14
The others don’t have my reflexes.
Our limo travels another hundred feet at least before the driver brakes suddenly, tyres squealing. The second limo almost runs me down where I’m standing, frozen and gaping, in the roadway. At the spot, the very spot, where Ryan was hit.
People explode out of both cars and slip and slide across the icy surface towards me. Five burly, dark-suited men, a couple with weapons drawn, and Gia, who’s screaming in the way people do when they go beyond the point at which there are any words to express the horror they’re feeling.
‘What were you thinking?’ she sobs, grabbing hold of my upper arms. The men circle me warily, as if I’m wired with explosives and might blow at any moment.
‘You killed him,’ I say dazedly, craning my head to look around them, over them. ‘Didn’t you see? Help me look for his body.’
But even as I say the words, I know that I just witnessed an illusion. Something a demon might send to taunt me, to make me question my sanity.
Vladimir shines a narrow, stainless-steel torch in my face, then plays it across the slick and uneven surface of the road around us, up the sides of nearby buildings and over parked cars. ‘What body?’ he drawls in his heavy Russian accent.
Gia’s voice is shaky. ‘Irina, what are you talking about? There’s nothing here.’
‘No blood?’ I say tonelessly, already knowing the answer. ‘No body?’
Six people shake their heads, shuffling uneasily, shooting each other covert looks.
But I saw him go down.
‘The driver says he didn’t see or … um … feel anything,’ Gia adds softly.
I wheel about in the snow, and shake my fists at the sky, shrieking, ‘What are you playing at? What are you waiting for? Come and get me!’
And I actually try to run. In my bare feet, I try to break free and run from the vision of Ryan being mown down by the very car I was travelling in, run from all the horror and devastation I’m feeling inside. What I told Bianca was true. All I have left are feelings.
I try to run from them all: from beings both seen and unseen; even from the watchful, lowering sky that, once, could never have mastered me.
‘Come and get me!’ I shriek, taking Angelo by surprise and shoving him out of the way so hard that he sprawls to the ground, his weapon clattering against the raised stone kerb. I dodge Vladimir’s outstretched arms and scramble away up the road on my scratched and bruised bare feet, almost losing my balance, then recovering it as I stretch out Irina’s long legs and run.
‘Are you seeing this?’ I shriek. ‘Any of you? Come and get me! I dare you! Show yourselves!’
I’ve almost made it past the hotel driveway when I’m crash-tackled to the ground by someone at least three times Irina’s body weight. Still facing down, the surface of the pavement moving past me in a blur, I’m carried at a run, under the arms, by the ankles, back through the emergency exit doors we came out of this morning, through the laundry room, the sound-deadened luxury lift, as if the day is being rewound all around me.
Someone throws open the door to my suite — every light inside blazing bright — and I’m set down, none too gently, on hands and knees on the floor. My damp hair hangs down stringily on either side of my face. I can feel that the soles of my feet are cut up and wet and filthy.
I look up to see a man in a suit standing over me, with a kind face and a courteous manner. He’s stocky and paunchy and clean-shaven, with a leonine head of grey, wavy hair and a tie like a stockbroker, all the stripes running upwards.
‘I’ve never seen you before,’ I say, squinting at him as someone helps me to stand. ‘Gianfranco?’
‘No,’ he says kindly in Italian-accented English. ‘But Gianfranco did send for me. And if you’re a good girl, you won’t ever have to see me again.’
Moving quickly for someone so large, he adjusts something just out of my line of sight and I feel a small stab of pain in one arm.
And just like that, I’m gone.
There’s the sensation of rapid movement, of leagues being eaten up in the space between two heartbeats. I’m flying, oh God, I think I’m flying. Something that’s been denied me for so long.
In the instant I recognise what I’m doing, I feel an intense wave of almost paralysing fear, but, also, exhilaration. And the two emotions could not be more distinct.
I’m looking down at the distant snow, so far below, a dull white in this moonless night. The air whistling past me is colder than any mortal could stand, but I’m moving through it easily, as if I’m a bird. Or an angel. Soundlessly, with purpose.
Watching the great distances pass beneath me, I feel my gorge rise, as if I’m going to be sick. I’m suffused with fear, almost rigid with it, and yet I fly on, under cover of darkness: over snow, over standing stones, ravines and valleys, one mountainous pass after another on which ski lifts and cable cars stand idle, all the floodlights out for the night. There’s no movement, no light, in the houses that I soar over unseen. The humans inside, they’re asleep. They’ll wake later, never knowing I was even here.
Am I … hurt? There’s a slight dragging pain in my side, as if I have a stitch, or I’ve been wounded. Not gravely; more of a flesh wound, a deep cut.
I’ll live. But it’s slowing me down, everything’s getting in my way, and I’m suddenly pierced through by so much rage, so much frustration, that I turn my head to find a target for my fury. I see a double-storey house with a steeply pitched roof and quaint paintwork, empty flower boxes at all the windows, and a winding drive. There’s a collection of outbuildings, built in the same style, gathered around it. Humans and animals all asleep within.
I narrow my eyes at them. That’s all I do. And set them all on fire.
The buildings burst into flame simultaneously.
Will it and it is done.
The night air is suddenly rent with screaming, the bellows of trapped beasts, the sounds of breaking glass, but I fly on. Torching anything, everything, I see. Because I can; because I am of a mind to do it.
Snow-covered trees with bare, frozen limbs as hard as iron; byres, barns, farmhouses, cars, convenience stores and cathedrals — all gone in seconds. Roads, cobbled laneways, truck stops, turn-offs, flyovers — all these become rivers of flame, the asphalt turning liquid, like mud.
Things that should not even burn — I set fire to them all. And I laugh.
A ringing laugh. Masculine.
There’s a sudden sensation of distance — as if I’m zooming out, refocusing, before zooming back in — and I realise that it’s not me doing this at all. Someone else is turning the world to fire and I’m just seeing it through his eyes. I’m somehow getting his feelings and mine, together. Unshakeable confidence versus sheer terror; triumph versus horror.
Of course, all the negative emotions I’m feeling are mine.
I know that laugh. Amusement tinged with cruelty.
How often did I hear it with my own ears when I was me, inhabiting my own body? How often have I heard it in my dreams?
Luc? I scream silently. Desiste! Stop!
But if Luc hears me, he gives no sign. Everything seems so real, it’s as though I’ve been given a temporary line into his head, as if I’ve hijacked his senses, shrugged on his skin. But what I’m seeing is unspeakable. The night sky lit up with flames, with suffering. It can’t be real, can it?
I’m hit by a sudden recollection. Of a time when the universe was young. Of Luc disrupting the settled orbits of planetary bodies, sending them careening into each other, displacing objects billions of times our size, mass and density, just because he could. Life had been an endless game to him, the universe his playground. But back then it had not teemed with the life it teems with now, and what he’s doing at this moment screams wrongness to me.
Luc crosses a final peak and soars down the heavily populated flank on the other side of the mountain — house after house built in terraces down the steep incline. In the distance I see a large body of water, a handful of
