Rebecca Lim - Fury

‘The stone!’ I cry in horror, feeling it shift and protest beneath my fingers. ‘It’s coming down behind us!’

Selaphiel burns now with an almost blinding light. I push up off the tunnel floor and crouch before him, placing my hands upon his face to make him see me, for an instant, the way Jegudiel had. As he catches the shift, the shift back, his blue eyes widen, his mouth parting as if he would speak. But no words come.

‘There’s a way out!’ I shout over the sound of rending stone, pointing at the concrete seal across the passageway. ‘It’s close, and this human, Ryan, will help you reach the surface, reach the light.’ I indicate Ryan sprawled beside me on the floor, his eyes, wide, on both of us. ‘But you need to do one last thing, brother, you need to shift as I’ve done. Do you understand what I’m asking of you?’

In reply, Selaphiel’s eyes close and his form seems to slump and shimmer. For a moment, I think I see the surface of the rock through the outline of him.

‘ No . You . Don’t ,’ I say fiercely. ‘You don’t give up. You don’t get to. You’re too important.’

I grab him and pull him close, cradling him against me, letting him feel the terror seeping out of me: for him, for Ryan, for all of us. The sound of falling stone buries my words, but I know that Selaphiel can hear them through my skin as I speak them.

‘Don’t let it be true, Selaphiel! Don’t let it be said that I was responsible for the destruction of everyone who ever loved me. Shift if you want to live. It’s the only way we can help you. If that boy dies, it will be my death sentence, too. I love him . Please, I beg of you. Shift that we may all live.’

‘Mercy!’ Ryan cries again, torn between wanting to run and wanting to stay with me, always with me.

Selaphiel suddenly struggles feebly in my arms, pushing me away. He raises a shaking hand, like a gesture of benediction, mouths a single word I cannot catch.

Instantly, the concrete barrier tumbles into pieces, falling outward, away from us. Ryan and I act like a single organism: we don’t look at each other or even speak, we just each take one of Selaphiel’s arms and haul him off the ground at a run, fleeing before the advancing rockfall. Lumps of stone — each big enough and deadly enough to end a man’s life — erase the passageway behind us.

As we stumble forward through the choking dust, Selaphiel does what I begged him to do — he shifts so that he’s scaled along more human lines, so we’re able to hoist him higher across our shoulders and run . But the brilliant light he gives out keeps intensifying, until he’s so bright, he’s only discernible in a kind of numinous outline. It’s like we’re cradling a dying star between us. Ryan can barely stand to look at him.

‘What’s happening to him?’ Ryan gasps, as we reach the narrow crevice in the wall we’ve been searching for.

I don’t answer, catching a flare of light to my right. Digging my heels in, I turn my head to see what’s causing it. It’s Jegudiel in the distance down the passageway, grappling with a shining, winged female figure that can only be Neqael.

I can’t see her face, but her trailing russet hair, her wing feathers, every inch of her, gleams with that foul, grey-tainted light. The folds of her diaphanous, long-sleeved gown billow around her as they struggle. I know that the other, Turael, can’t be far behind. Demons seem to hunt in pairs, and if we leave now, Jegudiel will have to face them both alone.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan cries, indicating the rungs of the rusty ladder behind him that are mounted directly into the stone wall. ‘Move it!’

I’m still standing in the entryway, my figure blocking both Selaphiel and Ryan from sight.

‘Go. Climb ,’ I implore Ryan, entrusting Selaphiel to him completely, trying to push them both deeper into the cleft. ‘Keep yourself alive, keep Selaphiel safe. Find Henri, do whatever it takes. Get to the plane. I’ll find you. I’m not leaving without Jegudiel. No matter how much I’ve provoked him in the past, he would do the same for me. I get that now.’

Ryan gives me a hard, searching look, his heart in his eyes.

‘It used to be all about how much I could take out of every situation,’ I tell him in a rush of words. ‘Individual liberty — it was always my paramount consideration, my guiding principle; Luc’s. Hers.’ I point at Neqael’s gleaming figure in the distance. ‘But I’m not alone. None of us is truly ever alone. We may feel as if we are, but our actions matter. Every single act impacts on this web of souls we form part of, and it’s a web that stretches backwards in time, forwards. I could never see that before, but now I do. It’s not ever just about you, or the person you … love above all others,’ Ryan’s eyes darken with emotion, ‘it’s about awareness and respect and gratitude. Everything in its place or it is chaos. That’s our creed — the creed of the elohim . I used to think it meant “know your place”, don’t get ideas above your station, and it used to infuriate me beyond measure to have that continually thrown in my face — but I was wrong. What Gabriel was trying to tell me is that liberty is important, but it has to take place in a context: of others, of a community. Evil has no community, Ryan. It feeds itself, upon itself, it considers itself above all. I have to help him,’ I finish desperately. ‘Don’t you see? It goes beyond what you and I want. It always has, and I was too blind to see that.’

Ryan bends and kisses me, swiftly, then he and Selaphiel are gone, out of sight, and I hear his boots striking the first rungs.

And even though I told him to go, I can’t help feeling utterly bereft without him.

I turn back to see Jegudiel in the demon’s embrace. They could be lovers, they could be dancing — though Jegudiel’s profile is tight and hard, like granite — for she has her arms around his neck, and I see her lay her head against the side of his face, turning him giddily, laughing. She’s wreathed in a robe that is gleaming with light, but also tattered, crepuscular, like a moth-eaten shroud. As she turns again, with Jegudiel held fast in her arms, I see the mark of the exile shining across her shoulderblades, between her wings.

She’s facing me now, over his shoulder, and I’m shocked to see dark markings crawling across her face, her neck, her arms and hands, like tattoos rendered in acid, or poison. Her hair and form are alive with a dark electricity, a tainted light, that serves to make her cornflower blue eyes — the only part of her I truly recognise — seem unhinged and feral. She meets my eyes and grins, and I reel back in horror from her teeth — each one with the appearance of having been filed into a point, resembling the canines of wild animals.

I see recognition in her gaze as the ground below me ceases to shake and the sound of falling stone stops. The corridor is as silent as a grave now and she purrs into that silence, ‘Did you truly think that your passage through the underworld would go unnoticed … Mercy ?’

So quickly I barely have time to register the movement, there’s a short, flaming blade in her hand and she pushes the tip of it into the smooth column of Jegudiel’s throat from the side. He cries out in agony. She keeps the blade there, deliberately holding its point inside him, inside his throat, and I see light leaching steadily out of the wound as he struggles to hold his head high, his bright hair flowing down his back, down between his wings, like a torrent of gold.

‘Let him go,’ I say quietly. ‘If you want me, if it’s true, as Luc has said, that I have always been the prize, then let him go.’