Rebecca Lim - Fury

Ryan pulls back from me and looks down into my eyes. ‘I can’t tell you what you can or can’t do,’ he says gravely, ‘because you’ll do it anyway. You always do exactly as you please. But don’t just vanish again because it’s easier than trying to work things out. Stay safe . Come back to me as quickly as you can. My, uh, charms are a little rusty these days.’

He retrieves his fake spectacles and shoves them onto his face, blinking, and it startles a laugh out of me. I flick the bill of his cap so that it falls backwards off his head and he has to bend to retrieve it with a grunt, jamming it back onto his buzz-cut scalp.

‘When you reach her, lose the cap, lose the glasses,’ I say with a grin, ‘and you’ll soon have one of the world’s most eligible rich girls eating out of your hand. She’s beautiful, too. Stunning. It could be love at first sight.’ I bite my lip. ‘Which could be a good thing, in the circumstances … a merciful thing.’

Ryan gives me a crooked smile. ‘Good try, but I’m not biting. Lightning never strikes twice, not with me.’ He pulls me close again. ‘Come back?’ he breathes against me, so tentatively that I wrap my arms around him tightly to contain his fear.

‘You know I will,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’m not Carmen any more, I’m not Lela. It’s not going to play out the same way.’

I turn and pick up the pretty dresses, then hand Ryan the backpack, which he puts on without even registering he’s doing it. Then I take him by the hand and lead him out of the folly. Low lights set into the edges of the driveway point the way down to the guesthouse, and I feel time recommencing, reeling out of my hands the way it always does, like an angler’s line.

Ryan’s worn-down boot heels slip a little on the steep, slick surface. Below us, I see the front door of the guesthouse open, and there’s a slender silhouette of a girl in the doorway, surrounded by a halo of electric light, looking up at us, just waiting.

As the driveway switches back and the guesthouse is momentarily lost to sight, I thrust the dress hangers into Ryan’s hands and whisper, ‘Be seeing you.’

Before he can frame a reply, I let my outline shred into a pale white mist, let myself break down, dissolve. Then I am ether, scattering into a billion pieces, soundlessly.

I see him step back in shock, looking around him wildly. ‘God, Merce, I hate how you do that!’ he exclaims.

It makes me laugh, and he flinches at the low sound that seems to come at him from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Trailing faint motes of light, I circle him once, twice — lighter than an embrace, than a kiss — before slipstreaming away into the night, down through the gardens of Villa Nicolin and through the bars of the tall iron gates that mark the lower boundary of the estate.

Down, down, to the waters of the lake.

I flow along the length of the narrow, private jetty, unseen and soundless. The boats moored there bump and creak as I head out over the water, skimming low, slicing through the rising wind that howls like a live thing and buffets the tall trees lining the shore. It’s so very dark, but I’m still able to discern the clouds that are once more building in the sky — massive, unnatural, like the sails of ghostly galleons.

Something wicked this way comes . The elements herald its very progress. I can feel in every particle of my being that dark forces are on the move.

I need to find Nuriel before Luc discovers I’ve already left Milan.

When I’m out over the water, I turn, a disembodied zephyr, and scan my surroundings. And that’s when it becomes obvious that I’ve seen this place before; I once dreamt of it so vividly I’d imagined that Luc and I inhabited one body, and that all the evil he committed that night was wrought by my own hand.

Luc was on the point of cutting Nuriel down with his sword when she made one last, desperate, spiralling attempt to pull away from him. In my mind’s eye I see them again — how her feint caught Luc by surprise. How he lost precious seconds before turning and pursuing her. They had exploded through the physical world — hunter and hunted — leaving destruction and incandescence in their wake. It makes sense to me now, how the main street of Moltrasio was destroyed; all those people turned to ash. When angels and demons collide, collateral damage is the only certainty.

In my dream, there was a vast estate by the water’s edge. A great house atop a hill, with a smaller outbuilding, a private pier, at the base of the property. From the water, it’s clear that Villa Nicolin is the house I glimpsed at the moment Nuriel dove down out of the sky. If Luc was acting in haste that night, if he’d wanted to secure her, but also lay a trap for anyone bent on saving her, the only place he could have hidden her would be in the lake itself.

I rise high into the air and gaze down at the black body of water below without fear, without sickness, and see immediately where Nuriel is being held. There’s a glow deep below the lake’s surface, so faint it would be undetectable to human eyes. Though I’m as insubstantial as air, no more than a faint pocket of turbulence in the night, it still makes my soul shudder to see the quality of the light. It’s numinous, incandescent, but subtly tainted. Not the pale blue luminescence of holy fire at its heart, but the creeping grey of corruption.

Demonlight.

It flares and subsides, pulsing within the dark waters of the lake like some monstrous, beating heart. Strange eddies play upon the lake’s surface, as if the tide beneath runs counter to nature; is being moved by inexplicable forces.

I don’t hesitate. I begin to narrow, to spin, funnelling all of my energy, my anger and fear, into a weapon that may be wielded. I make of myself an arrow, a spear, and fall towards the black surface of the water, piercing its dark membrane without sound, without raising so much as a ripple.

As I cleave through the water towards the depths below, all I can hear, with every fibre of my being, is screaming. It is the voice of a living soul in agony, in its death throes.

I follow the sound of unspeakable anguish to its source, driving swiftly down through the water until the darkness begins to give way, begins to roll back at this crushing depth, as if the world has been drowned and the sun has been shackled to the filth upon the lake bed.

But what I find shackled there instead — to a tall, obelisk-shaped rock over a thousand feet down — is a bright, winged figure, her cloud of long, dark, wavy hair shifting loosely with the strange currents in the water. She’s bound in chains of bright fire that crisscross her torn and bleeding figure. Her sleeveless robes are rent and despoiled, and the surface of her skin is marked by deep wounds that continually bleed light into the water.

I settle silently upon the lake bed at Nuriel’s feet, stretched tauter than a membrane, just a collection of particles indistinguishable from the lake-bed ooze. An archangel usually comes wreathed in light and anger, like a thunderclap, a clarion call. But not me. The human world has taught me wariness and subtlety. I must take my sudden, murderous fury — that urge to transform into something vengeful, something monstrous, blazing with fire — and bury it deep within the mud and silt and sand that I’ve become.

Nuriel’s entire figure is rigid, as if electrified. Her head is thrown back at an unnatural angle, eyes blank with anguish, her mouth stretched wide in that terrible, endless, wordless scream.

Though every part of me aches to release her immediately from her bonds, I know there’s more to this than I’m seeing. It seems too easy that she’s alone here. And I know what I saw through the water — demonsign. To know your enemy is to have some measure of control over that enemy : Luc himself taught me that. It’s an irony that I’m using his own wisdom against him now.