Rebecca Lim - Fury

I hand the card back to Bianca and she looks down at it, crushed. ‘So you won’t do it?’ she says in a small voice. ‘You won’t go?’

‘Merce?’ Ryan’s hold tightens as he looks into my eyes.

‘The dark place that Nuriel finds herself in now,’ I whisper, ‘Paris represents that place for me. The misery I felt then was nothing compared to the torment that Nuriel has endured, but I was at my … lowest there. I don’t think I will ever again be as alone, as lost, as forsaken , as I was in Paris.’

Bianca leans forward as if to touch me comfortingly, and I draw back into the solid warmth of Ryan’s body.

‘I don’t need your card,’ I say quietly, and her dark brows draw together unhappily. ‘I don’t need it,’ I go on, ‘because I’ve already memorised the number and the magic password. I won’t forget them, not now. You can keep it.’

Bianca sits upright, letting the card fall from her fingers. ‘So you’ll do it?’

I can see her immediately working out what she has to do, what she has to say, to make the magic happen.

I nod wearily within the circle of Ryan’s arms. ‘No other course would honour Selaphiel’s compassion for the monster that I was, nor Nuriel’s selflessness. They never deserved torture, and their bravery deserves mine. Those that guard Selaphiel were drawn to the darkness below, and in the darkness they must remain, or die — there are no innocents among them. Luc’s people have made a desert enough of this world. If I — who never had a task, never had a purpose — must be the one to slay the dragons that guard the gates of Hell in order to save Selaphiel, then so be it.’

I look up at Ryan. ‘But it’s not your fight, and you don’t have to do this. You should take up Bianca’s offer and go home.’

‘Damned with you,’ Ryan whispers, smoothing my hair back off my forehead, ‘damned without you, remember? You’ve got cover, whether you like it or not.’

The house is quiet now, with all the phone calls made, details exchanged.

Earlier, Bianca paced the dining room, working a telephone, laptop and scanner furiously, while Ryan trawled through the contents of her industrial-sized refrigerator, answering her questions between bites.

Excluded from talk of permits and clearances, flight-plan filing, catering requirements and ground handling procedures, I drifted through all the elegant, expensively furnished rooms of the house like a restless ghost, beset by a formless fear, struggling to remember the shape and contours of the ancient, sprawling city I’d once gravitated to to die. But though I dug and dug, my memories were chaotic and fragmentary — no more than snatches of sound and colour, a stench, vague impressions, a glimpse of a woman’s face, mouth stretched wide in a scream, eyes fixed in terror on something. Me?

The only clear memory I possess of that time is waking with the Eight standing over me, deep within the putrid heart of Cimetière des Innocents. It would have been my eternal resting place, too, but for Their interference.

When the planning was done, Bianca retreated to her rooms near the front of the house, exhaustion shadowing her blue eyes. ‘Tomaso will have the car brought around at six,’ she’d said. ‘He’s arranged for a police escort to take you from the police blockade to Malpensa airport. There’ll be a full VIP meet and greet at the hangar, Ryan, that will speed you onto the plane. And when you reach Paris,’ she’d added quietly, ‘I promised you point to point, exactly as if you were family, and I meant it. One of our drivers will be waiting on the tarmac at Le Bourget; he’ll meet you straight off the plane. Customs and immigration will happen onboard, Mercy, so make yourself scarce at that point. If you’re seen, and your presence can’t be explained, I’ll have no choice but to deny any knowledge of you.’

She’d refused to accept our thanks before turning and hurrying down the hall.

Now, I stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lamplit master bedroom, waiting for daybreak. I am looking across the troubled, black waters of the lake when Ryan emerges from the en suite bathroom, the light streaming out behind him, his hair still wet from the shower, a half-eaten apple in his hand. There’s a pale blue towel knotted tight and low around his narrow hips. Droplets of water gleam upon his broad shoulders, catching the light like faceted gemstones. I don’t think I’ve seen anything more beautiful for a long time.

He smiles instantly when he sees me, dropping the apple onto a nightstand and holding his hand out to me. But before I can move towards him, I get a disorientating flash: of Luc, bare-chested, similarly wreathed by light, holding his hand out to me in the same way. I shake my head, stepping backwards, genuinely frightened and confused.

The dark versus the light, though the dark and the light are inverted and distorted.

I see confusion grip Ryan, too, at my weird reaction. Then a deep anger flares in his expressive face, which is rapidly overcome by a bemused tenderness.

‘This is so messed up,’ he sighs, bending down and grabbing one of the large, overstuffed pillows off the top of the bed, punching it a little before leaning it up against the wall. He sits with his back against it, on top of the coverlet, watching me steadily as he finishes his apple.

‘ I’m messed up,’ I correct quietly as I move across the room towards him.

When I reach him, I look down into his face. And it’s both familiar and unfamiliar, a signifier I have neither the wit nor the talent to read.

Ryan doesn’t hesitate; he does what he always does when I get close — pulls me into him like we’re two halves of the same whole, though we can’t be, it’s impossible. I’m falling again, but this time I feel no fear. I end up half-sprawled across his lap, the towel between us damp from being drawn across his skin, laughing as I try to keep some semblance of balance, of distance. The skin of his chest is warm and yielding beneath my fingers. I feel the play of his muscles as he draws his arms around me tightly and just breathes me in, for a time.

‘Why is it,’ he murmurs wonderingly, ‘that you smell of snowfall?’

He is a jumble of contradictions, every part of him like velvet-wrapped steel.

He tips me over, suddenly, onto my back, catching me unawares the way he has done from the very beginning, somehow getting in under defences that were wrested in place by the hands of archangels. He lays a line of fiery kisses from the hollow at the base of my neck up to my jawline, and I arc up to meet him. He only pulls away when he reaches my mouth, and I feel his reluctance to do it.

‘Now you know how it feels to be me around you ,’ he murmurs, his mouth breaking into amused and sensual lines as he braces himself over me. ‘Jittery, psyched, out of control, out of my mind. We’re right back where we started, you and me. All that separates us is a damned towel .’

My eyes widen, grow dark with my desire, and he sees how devastated I am by his actions, his words, exactly the way he intended me to be.

He opens his mouth over mine, kissing me, moulding me to him, flesh to flesh, energy to energy, until I feel the heat bloom under his skin of steel and velvet, an answering rush of heat rising in me. He tastes of apples and mint and the salt-sweet, roiling sea. There’s that thrill of fire, of warning, along my nerves, but I dig my fingers into the muscles of his shoulders, his back, unable to pull away, because we are magnetic. We are two disparate energies colliding. And I grow so hot beneath him that he gasps out loud and has to push away from me, shield his eyes because I’m wreathed in light.