by Rebecca Lim
‘What’s really wrong with her?’ she says.
When I don’t answer, she looks back at me impatiently, then gasps. For a fine bloom of light has swept across my skin, my entire form, and I’m already changing, my outline is already shredding into vapour.
Within seconds, I draw myself up and up, looking down into Gia’s awestruck face. Then I collapse into a towering cloud of fine, silver mist, swirling and dense, taking all the heat in the room with me. Immediately I’m pulled into that terrifying, alien raceway that the human body represents to those of us who have no need of a chemical, mechanical presence. This time, I’m not looking for a way out, not yet. I’m searching for that knot, that kernel, that Irina’s soul has been reduced to.
Where is it?
Luc tore me free. There must be some disjuncture, a loose seam, a clue.
And then I chance upon something … like notes written in living blood, in cellular walls and electrolytes. The signature of my brethren is here: elegant, luminous, their intentions joining together like plain song to create a safe harbour for me within another living being. I read their haste; and then I read the work of another — one whose touch had once made me feel like I was the most beautiful thing in creation — rendered here in hatred and fury and spite.
And then I find it … a seam, a thread, a clue. So tiny I almost missed it.
I follow it back to its source, and the pattern and energy of her is there. So compressed and distorted it’s a wonder I could find her at all.
Mercy! I seem to hear a desperate voice echoing all around me, though I have no ears to hear, am nothing but pure, directed energy. Hurry.
I take that tiny fray and tug at it, unravelling it further and further, letting it stream out behind me like an unfurling ribbon as I follow the linkages, the switchbacks, the false trails, the complex broken pattern that Irina’s soul was cast into. Smoothing, untwisting, laying bare, so that the flame might be relit, so that the soul might return.
Pressure begins to build, a vast electrical storm, and I feel everything that Irina is convulse as if her body were a building being shaken to its foundations. I feel her soul struggling in mine. I hear the sounds that are torn out of her, as if she is being tortured. Possession. In this moment, I could truly be classed as demon. She does not want me here, she feels me like a burning presence that must be cast out. I can’t begin to tell you how wrong this feels.
Mercy! I hear it again, the voice disembodied, desperate. Please. Quickly.
I can’t wait to go, can’t wait to get out. There’s a sensation of abrupt coalescence, and I’m flung out of Irina’s body. For the very last time.
I come to on the floor beside Irina’s bed and turn to see Gia across the room, her back braced against the closed bedroom door. It’s clear from her strained expression that someone’s trying to open it from the outside. The warning voice I’d heard was hers.
She looks at me, white-faced, with wide, desperate eyes. ‘Do something,’ she hisses, indicating the telltale gleam coming off my skin. ‘Can’t hold it much longer.’
‘Open this door!’ a man roars. ‘Open it at once!’
And this time, the door jumps open an inch or two before Gia slams it shut again, pushing back with every ounce of strength in her slender frame.
The pounding and rattling intensify. ‘Mercy,’ she pleads.
It feels as if it takes forever to extinguish the glow, but it can’t be more than a few seconds because I’m suddenly standing at the foot of Irina’s bed and the surface of my hands, the ends of my curling hair, my clothing, of me, is matte and dull once more. I give Gia a nod. She takes a deep breath and pushes away from the door, which bursts open immediately. One of the suits — tall, dark-haired, overweight, red-faced — thrusts through the knot of concerned people at the entrance.
‘What are you doing to her?’ he demands, trying to see around me to the bed. ‘We heard the most terrible sounds. As if you were trying to kill her.’
‘Like the animale,’ the nurse says with a shudder, entering the room behind him.
‘Old Russian remedy,’ Gia improvises smoothly. ‘Quite the eye-opener.’
‘Like the prayer,’ I say in my girlish Russian accent, fluttering my eyelashes a little. ‘Only with the growling.’
‘Don’t forget the screaming,’ Gia drawls, and only I can tell how truly shaken she still is. ‘The screaming’s integral to the whole cure. The louder, the better. We all joined in actually, it was quite cathartic. That’s what you heard.’
‘Dio! Miss Irina,’ the nurse cries out suddenly, ‘you are awake!’
‘She’s awake?’ the man exclaims.
I turn to see the nurse with her hands clasped together against her lips, and Irina drenched in sweat, her eyes wide with shock. Her arms and legs are stretched out and rigid, hands curled into claws upon the rumpled mattress, her blanket and top sheet a crumpled heap of fabric on the far side of the room. The red marks of her own nails are on her neck. She reminds me a little bit of me, that time I woke in Carmen’s body. There’s a wild look in her eyes that I recognise.
‘Give her a leetle time,’ I say casually in my heavy Russian accent. ‘Then she will be — how you say — as good as new.’
I look down at the fingernails of one hand, like a ditz, as if I’m bored. But I’m almost as shaken as Gia is. I think I just pulled off bringing a captive soul back to the surface, the same way Gabriel himself might have done with me. And Irina might be suffering her own set of adjustment issues right now, but she’s struggling to sit up, she’s trying to speak. And, in my book, that’s got to be better than one rung above dead.
‘No, really, what did you do to her?’ the man demands. He scrabbles in his jacket pocket for his mobile and starts dialling, as the nurse scoops up the bedding and smooths it back over Irina’s body.
‘All she did,’ Gia says crisply, grabbing me by the arm and walking me away, ‘is remind Irina of how good it feels to be alive.’
I can’t help looking back over my shoulder at Irina, and she suddenly rolls her head and eyes in my direction, raises one long, thin, pointing finger at me accusingly.
‘You …’ she gargles.
Gia pulls me out the door. ‘Irina was convulsing, foaming at the mouth,’ she mutters, ‘clawing at her skin. And her eyes …’ She swallows hard. ‘And the sounds! God. It was like something out of a horror film except it was all real. I almost passed out.’ She stares into my face, crossing her arms tightly. ‘One day, you’re going to have to sit me down, buy me a beer and explain to me what I just saw.’
‘It’s because she was fighting me,’ I reply into her haunted eyes. ‘Two sentient souls suddenly sharing one body. It’s never going to be pretty unless something … gives.’
Gia shudders and says fervently, ‘Let nothing like you ever come after me that way. Please.’
It’s no comfort, but I say, ‘The sooner we get out of here, the less likely you’ll ever hear from any of us again. What happened at the Galleria was an … aberration.’
‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’ Gia’s eyes are troubled as she adds, ‘Now a deal’s a deal, and, by God, you delivered and then some. Tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen.’
We’re at her open bedroom door now, and I see Ryan’s sleeping form on the bed, his head thrown back carelessly, his dark hair spilling across the pillow, blankets rumpled down to his waist. As if he feels my eyes on him, he shifts in his sleep, mumbling some word I can’t catch.
Dottore Pellini joins us, telling Gia discreetly in Italian that there’s nothing essentially wrong with Ryan that a little less partying wouldn’t cure.
‘What he really needs is rest,’ I tell Gia regretfully when the doctor has moved away again, ‘but there’s something I need to do and he’s insisting on coming with me. So, could you get him some food and drink? I don’t know when his last square meal was. His clothing’s torn, and he needs a new pack. He also needs … props.’
‘Prop
s?’ Gia says, confused.
I frown, unable to think of the right word. It’s my own shorthand for shape-shifting, and Ryan’s no shape-shifter.
‘You know, things. He looks too much like himself,’ I say, ‘and too much like him.’
In my mind’s eye, I see Luc glaring across the catwalk at Ryan, Ryan at Luc, one so dark, one so light, like the negative and positive sides of a single image. With me caught in the middle.
‘Oh, the sexy ex,’ Gia replies in sudden understanding. ‘The blond god sitting beside Gudrun who made my mouth go dry with lust the moment I set eyes on him?’
‘It’s his speciality,’ I reply, horror dawning in my face as the thought suddenly crystallises. ‘Gia, Ryan’s in so much danger. When they can’t find me, they’ll go looking for him.’
‘So it’s best if you stay together then,’ Gia replies, trying her best to sound reassuring. ‘Watch each other’s backs.’
‘Which is just as well,’ I say miserably, ‘seeing as I can’t seem to give him up.’
Gia grins, looking Ryan over again with an expression of amused regret on her face. ‘Like sugar, or cigarettes. I completely get it. Look, I’ll get Tommy onto it. He can put together a man bag for him. But what about you?’
‘All I need is information,’ I reply instantly. ‘An update.’
Gia’s expression sharpens immediately. ‘Shoot.’
I search her face. ‘Remember how you told me about the fires that destroyed Domaso, Gravedona, Rezzonico, Menaggio, Tremezzo, Argegno, Laglio, Urio?’
She nods, hugging herself even more tightly, as if she’s cold, the wicked spikes on her shoulders catching the brilliant lights in the room.
‘What happened after Urio?’ I ask. Gia frowns. ‘Was there anything … more?’ I add.
‘I couldn’t honestly tell you,’ she replies. ‘But Juliana would know. She has a villa by the lake, as did Giovanni. Her staff will be keeping her informed.’
I trail Gia back across the room to where Juliana is still seated at the dining table beneath vast windows. She seems shrunken in her grief, all her usual vitality, her habitual curiosity, leached out of her. Gia repeats my question to her in rapid-fire Italian, and she looks up, startled.
‘I’m told that Moltrasio was partially destroyed before it all … stopped. After Moltrasio there was no more … burning.’
‘As if the cause of the fires was interrupted?’ I ask in perfect Italian.
Gia’s eyes widen for a moment in surprise, before her expression goes bland.
Juliana nods, looking perturbed. ‘Yes! It is exactly how it was described to me — as if the arsonist was interrupted. Though the arsonist must have been in league with the Devil, for it should be impossible for fire to behave that way, as if it were alive …’
She shivers and crosses herself, then says to Gia, ‘Bianca St Alban’s family estate is in Moltrasio and I haven’t even called to ask after her, or to let her know that I’ve decided to give to her as a gift the haute couture pieces she ordered. Nothing in Giovanni’s final collection will ever be reproduced again, for anyone. But he would have wanted Bianca to have the gowns she selected before he … before he …’ Juliana looks down, but not before I see her eyes filling rapidly. ‘The police are only letting locals into the area,’ she whispers. ‘I could deliver them myself, of course, but I don’t have the heart to see it. It is too much …’ Her voice trails away.
I have to look away quickly so that she will not see the sudden flare of excitement in my eyes. My voice is casual, unhurried, as I study my booted feet. ‘I could do it for you. I have business in the area. And Bianca knows me. We spoke only a few days ago in fact, face to face.’
I glance up just as Juliana looks at Gia dully. ‘You would vouch for this young woman? Can she be trusted to take the two pieces directly to Villa Nicolin? Deliver them personally into Bianca’s hands? A price cannot be put on those dresses now, but I would sooner harm my own children than touch them again.’
Gia’s expression doesn’t waver for an instant as she stares into Juliana’s grief-ravaged face. ‘Absolutely. She is —’
‘A creature of my word,’ I interject. ‘If I say I will do something, then it will be done. Without question.’
Juliana turns her reddened eyes upon me. ‘Then please do so, with my thanks.’
She looks away from us towards the vast sash windows that dominate the room. ‘See to it,’ she tells Gia. ‘Give her every assistance and Atelier Re will make good any trouble it has caused you, twice over.’
Gia nods and calls out across the room, ‘Carlo.’
‘Miss?’ he replies, rising from the low-slung and impossibly fragile-looking Louis XV-style armchair near the front door that he’d somehow folded himself into.
‘Mercy must be given the exclusive use of one of the cars today,’ Gia barks. ‘Clear it with Gianfranco. Atelier Re will meet the expense. She needs to leave as soon as some gowns arrive and her friend has had a meal and bathed.’
‘One way or return?’ Carlo says, surprised, raking one large hand through his head of short, tight, black curls.
Gia raises an eyebrow at me and I say, ‘One way. The driver’s to drop us and go. No waiting.’
Carlo is already dialling from the in-house phone when he looks up again, at me. ‘Destination, Miss? Where shall I say the driver is going?’
‘Moltrasio,’ I reply, and Carlo’s olive skin goes pale. ‘To the Villa Nicolin.’
His eyes fly to Gia’s for confirmation, and she gives him a terse nod before tapping away on the seamless screen of her slender, black phone. She is making things happen the way I’d hoped, prayed, she would.
I bend over Ryan’s unconscious form and his eyelids flicker. Someone’s taken off his leather jacket and jeans and thrown them across an armoire beside the bed. He’s just wearing the long-sleeved tees he was wearing when I last saw him in Australia, one blue, one grey, both looking a little grey now around the neckline. I want so badly to trace the exposed line of his collarbone that I have to turn away and busy myself in the marble en suite bathroom.
I perch on the side of the massive stone spa that dominates the room and start drawing him a bath, dumping in an array of bath salts and potions from all the little brand-name bottles lined up neatly beneath a vast urn of white flowers on a ledge beside me. I play my fingers beneath the running water and allow the flesh of my hand to turn opaque and vaporous. The water runs right through it, and I find that it’s still easier to make myself a creature of mist than it is to hold this human form that I’ve chosen. But the dizziness, the disorienting sense of dislocation, of vertigo — they’re lessening all the time. I pull my hand back together, rebuilding it until the water ricochets once more off its sleek, solid surface.
‘Mercy?’ Ryan calls out uncertainly.
I turn away from the running water and rise quickly, unable to suppress the smile that spreads across my face. It’s echoed by Ryan’s grin.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ he says softly as I approach him. ‘Run me a bath, I mean.’
I lower myself down on the edge of the bed beside him and reply cheerfully, ‘The weird thing is that I want to, and I can’t understand why. I’m the most selfish creature alive. Anyone will tell you that.’
He sighs, shifting across the bed, making room for me beside him. I shake out my head of wild, dark curls and lie down on top of the covers. Both of us turn inwards to face each other so that we are eye to eye. There are still dark circles under his eyes, but that sense of him that I get is no longer clouded by sheer exhaustion. He reaches out, tracing the line of my nose; and when I smile, he touches the dimples beside my mouth, my laughter lines, and traces them, too.
‘I could get used to this,’ he murmurs, playing his fingers through the ends of my curling hair, then says hesitantly, ‘You know what I was most afraid of? It sounds so dumb even saying it. I was afraid …’
He swallows, tries again. ‘I was afraid that I’d never be able
to compete. That maybe what I thought you felt for me all this time was just a pale reflection of what you really felt for him …’
‘Compete?’ I say dazedly.
‘Yep, compete.’ Ryan laughs self-mockingly. ‘As if anyone would ever win in a play-off against the Devil.’ He laughs again, softly.
‘Brenda wasn’t my first serious girlfriend,’ he says in a weird rush. ‘Before we moved to Paradise, I was crazy-in-love with a girl called Edie Nolan who dumped me after she caught me drunkenly helping her best friend out of her shirt at a party. Edie would never let me touch her, and I was dying. You’ll have no idea what that feels like, what I’m even talking about. After that, I couldn’t have moved towns fast enough. First kiss at seven, in the dark, in the gym, on a pile of smelly old gym mats with a girl called Nikki whose dad ran a bar. Our teeth kept clashing. She’d just eaten a cheese sandwich. I remember thinking it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, kissing.’ Ryan’s words are almost tripping over themselves.
I see them, those girls. I let myself see them through his skin, and then I tell myself to shut it down, to stop torturing myself, though the damage is already done. Edie walks through my mind — a gentle-looking, strawberry blonde; the best friend, an up-for-anything brunette; Nikki — a tough-looking kid with straight, sandy bangs.
‘And maybe Brenda and I were bad for each other,’ Ryan almost gabbles. ‘But after Edie, being with Bren was like being with a, a … blowtorch. If what happened to Lauren hadn’t happened, we’d probably still be together.’
‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,’ I whisper.
‘I need you to know,’ Ryan insists softly, ‘about me; I need you to know me. But it’s coming out all wrong.’
I feel the rising heat beneath his skin, read his intention the same instant he leans forward gently and takes my mouth with his, reaching out and cupping the side of my face with one hand, his fingertips tangling in my hair, the kiss deepening until my entire world, my entire horizon, is Ryan, and every sense is flooded with him.
