I glance down at the roadways — like human arteries, like veins — the emergency vehicles that look like toy cars and trucks, and have to close my eyes again, dry retching. All I can think about is falling. And I do fall.
It’s a death spin. Gravity’s got hold of me again, the way it did all those years ago, and I can’t fight it. The wind’s shrieking past us.
‘Pull up!’ Ryan yells, white-hot terror in his voice. ‘Just look at me, Mercy! Look at me and you won’t fall.’
When I open my eyes, I see people on the ground, getting bigger all the time. People I’m going to take out.
Ryan forces me to look at him, turning my face with the fingers of one frozen hand as we fall and fall. All I allow myself to see is the rain beating down on him, plastering his dark hair to his head, his clothes to his body; his dark eyes holding mine. The whole world, the whole sky, reduced to his dear face. My trajectory grows flat, begins, unsteadily, to climb.
‘Okay?’ he gasps, the icy air burning his mortal lungs with every breath.
I nod, the worst of the dizziness receding. My peripheral vision starts to return again and I look further and further afield. I rise higher, unsteadily, trying to get my bearings.
The battering rain, the hurricane winds, are buffeting us from side to side. The smallest downdraught sends me spinning out of control. A particularly violent updraught causes Ryan to slide through my arms, and only the iron grip of our entwined fingers keeps us together.
‘So cold,’ Ryan murmurs as I pull him close to me again, terrified I’ll drop him; terrified of lightning strike, of air pockets, of wind currents — things no mortal should ever be subjected to at this altitude. But we need to leave Milan, to get as far away from here as possible, and this is the only way I know how.
It’s a night for ironies, I think, too sick, too petrified by what I’m doing, to properly scan the ground for landmarks. I have powers, abilities, no human being could possibly comprehend, but I can’t use even half of them. Because of Ryan.
I can’t expect him to pass through solid matter. I can’t expect him to become invisible on cue; to transport himself from place to place simply by wishing it. He was not made to counter science. He’s made of a far different stuff than I am.
I’m weak, out of shape, out of practice. We’re barely any distance at all from the Galleria as the crow flies when I see one gleaming, winged shape, then another, launch itself out of that wound in the iron and glasswork ceiling. They come straight after us, scars burning brightly in the midnight air.
‘Mercy!’ Ryan gasps.
‘I see them,’ I say through gritted teeth.
There’s nowhere to go but down, and that alone is terrifying. I falter as I remember waking on that lonely hillside, broken, terrified, not understanding where I was or what had happened to me. But there’s no getting around it. We need to go down. We need to lose ourselves in the human world, because there’s no hiding up here, not when Ryan’s with me.
A crack of thunder pierces the air, swiftly followed by lightning. In its glare, I turn to see that our pursuers have diverged, and that beyond them, above the burning Galleria, the battle has taken to the skies. Archangels and their glowing nemeses wrestle, falling and rising in the air, the tide of warfare turning and turning again. The air is lit by holy fire meeting its polar opposite.
No matter how I twist and fall, soar and feint, our pursuers close in steadily, driving me back towards the Galleria and to Luc. One of them is a lethally muscular male with short, auburn curls; the other has pale yellow hair that streams out behind her, a wicked, twisted blade in one hand. I have no doubt in my mind that it is Gudrun.
Ryan’s teeth are chattering with cold, his lips have a bluish cast, and he’s like a block of stone in my arms, head bowed against me, the rain sluicing off his soaked clothing. His eyes are closed now, as if he lacks the energy to keep them open.
‘Stay with me,’ I cry, gripping him even more tightly to me so that he struggles briefly, making a small sound of protest. ‘Don’t you dare die on me, not now. Not now we’re finally together.’
‘Sanctuary,’ he mumbles, and he’s barely audible, even to me. ‘We need sanctuary.’
As he says the words, a bolt of lightning hits so close to us that it sends me into freefall. All I see is the Piazza del Duomo rushing up to meet us, and it’s covered in a patchwork of emergency-service vehicles, tents, crash barriers, people, that lit-up Christmas tree that seems like something from another world, another time.
‘Sanctuary,’ Ryan mumbles. ‘Sanctuary.’
I peel off at speed, skimming low over the flashing lights of all the vehicles, circling the square in frustration, Gudrun and the others in pursuit from above and below, closing in.
‘Demons,’ Ryan mumbles. ‘No sanctuary for demons.’
And then I understand what my poor, battered, half-drowned human is trying to tell me.
‘Nullum asylum daemonibus!’ I shriek into the night. No sanctuary for demons.
I scream straight up the neo-Gothic face of the cathedral — hundreds of feet in the air — making for the crazy rooftop crowned by spires and tracery, gargoyles and statuary, the demons in pursuit. Gudrun’s so close I can feel her hot breath upon my heels, feel the sizzle of energy her blade gives out.
As I burst above the roofline, all I see are human figures, each the size of giants, standing in rows upon the carved and fretted spires, hundreds of feet above the ground, their faces turned upon the city of Milan below.
I draw a sharp breath as lightning cracks behind me. For a moment, the figures seem alive, seem to move. I imagine I see disapproval upon their faces as I search frantically for the stairs. Stairs that lead down from the open roof of the cathedral to a walkway on the lower north side. There’s a door there. And then another set of stairs — encased in a stone tower — that people use to access the roof from the ground.
I know it with a certainty born of true memory. I’ve walked those stairs before, been inside that tower. Years ago. The stairs must still be there.
I just need to get down onto the roof and the demons won’t be able to touch me. No sanctuary for demons. No respite for demons in this place.
I feel a piercing pain as the edge of Gudrun’s blade meets my heel and blindly throw myself down at the field of saints and spires, Ryan held tightly in my arms.
Landing is always going to be a problem for me, I realise; it’s that sense of falling, of losing control. We collide with the edge of a spire on the way down. Or, at least, I appear to collide with it. The sensation of solid stone passing straight through my body shocks me so much that I lose my hold on Ryan for the last few feet and he hits the roof at an awkward angle with a dull impact I can almost hear. He rolls a short distance down the pitched roof of the nave, then lies sprawled, face down, unmoving.
Without knowing how I got from where I lost hold of him to where he ended up, I’m already kneeling beside his still form, fear crowding my throat. I roll him over gently, take his face in my hands, and silver tears fall down my cheeks in gratitude, in praise, as I see his pain-filled eyes open.
He looks at me in wonder as he rasps, ‘Are those for me? What happened to the hard ass I fell in love with?’
‘We made it,’ I say shakily. ‘Think you can stand?’
He coughs, grimacing in pain. ‘If you help me, sure.’
But then his eyes close, and I can’t shake him awake. And I realise that there’s blood on his mouth. He’s badly hurt, and it’s all my fault.
Why do I destroy everything I touch? Even the things I … love?
Above me, the two demons wheel as close as they dare, shrieking in their inhuman voices. I know that we need to get on the move by daybreak; we can’t stay here. I make everything around me a target. They will raze Milan around us while they wait for me.
I sling one of Ryan’s arms around my neck, grasp him about his waist and pull him upright easily. He’s a dead weight in my arms, his head of dark hair hanging forward, and I know that I’m running out of time. He’s dying, I can feel it happening beneath my hands. His soul is beginning to cleave away from his body.
‘Azraeil!’ I call out despairingly. ‘You keep away from him, you keep away, do you hear?’
Lightning illuminates the empty rooftop, the sea of slick and treacherous tiles on which we are marooned.
