something embedded at some murky, cellular level.
‘You should see the look on your face, it’s priceless,’ he teases as I tentatively place my cheek against his achingly familiar profile and breathe in his addictive clean, male smell.
He’s wearing a beat-up leather jacket, faded navy tee, scuffed boots and blue jeans. And it feels so right, the two of us standing together like this.
I’m almost afraid of what I’m feeling, surging like a sea inside. What would Luc say, if he knew? He’s always been so . . . protective of me, though protective doesn’t even begin to describe how carefully he watched me and watched over me. When he chose me for his own, that was how it was to be, forever and ever, in saecula. He made me feel safe. Made me the centre of his world.
I am pierced by a vision of Luc and me entwined in each other’s arms within a living bower of flowers, the air heavy with the fragrance of neroli, jasmine, white magnolia, orange blossom, a thousand different blooms that no human hand could possibly have put together. It was our place, the hanging garden he created for me alone. Seen since that day only in dreams, and likely gone forever.
‘All I want,’ he’d said, resting his forehead against mine, ‘is your enduring happiness. You are the best and most loved thing in my life — let nothing ever be possible, or complete, if you are not with me. And may the elements witness my vow in all their silent glory.’
The memory is so real that when I look up and see Ryan there in Luc’s place, I feel the lines of my face collapse like crumpled paper. The pain is so intense, I wonder how I can feel this way and still be alive.
Ryan pulls me closer. ‘God, I’ve missed you. You have no idea how much. I’ve been in agony since you’ve been gone.’
He looks down at me, smoothing back my long, dark hair with his hands. ‘They’re fighting dirty this time. They actually managed to make you forget who I am. I didn’t think it was possible to mess you up any more than They already have, but They did it. I’d congratulate Raph if I wasn’t so angry with him I could destroy him.’
I frown, something I’m missing in his words.
Ryan steps back, holding me at arm’s length the better to look at me, really look at me. And I realise with a start that I’m standing here in my own body, my garments drifting around me — white, glowing, ghostly — though there is no breeze in the room. Beside me, Lela’s sleeping form is curled up in the chair. I am myself as I once was before I was cursed to roam the earth.
The truth hits me an instant later.
‘This is a dream,’ I snarl. ‘When I wake, you’ll be gone again. And I won’t remember you.’
‘You don’t even remember “me” now,’ Ryan laughs, ‘and I need you to remember. It’s the first step.’
And, suddenly, it’s no longer Ryan with his arms around me but Luc. It had been Luc all along.
‘You’re disappointed,’ he says, his expression curious, watchful.
‘Of course not,’ I reply quickly. ‘How could I be? When it’s only ever been you?’
Do I imagine that my voice falters a little as I say the words? Luc must not hear, for he spins me around lightly so that the room dissolves — in the way that dreams make possible — and I find that we are standing on a desolate beach under moonlight. It’s a place I’ve seen before, through someone else’s eyes. Deserted of any living thing except we two. Grey, tempestuous, with vast offshore waves, a dangerous reef out beyond the shallows, shaped like a devil’s crown.
Despite the roaring wind coming off the water, whipping the sand through our hair, stinging against our skin, I hear Luc clearly when he murmurs, ‘What would it take to unlock the mystery of you?’
I shake my head, helpless to answer him, the elements outside a replica of what’s inside me.
It’s as if we are standing in the eye of a perfect storm. Lightning pierces the blanket of night around us, striking the distant water, lighting up the horizon, illuminating the stark coastline, the jagged rocks that rise up beyond the shallows like reaching fingers or claws, the lashing boughs of the trees that line the shore like a vast, crowding army of the undead.
‘I haven’t forgotten you,’ Luc breathes against my neck as the elements rage around us. ‘I haven’t forgotten a single thing we said or did together. I’m obsessed by my memories of you. They’re eating me alive. Why can’t I find you? Why haven’t you tried harder to find me?’
‘Tried harder?’ I cry, distressed at the implication in his words. ‘You can’t know what it’s been like for me!’
‘Or me,’ Luc growls. ‘When you . . . left me, it ruined everything.’
I shiver, wanting the dream to be over, desperate to wake myself up. I try to pull myself out of his arms but Luc’s grip is suddenly like iron.
I begin to struggle and twist in earnest. ‘I don’t respond well to threats,’ I growl. ‘You, of all people, should know that about me.’
Luc shakes me roughly. ‘Where are you?’ he cries, as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Answer me!’
He shakes me again and the feeling in my heart turns to . . . anger.
A surge of fury breaks in me, higher than any wave. And my left hand begins to burn.
I draw breath sharply, contemplating the pale corona engulfing my hand, beginning to creep silently up my wrist, white, like ghost flame. How can something so beautiful be so . . . corrosive?p>
Luc’s eyes gleam with an answering fire as he contemplates my evanescent skin. ‘That’s the key,’ he hisses.
‘Key?’ I gasp, unable now to flex the fingers of my left hand. The agony is leaching into my voice. Can he hear it? The flame is like a living thing. I see it throw out questing tendrils, as if it is sentient and seeking new sources of fuel.
‘Fear and anger,’ he replies. ‘Fear and anger allow you to access your true nature, those powers that are yours by right. Fear and anger are a window upon your soul; shall lead you back to me. Fear and anger,’ he laughs, almost to himself. ‘It’s only fitting.’
I cannot look away from the steady conflagration of my flesh. My forearm is now wholly incandescent. It feels as if nothing will ever rival this pain.
‘What of love?’ I remind him sharply, my voice rising as the flame also rises. ‘It’s a currency I would rather deal in.’
Luc seems so different now, from when I first knew him. Mocking, self-confident. The look that drew me to him in the first place, all those long years ago — of love, and longing — is missing, as if it was never there.
‘Love!’ His voice is disdainful. ‘Love is what got us into this mess in the first place. The time for love will come again, but now is the time for war. If you won’t look for me, then find that mortal boy, Ryan, return to the place where he lives, and I will come for you. But do it quickly — I have waited long enough.’
‘When you’re like this,’ I whisper, ‘I don’t even know you.’
In answer, Luc shakes me again. ‘Stupid creature! Without him there will never again be an us. You will always and forever be just a lost girl. Ryan is only the first step of many that must be taken. Don’t you understand? Find him.’
With a growl of frustration fierce enough to shake ancient bedrock, he suddenly streaks skyward with me in his arms, held fast, a living projectile.
And I remember . . . my terrible fear of heights —
— the surface of the earth falling away from us at a speed that must surely be against the laws of nature; the vault of heaven looming until we break into the cold embrace of the eternal night sky, continue streaming away into absolute space, the airless, aching void. How is it we are able?
In dreams, anything is possible.
Yet it all feels so real that I cannot draw breath; terror is interfering with my musculature, my physiognomy.
Luc steers us madly, deliberately, at a piece of space junk the size of a small mountain — a rain of certain death were it to fall upon the earth — and smashes through it, laughing wildly. Though I cower and turn my face away within the circle of his embrace, the debris seems not to touch us.
This may be a dream, but dreams bring the truth to the surface, don’t they? And I know now that I cannot bear any distance away from the solid surface of the world. And yet we spiral deeper through the uncaring universe than anyone has ever been, and I wonder why I — why Luc, the one who loves me — would inflict a dream like this upon my sleeping consciousness. A dream as real, as terrifying, as this could bring death to someone like me.
