Luc — as if he marked you in some way that cannot be seen by any save him. It is especially strong when you are asleep, when the linkages between soul and body are at their weakest. When you are at rest, he has access to your thoughts and pursues you across all the hours of darkness, only to have that connection snatched away at daybreak.’
Gabriel’s tone grows graver still. ‘It is time. If Michael knew I’d given you even this much insight into your . . . condition, he would not be pleased.’
I recall Michael, and how he is, terrible in his beauty and his wisdom. I am sure he has not changed in all this time. To him, change is something that occurs only within established and permissible parameters: the seasons may change, the tides, the cycles of the moon and of the sun, but little else in nature. He is warlike, constant, always correct, dealing only in absolutes of black and white, admitting of no grey. Sometime in the dim past of our history together, he turned from me — or did I turn from him? Since that day, what lies between us has been an ocean of misunderstanding and rue. I’m sure he considers me now more of a long-term project, with its attendant costly overruns, irritations and delays, than a person who was once his . . . friend.
Gabriel closes his brilliant green eyes and I know I am about to leave this place, this third-rate cafe, and by no conventional means. He will cast me out into that vast sea of human souls, perform that strange necromancy that the Eight fiendishly devised all those aeons ago. But I’m not sure I’m ready to go.
Ryan? I plead, all my longing in that word.
Not for you, Gabriel replies without missing a beat, without opening his eyes. Not your fate.
Time recommences, and I hear Justine’s terrified gasp.
‘Of course you know him!’ she cries. ‘Don’t try and speak, Lela. Please. Oh God, oh God.’
‘Stand aside, sir,’ says a male voice beside us urgently.
Sulaiman only holds me more tightly to him.
I feel Lela’s body begin to convulse in his arms, blood pouring from her mouth. I am blind again. Cold and growing colder.
What happens now? I cry into the stillness between us.
It begins again, Gabriel sighs inside my mind. And we will tell you to do nothing and you will do everything in your power to draw Luc to you, make ripples enough to signal to the universe that you yet live.
I hear Cecilia and Justine wailing over Lela’s body, while the male paramedic tries to wrest her from Sulaiman’s arms.
You know I will continue to defy you all, I reply. And I shall do it again and again!
No doubt. His voice is like a fleeting smile in my mind. You have surprised us so far, we eight; behaved more like us than your original self — the self we first cast into hiding. You had taken on all of his worst traits — vanity, pride, self-indulgence, cruelty. But since you’ve been . . . banished, when he says the word, his voice seems troubled, you’ve taken so many souls out of Luc’s grasp. Some of us argue that you have changed irreversibly; that the centuries-long game we have engaged in has changed you — for the better. Others of us are not so sure; we believe that were Luc to reclaim you tomorrow, you would be as you once were, save infinitely more powerful.
Now you have forced our hand once more, he adds, a touch of anger in his tone. And you must flee this broken body for a new home.
His hold on me grows tighter and I gargle, ‘Wait!’
He grows still, tells the wailing women around us, ‘Quiet! Lela speaks.’
I feel a surge of the living fire that Gabriel represents. Not enough to banish the mark of Azraeil from Lela’s body, but enough to enable me to be understood, to undertake one last accounting of my own.
The humans around me grow still, strain forward to hear my words, spoken through pain, through blood, through the harsh susurration of my breathing.
‘Justine, promise me you’ll place a higher value on yourself. Never sell yourself short again. Promise.’
She nods tearfully. ‘I p-promise,’ she stutters, clutching one of Lela’s cold hands in hers. ‘You hear me? It’s a deal.’
‘Franklin?’
I can’t see him through Lela’s sightless eyes, but I hear him clear his throat gruffly, mumble, ‘Yes?’
‘Tell your wife everything. Cause and effect, Franklin. Let your cowardice haunt you all the rest of your days, because this is partly your doing . . .’
For a second, I grip Justine’s hand fiercely in mine. ‘And nd Ryan. Tell him . . . that Mercy shall come again . . .’
Lela’s voice trails away as her lungs fill up with blood. Gabriel loosens his hold on me and I feel Lela’s eyes roll back in her head as I cede control of her dying mind, her soul still knotted tightly into the wreckage of her body.
I’m so sorry, Lela.
Cecilia and Justine wail and wail. It’s a primal sound, the grieving ululation of women everywhere. I could be in the Hebron, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, Rwanda, Kandahar, Jiangxi, the Sudan. Grief is universal. It transcends language, even time. And it is always the women who are left to grieve.
Though this time, there is one other to join their grieving number. And I pray he will receive and understand my message.
There is a sensation, a tug, as if Gabriel has broken some kind of cord that binds me to Lela. I am like beads on a broken string, each being drawn slowly upwards and pocketed. As I feel myself become something like mist, like fog, the bonds between myself and Lela’s body beginning to loosen.
Inside Gabriel’s mind I cry: Command Azraeil to reap them gently. Command him to lead Lela’s soul, the soul of her mother, home . . .
Home.
Where the great universe wheels and turns and turns about. Where planets, stars, suns, moons, the greater and lesser bodies, fly by; comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space, twist and curl overhead like a painted, yet living, ever- changing dome. A place I have not seen for millennia, but to which I hope one day to return, to see again with waking eyes.
Mercy, Gabriel says for my ears alone. It is a good name you have given yourself; an apt name.
Godspeed, I hear him murmur before I find myself falling out of this life, into another . . .
Acknowledgments
Of course, this book wouldn’t have been possible without the love and support of Michael, Oscar, Leni and Yve.
Thanks also to Lisa Berryman, Rachel Denwood, Carla Alonzi, Natalie Costa Bir, Elizabeth Ryley and Nicola O’Shea for their expertise, professionalism, wisdom and good humour, and to Cristina Cappelluto, Shona Martyn and Evangeline for believing there was something to Mercy in the first place.
To Chris O’Connor of the Primitive Radio Gods — thank you for the music. And the words.
Thanks to the marvellous Catherine Onder and Stephanie Lurie at Hyperion-Disney and my excellent editorial and publishing team at Ravensburger Buchverlag.
Thanks also to Libby Callinan for tips on grammar, Shakespeare and quiche over the years.
And gratias ago, Norma Pill, for giving Mercy more facility with Latin than she is entitled to have, and for pointing out stubborn instances of the Toorak nominative.
Also by Rebecca Lim
Mercy Muse (2011) Fury (2012)
Mercy ‘wakes’ on a school bus bound for Paradise, a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business — or thinks they do. But they will never guess the secret Mercy is hiding . . .
As an angel exiled from heaven and doomed to return repeatedly to Earth, Mercy is never sure whose life
