the words Via Borgonuovo, 22 that represent sanctuary, I can’t help turning my head to scan the opposite side of the street, beyond my abandoned limo. K’el’s gone. All I see in his place is the figure of a young woman in ordinary street clothes: a pale blue puffy down jacket, blue jeans, snow boots, a Fair Isle knitted cap jammed down low over the long, wavy dark hair that frames her sweet-looking face. She’s a little above average height, and slender. I wonder if she knows that she’s standing right where an archangel had been.
But then I look more closely at the skin of her face. To someone with eyesight like mine, there’s something just the faintest bit ‘wrong’ about it. It’s almost matte, like a human’s. Almost, but there’s a faint surface sheen to it, as if light is seeping out slowly through her pores, can’t fully be disguised.
And I know that I’ve seen her before, and I feel Irina’s heart kick into high gear with sudden, fearful wonder. My eyes fly wide in my pale face. The archangel Nuriel. My next watcher. She’s already here.
It’s who Justine Hennessy had reminded me of, when I was Lela. I’d seen Justine walking towards me in the stark, bright, noonday sun of an Australian summer dressed all in white, her long, dark, wavy hair unbound against the light and I’d thought then that I was looking at … Nuriel, I realise now. Nuriel.
Our eyes meet across the chaos in the street and I recall that we were friends once, the best of friends. She always had my back. Although that day — when Luc and I faced the Eight — she sided with Them, not with me. It had been the biggest betrayal, the biggest shock, of my entire life. The Eight — They took her away from me, too. It’s just one more thing to hold Them to account for.
Nuriel mouths: Keep moving, and gives me a heartbreakingly familiar smile as she suddenly vanishes, unnoticed by the crowd.
K’el had said that Nuriel had been assigned to watch over me in my next life, the one after this one. I start shaking as I realise that Nuriel’s here for a reason. Those that remain of the Eight are going to try and shift me again. Before Luc gets here.
9
Vladimir and Carlo each put a supportive hand beneath one of my elbows as I stumble beneath the graceful, rectangular portico, through those discreet sliding glass doors.
We stand there for a few seconds, looking up into the lens of a camera trained on us from above, while security runs some kind of visual check on us from inside the building. Beyond us is a second set of doors exactly the same as the first. Finally, these slide open to allow us into the reception area of Atelier Re.
I’m standing in a light-drenched, music-filled atrium that is completely at odds with the blunt neo-classical stone facade of the building’s exterior. An intricately patterned mosaic floor stretches away from me in all directions, its thumbnail-sized tiles laid out in soothing sea greens and luminous blues, shades of ochre, white and black.
It could be the world seen from above. And I imagine the six that remain — Michael, Uriel, Gabriel, Jeremiel, Jegudiel, Barachiel — speeding here from all points across it, or maybe even the universe. To get to me. It could happen any moment. I might blink now and wake up somewhere else, as someone else, and have to start all over again.
K’el is ready to let me go. Nuriel’s ready to receive me into her care. How else to explain her presence here?
Then I frown, remembering that though it takes the might of many to place me into a new human form, it takes only one of them to draw me out of a mortal body. The six should be gathering where my new host is going about her daily business, oblivious to the fact that she’s about to experience a kind of spiritual lockdown. So why are they all coming here first?
Is it because there’s no time? I don’t think I’m mistaken in thinking that things seem to be speeding up; that the length of time between each soul-jacking seems to be shortening.
And why place me inside a new host whose life so closely intersects with Irina’s? My last five lives were all so different. In age, in circumstance, physical location, culture, everything. Why put me into a new life that has two, maybe three degrees of separation, at most, from Irina’s?
‘We’ll be on standby, Irina,’ Carlo murmurs in my ear. ‘If you need us, have them call.’
I nod distractedly.
At the peripheries of my sight, I see Carlo rejoin Vladimir, Angelo and Jurgen, and they exit back through the two sets of sliding doors, making for the limos, shoving a few of the remaining paps on the way, just for fun. For a moment, I’m on my own, listening to the music. It’s an operatic duet of thrilling beauty: two female voices, two soprani. The melody seems familiar, but I can’t place the language the voices are singing in.
I scan the atrium absently, ignoring the stares and whispers that form part of just being Irina. It’s space age meets art deco on the ground floor of Atelier Re. Everywhere I look, there’s an interesting interplay between mirrored glass and polished, curvilinear stone, rich-toned wood and black bakelite and chrome. Many of the polished, flowing surfaces seem to reflect the light that’s spilling from massive, organic-looking, many-branched light sculptures that hang from the ceiling. Though the space seems uncluttered, almost under-furnished, there are groups of pretty people in beautiful clothes conducting meetings at small, pod-like break-out areas, or taking calls at ingeniously designed workstations that are miraculously free of wiring, dust or knick-knackery. Even the computer screens seem embedded into the smooth lines of the tabletops.
It’s all breathtakingly elegant, and I’m still staring up at the small constellations of light bulbs, mesmerised, when someone calls out ‘Irina!’ and I lower my gaze to see an elderly man — maybe seventy? seventy-five? — standing in front of me.
He’s almost the same height I am in my killer heels, with a full head of artfully dyed, dark brown hair that’s slicked back in a retro, yet ageless style. He’s clean-shaven, olive-skinned, and his bright blue eyes are framed by quirkily rounded tortoiseshell spectacles. He’s a little paunchy now — his cleverly cut, Nehru-collared black suit can’t hide that — but he would’ve had a rangy, athletic frame in his youth; he would’ve been handsome. And there’s still great strength in his soft, wrinkled old man’s hands as he grabs hold of mine, taking me by surprise.
I look down sharply at Irina’s fingers gripped tightly in his and know that it would be rude to pull away. But I feel something like panic as my left hand begins to ache dully. It’s too late, the old man’s grip is too strong. There’s that sensation of a building pressure behind my eyes, then we flame into contact, and I see —
— Irina Zhivanevskaya as a sixteen year old, through the old man’s eyes. She has dyed-black, punky hair, wild eyes and ripped clothes; an even filthier attitude. I see her slouching into the room towards him, feel the sudden leap of his interest, see her deliberately bump into a tall, slender, blonde girl who’s just stepped down gracefully from a catwalk set up in the centre of the room under harsh lights, so that the girl stumbles and almost falls, then runs from the room in tears.
Then I see a woman with a pale, severe face and snow-white hair in a sleek chignon, all in black, sitting beside him. I hear her tell Irina to stand up straight, hear Irina snarl, ‘Go to hell!’ in her smoky voice, without missing a beat.
The woman turns and says angrily, ‘She’s no good, this one, send her away.’
But the man’s voice says kindly, ‘Walk, child, walk.’ And his hand indicates the catwalk.
Irina mounts the stairs and transforms into someone else altogether as she storms along the narrow white platform, head up, eyes wide, shoulders back, hands swinging freely by her sides, hips thrust forward, her freakily long legs easily covering the short distance before she pauses, stares, pivots, and stalks back the other way. And I see what the old man saw that day — a certain look, a feline, haughty walk. Together with her wide-set eyes and narrow everything, that go-to-hell stare, Irina is unforgettable.
That’s all I want to see, and I gently pull my hands free of the old man’s. The ache in my left hand, behind my eyes, fades away.
‘I feel a little bit … responsible, you know?’ he says with an apologetic lift of his shoulders. ‘For all the craziness. You walked for me, and then nothing in your life was ever the same again.’
I shrug. ‘In the end, we’re responsible for ourselves, for our actions,’ and I’m speaking for myself as much as for Irina. It’s something I think I’ve only just begun to appreciate.
The old man gestures at one of the pretty people standing at a workstation across the room. ‘Gudrun,’ he
