less and less human. More and more luminous, more beautiful. Grow wings.
Then swords of pure flame ignite in their hands, crackling with energy, and the air around me begins to superheat as six move to contain two.
People begin to shriek and scramble backwards, away from us. I sit up slowly on the runway, head pounding, eyes watering.
Luc raises one hand casually and the vast space is suddenly plunged into a terrible darkness in which the only visible things are the eight beings surrounding me.
One by one the video screens go up in flames along the length of the arcade, so that those who have not already made it to the southern exit turn and flee for the east–west axis of the cross-shaped building, screaming in terror, trampling others in their desperation to flee the flames.
The darkness is lit by fire, by the screens of mobile phones, by eerie flashes of lightning from above. Around us is utter chaos; the theory of that man Darwin in motion.
‘Mercy!’ I hear Ryan shouting somewhere behind me. ‘Mercy! Where are you?’
I turn to look for him, but all the chairs have been swept aside. There are bodies everywhere, people pushing and buffeting each other. The smell of burning plastic and circuitry is intense and acrid.
‘We have no quarrel with you,’ I hear Barachiel say to Gudrun as she edges towards me, as if for safety. ‘Stand aside from him and you get to live.’
K’el, Jeremiel, Uriel and Gabriel close in around Luc’s golden, watchful form.
Michael turns his head of short, black curls in my direction, fury in his black eyes and raises his blazing blade. ‘Flee,’ he roars at me, at Gudrun. ‘You will have little stomach for what we are about to do to the one you each call your beloved.’
‘Kneel,’ he bellows at Luc, judgment in his bell-like voice. ‘Submit. There is no one left to pray to. He turned from you when you turned from Him. I should have finished you properly the first time.’
The six close their circle around Luc, intending to sacrifice him here, before us all.
Through the screams of the injured and terrified, I hear Ryan again. ‘Mercy! Mercy! Tell me you’re still here.’
I swing my head in his direction, shouting, ‘Ryan! Yes, I’m here. I’m still here. Don’t move — I’m —’
Then Luc does it again. He roars my name and I’m as good as dead. Bent double in agony, I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t speak. All because Raphael once thought it a good idea to hide the memory of my name inside me, so deep that I can’t recognise it, or bear to hear it, without going haywire.
Gudrun seizes me by the throat then, lifting my mortal form easily off the ground.
Michael frowns; the other five exchange glances. But their watchful stances never vary. They are here for Luc first and foremost.
‘Let her die,’ Michael says dismissively, turning away from Gudrun, from me. ‘At heart, she’s one of you anyway. Do your worst, demon.’
Demon? Is that what she is?
Is that what Michael and the others really think of me?
I am filled with so much rage and shock and hurt, that my clenched left fist begins to blaze in agony and I kick out, almost breaking free of Gudrun’s imprisoning hold. She digs the fingers of her right hand harder into the flesh of Irina’s throat as Michael and Luc circle around us slowly, blades raised and rippling with a pale blue luminescence.
As I struggle to get air into Irina’s lungs, to stay conscious, Michael’s black eyes clash briefly with mine before they slide away. My shock deepens when I realise that he’s doing this deliberately. He’s actually trying to provoke me, and somehow, just for a moment, I could divine his intent. Anger can be used; it can be channelled, his gaze seemed to say. There must be no surrender. The realisation only makes me struggle harder, though my eyes are failing, and my movements are growing feeble and unfocused.
Luc’s voice is amused. ‘Still haven’t worked it all out yet, my love? You didn’t used to be so slow.’
Lightning splits the sky above the Galleria again and I see Ryan gripping the edge of the catwalk about ten feet away to my left, people pushing and shoving past him like a living tide. His own eyes widen in shock when he sees Irina dangling like a doll in a bride’s dress and crumpled wings at the end of Gudrun’s arm.
The others don’t see Ryan vault up onto the runway, staying low. And I can’t warn him to keep away, not to try anything heroic, because Gudrun’s crushing my windpipe in her right hand, the nails blood red.
Flames suddenly burst up the sides of the runway and Ryan dives out of view. At the edges of my sight, I see the hysteria worsen as people are hemmed in by flames on all sides. They change direction multiple times, like a stampeding herd. People go down and stay down, lie still.
‘Don’t you understand?’ Luc says calmly, facing down the tip of Michael’s flaming broadsword without flinching. ‘My trap is sprung within yours. It has already closed around you all — most holy, most high.’ He throws his golden head back and laughs. ‘It is you who must kneel. I have a special vengeance reserved for all of you; but for you, Michael, I have something truly exceptional in mind.’
Luc raises his blazing blade aloft and light seeps up out of the mosaic floor in multiple locations, twines swiftly around the ankles of all the people pushing desperately for the exits, slides over the still bodies of the prone, before coalescing into shining shapes that move rapidly towards the catwalk and rise unscathed through fire. They gather upon the catwalk, a shining army, a score of them at least. All beautiful, all tall, all lethal. They must be part of Luc’s personal guard; the most fearsome of his legion: his daemonium.
They are winged as the archangels are — for that is what they once must have been. And they are still indistinguishable from us, save that most are in shining raiment that is high-necked or long-sleeved. Not for them, the glowing, sleeveless raiment of the six archangels they now surround. They are truly our opposite, in attitude and appetite.
Swords ignite in their hands as they fall upon Michael, upon Barachiel, Jeremiel, Gabriel, Uriel, until their shining forms are engulfed. I hear the sizzle as blade meets blade, and the air is a whirl of limbs, wings, ambient light.
K’el, the weakest of the six, is engaged by five of Luc’s forces at once, and immediately takes to the air, trying to shake them off. Uriel, too, suddenly ascends — as if he would protect K’el — parrying the blades of the two beings that harry him, one from each side.
People scream and point upwards as they flee.
I kick and twist within the grip of Gudrun’s crushing fist but she is like a creature of legend, a stone giantess. Darkness invades my sight once more as Irina’s body begins to suffocate, to die.
Luc turns to Gudrun and gives her the kind of smile that once would have brought me to my knees with love.
‘Give her to me,’ he says. ‘Alive or dead, I still have use for her. The moment is upon us, my dear. It begins tonight.’
Gudrun throws me down onto the catwalk, and I suck greedily at the tainted air, searching through the smoke and flames and darkness for Ryan. But he’s nowhere to be seen.
Luc’s sword vanishes into the palm of his hand and he crosses the short distance to me, looks down upon my bowed, human head.
‘I told you something once — in a fit of love-struck madness,’ he says. ‘Do you remember it?’
I close my eyes briefly and nod, remembering the two of us entwined in our secret garden, the air heavy with the scent of a thousand different blooms that no human hand could possibly have put together.
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.
My eyes sting in remembrance. How happy I’d been then. I hadn’t known that happiness would be denied me, all the years thereafter.
‘That was my undoing,’ he whispers. ‘My vow was witnessed, and it has dogged me all of my days upon this earth. It is the supreme irony that without you, I am nothing. I have power, but only so much; a kingdom, but such a poor, mean kingdom with no hope of expansion or conquest. Until now. Now, your soul is mine again. And it shall free me.’
I recoil at his words as if I’ve been spat upon. He speaks of kingdoms and conquests when all the universe was once ours to play in. What happened to us?
Luc raises me up with one gleaming hand, and I am forced to look into his eyes, so far above me, that are
