‘And you turned from us and condemned yourself,’ Gabriel snaps. ‘You think we have little better to do than to keep you safe?’
I feel the air between him and me begin to supercharge with energy, begin to burn like dry tinder.
‘Don’t make me angry, Mercy,’ he warns. ‘You are in no position to win any argument you enter into with me today.’
‘Prove it.’ The challenge in my voice only intensifies the lightning in his eyes. ‘Prove that the Eight have been behind my . . . condition all this time. You say I can’t trust Luc? I can’t trust you, either. If I believed you, if I could remember how the hell I got into this mess, then I wouldn’t fight this . . . situation so hard. I’d find it easier to do . . . nothing. Let myself be blown from one place to another like the waves, like the clouds.’
‘Then believe this.’ Gabriel’s voice is as the wind ghosting through ancient pines; a perfect storm building rapidly out over the ocean. ‘For it is as Uriel told you. It has always been for you, always. This is how it was for you, and how it can never be again. Believe it and mourn.’
Chapter 21
In that instant, Gabriel collapses into a towering cloud of fine, silver mist above me, swirling and dense, taking all the heat with it. As I fall to the floor, I look up into the lightning at the heart of that cloud and it falls upon me, like a rain of mercury, a rain of fire, and engulfs Lela, me, us.
Consumes us. Becomes us. Three-into-one.
Gabriel moves through — like a swarm of raging locusts, like the Holy Ghost itself — and I feel, as I did in my dream of Ryan, our separate strands, all there. We are wholly distinct, although somehow loosely contained together in the one vessel. Lela is in there, like a locked box, a closed circuit, her soul so twisted and hooked in deep that I can’t find a way to break through to her. She can’t free herself; she can’t slip the knot. And there is a knot, I’m certain of it. I can feel us, her and me, anchored inside her body by bonds no human being could hope to sunder.
The pressure builds and I feel every cell, every nerve ending, in Lela’s body convulse. There’s a vast electrical storm inside us that is more potent than anything a mortal alone could withstand. It burns through the veil of time itself so that I see, I see —
— myself and Luc, a shining multitude at our backs, the Eight arrayed against us, holding their instruments of power aloft, a shining host behind Them, stretching farther than the eye can comprehend. It is what Uriel showed me before: the two of us the epicentre of something vast, a conflagration waiting to happen — but seen through Gabriel’s eyes.
I feel a shock when I behold my golden beloved again, as if the moment is now and not some long distant past that has already slipped through my fingers. Luc’s beauty, his terrible power, is piercing, and when I see myself through the lens of Gabriel’s gaze, my left hand grasped tightly in Luc’s right — so tall, pale and luminous the two of us, even amongst that shining throng — I know that, in that moment, I was invincible because I was under Luc’s protection.
For he was the highest ranked of them all, whispers that small voice inside. Or so he claimed for himself.
Luc and me, me and Luc, proof against all the world.
What happened to us?
Then I see a steep, distant mountainside — in Greece? Tibet? Russia? — inaccessible to all save the most foolhardy; the soil scorched for leagues around, every tree, plant, animal and rock in the vicinity of the deadly crater upon one lonely slope utterly destroyed, reduced to ashes. That term they use on news bulletins everywhere these days pops into my mind: collateral damage.
I see Gabriel combing souks, markets, fairs, uprisings, gatherings of every form and description in a thousand cities that will never live again. In search of something, someone — me? I sense his frustration, his growing anger, how he almost tears down the physical world in his search — leaving in his wake unnatural storms and weather patterns, random lightning strikes that devastate all. Like me, he is not always the most . . . even- tempered.
Then he takes us into a series of chambers deep beneath the streets of an ancient human city. It is a place truly out of nightmare: both crypt and ossuary, piled high with centuries of the jumbled dead. Walls, floors, ceilings all carpeted with bones — grinning skulls, femurs, tibias, pelvic girdles; full skeletons arranged in grisly tableaux; everywhere the bodies of the ancient dead laid out on marble tombs, arranged in sepulchres in the seeping walls. The smell of decay, mildew, waste, the dust of ages, is thick in the air, which is itself alive with the sounds of running water, of rats and mice, of creeping, chitinous life.
In this hellish domain stand seven men, unnaturally tall, preternaturally beautiful, youthful, unmarked, ageless, each like a beacon, a lighthouse, unto himself. They have no need for external illumination, for each is a being of pure fire, casting no shadow.
They are gathered about a stone table, discussing in low voices the remains laid out upon it. Only one is missing from their number: flame-haired, emerald- eyed Gabriel, who steps now into this chamber, which is the last in a series of echoing rooms so deep within the earth that mortal man has surely forgotten them.
‘Brother, well met,’ says the being I knew as Jeremiel, silver-eyed, auburn-haired, with a voice like exaltation. It sends a shiver through me to see him again, to hear him, though the words he speaks are already dust and memory.
I see Uriel there, too, one eyebrow raised sardonically as he says, ‘You took your time, brother.’
Gabriel ignores him, asks of Jeremiel eagerly, ‘Can you be certain . . .?’
In answer, the circle of men, of creatures more than man, part to allow Gabriel into their midst. What I see on that marble dais — twisted, blackened, shrunken — brings a ringing scream to Lela’s blue- tinged lips that wrenches me out of memory into the present.
And I see that my left hand is afire, the flames fully visible though it is daylight.
I hold my burning fingers up to my face, and my cries of anguish echo off the walls of the Green Lantern, breaking against the still forms of all the humans that surround me. I feel the heat of the flames bleed into the air, but the pain is only a ghostly trace of the original agony that once almost consumed me. Of that agony I felt when I woke to find Them standing over me, judgment in Their eyes, every one of Them, all those years ago.
Where did the time go? Where was Luc when I begged Them to put me out of my misery in that grim realm of the dead, and They denied me? Forced me to live.
The full horror of that memory, of what I was reduced to, assails me again and I cannot speak the words, though I think them. Why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you put me down like a dog?
As if in answer, I feel Gabriel surge through Lela’s dying frame, as though he has become reduced to his base particles, like some kind of sentient gas, a storm front of liquid fire, of inexorable energy. He leaves no physical mark of his passing, but, like a swarm of raging locusts, like the Holy Ghost itself, he has eaten away at the foundations of my absolute, unshakeable faith in Luc, and now there is doubt there, in my gaze, where before there was none.
Who lies to me? Who lies?
He leaves us and coalesces rapid into his human form. I take a great, heaving breath, coughing and gasping, no longer racked by the torment of spiritual possession.
The being that is Gabriel gently lifts me into his arms again. ‘So you see,’ he utters sorrowfully, ‘how easy it was to carry you out of that place and devise a means of hiding you inside a vast array of human lives over many, many years. You were nearly spent when Selaphiel located you. While it is true that we want to keep you and Luc apart, it is not true that we wish you . . . dead. We were simply forced to find a means of shielding you from Luc’s attention, of throwing him off your trail. He was looking for you in all the places we had been, and we have only managed to stay ahead of him all these years because we Eight united in this purpose almost as soon as you were . . . lost to us.’
Is that pain in his gaze, I wonder. Why would he have cared if I was lost? Why must Luc and I — star- crossed lovers, if ever such a thing existed — be kept apart?
Gabriel frowns. ‘The only flaw in Raphael’s plan has been that strange continuing connection you have with
