisper aloud, shocked.

My eyes flash across to the other winged being in dawning horror, and I see that he holds an open book in one hand; an orb shaped like a globe, or a planet, in the other. His eyes, his face, are lost in thought, beneath a head of shoulder-length curly hair. In life it would be sandy-coloured. A coronet of stylised stars rings his brow.

‘Selaphiel,’ I murmur, appalled.

The inscription on his pedestal reads, simply: Bellator Deus. Warrior of God.

The words are in bad taste. A taunt. For Selaphiel has no warrior side, it is not his metier. He is only contemplation and quietude, as mysterious as the universe he meditates upon.

The footage of Uriel drifting across the surface of an icy Scottish loch suddenly flashes into my mind. Jegudiel somehow located Selaphiel when Uriel could not, but something went terribly wrong. Jegudiel never made it to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan that night because he was trapped here; taken while he was trying to free Selaphiel. They are caged within these stone effigies, I would wager my life on it. Beings of energy, of light, weightless and airy, cast into blocks of heavy, lumpen stone. What I am looking at is a deliberate and calculated provocation, an insult.

‘How …’ Ryan begins, but I place my hands on his shoulders, pleading with him in a low voice to wait.

I move forward into the strange lake. Immediately, the water around me bursts into flames, which ignite the entire surface of the lake with a roar. I understand immediately what these flames are for — a special effect to keep out the mortal, the unwary, who might think to enter this chamber in which celestial beings are held captive in plain sight.

I turn and look back at Ryan, his skin lit by a weird red glow, his eyes showing his helplessness.

‘Be careful,’ he mouths. ‘I love you.’

I nod to show that I’ve heard, give him a crooked smile.

I turn back and study the stone angels, their faces averted as if each can’t bear the sight of the other. The smokeless flames lick at my boot-clad ankles, my denim-clad legs, but I do not burn. Oh, the flames are hot enough. But my own energy these days is equal to them, and they trouble me not at all.

I move forward through flaming water that is soon up to my waist, feeling the broken bones of a multitude of human dead shifting underfoot. Though there is demonsign aplenty, there are no demons in evidence. And I wonder at it, whether this is some elaborate trap. But nothing comes screaming at me from out of the darkness above or the waters below.

I cover the last few feet to the statue of Jegudiel at a stumbling run, and place my hand upon the stone that looks so cold. But it is warm beneath my fingers, and that warmth tells me all I need to know: that a being of fire is indeed bound within the rock.

I leap up onto the pedestal, and it’s reflex what I do next. I plunge my hand through the surface of the stone, feel my own energy run in and through the hard, crystalline structure, seeking some thread, some flaw, some sign. Though Jegudiel himself eludes me, I can somehow read the signature, the pattern of him, within the rock. For his hand once wrote upon my soul the way I now seek his, and I will always recognise him now.

‘Where are you?’ I growl, half-merged with the stone, almost feeling something then losing it again.

Something seems to shift inside the rock. I feel him coiled there, like a serpent, and then the serpent begins to move. But something continues to hold him there, and I’m too afraid to give myself over to the stone completely in case I, too, am lost.

In frustration, in a voice with a ringing, steely edge to it, like a tolling bell, I cry out, ‘Libera eum!’ Free him!

A vast, cracking sound echoes across the underground lake. The stone statue blows apart, into splinters, the mocking inscription instantly obliterated. I fall back into the water, shielding my face automatically, as a mist rapidly gathers in the place where the statue once stood, forming into the towering, glowing figure of a winged man that crumples forward silently.

He hits the flaming surface of the water and goes under, and I can’t find him with my hands, though I search and stumble, crying out his name, throwing up a glittering spray all about me that reflects the firelight. Underfoot, the bones slide and tumble and tangle.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan screams, and I hear the awe in his voice. ‘Over there.’

I turn and follow the line of his pointing finger and see Jegudiel staggering out of the water at the feet of the other stone angel, the one that wears the cosmos as his coronet. Flaming water sheets down off Jegudiel’s powerful figure, cascading down through the folds of his bright and luminous robes, his wings. I see that some of their end feathers are bent and broken and trailing.

He plunges his hand into the stone angel before him and roars out, as I did, ‘Libera eum! ’

The second statue flies apart, raining fragments of stone across the blazing lake surface.

It seems an age before Selaphiel’s palely glowing figure coalesces and grows recognisable. Like Jegudiel, he falls forward and hits the flaming waters of the lake, going under. But he does not rise again.

Jegudiel spins, throwing up a desperate flurry of spray, his eyes seeking to penetrate the oily, burning water that swirls and shifts with some unseen current. As he looks up, he meets my eyes, and I see shock flare in his. The flames reflect on their dark surfaces so that it seems, for a moment, that he is on fire from within. A whip appears in his hand and he gathers himself like a lion, then surges towards me with a fearsome war cry loud enough to shake the cavern, intent on striking me down.

He believes me human, I think in wonder, in terror. Or demon. My disguise must be absolute. He does not know who I am.

Jegudiel has already half-covered the distance towards me, his whip raised high, before I relax the control I’ve fought so hard to maintain. I let my outline ripple, let it blur, so that he sees me before I reassume my human guise like a cloak.

He stops dead the instant he catches the shift, then the shift back, and his weapon is suddenly gone from his grasp.

‘Find him!’ he pleads. ‘He’s almost past help, Mercy. This could end him.’

14

Immediately, both Jegudiel and I dive beneath the surface of the burning water and I feel his trailing wing feathers brush across my face as we spear through the airless, roaring depths, seeking our fallen brother. There’s nothing but darkness and filth and noise below, bones a foot deep in every direction, everything washed red by fire.

I surface, surging upright to see Ryan lunging through the flames at the lake’s edge as he drags the gleaming figure of a slack-limbed giant, wings bedraggled, up onto dry land.

Jegudiel appears on the far side of the chamber and prepares to re-enter the water, but I cry out, ‘Look to the mortal!’ — for Ryan’s name would mean nothing to him. ‘The mortal has found him.’

Jegudiel turns, astonished. He’s crossed the length of the flaming lake and is looming over Ryan like a creature of nightmare, faster than I can move to stand between them. Ryan steps away from Selaphiel’s prone body, his hands up and open in a gesture of parley, eyes wide, head tilted back, as he takes in Jegudiel’s terrifying countenance so far above his.

‘Who are you?’ Jegudiel roars. ‘Speak.’ And the whip in his right hand twitches.

I place my small, human-sized hand upon Jegudiel’s side, but he does not turn to acknowledge me, just continues staring at Ryan as if he would turn him to stone with his eyes.

‘Brother,’ I say quietly, ‘he’s with me.’

Jegudiel’s head whips around, his dark gold hair momentarily tangling in the feathers of his wings, and