Fury

Instantly, the concrete barrier tumbles into pieces, falling outward, away from us. Ryan and I act like a single organism: we don’t look at each other or even speak, we just each take one of Selaphiel’s arms and haul him off the ground at a run, fleeing before the advancing rockfall. Lumps of stone — each big enough and deadly enough to end a man’s life — erase the passageway behind us.

As we stumble forward through the choking dust, Selaphiel does what I begged him to do — he shifts so that he’s scaled along more human lines, so we’re able to hoist him higher across our shoulders and run. But the brilliant light he gives out keeps intensifying, until he’s so bright, he’s only discernible in a kind of numinous outline. It’s like we’re cradling a dying star between us. Ryan can barely stand to look at him.

‘What’s happening to him?’ Ryan gasps, as we reach the narrow crevice in the wall we’ve been searching for.

I don’t answer, catching a flare of light to my right. Digging my heels in, I turn my head to see what’s causing it. It’s Jegudiel in the distance down the passageway, grappling with a shining, winged female figure that can only be Neqael.

I can’t see her face, but her trailing russet hair, her wing feathers, every inch of her, gleams with that foul, grey-tainted light. The folds of her diaphanous, long-sleeved gown billow around her as they struggle. I know that the other, Turael, can’t be far behind. Demons seem to hunt in pairs, and if we leave now, Jegudiel will have to face them both alone.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan cries, indicating the rungs of the rusty ladder behind him that are mounted directly into the stone wall. ‘Move it!’

I’m still standing in the entryway, my figure blocking both Selaphiel and Ryan from sight.

‘Go. Climb,’ I implore Ryan, entrusting Selaphiel to him completely, trying to push them both deeper into the cleft. ‘Keep yourself alive, keep Selaphiel safe. Find Henri, do whatever it takes. Get to the plane. I’ll find you. I’m not leaving without Jegudiel. No matter how much I’ve provoked him in the past, he would do the same for me. I get that now.’

Ryan gives me a hard, searching look, his heart in his eyes.

‘It used to be all about how much I could take out of every situation,’ I tell him in a rush of words. ‘Individual liberty — it was always my paramount consideration, my guiding principle; Luc’s. Hers.’ I point at Neqael’s gleaming figure in the distance. ‘But I’m not alone. None of us is truly ever alone. We may feel as if we are, but our actions matter. Every single act impacts on this web of souls we form part of, and it’s a web that stretches backwards in time, forwards. I could never see that before, but now I do. It’s not ever just about you, or the person you … love above all others,’ Ryan’s eyes darken with emotion, ‘it’s about awareness and respect and gratitude. Everything in its place or it is chaos. That’s our creed — the creed of the elohim. I used to think it meant “know your place”, don’t get ideas above your station, and it used to infuriate me beyond measure to have that continually thrown in my face — but I was wrong. What Gabriel was trying to tell me is that liberty is important, but it has to take place in a context: of others, of a community. Evil has no community, Ryan. It feeds itself, upon itself, it considers itself above all. I have to help him,’ I finish desperately. ‘Don’t you see? It goes beyond what you and I want. It always has, and I was too blind to see that.’

Ryan bends and kisses me, swiftly, then he and Selaphiel are gone, out of sight, and I hear his boots striking the first rungs.

And even though I told him to go, I can’t help feeling utterly bereft without him.

I turn back to see Jegudiel in the demon’s embrace. They could be lovers, they could be dancing — though Jegudiel’s profile is tight and hard, like granite — for she has her arms around his neck, and I see her lay her head against the side of his face, turning him giddily, laughing. She’s wreathed in a robe that is gleaming with light, but also tattered, crepuscular, like a moth-eaten shroud. As she turns again, with Jegudiel held fast in her arms, I see the mark of the exile shining across her shoulderblades, between her wings.

She’s facing me now, over his shoulder, and I’m shocked to see dark markings crawling across her face, her neck, her arms and hands, like tattoos rendered in acid, or poison. Her hair and form are alive with a dark electricity, a tainted light, that serves to make her cornflower blue eyes — the only part of her I truly recognise — seem unhinged and feral. She meets my eyes and grins, and I reel back in horror from her teeth — each one with the appearance of having been filed into a point, resembling the canines of wild animals.

I see recognition in her gaze as the ground below me ceases to shake and the sound of falling stone stops. The corridor is as silent as a grave now and she purrs into that silence, ‘Did you truly think that your passage through the underworld would go unnoticed … Mercy?’

So quickly I barely have time to register the movement, there’s a short, flaming blade in her hand and she pushes the tip of it into the smooth column of Jegudiel’s throat from the side. He cries out in agony. She keeps the blade there, deliberately holding its point inside him, inside his throat, and I see light leaching steadily out of the wound as he struggles to hold his head high, his bright hair flowing down his back, down between his wings, like a torrent of gold.

‘Let him go,’ I say quietly. ‘If you want me, if it’s true, as Luc has said, that I have always been the prize, then let him go.’

‘The way we let that eunuch Selaphiel go?’ She laughs. ‘We can always pick him and the boy up later, can’t we, Turael?’

A chill moves through me at her words and I turn to see a gleaming male figure standing before the rockfall at the other end of the passageway. He’s at least eight feet tall, the end feathers of his grey-tinted wings trailing in the dust on the floor, and there’s a burning scar on his chest as large as an archangel’s handprint. He has the dark eyes and dark hair that I dimly recall, but all else about him has changed, and changed utterly. He bears an intricate flowering of black markings around his left eye that only heightens his wild, male beauty.

Maybe he was standing there the whole time and saw the way Ryan and I looked at each other — the way everything we are to each other was in our eyes — because there’s an ugly expression on his beautiful face, a promise of pain.

‘Turael,’ I say evenly, trying not to betray my fear, ‘why on earth do you still affect to wear wings when all you and Neqael do these days is crawl in the earth like worms?’

He opens his mouth and hisses at me like a snake, and I see that his teeth are also sharp in appearance, like the canines of wild dogs.

‘Shall I bring you his head?’ he says, flexing his powerful hands. I go cold at his words. ‘Or would you rather not know the manner in which the boy dies?’

Neqael swings Jegudiel around to face me. I see the dark talons of one long-fingered hand stretched down across the front of Jegudiel’s torn robe like the claws of some predatory bird. She holds her short, flaming blade hard up against the front of his throat with her other hand.

‘It’s impressive,’ she says, ‘how ordinary and insignificant you’ve managed to make yourself. Even more ordinary and insignificant than you once were. It’s a mystery to us all what our Lord Lucifer saw in you. None of us could ever understand it. You had no more to commend you than any of us did.’

‘He saw her fire,’ Jegudiel snarls. ‘He saw her strength and her indomitable will. She is worth an infinity of you, and there will be a reckoning. It is coming.’

He inhales sharply as Neqael pushes the edge of her burning blade into his throat so that it bites deep.

‘Reminiscences bore me,’ she snaps. ‘Take her, Turael. Let us be celebrated, let us be raised up at last, for I am sick of playing gaoler, of being a keeper of bones and dead artefacts and dust. She shall restore our fortunes, and the order of all things will be remade in our image. It has been too long in the execution, our homecoming. Let her see for herself what Hell is like.’

I feel Turael moving closer behind me, feel the dark shirring of his energy, am nauseated by it.

‘I will hold them off for as long as I can,’ Jegudiel says, regret in his dark eyes as he looks at me.

‘That won’t be necessary, my friend,’ I murmur, as Turael’s weapon springs into his hand at my back. I hear the sizzle of the blade as it pulses with that tainted light and heat peculiar to the fallen. ‘Just remember to duck.’

A fleeting look of puzzlement crosses Jegudiel’s face as I slowly pivot so that I’m side-on to Neqael, to Turael. I take a small step back so that I have a perfect line of sight in both directions.

‘You know what?’ I say conversationally. ‘You’re antiques, you two. You’re stupid. And you know why you’re