by Rebecca Lim
Dedication
To Michael, with love always
Epigraph
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
1 PETER 5:8
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Also by Rebecca Lim
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Picture, if you can, the ancient city of Milan in the dead of night, lashed by an unimaginable storm. Picture the rooftop of a vast, white cathedral that towers hundreds of feet above snaking, crowded streets of stone, wreathed in lightning so fierce it transfigures the oxygen in the very air.
Do you see it? Because it’s what I see.
I stand within a mighty forest of spires and tracery, gargoyles and statuary, utterly dwarfed by what the hand of mankind has wrought.
And yet …
I am the world, and the world is in me.
How can I make you understand this feeling?
I am myself, as I once was, when I was first created.
As potent, as piercing, as light.
Dizzy with power, drunk with it.
Capable of things you couldn’t begin to imagine.
In this moment of rebirth and reclamation, I am a maelstrom of possibility — more powerful than the snow driving across this gothic rooftop I’m stranded upon, more powerful than the wind that squalls around me, more powerful than the lightning that splits the darkness overhead, more powerful even than the two winged demons shrieking curses at me from the skies above.
For I was never exiled from heaven like they were, all those years ago. I was sacrificed.
Sacrificed by the hand of the one who was supposed to love me more than life itself.
And though I might carry the mark of the exile upon my burning flesh, I am not guilty as Lucifer was guilty.
Pride I had, and vanity.
But I am no demon. Though I did not enter this world willingly.
I have been trapped here on earth, but it doesn’t change what I am: an archangel.
No mere malakh, or messenger, but one of the elohim, most holy, most high. Who is more human now than one of my people has any right to be.
And the reason I’m feeling all the frailties, all the helpless fears and simple longings that bedevil humankind, is right here in my arms, rigid with cold, the sleet sluicing off his beaten-up leather jacket, soaking his dark hair, his heartbeat faltering beneath my fingertips.
‘Ryan?’ I say shakily. ‘Stay with me.’
His eyes are closed, and his lips are blue with cold. The only thing keeping all six foot five of him upright is me.
Stupid, I tell myself fiercely as I lurch forward, the wind like broken glass against my face, Ryan a precious dead weight in my embrace. What kind of damned angel can’t even fly right?
As I tried to land on the cathedral roof, I saw human figures, the size of giants, standing in stern rows upon the carved and fretted spires, their faces turned upon the city below. The lightning that had sundered the sky around us, transforming night momentarily into bright day, had made them seem alive, and I’d faltered and lost altitude.
No sanctuary for demons, they’d seemed to say.
Even to saints and martyrs made of stone, maybe that’s what I’d looked like to them. Like a demon.
I was so disoriented, so crippled by my absolute fear of flying after all these years of being earthbound, that I came in at a bad angle. I fell too far, too fast, and collided with a spire, felt it pass right through me, clipping Ryan, hard, across the torso. In the shock of the impact, I dropped him from a great height upon the unforgiving flagstones of the cathedral roof.
Candoglia marble versus human flesh and bone. He has to be a mess inside from the way he’s breathing. He’s just barely holding on. There’s blood on his mouth.
‘Ryan?’ I mumble against his hair, my eyes searching for the way down. ‘I’m going to fix this, okay?’
But I don’t know if I can fix him, because I can’t seem to fix me.
The world around me seems too fast, too loud, as if I’m seeing everything through some kind of crazy lens, or filtering things through a blinding strobe light that’s going off in my head alone.
On the surface, I seem the same as I used to be. I recognise these limbs, the glowing, sleeveless, white raiment I always used to wear. The surrounding storm can’t touch me — before any sleet can hit the energy my skin gives off, it vanishes completely. But there’s a flaw in me, I can feel it. Something’s changed. Something small, yet fundamental; something I can’t put my finger on.
In this moment, I may be power incarnate, but I don’t feel as if I can channel it, or even hold myself together for much longer. It’s the greatest irony: I always thought that the moment I got the old me back, I’d never again feel the sick sensation of being in a stranger’s body, fighting desperately for control. Instead, one false step and I might shatter; blow apart completely.
I want so much to give in to this feeling of building inside me, but I know that if I do, if I allow myself to atomise, to be pure energy, pure light, the way my body yearns to — Ryan will die. And it will be my fault.
I need to control it. I can’t control it.
The snow drives down as if it would bury the world. And the two demons that hunt us circle the forest of marble spires at a distance. Unable to come any closer, compelled to stay back, rending the air with their violence, their screaming. Even from so far away, I see how beautiful they are — the lethally muscular male with short, auburn curls and dead-looking, midnight eyes, whom I once knew as Hakael; his companion, Gudrun, Luc’s beloved these days now that I am his beloved no longer. His minions, here to finish what he started.
In a moment of weakness, I lean the side of my face against Ryan’s bowed head. His skin is so cold. In place of the exaltation I should be feeling, I’m filled with a crippling dread.
There’s no time. There’s never been any time for Ryan and me. As if it was the fate that was written for us once, a long time ago to find each other, then lose each other twice, three times over and we are merely playing it out.
I falter to a stop, my eyes raking the darkness, the steep incline of the cathedral’s peaked roof, holding Ryan so close that the unsteady beat of his heart could be mistaken for the one I don’t possess. I remind myself fiercely that I don’t believe in fate. Remind myself, too, that I have the power to kill and the power to heal in equal measure; that these things were in me when I was first created. I just need to get Ryan inside, away from the bone-piercing cold, from the demons screaming, Haud misericordia! No mercy! Then do what needs to be done. The other stuff, the tricky stuff — about us, and what that could even mean — I’ll have to work out later.
The grip I have on Ryan is awkward, as if I’m locked in the arms of a drowning man who’s dragging me beneath the water. I brace him against my right side, pulling his left arm over my left shoulder so that he’s more upright against me
and that’s when I see it.
The fingers of my left hand are entwined with his, and they burn with flames of pure energy. The pain of this living scar, this proof of Luc’s betrayal, is no more than a dull ache now, present but subsumed, though the flames still retain their hypnotic, corrosive beauty.
And I suddenly remember that when Luc had torn me free of Irina Zhivanevskaya’s body, he hadn’t bothered to unravel that last, tiny portion of my soul in which the Archangel Raphael had hidden my name. In these flames, in this flaw, is written my true name; the name that still eludes me. Raphael’s gift. And his curse.
I will never be whole and perfect until I reclaim the name I was given. Until then, ‘Mercy’ will have to do, as it has done for the longest time. It was the last word I ever uttered as myself — until today. And it is apt. I think that, maybe, I have even begun to earn the name.
A flash of silver-grey, as luminous as it is subtly tainted, passes overhead, then another. The demons come as low as they dare, and the air is filled with a shirring sound, as of an approaching plague. Then living fire rains out of the sky — sphere after sphere, each perfect and distinct, no bigger than a demon’s cupped hand. There’s no time to run, nowhere to hide. All I can do is curve myself protectively around Ryan and pray that the end is swift, and that we might meet again.
But this place carries its own peculiar magic. The flaming spheres hit some barrier that even I cannot see, and shatter into waves of brilliant light before dissolving utterly. The sky is lit weirdly red as each missile implodes and dies away to embers — as if I stand beneath some kind of demon-born aurora borealis.
And then I remember to move.
But thunder loud enough to raise the dead peals out, followed by a flash of lightning that cracks the rim of night. In its light, I see a tall, broad-shouldered figure, outlined in silver, dressed in robes of black, with long silver hair flying loose about his shoulders in the storm. He stands upon the very apex of the crown of stone carvings about a hundred feet away. His face is youthful and beautiful and deadly, his stance relaxed; arms held loosely at his sides, fingers slightly curled. His eyes are untroubled, but watchful, as blue as the daytime sky.
Shock blazes through me as our gazes lock. The Archangel of Death craves the souls of the blameless; he cannot help but be drawn to them. It is his province, his peculiar calling. He has no use for the other kind.
Azraeil! I scream, for his ears alone. You stay away from him! You stay away.
Do I imagine his half-smile before the darkness returns? When I peer at the raised cross at the centre of the stone crown, it stands empty of life.
No one takes precedence over Death. It’s part of our lore; a given. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Ryan go before we’ve had a chance to work out what we are to each other. I am owed.
At the very least, I am owed some answers, and to give some in return.
I resume my stumbling descent down the treacherous roofline, cradling Ryan’s head against the line of my neck. His left forearm is taut across my shoulder, his left hand still grasped tightly in my burning one. The argent flames seem to leap off my skin, begin to envelop his, yet he remains beyond reach, is turning slowly to stone.
For a moment, I imagine that his heart actually stops before resuming its faltering, thready beat. My fear causes me to break into a sliding run.
I realise with shock that Azraeil was standing almost directly above the flight of steep, stone stairs I’ve been searching for. With Ryan clamped tightly against me, I skitter towards them, along a rain-slicked, narrow canyon of stone. As I pass beneath a towering row of flying buttresses, Ryan’s head slumped against the line of my jaw and collarbone, I hear the demons challenging me with their bestial voices from on high: Haud misericordia!
They can wait forever. I don’t have forever.
At the end of the walkway, I reach a doorway cut into the stone: the entry to a great tower. Inside, is a staircase that leads down to the street, straight into the Piazza del Duomo, the Duomo Square. I have not walked those stairs in centuries, but I remember. I know I’ll have shelter enough inside that tower to try to fix the things inside Ryan that are broken.
As I step forward into the gaping darkness, Ryan’s heart stops all together, and its shuddering beat does not resume.
I have no memory of how I got us inside the tower, but suddenly I’m crouched over Ryan’s motionless form. He lies where he fell from my nerveless grasp upon the cold stone, his long frame curled awkwardly on one side. His skin is unnaturally pale and he’s no longer breathing.
My terror causes me to wail aloud, causes my burning left hand to flame even brighter so that it’s as if a small star is trapped in this narrow, breathless space. There’s no time. There’s never been enough time for us.
Outside, the demons screech their fury to the skies, seeking a way in, a way to get to me. But for now, we’re in one of the few places on this earth where they may not follow, and it gives me the courage to plead to the dead air crowding us.
Azraeil! I feel your presence here and I ask you to stay your hand. Not yet, Brother, please.
It’s too soon. Too soon.
We are deep within the tower, many twisted flights down, our bodies close together upon a narrow stone landing. Above and below, stairs stretch away into the gloom, each one worn down in the centre from centuries of human passage.
No doctor on this earth, no hospital, can save Ryan now. It falls to me alone to call my love back. I steel myself against what I am about to do, because it always, always invites in the unwanted.
Then I place my burning left hand upon his lifeless body, at the base of his cold throat in which a pulse no longer beats. And I atomise in the instant, becoming a rain of mercury, a rain of fire, letting the tide take me where it will.
I am light now, pure energy. I am overwhelmed by the memories of Ryan’s life, his blameless, small-town existence into which a monster strode and took his sister, changing everything in the instant. I feel his horror and rage and helplessness as if I, too, lived every second of those years that Lauren was kept caged away from the sun. I relive all the fights, the dead ends, the building darkness within. In this moment, I know Ryan better than he will ever know himself. I see that he would give his life to save his sister; to save anyone he truly loved. He is by no means perfect, but he’s the real deal; in the end, he would fall on the side of the line that really matters. His is the kind of soul that Azraeil searches for the world over.
And now I see myself, the way Ryan has seen me — as Carmen, as Lela, as Irina — and I feel him falling for me, life by life, encounter by encounter, harder each time. I see the effect I had on him when I was Carmen. When we met, he was frozen inside, and it made him unpredictable, savage, incredibly careless of himself. But something about me cut through the noise in his head. I gave him hope when it seemed the time for hope had long passed.
I feel his shock the moment Carmen woke in the hospital and denied ever meeting him before in her life; his piercing grief when Lela was gunned down before him. And I feel his love for me the instant our eyes met across that catwalk under the blue-lit dome in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele here in Milan. A love so absolute and fierce and sure that, even now, it makes my soul shiver.
The heart will always want what it wants, his voice seems to whisper.
I can feel his love. Can almost touch it, as if his memories have reached out and enfolded me in an embrace such as I’ve never known. But it’s fading, that love. And him with it.
The despair I feel makes me move with greater purpose, greater urgency. I rage through Ryan’s dying frame, making of myself a healing fire, channelling everything that I am at the wounds inside him. Making the temple of his body whole again so that the flame might be relit, that it might return.
I am clumsy and unpractised, but my touch is electric. My power cannot be denied; it should be bringing him back to life. But, all around me, his body continues to slacken. Ryan’s soul seems to flee
before mine like a separate wave. The two of us moving in aching parallel across a lonely sea.
I sense his organs starting to fail at the peripheries, and the memories of his blameless life cease to stream into me. They waver and grow dim, as if someone ahead of me is turning out all the lights as they leave.
I almost imagine I see Ryan hurrying away from me down a long corridor, bounded by light on all sides. I can’t bring back the dead. It’s not my gift, not my province. Only Azraeil — and one other — can claim that as their right.
Ryan! I cry out. Don’t leave me!
But his body continues to fail, and he seems to pull even further away. Hides his face from me, won’t turn around.
It’s growing too still, too quiet.
I’m going to lose him.
All I am, at this moment, is wild and undirected energy, shrill panic, unspeakable grief.
I force myself to still, to cease pursuing his ghost. To think.
The soul is ephemeral. The soul weighs less than the air a body needs in order to stay alive.
They say that the mind is the last thing to die. But the way … the way is in the heart. A holy man told me that, a long time ago, in another life, another time altogether.
Another wise man once said that the greatest evil is physical pain. But I’ve never shied away from dishing out pain, or taking it. And I know Ryan will forgive me, because I know of no other way.
I turn and gather myself. Like floodwater, like a rattlesnake striking. And hit him with the full force of me.
As if I have brought the lightning, the storm, inside, I beat down the doors of Ryan’s heart, and the whole world immediately turns red with pain and heat and noise.
