Rebecca Lim: Muse

I hear K’el’s voice in my head. We maintain, they destroy. That’s roughly how it works.

I grasp Ryan’s shirt in my hand and pull him around to face the south entrance. As we start to move, Luc’s voice penetrates the vast space from above. ‘I want them all.’

Suddenly, Gudrun blocks our way, a new, more deadly weapon in her hand. A long, twisted, flaming blade, guaranteed to cause maximum damage on entry and exit.

When Ryan and I pivot towards the western axis, another demon stands before us. Another to the east. Those that are not bent on subduing the archangels who still live, move forward to block our way. Some are male, some are female. All their scars burn brightly, no matter how they might shift to disguise them.

I embrace Ryan tightly, feeling all his unspoken terror in the hard muscles of his arms, his torso, through his familiar, beaten-up leather jacket.

Michael bellows again, his voice disembodied, desperate: ‘Fly, Mercy, fly.’

Then he seems to address Ryan directly. ‘Guard her, human.’ Michael’s voice sounds throughout the vast Galleria like a tolling bell. ‘Keep her safe in your human world when we cannot.’

Ryan gives me a hard shake. ‘Can you do that?’ he says urgently. ‘Fly?’

I can’t bring myself to answer him, just continue to watch, transfixed, as the reinforcements Michael has called here struggle to turn the tide of battle. Though the daemonium are roughly the equal of the elohim in number, they are extraordinarily vicious. As if they have been denied the chance to stretch their wings, to test their might, until now. One by one the elohim begin to go down. Each one singular and perfect, never to be made again.

Ryan is still shaking me insistently. ‘Mercy, can you? Can you fly? You’ve got no wings.’

‘Don’t need wings,’ I whisper. ‘But I don’t know if I can. It’s been too … long.’

I know now where my fear of heights comes from. When I recall that moment when Luc cast me out, cast me down, I feel that same terror all over again, the sensation of falling, the blinding, terrible impact. To know your enemy is to have some measure of control over that enemy — that was something Luc taught me, a long time ago. But I have no control over this fear. It seems boundless.

Luc loved me. Yet he tried to kill me. And for what? Power.

‘Take them!’ Luc screams at Gudrun as he and Michael spin towards each other, meeting with a sound like breaking waves.

‘You have to try,’ Ryan shouts, as Gudrun leaps through the air towards us, her twisted, deadly blade raised, her perfect teeth bared, a personal score to settle.

‘Try, Mercy,’ Ryan yells. ‘For us.’

Us.

Though I’m nauseous and dizzy with fear, I embrace Ryan tightly with one arm, shut my eyes and leap off the ground.

No thought, just sensation. Against gravity, against every inclination, I’m flying.

My left hand burns and burns in agony. I make the mistake of looking at it, looking down at the ground falling away from us, and have to close my eyes again and swallow.

‘Mercy, open your eyes!’ Ryan screams. ‘We’re going to hit!’

My eyes flash open to see that majestic roof inches away from our upturned faces. It’s pure reflex what I do next.

I curve my arms around to protect Ryan’s mortal form, curve his face into the side of mine, clasp him even more tightly to me. And I take the full brunt of the glass and iron ceiling of the Galleria upon my forearm, upon my shoulders, my down bent head. Glass and steel shriek and rend as we burst outward into the storm-tossed night.

The air is icy. Ryan inhales sharply, begins to cough and shudder.

I look back at the jagged hole torn in the roof of the Galleria, the fiery glow emanating from the building, and know that we have only minutes before Luc’s forces come after us.

I glance down at the roadways — like human arteries, like veins — the emergency vehicles that look like toy cars and trucks, and have to close my eyes again, dry retching. All I can think about is falling. And I do fall.

It’s a death spin. Gravity’s got hold of me again, the way it did all those years ago, and I can’t fight it. The wind’s shrieking past us.

‘Pull up!’ Ryan yells, white-hot terror in his voice. ‘Just look at me, Mercy! Look at me and you won’t fall.’

When I open my eyes, I see people on the ground, getting bigger all the time. People I’m going to take out.

Ryan forces me to look at him, turning my face with the fingers of one frozen hand as we fall and fall. All I allow myself to see is the rain beating down on him, plastering his dark hair to his head, his clothes to his body; his dark eyes holding mine. The whole world, the whole sky, reduced to his dear face. My trajectory grows flat, begins, unsteadily, to climb.

‘Okay?’ he gasps, the icy air burning his mortal lungs with every breath.

I nod, the worst of the dizziness receding. My peripheral vision starts to return again and I look further and further afield. I rise higher, unsteadily, trying to get my bearings.

The battering rain, the hurricane winds, are buffeting us from side to side. The smallest downdraught sends me spinning out of control. A particularly violent updraught causes Ryan to slide through my arms, and only the iron grip of our entwined fingers keeps us together.

‘So cold,’ Ryan murmurs as I pull him close to me again, terrified I’ll drop him; terrified of lightning strike, of air pockets, of wind currents — things no mortal should ever be subjected to at this altitude. But we need to leave Milan, to get as far away from here as possible, and this is the only way I know how.

It’s a night for ironies, I think, too sick, too petrified by what I’m doing, to properly scan the ground for landmarks. I have powers, abilities, no human being could possibly comprehend, but I can’t use even half of them. Because of Ryan.

I can’t expect him to pass through solid matter. I can’t expect him to become invisible on cue; to transport himself from place to place simply by wishing it. He was not made to counter science. He’s made of a far different stuff than I am.

I’m weak, out of shape, out of practice. We’re barely any distance at all from the Galleria as the crow flies when I see one gleaming, winged shape, then another, launch itself out of that wound in the iron and glasswork ceiling. They come straight after us, scars burning brightly in the midnight air.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan gasps.

‘I see them,’ I say through gritted teeth.

There’s nowhere to go but down, and that alone is terrifying. I falter as I remember waking on that lonely hillside, broken, terrified, not understanding where I was or what had happened to me. But there’s no getting around it. We need to go down. We need to lose ourselves in the human world, because there’s no hiding up here, not when Ryan’s with me.

A crack of thunder pierces the air, swiftly followed by lightning. In its glare, I turn to see that our pursuers have diverged, and that beyond them, above the burning Galleria, the battle has taken to the skies. Archangels and their glowing nemeses wrestle, falling and rising in the air, the tide of warfare turning and turning again. The air is lit by holy fire meeting its polar opposite.

No matter how I twist and fall, soar and feint, our pursuers close in steadily, driving me back towards the Galleria and to Luc. One of them is a lethally muscular male with short, auburn curls; the other has pale yellow hair that streams out behind her, a wicked, twisted blade in one hand. I have no doubt in my mind that it is Gudrun.

Ryan’s teeth are chattering with cold, his lips have a bluish cast, and he’s like a block of stone in my arms, head bowed against me, the rain sluicing off his soaked clothing. His eyes are closed now, as if he lacks the energy to keep them open.