The light streaming in through the windows, the high-pitched shrieking, grow and grow until they are almost unbearable and I know that he’s out there, Luc’s out there.
Ryan stumbles away from me suddenly, up the stairs, tripping and cursing as he rounds the corner, out of sight. And I fall to my knees, my arms wrapped around my head in agony, wondering if the noise has driven him out of his mind the way it’s invading mine.
Through the monstrous screaming, I seem to hear Luc whisper in my ear, almost as if he’s standing over me.
An incredible surface pressure suddenly builds, as if the atmosphere is somehow twisting and condensing, pushing down upon me. It’s as if the air around me is becoming molten. I feel an indescribable rage, a terrible malice. Luc cannot physically touch me, but he’s manipulating the air itself into a kind of weapon, the embodiment of his anger. It pushes at me from all directions, reaching in through the paneless windows as if it would kill me where I lie.
‘Ryan!’ I cry out, fearful it will crush his mortal frame.
The light outside, the heat, the screaming, all build and build. There’s a
An instant of light, so searing it’s like being at the heart of an atomic cloud, and then darkness returns. The pressure begins to recede rapidly, like the tide turning. The air grows cool and thin, the way air should be. And I know with absolute clarity that Luc is gone, for now, taking his demons with him.
I spring upright, screaming, ‘Ryan!’
I am the only visible thing left in this place. The darkness inside the tower is absolute. The cold air streaming in from the open windows is like needles against my skin, though the night is still and silent now. There’s no snow, no sleet, no wind. The storm that has been raging all night, the storm to end all storms, it’s over. Gone with Luc.
I feel Ryan before I see him: his familiar energy, the hum of him growing stronger to my senses. His boots strike the stone stairs with a clumsy sound, then a crunch and slide upon powdered glass as he turns the corner. He collapses beside me on the landing, breathing heavily.
‘I headed higher up,’ he gasps, ‘thinking the view would be better, but all the windows are so high and narrow. I couldn’t grab on to any of the window ledges — they’re cut so that they slope down.’ He grasps my arm, his gaze and words feverish. ‘I had to jump to see out properly. And I’d just left the freakin’ ground when something gripped me hard, like a fist, holding me there. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I saw all these streams of light twisting together like a rope that got sucked back into the hole in the roof of that Galleria place.’
I feel his thoughts running hot beneath his skin; let myself see how it was through his eyes.
‘They were … demons, right?’ He swallows, still unable to grasp the physical existence of such creatures. ‘How could something so beautiful be so … evil?’
Again I get that disorienting flash of Luc — superimposed over the features of the young man before me. I shiver, whispering, ‘Take it from me, it’s possible.’
Still shaking, I head up several steps to the window above our landing, needing to see for myself. The narrow aperture lies just beyond reach, uncovered now against the night air, the glitter of pulverised glass beneath it. Ryan described it accurately: the window is set in deeply, and impossible to keep a grip on. But I tell myself fiercely:
Yet, I am vertigo. I am panic. I am nausea. It feels too much like flight for comfort. I wonder if it will ever feel natural again: leaving the earth behind me.
As I drift there, unsupported, I glimpse black smoke still pouring from the ruined roofline of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele; the steady pulsing of the lights of the emergency vehicles parked haphazardly behind hastily erected crash barriers on the Piazza; tiny figures getting slowly back onto their feet, gesticulating at the sky in fear and wonder.
My view is truncated by the decorative angles of the Duomo, but at the horizon I see the faintest lightening. Daybreak is coming at last.
I land as lightly as I left the ground, though I stumble as my feet reconnect with the stone. Ryan stares at me in silence, his eyes reproachful at the reminder of the chasm that lies between us.
I voice the thought I’ve been carrying around inside me. ‘We can’t stay here. I make everything around me a target; enough has been done to this city, to its people. The demons are gone for now. Michael, Gabriel and the others must have drawn them away somehow, long enough for us to leave here. So if you really want to do this, if you want to try and carve out some time for us, pull off one last “joint mission”? We’ve got to get ready to go. It’s almost light.’
‘How?’ he asks. ‘We can’t just walk out of here. They’ll see us. There’s nowhere safe in the world when they can destroy something without even touching it.’
He shudders. I take his face in my hands, letting the warmth bleed from my skin into his, hoping he will mistake it for confidence.
‘We can,’ I whisper. ‘We have an advantage they do not possess. We have the ability to think like mortals and act like mortals in this mortal world. It’s something none of them — angel or demon — has ever really “stooped” to do; at least not in the way I’ve been forced to. They persist in treating you like unthinking cattle when you’ve demonstrated, over and over, that you are capable of rationalising the mind of God. You are miraculous.’
I lean my forehead against his and he closes his eyes at the warming touch.
‘When it grows light and the tourists begin to spill out into the streets,’ I murmur, ‘we’ll move. Everyone loves a catastrophe. The Piazza is already crawling with people. And more will come. A tide of humanity is going to flow up this staircase today. The Galleria has become a tomb for the dead still inside, and this roof provides the best view of it. The reporters and thrill-seekers and ghouls will flock here. When the first sightseers begin to leave, we’ll leave, too, hidden among them.’
Ryan pulls away from me, his laughter disbelieving. ‘And I’m asking you again,
I see his eyes grow round, see him fall backwards in genuine fear, as I do what K’el, what Nuriel, what even Gudrun reminded me was possible.
I shape-shift.
Permutations, combinations — they should flow seamlessly, one from another. But I’m rusty, still fighting the feeling I could fly apart at any second. So it seems to take a lifetime to finetune and discard, add and subtract, borrow and enhance, drawing on shattered memories, old abilities, forgotten powers, until I’m satisfied with the eyes, the nose, face shape, hair colour, height, the works.
And while I do all of it, Ryan’s face reflects his own fascination, and nausea.
When I’m finally done, I’m an equation, I suppose. A strange amalgam.
I look sixteen, maybe seventeen at most, because it’s the way I’m feeling inside: so strangely confused and vulnerable and unformed.
What I remember distinctly? Is being young, and so in love with Luc that I couldn’t see beyond that. Then whole human years, whole human lives, must have intervened between the creature I was then — the creature who fell — and the thing I am now. But all I can clearly remember out of all that lost time — years that could have happened to someone else — are recent memories. Like waking as a battered wife called Ezra, with blood caking my face, a hairline fracture in one eye socket.
So in honour of Ezra, I’ve given myself her sun-kissed skin. And I have gifted myself Lucy’s green eyes because I’d look every morning into the cracked mirror in her stinking apartment and wish I was somewhere else. I have Susannah’s dusting of freckles across the bridge of her long, narrow nose. And I have her dimples, one beneath the apple of each cheek so that when I smile, I appear open-faced, uncomplicated and friendly, the exact opposite of Susannah’s nightmare of a mother, who made her life a kind of hell. I have Carmen’s wild, black, curly hair and I’m wearing it bound back in the kind of low ponytail that her nemesis, Tiffany, used to favour. I have
