Rebecca Lim - Fury

‘The way we let that eunuch Selaphiel go?’ She laughs. ‘We can always pick him and the boy up later, can’t we, Turael?’

A chill moves through me at her words and I turn to see a gleaming male figure standing before the rockfall at the other end of the passageway. He’s at least eight feet tall, the end feathers of his grey-tinted wings trailing in the dust on the floor, and there’s a burning scar on his chest as large as an archangel’s handprint. He has the dark eyes and dark hair that I dimly recall, but all else about him has changed, and changed utterly. He bears an intricate flowering of black markings around his left eye that only heightens his wild, male beauty.

Maybe he was standing there the whole time and saw the way Ryan and I looked at each other — the way everything we are to each other was in our eyes — because there’s an ugly expression on his beautiful face, a promise of pain.

‘Turael,’ I say evenly, trying not to betray my fear, ‘why on earth do you still affect to wear wings when all you and Neqael do these days is crawl in the earth like worms ?’

He opens his mouth and hisses at me like a snake, and I see that his teeth are also sharp in appearance, like the canines of wild dogs.

‘Shall I bring you his head?’ he says, flexing his powerful hands. I go cold at his words. ‘Or would you rather not know the manner in which the boy dies?’

Neqael swings Jegudiel around to face me. I see the dark talons of one long-fingered hand stretched down across the front of Jegudiel’s torn robe like the claws of some predatory bird. She holds her short, flaming blade hard up against the front of his throat with her other hand.

‘It’s impressive,’ she says, ‘how ordinary and insignificant you’ve managed to make yourself. Even more ordinary and insignificant than you once were. It’s a mystery to us all what our Lord Lucifer saw in you. None of us could ever understand it. You had no more to commend you than any of us did.’

‘He saw her fire ,’ Jegudiel snarls. ‘He saw her strength and her indomitable will. She is worth an infinity of you, and there will be a reckoning. It is coming.’

He inhales sharply as Neqael pushes the edge of her burning blade into his throat so that it bites deep.

‘Reminiscences bore me,’ she snaps. ‘Take her, Turael. Let us be celebrated, let us be raised up at last, for I am sick of playing gaoler, of being a keeper of bones and dead artefacts and dust. She shall restore our fortunes, and the order of all things will be remade in our image. It has been too long in the execution, our homecoming. Let her see for herself what Hell is like.’

I feel Turael moving closer behind me, feel the dark shirring of his energy, am nauseated by it.

‘I will hold them off for as long as I can,’ Jegudiel says, regret in his dark eyes as he looks at me.

‘That won’t be necessary, my friend,’ I murmur, as Turael’s weapon springs into his hand at my back. I hear the sizzle of the blade as it pulses with that tainted light and heat peculiar to the fallen. ‘Just remember to duck.’

A fleeting look of puzzlement crosses Jegudiel’s face as I slowly pivot so that I’m side-on to Neqael, to Turael. I take a small step back so that I have a perfect line of sight in both directions.

‘You know what?’ I say conversationally. ‘You’re antiques, you two. You’re stupid. And you know why you’re stupid?’

Neqael’s laugh is discordant and derisive. ‘This coming from you , who could not resist showing off your “cleverness” to Jegudiel, to Selaphiel. Turael saw you. You’re as dimwitted as the humans you consort with these days.’

I continue softly, as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘You’re so consumed by malice, so focused on universal domination, that you’ve completely missed the point. You bring out the very worst in humankind, but you don’t see them, you don’t comprehend what they’ve done, what they’re capable of.’

‘Oh, I see well enough.’ Neqael laughs, exposing the sinuous line of her throat that is wreathed with dark markings. ‘They possess a fine capability for depravity of every nature, but beyond that, they are animals. And now you consort with animals — and therefore you are their whore, the way you were once Lucifer’s whore, H —’

I see her tattooed mouth begin to form the first syllable of my name, I feel Turael grasp me by my long, curling hair, lifting me off the ground easily, and I have no choice. They leave me no choice, and I’m almost glad as pain begins to explode in me.

I let Turael swing me towards him, and I turn my face as if I would place one last kiss upon his cheek. Then, like a reflex, like the speed of thought, there’s a gun in each of my hands: sleek and heavy, with the look of the semi-automatic, a single lick of blue flame passing across the surface. They require no strength, no finesse to wield, just proximity and dumb luck.

I feel the muzzle of the gun in my blazing left hand connect with Turael’s jaw as the gun in my right rises towards Neqael as my eyes meet hers. My wrists are crossed before me, and it happens so fast that I’ve already pulled the trigger of each weapon simultaneously in the time it takes for Neqael’s eyes to widen in recognition of the things I hold in my hands.

Her mouth falls open and I see her thinking: But guns are stupid things; human things that humans use upon each other. They have no bearing upon angels, or upon demons .

Until now, until me .

It’s just a single shot from each weapon — small and insignificant against the majestic, blazing blades of my enemies — but the bullets are as deadly as any cutting surface, sped by thought, infallibly accurate, because I am the scope, I am the accelerant.

Just a small sting, like the bite of a mosquito.

But I imagine I see Jegudiel wrenching himself to the right as the blast wave of heat and dark energy that once was Turael knocks me to the tunnel floor. I’m deaf and blind to everything, my entire being resounding with pain as if my body were a tolling bell. So I don’t see the second bullet connect, I don’t see Neqael die. But I feel it. I feel the atmosphere compress then expand almost beyond bearing as the passageway is filled with the roar of her dark matter returning to God.

Then Jegudiel and I are all that remains in this silent, tomblike place.

I crawl across the cold and filthy floor towards him and say into the still place inside his head: Brother, you’re hurt .

Jegudiel sits up slowly against the wall and his damaged wings shred into nothingness. He just looks at me with his dark eyes. I kneel before him, almost in an attitude of worship, dwarfed by his scale.

Raphael kept insisting you’d changed . His voice in my mind is very quiet. And I confess, I did not believe it possible .

Raphael is missing , I reply. He was not in Milan. He has been taken, too. But not here. Taken somewhere else .

Jegudiel seems to slump at the news. Then he gestures in the air, making the fingers of his hands into unfamiliar weapons, into guns. How …?

The smile I give him is sad. When you have lived long enough in this world, you will understand how I am able to manifest something so utterly foreign to everything we are .

I reach out to him, and as my small fingers connect with his, he takes both my hands gently.

‘You do me good,’ he murmurs aloud. ‘To have you restored in this way — it gladdens me beyond measure.’

‘My memory is still riddled with holes,’ I mutter, ‘like this place. I’m not complete, not the creature I was. I may never be whole again.’