Rebecca Lim - Fury

I feel my eyes widen in comprehension. ‘In a way that I did not; for the cold troubles me not at all.’

Nuriel nods, hanging her head, her hair drifting ghostly about her in the water. ‘It felt like a lifetime before I worked it out. While one of them took me apart, piece by piece, from the inside,’ her voice flies up the scale in anguish, ‘the other always went away for a time, weakened by the cold of the lake water, but always returning …’

‘Strong again,’ I finish. ‘Renewed.’

It makes sense now, how Remiel seemed so clumsy, almost punch drunk, as he veered away through the water.

Nuriel glimpses something behind me. ‘Ananel,’ she gasps, and I see death and madness in her gaze. ‘He returns. He returns .’

I spin in the water and see a pinpoint of brightness in the distance, growing larger second by second. He’s moving swiftly. We don’t have long, if he hasn’t seen me already.

‘ Hide ,’ I tell Nuriel, pushing her down towards the murk of the lake bed. ‘For once in your life, don’t stand there clothed in glory, the way all of you do, dazzling each other with your rank, your pomp, your powers. Be like the water, be like mud — invisible . I’ll take care of the rest.’

Her expression is wild as she scatters into motes of light, fading away almost instantly. One second I’m there, too, and the next I’m gone, indistinguishable from my surroundings.

Ananel surges towards me, bare-chested and heavily muscled, sleek and predatory, a gleaming dagger with a short, lethal blade clenched between his teeth. Silver bubbles slipstream through his long, midnight hair, the ends of his luminous wings, past the burning scar that lies along the top of his hip, as he sweeps overhead. I see him freeze in disbelief when he spies the rock to which Nuriel was bound, now empty of all life.

But he’s stronger than Remiel was, no longer punch drunk from the cold, and he can sense something, something close, because he grasps his weapon in his right hand, turning and calling out sharply, ‘Nuriel?’

He spins in the water, his shrewd grey eyes scanning the drowned landscape before he hisses, ‘Don’t make me hunt you down, or you’ll wish yourself already dead. We have been greedy, Remiel and I, in keeping your sweetness to ourselves. But, sister ’ — at the word of endearment, I have to smother a gasp of revulsion — ‘if you do not show yourself now, I will throw you to the legions at my command so that your agony may be made infinite .’

I flicker into sight just out of striking distance, and Ananel smiles, though it does not reach the darkness in his grey eyes.

I drift before him like a drowned girl, my hair a dark cloud around my shoulders, my luminous robes torn and trailing, bleeding light from the wounds that crisscross my body: all fake, all props. But I see from Ananel’s expression that he believes without question he’s looking at Nuriel, for I’ve made myself a simulacrum of her, a perfect copy, down to the tiny, gleaming defence wounds along the inside of her fingers, the madness in her eyes.

‘Be merciful,’ I plead in her sweet, high voice as I drift there with my hands outstretched in supplication. ‘For I always loved you. Even after all you’ve done to me — I love you still.’

Ananel’s eyes widen for a moment, though he’s quick to disguise his shock. He lowers his blade uncertainly, the deadly weapon vanishing into the palm of his hand. Love is a thing he has not felt for aeons. A demon like he is, denied the kind of love that once surrounded him as freely as the air, must crave it like a drug.

He knows as well as I do that Nuriel doesn’t lie. She can’t. It’s not the way she’s wired. She’s quick-witted and resourceful, but also gentle, true and faithful. Her one flaw, if you can call it that, is that she possesses no capacity for deceit. I see him thinking all of this, hardly daring to believe.

‘You … love … me?’ he whispers. ‘Even after …?’

‘I will give myself to you freely, and in love,’ I murmur, my dark eyes huge and haunted in my heart-shaped face, ‘if you promise not to bind me to that rock again. I shall be yours, yours forever, if you keep me safe from that animal Remiel, if you keep me close.’

‘What are you asking?’ Ananel says as I drift closer to him, tantalisingly close. Close enough to touch my lips to his.

He is between me and the rock now. He is one of Luc’s fiercest daemonium , one of the original hundred who fell, more than my match in every way — but I think I actually see uncertainty in his grey eyes.

‘Take me,’ I murmur, mere centimetres from his mouth. My voice is low with a desire I do not feel, and my eyes never leave his for an instant, the way one must keep watch upon a venomous snake that is poised to strike. ‘Keep me,’ I whisper. ‘Kiss me.’

He reaches out, almost despite himself, and cups the side of my face with one hand before tangling his fingers into the roots of my hair and pulling me close. Our lips meet and his mouth opens over mine, and his kiss is like a numbing, drugging venom that is turning me to lead. He is heat and corruption and a voracious need, every dark impulse clothed in a staggering beauty.

I can’t keep my eyes open. There’s a heaviness in my limbs, a growing paralysis, and as he deepens his devastating kiss, I feel myself changing, the false face and form I’ve assumed sloughing away like dead skin. I can’t hold it, can’t hold any thought or feel anything except his mouth on mine and the terrible heat and power of him. My stupid plan — I can feel it all rapidly going to hell, as defiance, my will, seep away beneath the relentlessness of his mouth, his touch. Somehow I can see everything that he’s ever done, felt, thought, caused, over aeons. I know him for what he is, and he is truly a monster.

Ananel thrusts me away from him suddenly, though he keeps one hand buried in the roots of my own straight, dark hair. I open my eyes with difficulty. His own eyes are wide with shock and a growing recognition as he holds me away from him.

‘Who —’ he gasps.

Before he can say anything more, or begin to utter my name — my true name, which can be used as a means of control, as a weapon against me — there’s a blazing short sword in my left hand, a twisted, lethal blade with pale blue fire playing across its length. Without hesitation, with the speed of reflex born of a terrible fear, a soul-deep disgust, I drive it straight through his throat and into the rock behind him, pinning him there.

‘ H —’ he starts to say, his grey eyes wide and staring as the dark matter of him, his dark energy, flows rapidly out of him into the water, like blood. I am covered in it and imagine I feel it burning me, like acid.

The light of accusation in Ananel’s gaze is dimming as Nuriel reappears at my side. I only realise now how badly I’m shaking. I’ve just taken a life; a terrible perversion to be sure, but still a life . The first I have ever reaped.

As we watch Ananel begin to unravel before our eyes, both our faces are filled with horror at the thing that I’ve become. At once elohim , but also liar; seductress; killer.

When Nuriel and I break the choppy surface of the lake, there’s a small boat maybe thirty feet away, buffeted by the waves, motor running. It makes straight for us as I pull Nuriel free of the strange currents that seek to hold us below. I recognise Bianca St Alban at the tiller, in a dark rain slicker, her sleek, dark hair bundled into a heavy plait that lies over one shoulder. Ryan is balanced in the bow.

We wait, drifting just above the waterline, our feet not quite meeting the surface. I see awe mingled with fear on Bianca’s face as the runabout draws closer. There’s recognition, too. She did see me that night at Atelier Re, the way she’d claimed to. I had somehow pulled free of Irina Zhivanevskaya’s body, just for a moment, and she caught a glimmer of me, a glimpse.