by Rebecca Lim
‘What people?’ he asks. ‘All I can see are search crews. But it doesn’t look like there’s anyone left alive to find out there.’
And then horror seizes me fully and I understand what that man is. What all those drifting, dazed and voiceless people are, so divorced from all the frantic activity around them. They are those that Azraeil had no use for, those who were not blameless. And that mark on the wall? It was the agony of one man’s passing, caught there in his own life’s blood.
It’s a ghost town, I think, sickened. As it was in Hiroshima, as it was in Nagasaki.
And it is Luc’s doing, all of it.
I will bring you down, I hear him say again in that dark and smoky voice that used to play havoc with every sense I possess. Believe it.
The back wheels of our limo grind and scream uselessly, unable to get traction as the driver crunches the gears, trying to accelerate out of a giant pothole within sight of the towering gates that guard Villa Nicolin.
Our police escort salutes us from his motorbike and roars away.
I pop the lock on my door and tug on Ryan’s hand. ‘Come on,’ I say, jumping out of the shuddering limo, the elegant dresses upon their padded hangers hooked over the fingers of one hand.
The pothole looks recent. When I stare at its clean edges, I imagine that I see the faintest trace of phosphorescence, of melted, cauterised earth. Nuriel must have fought Luc so badly.
Ryan shoulders the daypack and we walk up to black wrought-iron gates. They are at least twenty feet high and set into the centre of a towering stone facade built to resemble the entry to a medieval keep. Dusk is falling, and as we draw closer, automatic sensors flood the area immediately around us with a dazzling light. Four sleek, fine-boned shapes materialise out of nowhere and throw themselves at the gates, thrusting their muzzles at us through the bars, teeth snapping, foaming and yowling.
Ryan yells, ‘Holy crap!’ and leaps backwards, but I remain where I am, watching the light strike the glistening, bared fangs only inches from my fingers.
‘Italian greyhounds,’ I say absently as I turn and press the buzzer on the intercom panel set into the gate. There is no nameplate on it, no address.
A faint metallic chiming sound comes back at us from the built-in speaker. The camera lens that’s set into the centre of the panel swivels minutely in my direction. From the corner of my eye, I see Ryan slip on the fake spectacles, adjust the cap on his head so that it sits low over his eyes.
The intercom speaker suddenly crackles into life. ‘Business?’ a woman’s voice says pleasantly. I place the accent a second later as Irish.
‘Juliana Agnelli-Re sent us with the gowns for Miss St Alban,’ I say smoothly, holding the dresses up in front of the lens.
Ryan and I turn as, with a squeal of tyres, the limo shoots out of the pothole and does a rapid U-turn before burning back the way we came. Ryan runs the fingers of his right hand through the ends of my loose hair, and I give him a stern look, twisting it back into a knot behind my neck with my free hand. It stays there.
He grins. ‘Neat trick.’
‘Focus,’ I reply repressively.
The intercom remains silent, and I look over the heads of the baying, scrabbling dogs at the estate. The wide driveway — paved in smoothly rounded, dark and light stones that mark out an intricate pattern — seems to go for a mile past gently playing fountains and manicured lawns before curving around the side of an imposing three-storey Palladian-style villa with cream-coloured walls and dozens of windows framed by forest green shutters. It’s a house with scores of rooms and chimneys, entered by way of a grand central portico supported by stone pillars. The huge carriage lamps on either side of the front door suddenly come on, as do all of the floodlights lining the driveway. Immediately, the sky seems darker, heightening the impression of Villa Nicolin being a kind of fortress against the outside world.
‘Tomaso will be right with you,’ the woman’s voice says through the speaker.
Minutes later, an olive-skinned man built along the lines of a silverback gorilla, taller even than Ryan, in a sleekly fitted three-piece suit, with short, greying hair and an earpiece, approaches the gate. He looks us up and down expressionlessly, before looking at the dogs going mad at his heels, drenched in sweat.
He drags the dogs away by their collars around the side of the house, then returns and points some kind of remote unlocking device at the gates. They swing away from us almost soundlessly, and as we enter, the man indicates wordlessly that we should submit to a search. He sets the gates closing again with the remote, before pocketing it and patting Ryan and me down individually for weapons, the touch of his hands feather light and impersonal. Beckoning for the dresses, he wrings each one lightly, then rummages through the daypack. Finally, with a jerk of his head, he indicates that we should follow him up the drive.
As we walk along the pebbled roadway towards the villa, we can still hear the faint howling of the dogs. I know they will continue until they are hoarse from screaming, or can no longer sense me. Ryan’s dogs had reacted to me in exactly the same way. It must be my essential inhumanity that they discern, my utter alien-ness.
‘I bet they’re jumpy from the fires,’ Ryan says hastily, but Tomaso doesn’t even turn his head to look at us. Just keeps walking swiftly, almost silently.
It’s almost second nature to me now to try to tune out any trace of mortal energy around me, and little by little I’m getting better at it — I can choose to accept what I wish to accept and discount the rest. But I let myself see, for a moment, how this man must see us. I get no sense of alarm, no curiosity as to why the dogs are behaving so out of character for their breed. He believes we are what we appear to be — troublesome young foreigners on some frivolous errand — and I relax a little as I take in my surroundings.
The villa is set on a steep hill above a vast garden that runs down in immaculately maintained tiers to the lake’s shore far below. The level below the forecourt features a formal parterre garden built around a series of small circular ponds. Below that, there’s a grove of miniature citrus trees scattered with curved stone benches. Below that again, a classical statuary garden filled with the frozen forms of nymphs and satyrs. Running water features cascade down either side of the wide central staircase that leads to the portico of the main house and bisect the top three tiers of the formal garden. There’s also a cleverly concealed winding driveway that connects the main house to a much smaller, sleekly modern one-storey guesthouse of glass and steel at the foot of the hill. A high stone wall with another pair of tall, black, wrought-iron gates set into it separates the property from a narrow street that runs along its lowest boundary.
‘Holy crap!’ Ryan mouths again, looking around. He points out a long, narrow jetty jutting into the lake opposite the lower gates of the property. A large cruiser and a couple of smaller motorised runabouts are moored to it. The jetty had caught my interest, too, almost immediately.
‘Worth checking out,’ I mouth at him behind Tomaso’s broad back.
He nods to show he’s understood, reflected light glinting off the lenses of his fake glasses.
As we step onto the large, complicated, Renaissance-style symbol picked out in polished black and white stones just below the front portico, a slight woman in a long-sleeved white dress and white bib-fronted apron, with curly, jaw-length blonde hair and ruddy cheeks, opens the tall, heavily carved front door to the house. When she sees us, a smile lightens the anxious expression on her thin face. She walks towards us, hands outspread in welcome.
‘Thank goodness you’ve reached us safely,’ she says in her lilting voice. ‘When Signora Agnelli-Re’s office called to let us know you were already on your way, well, I …’ A shadow crosses her face before she adds brightly, ‘Now let me take those from you, you must be exhausted.’
Ryan and I exchange glances. I hoist the hangers in my left hand a little higher.
‘I’m sorry …’ I begin, and pause. ‘Clara,’ the woman s
ays. ‘How rude of me. Clara O’Manley.’
‘Clara,’ I continue smoothly, ‘but I have strict instructions to deliver these personally to Bianca St Alban. Mrs AgnelliRe was quite adamant. As you will be aware, a value cannot be placed on them now. They are museum pieces, you understand.’
Clara’s expressive face cycles through surprise, sorrow, comprehension, then a studied neutrality. ‘Tomaso,’ she says to the silent hulk standing to one side of us, ‘have Gregory call down to the dépendance to see if Signorina Bianca is available to receive …’ Now it’s her turn to pause.
‘Ryan Daley,’ Ryan says immediately, his manners impeccable, holding out his right hand. ‘And Mercy.’
‘I have one of those impossible names,’ I add quickly, shaking her hand, too, which feels calloused, cool and dry. ‘Just Mercy will do.’
Tomaso moves around us silently, entering the villa through its open front door. Neither name will ring any bells with Bianca St Alban. She’s never met Ryan, and when she met me I was the notorious Irina Zhivanevskaya. But she’s staying in the guesthouse at the foot of the estate, near the lake, and that’s where I want to be. All I have to go on is that terrible dream in which I somehow saw inside Luc’s mind, was him as he pursued Nuriel across the dark waters of Lake Como. I need to look at the shoreline from the perspective of the lake itself and maybe then it will become clear what happened to her.
My voice is deliberately casual as I say, ‘We’d be happy to walk the dresses down to Bianca ourselves. We spoke only a few days ago, in fact, at Atelier Re, just before the couture show. That’s the guesthouse, the dépendance, down there, I take it?’
Clara nods. ‘You’re friends of hers? She’s been something of a recluse lately …’
I nod. ‘When Juliana told me she needed to get the gowns to Bianca, and we were already headed this way, well, it made sense to stop by. All that business with Félix de Haviland …’ I frown. ‘So shocking, and so, so sad.’
Ryan blinks for a moment, struggling to recall where he’s heard the name before.
‘You know, darling,’ I purr, turning to him and putting a hand lightly on his arm. ‘You and Justine were talking about it only the other day, remember?’
Ryan’s face clears. ‘Félix always was an idiot,’ he says disapprovingly.
‘Félix broke her heart,’ Clara murmurs, gazing down at the guesthouse. Light spills from its floor-to-ceiling windows onto the lawns, casting shadows in pretty patterns. ‘She’ll be so happy to see some familiar, friendly faces. Her parents are travelling between board meetings, like they always do this time of year. She was already feeling under siege, so alone, you know? And then all this happened …’
She touches the back of my hand and, for a moment, I get a clear sensation of her terror when she’d woken that night to see strange lights in the sky. The estate had become a kind of island, marooned by a fire that had seemed somehow to be alive. She’d watched from her upper-storey bedroom, scarcely able to breathe, as trees and buildings had burst into flame all around the shoreline. Lines of fire had appeared across the surface of the lake, like holy writing, though she hadn’t been able to make out any source. She’d seen the main street of the town burning in the distance and had recited the words of every prayer she’d ever been taught as a child, because she hadn’t known what else to do.
I shake off her touch lightly, knowing it’s imperative I get down to the lake.
‘We’re visiting other friends in the area,’ I say, ‘just to see how they’re getting on. We’ll duck in and have a quick chat with Bianca, drop the dresses, and be on our way.’
‘We’ll be gone before you know it,’ Ryan adds warmly, and he’s so solid and reassuring and boy-next-door handsome in his kooky get-up that Clara can’t help twinkling up at him.
‘Oh, go on,’ she says with a shooing motion. ‘I expect she’ll be glad of the distraction. Head past the little folly to my left there, and you’ll find the start of the driveway that will take you down.’
She waves at us before re-entering the house. As she shuts the door behind her, I hear her call out, ‘Tomaso? Tell Gregory —’
‘For an honest guy, you make a convincing liar,’ I tease Ryan in a low voice as we walk towards the marble and wrought-iron folly — like a miniature rotunda — set on the far edge of the property.
Ryan takes the heavy spectacles off his face, slipping them into his pocket with relief as he rubs at the bridge of his nose.
For a moment, we linger beneath the delicate ironwork canopy of the folly, looking up at the first stars of evening appearing in the sky. Then, by some unspoken consent, we lay our separate burdens down upon a curved marble bench seat within the folly, and Ryan hooks his arms around me from behind, pulling me close into his body. We gaze together across the darkening lake as the wind rises around us, ghosting through the folly, through the pines that tower overhead. The view is astounding. Twinkling lights ring the foothills, mirroring the lights in the sky, as if strings of stars have somehow fallen out of the firmament and come to rest beside the water, just for us. And I’m suddenly filled with an intense gladness, for each light represents at least one living soul, someone who survived Luc’s malevolence, the way I did.
‘I’m glad it’s you,’ Ryan murmurs, ‘that I’m seeing this with.’
‘Don’t ever forget this,’ I reply softly. ‘Don’t ever forget me.’
When he starts to protest, I say fiercely, ‘It happens. Memories die, they can be twisted, shattered, stolen forever. I’m proof of that. Remember this, Ryan. That we managed to find each other. That we were together, here, just for a little while.’
That I love you. I’m too much of a coward to say the words.
I turn in his arms and look up into his eyes, place one hand against his warm human skin, letting the energy of him wash over me for a moment, the song of him play through me, before I turn back to face the lake, leaning back into the hard line of his shoulder. It’s dark beneath the folly’s fretwork canopy. The moon is almost overwhelmed, only a thin sliver. Dominated by its paramour, the sun, the same way Luc once had me in thrall.
‘Do you know what I’m thinking right now?’ Ryan’s voice is very quiet as he tightens his arms around me.
‘Yes,’ I whisper without hesitation, because lying to him would be like lying to myself. I turn my head so that his heartbeat is just beneath my cheek. ‘I do. And I’m humbled by you.’
‘It’s the first and last prayer I think I’ll ever make,’ his laughter is ragged, ‘that God might let me “keep” you; that we can be together for always. You’ve paid and paid. Why must you keep risking everything when there are others who can take the fight up to Luc?
‘We were both like dead people,’ he murmurs. ‘Why show us what’s possible only to take it away? Why doesn’t He ever help us, anyway? Why does He allow all this bad stuff to happen?’
He flings an arm out at the lake, at the world, and in that gesture I understand the frustrations of an entire, uncomprehending species. I think of Lauren and what was done to her, how any sense could be made of a thing so unspeakable. I’ve asked myself the same kinds of questions, and yet I am one of His weapons, His anointed. It’s an irony to me, that I should keep finding mysteries within mysteries; that life is a puzzle box without end; that if you peel back every layer, there are more beneath.
‘He knows,’ I reply, more hope in my words than certainty. ‘He knows and sees, I really believe that, but I think He’s gone beyond the point of intercession. I think we were all set in motion a long time ago; we exist now inside this bell jar, as do the parameters, the rules, the cycles, and it’s up to us — all of us, even the elohim — to weather the conditions. We are pieces of Him, all of us, from lowest to highest. Whatever we do, we do to Him also; whatever happens to us happens to Him. We are His great experiment, and if we suffer, He suffers with us. We have to believe that, for the alternative would be unbearable.’
‘Have you ever seen Him?’ Ryan asks,
turning me to face him, and I feel his terrible need: for reassurance, for answers.
I shake my head. ‘I have felt His presence, like a breath of holy fire, of life. Maybe only the Eight ever have. They hold us together at the centre, when many may have drifted.’
‘The way Luc did?’ Ryan says.
My voice is troubled. ‘And the others. K’el said a hundred elohim fell with Luc, and who knows how many from the ranks of the malakhim, the seraphim, more …’
Ryan’s voice is very quiet, very controlled. ‘You know what really scares me? That maybe this is it. We get this one shot at things and then I never see you again. I don’t think I could stand it if this is all we’re ever going to have. It’s not enough. It isn’t fair.’ His laughter is self-mocking. ‘Listen to me.’
Around us, the wind whistles, and scudding clouds cover the moon until what little light there was has turned to shade.
‘Just don’t ever leave me without saying goodbye,’ Ryan says suddenly, violently. ‘Don’t leave me at all.’
Then he lowers his head to capture my mouth, and I turn and wrap my arms around his neck, letting all the words I can’t bring myself to say to him, all the unspoken fears and longings inside me, speak of themselves in this one kiss.
There’s that lick of fire along my nerves. But Ryan and I remain locked together, saying everything that can be said through touch alone; though what we are is pain, an impossibility.
He finally tears himself free against his will — unable to bear being with me, or away from me — and I place my fingers against his wounded mouth and take away the hurt, instantly.
‘You’re like fire and water,’ he gasps against my hand. ‘You’ve spoilt me for anyone else in this life, any life, you know that, don’t you?’
