Fury

Ryan, Richard and I crawl down the beach towards her, but the water from above and below tumble-turns us, making us lose any sense of direction. And Lauren is pulled further and further out, towards the rocks.

And then they are among us, my people, as far as the eye can see along the beach. They come clothed in glory, the light of them piercing the darkness, brighter even than the lightning that hits the distant water and illuminates the teeth of the jagged, offshore reef. The storm touches none of them, from lowest malakhim to the Archangel Michael himself, our Viceroy, who commands in place of our absent Father. The water burns away before it can even touch them.

It is Michael who drifts through the angry swell, bearing Lauren up the beach to where Richard is kneeling.

Then Michael walks back down into the water and all my people follow him. Waves of up to ten feet, then twenty, break over them as they keep moving out towards the reef without faltering.

The four of us who remain cluster together in a tight knot on the beach, like drenched cattle, watching. Everything in me wants to be with my people, wants to shift so that I might wreak my fury upon Luc with my own hands, but I can’t move. I have to stick to the plan, pretend I’m human just one last time.

Still the waves beyond the reef keep growing, until they are forty feet, sixty feet, eighty feet in height, their crests as tall as apartment buildings — and then the jagged black teeth of the reef seem to move, too. The reef that gives Coronado Beach its name rears out of the surf, water streaming down its sheared-off, deadly facets. Raphael is bound to its black and twisted crown, by chains of fire that crisscross his body.

Everything stops then, time stands still.

There is no wind, no rain, even the sea is as still as glass, the waves beyond the reef — those eighty-foot, no, hundred-foot waves — frozen there like icebergs.

Luc and his people come, thousands of winged and monstrous faceless or misshapen beings that he and his exiles have created to do their bidding, like murderous dogs. I see three or four score of his original fallen shining here and there amongst the mass. They part around the base of the crowned reef, before rejoining and coming to a standstill before Michael, his forces ranged behind him.

A quarter of a mile of sea, no more, separates two halves of a people that were once whole and united.

Michael’s forces are far fewer in number, less than three hundred brave souls to meet the most putrid and evil force this earth has ever witnessed. I don’t see how we could ever win, could ever hold back such a gruesome host.

Seeing Luc paralyses me. He is as he was in Milan, that sexy, modern Luc that I never knew, as dazzling as the sun, drawing all eyes to him. And even now — even when I know what he did to me, how I was hurled down from Heaven by his own hand — the thought of what he used to be like, what we once shared, hits me like a sucker punch to the head.

Something splinters inside me as I see Gudrun, with her bright yellow hair, sapphire eyes and ruby red mouth, step forward from amongst Luc’s people. She places her hand upon Luc’s arm, possessively, and, for a moment, I feel jealous and ugly and cast off. It’s crazy, I know it is, but I can’t help it, seeing Luc again. Almost as if I’m sleepwalking, I wrench myself out of Ryan’s arms and move towards the water.

I hear him curse and stumble after me. Lauren and Richard follow, to keep me hidden, to keep me safe, loyal unto the end. Where the waterline is frozen upon the sand, Ryan enfolds me in a vicelike grip and will not let me go any closer.

‘Are you nuts?’ he hisses at me.

I can barely drag my gaze away from Luc to meet Ryan’s eyes, and what he sees there makes him shudder.

Luc and Michael glare at each other across the frozen waves: one so pale, beautiful beyond belief; the other dark and fiery in countenance, his black eyes snapping with anger.

‘Mercy for Raphael,’ Luc snarls, his voice echoing off the cliffs, the iron-hard water, ‘or I waste Raphael, I waste this planet, nothing survives. And even when Raphael is back among you, you’d better start running. Because once her soul is back within my grasp, nothing will be safe. It will be open season on the elohim and their servants and on the Kingdom of Heaven.’ His voice drops to a murmur. ‘You should have killed me when you had the chance. For when the new regime arises from the ashes of the old, you will be the first put to death for exiling me all those years ago.’

Michael stands his ground calmly. ‘By that same measure, you, too, are guilty. For you sacrificed Mercy, who was innocent of any crime but loving you.’

Luc laughs, and the sound makes me flinch within the tight circle of Ryan’s arms. ‘Ancient history, brother, the old rules no longer hold. Your bargain was false. You agreed to recognise me as standing higher than God if I gave up the one thing that was most precious to me. And I did. I gave her up.’

‘You tried to murder her,’ Michael bellows.

‘I gave her up — utterly!’ Luc snarls back. ‘While you broke your word. Give her to me now,’ he roars. ‘Or I start with Raphael. Then we will rend all of you limb from limb.’

He scans the small force arrayed behind Michael with narrowed eyes and the searing pain returns as I feel Luc’s consciousness searching for me, trying again to single me out, to open that deadly two-way channel that only we share.

I fight to keep myself closed off from him. Ryan feels me tremble within his embrace and whispers so that only I can hear: Stay strong. I love you. God, how I wish it was enough.

Luc raises one of his beautiful, long-fingered hands high and the chains of fire that bind Raphael flame up with shocking brightness. Raphael cries out in anguish from where he is bound high upon the rock.

Maybe only I see the small, drifting light that moves into the space between the Archangel Michael and his eternal nemesis. It stills upon the surface of the frozen sea for a moment, drawing power from the two beings on either side of it, then it flares more brightly and takes the form of the young girl I saw in the Daleys’ garden, blurry and unstable in outline, but clearer than she was last night.

‘Lord,’ she says beseechingly, kneeling before Lucifer, head bowed, turning her back upon Michael and those she knowingly betrayed. ‘I am dying. Give me what you promised, before it begins and you forget. I found her when no other amongst your people could find her. I shadowed her as you asked — across half the world — and I have suffered, how I have suffered. Give me a warm body, a living body in which to end my days. There are humans upon the beach; give me one of them for my own.’

I feel the others draw tight around me at the creature’s words, sense their fear.

Luc looks down upon her bowed head for an instant, then puts a hand beneath her chin, lifts her sweet, lost face to his, so far above.

‘You have been faithful, my child,’ he says kindly. ‘And for your faithful service I give you what you ask — an end to your suffering.’

Faster than the human eye can follow, there’s a blazing dagger in his hand and he cuts her throat, the way he cut K’el down, without a flicker of emotion.

There’s no heat, no energy, when she dies. Her outline just seems to collapse, like a cloud of dust, and she’s gone.

I think I try to scream, but Ryan has felt it building in my body and he’s got his hand over my mouth, his arms binding me to him fiercely, before I can make a sound. My keeper, my anchor, my rock. Always.

‘Release him to me, Devil,’ Michael thunders.

The chains of fire that hold Raphael to the stone dissolve and he falls from a great height onto the surface of the glassy, unmoving sea, lying still for so long that Richard mutters against Ryan’s ear, ‘Dude, esta muerto.’

But Raphael finally stirs, pushing himself up from the ground, his long, dark hair straggling across the strong, angular planes of his face. He drags himself slowly to his feet and stumbles through the ranks of Luc’s bastard children, who jostle and assault him as he passes. His sable eyes are clouded with agony, light bleeds from the wounds of his torment. I cover my mouth with my hands at the sight of him.

I’m suddenly overwhelmed by snatches, fragments, of memory. Of Raphael laughing; of him and me walking arm in arm upon the surface of some lonely world; of me telling him it would always be hopeless, that I’d never love him the way that I loved Luc. Raphael was patience and kindness, compassion and propriety, but none