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.

There’s an abrupt sensation of coalescence, and I’m flung out of contact with Ryan’s body. The instant I come to, shaking and swearing to myself that I will never again do this thing to another living creature, Ryan takes a great, heaving breath.

His dark eyes fly open and he chokes and claws at the rigid muscles of his neck, at the place where I laid my hand upon him.

I don’t even think, I just pull him to me with trembling hands and bury my face in his dark hair. I’m holding him to me so tightly that the sound of his heartbeat, the murmur of his quickening blood, could be my own.

Thank you, I say silently and with reverence. Thank you.

He smells of rain and smoke and leather, and it’s the uncanniest thing, but being this close to him, having somehow personally wrested him from Azraeil’s grasp, I can feel his life force. I’m almost intoxicated by it.

It’s something I never felt when I was cast into Carmen and Lela, all the others. I never got a real sense of the peculiar human energies of all the people around me. But now, in Ryan, I can somehow … read it, or hear it, like music. It’s singing out of him — who he is; what he is.

He’s alive. He’s so alive.

Two walls meeting to my right form a sheltering angle and I lean into it, taking Ryan with me, still held fast in my arms. He’s retching and shuddering, and I remember how it was when I was trapped inside Lela’s dying body and the Archangel Gabriel gave me a personal reminder of the evils of possession. It felt like live current moving through me, as if I was touching eternity. How must it have seemed to Ryan?

It’s a long time before he can do anything except breathe with a raw sound, like someone who has survived a raging fire. All I can do is hold him and measure the passing seconds by the beating of his heart.

Finally, Ryan pushes away slightly, though he does not try to break my hold. I help him sit up, before reluctantly letting him go. This touching thing could get to be habit-forming, and the last thing I need now is a new addiction.

My left hand no longer burns with the mark of Luc’s betrayal. For an instant, I’m mesmerised by the sight of my own skin, my own fingers — how long it’s been since I’ve really seen them and felt as if they were a part of me. They are as unmarked and smooth as fired porcelain. I’m reminded with a jolt of Carmen’s eczema-scarred wrists, Lela’s small hands, Irina’s slender, tapered claws. I’ve left them all behind me now, truly.

Ryan breaks my reverie by raising his head to face me at last. His eyes are pain-filled. He looks at me for the longest time; studying my features, my glowing, strong-limbed form. He told me, once, that he kept a picture of me in his wallet — something a sketch artist put together on the strength of Lauren’s description. But he’s never really seen me, the real me. He’s only ever known me as a sharp-tongued presence, a wise-cracking ghoul, inhabiting a stranger’s body. Is he … disappointed?

But there’s awe in his expression, and a dawning gladness. There’s something else, too, in his eyes. Some kind of new-found awareness that was never there before.

I wonder what he saw when he journeyed through the valley of the shadow of death. Whether he witnessed things that cannot be reasoned away. The path, for every person, is different, they say.

We sit staring at each other, side by side, our backs to the rough stone. I focus solely on Ryan, on his face. It’s weird, but so long as I look at him, the feeling that I’m about to splinter apart, seems to lessen.

‘What …’ His voice is like something carried back on the wind from the afterlife. ‘What just … happened? It felt like I was …’

‘On fire?’ I say quietly.

He nods, wiping the blood from his mouth with the heel of one hand. ‘From the inside.’ He struggles to swallow, grimacing when it causes him pain. ‘I died, didn’t I? I was d—’

I put a hand to his lips to stop him saying more, in case Azraeil should be reminded of how he was cheated and think to return.

Ryan turns his face into my palm. I want so badly to trace the line of his mouth with my thumb, but I quickly let my hand fall before I can give in to weakness.

‘It takes a lot to heal someone,’ I reply cautiously. ‘And I don’t have a great track record at healing things, so cut me some slack.’

‘You saved me?’ His voice is raw. ‘You mean you were responsible for that … that …’ He inhales sharply at the memory of the pain and his fingers curl involuntarily where they rest upon his knees. When he turns his gaze back on me his eyes are almost accusing. ‘That was … you?’

I say gently, ‘Like I told you before, I’m not a “regular” girl, Ryan. And seeing as how I almost killed you, I figure we’re about even now.’

He coughs as he pulls himself more upright against the wall, and that familiar fringe of straight, dark hair falls into his eyes.

‘All I can remember is a bunch of steeples and …’ he frowns, ‘people? Am I right? Were there people up there? All rushing up to meet us, then blam, I hit something. Lights out. Then I wake to find you watching over me. Like some kind of angel …’

He looks at me sideways, deliberately casual, to gauge my reaction.

As I look down, discomfited by the intensity of his gaze, a strand of my own straight, dark hair falls across my face. Ryan bridges the gap between us, loops it gently behind my ear, briefly tracing down the line of my jaw as if he can’t help himself. His touch is so shattering, so damned human, that some cold, hard part of me feels as if it is giving way.

‘You feel so real,’ he rasps.

Self-preservation is instinctual in me now and I move out of reach, warning him raggedly, ‘Don’t.’

‘Or what?’ He sighs, leaning his head back against the wall. It’s so cold in here that his breath streams out white, like a cloud, or a soul departing.

‘You know, I’ve had my own freaky theories about you for some time now,’ he murmurs. ‘I went away and did my research like you said to, between dealing with a mountain of self-pity and anger and … grief.’ He shoots me another glance. ‘I don’t know how it’s possible … how you’re even possible. You’ve made me question everything I’ve ever believed in. I deserve a little more … clarity.’ His voice is strained. ‘I think I’ve, uh, earned it.’

Warily, from the safety of my corner, I meet his eyes.

‘For what it’s worth,’ he says, ‘I feel like everything’s new again between us. Like we’ve been given permission to … start over.’

‘Permission?’ I laugh despairingly. ‘In what universe could someone like you and someone like me make any kind of sense? Who “permits” this?’ I look away from the tenderness in his gaze, the hurricane inside me begging to be set free.

‘You need to explain things to me,’ he insists. ‘I need to understand who it is that I’m —’

‘Dealing with?’ I cut in.

Something flares in his eyes, and I’m instantly ashamed of my own cowardice because I know what he was about to say, the words he was going to use.

‘You could put it that way,’ he says, stung.

I look down at my hands, wanting to touch him, to tell him I don’t deserve his love. Maybe I’ve never really known what love is; after all, I chose as my first love someone who soon after became … the Devil.

I shudder. Ryan catches the movement and frowns.

‘Trade?’ he says so softly, I almost miss the word.

For a long while I don’t answer, seeing landmines in every direction, seeing ancient history that could only cause Ryan pain, the last thing I would ever want for him. All the while, I struggle to keep my nausea at bay, to contain that sensation inside me of building, of escalation.

‘You promised.’ Ryan takes a shuddering breath. ‘It’s because of you I got broken in the first place.’

‘And I fixed you!’ I reply, turning on him like a wounded animal. ‘So quit complaining.’

‘I was broken the moment you left me the first time.’ His voice is very quiet. ‘Damn straight, it’s up to you to fix me. And you haven’t even begun to mend the hurt you caused. You can’t hide from what’s between us forever! You deserve … love as much as anyone does.’

It’s as if the word is ripped out of him. He’s unaware that I’ve already read his heart like a map, like the constellations.

‘Let me in,’ he begs, murmuring again, ‘you promised.’ ‘What?’ I say, struggling to hold myself together, to hold myself apart from him. ‘What did I “promise”? How was I even in any condition to promise you anything?’

I see his face soften as his eyes glide over my features, over my glowing form, the curls of energy that drift off my skin, then blur and fade.

‘You promised that you’d never hurt me,’ he whispers. ‘Remember? When you were Lela. Then you went and died on me. It felt as if I was the one who’d been shot. I even looked down to see if I was bleeding …’

I close my eyes, feeling again the ghostly impact of the bullet that ended Lela’s life. ‘I so badly wanted to go with you then,’ I murmur, ‘but it wasn’t permitted.’ I place the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to stem the ache I still feel for that lost girl. ‘I’m trying to protect you,’ I mutter over the white noise in my head, ‘for what it’s worth. You don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘That talk we were always supposed to have?’ Ryan pleads. ‘We’re having it now, Mercy. So start talking. You’re afraid, I’m afraid. But we’re here now, you’re free.’

‘I may not be caged inside another any longer,’ I say from behind my hands, ‘but you have no idea how wrong you are, what you’re up against. I will never be free.’

Of you, of him. Not while I live.

I see it again: the hills around Lake Como, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, all exploding in a kind of liquid flame, consumed by the wrath of demons and archangels colliding. In those memories, I see Ryan’s death foretold, and I almost cannot bear it.

‘Why are we even arguing?’ Ryan whispers, his breath stirring upon my skin. ‘Where have you gone?’

‘Beyond the stars,’ I whisper, hearing the static and the silence, the inexorable distance, in my head. How very far I fell, how far.

He places a tentative hand upon my bare and glowing arm; against all wisdom, I allow it to remain. Ryan always was brave, and foolhardy around me. We’ve always fed that impulse in each other, and isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Lend you wings; grant you the strength and courage of Titans.

‘So real,’ he murmurs again in wonderment.

Through his skin I can read the chaos in his thoughts: love piled upon fear, layered upon hope and desire, anger and frustration. The weight of them, their metaphysical noise, is almost intolerable.

It feels wrong to have access to his innermost thoughts. Knowledge like that is so dangerous in the wrong hands. It’s little wonder that Luc’s ambitions have gained a certain purchase in this world: they are here for the picking, these mortals. Everything you need to know — their dreams, their vices — all flowing beneath the skin constantly, like a river. To be drawn from, or poisoned.

Without consciously recalling how it’s done, little by little I turn Ryan down, tune him out. So that his inner energy, the random glimmers of thought and emotion I get from him now are almost bearable. It’s not perfect, but at least I can think again. I drop my hands from my face, turn to look at him.

Finally, I tell him of home. And as I describe it, the way it was when it was fresh made and new, and every small thing seemed a miracle in and of itself, tears of fire spill down my cheeks, melting away even as they hit the chilly air.

‘My kind,’ I weep, ‘were not created to feel sorrow. Everything about me, about us, is impossible, Ryan, so frightening, I can’t see my way clear …’

‘You told me to go look up that word, elohim,’ he says. ‘The word for what you are. And I did, but I’m still missing something important. It can mean so many things. I’m no good at languages. Or history. All the stuff I read just confused me even more. I just want to hear what it means, from you.’

He puts his arm around me and hauls me close, and it’s so electrifying, so longed for, that I can’t think again, can’t move. We’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and I’m so distracted by the achingly familiar scent of him, his human warmth, the life force surging inside him, that I close my eyes and give myself over to sensation, resting my head against the hard line of his shoulder. It feels so right. And so real. It’s just a moment or two out of time. Even the Archangel Michael would grant me that much.

But then a bright, numinous light sweeps past the windows of our tower, followed swiftly by another, causing me to flinch, for I alone recognise its source. I can almost hear Gudrun breathing in the night, all her hatred, and that of her dead-eyed hunting partner, Hakael, bent towards me. They smell my fear. They seek to know where we hide inside this vast stone edifice. If Ryan and I had not reached sanctuary, I’m sure we’d already be dead.

‘Once,’ I say, struggling to keep my voice calm as the sweeping, searching light recurs, and recurs again, ‘there were upwards of a thousand elohim. Some created male, some female. Eight were made most powerful, most prescient, of all things that dwell in the universe: His regents. His princes. Tasked to discern His will.’

Their names rise like smoke in the icy air. ‘Barachiel,’ I murmur, ‘Selaphiel, Jeremiel, Jegudiel, Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael …’

A look of shock appears on Ryan’s face. ‘Mercy, those are the names of archangels. Beings that people actually … worship.’

‘And they were my friends,’ I whisper, ‘like my brothers. The name of God is woven into the very fabric of their beings, their names, as it is in mine, if only I could remember it, but something was done to me to make me forget, do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’

There’s baffled wonderment on Ryan’s face. For a moment, I get a torrent of feeling from him, denial the strongest thread.

‘And these eight, uh, archangels …?’ he says hesitantly.

‘Were the ones who kept me “safe”, who placed me inside a woman called Ezra, into another called Lucy, a girl called Susannah, then Carmen, Lela, Irina; and, before them all, an unbroken chain of human lives I can no longer recall …’

Ryan frowns. ‘Kept you safe from what?’

I pretend not to hear. ‘Our people are further divided into malakhim — the messengers, who are sometimes seen to intercede with the living here on earth; and seraphim, ophanim, dominions, powers, others. There are many … “castes”, for want of a better word, but the elohim are highest of all.’

Ryan rolls his eyes. ‘Castes? You’ve just described Paradise High. And, I guess, I used to be one of the elohim, too. Before I fell. So snap! Some pair we make.’

I return his grin with a startled smile of my own, but then my voice grows sombre again. ‘There are three classes of being under God: bestial, human, angelic. And one thing is known and understood by us all: never shall they intermix, or evil is the result. I know it as if it is written on my soul in letters of fire.’

‘Evil?’ Ryan leaps on the word. I feel his sudden tension in the arm lying across my shoulders.

‘When the Daughters of Man began to multiply upon the earth,’ I explain, unsure of how I gained such knowledge, where the words arise from, ‘some of our people lay with them, begetting a race called the nephilim. Some say they are murderous giants, some say devouring spirits.’

‘Fairy tales,’ Ryan scoffs.

My eyes sharpen upon his. ‘The way the Devil and his demons are?’

‘What we are isn’t evil,’ he insists.

‘I don’t know what we are,’ I reply. ‘And I’m not saying I agree. I’m just giving you an idea of the … baggage that I come with.’

Two supernatural factions wrestling for control of my soul across the centuries, reduced to this one word: baggage.

Ryan’s answering look is wry.

I recall Irina’s roomful of bespoke luggage and give a short laugh. ‘I’m just telling you that this is how we’re … wired. So if you don’t think I come with the biggest damn warning sign you’ve ever seen, you aren’t really looking at me properly. Why aren’t you afraid of what I represent? Why aren’t you already running?’

Ryan looks down. ‘You know the answer to that. Don’t make it any harder for me than it already is. And I’m not saying that the, uh, nephilim were a good thing. But the fact that they, uh, might exist,’ his face is sceptical, ‘shows that some of your people broke “the law” in the past, right? By mixing with us lower life forms. You might say you’re programmed one way, but I see you questioning things all the time. Everything you’ve done since I’ve known you has been a process of trying to break free; to override what was done to you by eight of the most powerful beings in existence.’

I stiffen at his words, recognising both truth and heresy in them. It’s true that I no longer comprehend the ways of my own kind; that, in some way, for better or worse, I’ve … evolved. After all this time, I may be more human than not. Don’t I feel pain, fear, grief, sorrow, when I was created to feel none of these things?

‘Were they all there? The Eight?’ Ryan asks, catching me by surprise. ‘At the Galleria?’

I shake my head. In my mind’s eye, I relive the instant Luc cut K’el down and pain explodes through me again. I rock forward, crossing my arms tightly to hold in the hurt.

‘K’el’s last act in life was to protect me,’ I gasp. ‘Even though I never loved him enough to deserve such sacrifice.’

‘K’el?’ Ryan seizes on the unfamiliar name, his grip tightening. I know what he remembers: a gleaming giant, tawny-haired, unyielding, honourable, bitter, with eyes like a young lion, who stood between me and Luc.

‘Raphael was supposed to be there, too,’ I whisper. ‘But he never made it. Nor did Jegudiel. And Selaphiel’s been … missing for a while now.’

‘Missing?’ Ryan queries sharply.

I hear his frustration as he struggles to piece together the little I’ve seen fit to offer.

‘Taken,’ I clarify bleakly. ‘All three of them, by Luc’s forces. K’el was just a stand-in; he was out of his depth, and his reward was an unjust death. He was singular and perfect, Ryan. And he will never be made again. I think that’s all I want to “trade”. You don’t need to know the rest.’

Ryan grips me by the upper arms, turning me to face him with a hard shake. ‘Why can’t you trust me?’ he growls. ‘Don’t underestimate me. Don’t treat me like I’m something less than you are — I don’t deserve that. Who is he, Mercy? The one who was threatening you? He’s the reason K’el’s dead, the real reason Raphael and the others are missing, right? The reason the Eight have had to hide you for so long, inside so many people? I’m not as stupid as I must seem to you.’

I begin to tremble as if I’m in the grip of a killing fever. Don’t make me tell you, Ryan. Please.

‘Who is he?’ Ryan insists. ‘That … archangel,’ he stumbles over the word, ‘who looks just like me? If he isn’t one of the Eight, then who is he?’

Trust Ryan to cut to the heart of it, of me.

He gives me another shake. ‘He was hurting you and I tried to kill him. Kill him!’

I hear his disbelief. He is wide-eyed now at the memory. I know that he’s seeing what I’m seeing: Luc suspended sixty feet in the air, arms outspread, flames enveloping his living form, laughing wildly.

‘He was on fire,’ Ryan shudders, ‘but he wouldn’t die. And I wanted him to die because he was trying to hurt you. Tell me who he is!’

I look at Ryan again, really study him. For an instant, I see eyes as pale as broken water, as living ice, in place of his brown ones; golden hair where his is dark; golden skin where his is so pale. He could be Luc in disguise. Save mortal and vulnerable in a way Luc has never been and never will be. Could Ryan represent some kind of warning? I was never good at reading signs and portents, having fallen to earth before I could work out, for myself, who I was and what my purpose could even be.

‘Who is he?’ Ryan’s voice is raw. ‘He’s no archangel,’ I murmur. ‘Not any more. I’ve always called him Luc,’ I add reluctantly, ‘but you would know him as Lucifer, Ryan.’

I see Ryan blanch as understanding finally dawns: that he is a dead ringer for the Devil Incarnate.

As if to underscore my words, a soul-rending scream pierces the storm-tossed night. It reverberates in the silence that has fallen over Ryan, over me, deep inside our stone citadel.

Both of us flinch as another scream sounds, closer this time, and louder. For a moment, a bright, constant light pierces the narrow window set deep into the walls above our landing, and we stare up at it, frozen with fear, before it suddenly extinguishes.

Ryan lets go of me abruptly, leans back against the wall.

I pull my knees up under my chin, tightening my arms around myself defensively. ‘So you see how this is hopeless, you and me?’

In answer, Ryan just closes his eyes and tilts his head back, as if he can’t bear the sight of me.

I never babble, I’m no good at small talk, but I rush to fill the silence with the oldest story there is. About a girl seeing a guy through a crowd for the first time, and falling in love.

‘It was like a sickness,’ I mutter. ‘We were young, capable of things your people would deem impossible. We were … obsessed with each other, with what we could do. We thought we were outside the order of things. That rules were only there to be broken. We sneered at the others — believing they didn’t possess our depth of understanding about the way things could be. The whole universe was our playground, and Luc loved to walk in your world. He’d return with stories of some strange, rare place he knew as “Eden”. The greatest irony is that he should be trapped here for an age, growing in vengefulness and spite and pure evil because of me …’

Can Ryan hear my unspoken plea?

I did nothing but fall for the wrong person, Ryan. I picked Luc, when I should have picked Raphael, even K’el. But then I never would have met you …

Even then, Luc had been trouble. He’d been wild. We’d been created to govern. We were responsibility and duty and faith and principle made flesh, made real. But Luc had taken all the power bound inside him, all the unspoken covenants laid down between us and our creator — the covenants hard coded into the very matter of which we were made, thou shalt, thou shalt not — and he’d used them for his own … sport.

It had been exhilarating, and frightening, being with him. Almost from the first, Luc had behaved like a god himself: creating, destroying, twisting the animate and inanimate world around him into anything he desired simply because he could. He was different from us all and somehow … free. And more beautiful than the sun.

And I fell for that. Who wouldn’t have?

Maybe I hadn’t transgressed the way Luc did, but I never tried to rein him in. I was implicated, a witness; at the very least, I turned a blind eye, when I must have known he’d never be satisfied with things the way they stood.

I tell Ryan all of this and he doesn’t say anything, or open his eyes.

‘I had it wrong for the longest time,’ I finish softly. ‘It was never the Eight who cast me out of home, cut me off from everything I’d ever loved, everyone I’d ever known. It was Luc all along. The Eight did the best they could to keep me alive down here, but they couldn’t stop Luc filling my sleeping mind with longing and lies. Some fatal bargain was struck between Luc and Michael, all those years ago. But Luc gave it a special twist, all of his own making, like he’s always done. He was the one who exiled me and it almost killed me. But he didn’t count on me surviving. And he didn’t count on being cast down himself, by Michael. And because of a rash vow that Luc once made me, he’s been trapped here on earth.’

I close my eyes in horror, whispering, ‘Luc craves a monstrous empire. And I am the key, the touchstone. What he wants won’t be possible until he has me back under his control. He will never stop pursuing me.’

Ryan still hasn’t moved. ‘And are you still … obsessed with him?’ he says finally, without opening his eyes.

His voice is emotionless, steeled against more hurt. ‘Yes,’ I whisper over the hurricane inside. ‘More than ever.’

Ryan swallows and opens his eyes and I see them shimmer with an unspoken devastation before he abruptly looks down at his clenched hands.

I watch the skin of his face tighten in rejection as I say, ‘I am consumed — with thoughts of destroying Luc the way he destroyed K’el, the way he’s been responsible for destroying and defiling more of your kind than you could begin to number, the way he tried to destroy me. He robbed me of time, Ryan, of choice, the two things I consider as precious as life itself. He raised his hand against me when all I ever did was love him beyond reason.’

Ryan raises his head as my words sink in. I hold up my aching left hand, which I’ve been concealing from his gaze, and the living flames rise off my skin as if they reach for him. He gasps, recoiling.

‘I’m sick of being objectified by those who are supposed to “love” me,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’ve been a game piece for far too long. I want vengeance, Ryan. I want to rain down upon my enemies like a ruinous plague. But most of all? I’m ready to be loved, just for myself, no other reason. And I don’t think you’re strong enough to be with someone like me. No one is, not now.’

Ryan’s continuing silence tells me everything I need to know. I feel such a sudden weight of sadness that, for a moment, the screaming, spinning world beneath my skin grows still. Abruptly, my burning scar extinguishes all together, ceases to ache.

Who could love me the way I am? Nameless, stateless, flawed.

‘I have no name,’ I say, my voice bleak. ‘And there is a legion after me who would reduce you to blood. For what it’s worth,’ I whisper, ‘I feel it, too. Felt it, almost from the moment I met you. When we’re together, I feel so much less … alone. And I would like nothing better than to lose myself in the human world with you, but that’s a dream, Ryan. And I’m done dreaming. I’m awake now. Now and forever. And where I’m going, you cannot follow.’

A demonic shriek shatters the night, so close beside us that I surge upright in fear, only to have the entire world tilt through its axis as I struggle to retain my balance.

Ryan is on his feet immediately, steadying me.

He’s so tall, taller than me, built like a line-backing angel.

I’m still Irina’s height, still mortal-sized. I can’t seem to find the energy, or the will, to dominate the space I occupy, to reclaim my true nature. There doesn’t seem any point. I’m no “better” than he is. Not any more.

I struggle in Ryan’s arms, but he won’t let me push him away. Maybe I imagine it but, for a second, it seems as if my outline ripples, like Ryan’s clasping a creature made of fog, I can see the ground below my bare feet, through them.

‘Don’t you dare!’ Ryan cries, his grip momentarily tightening on emptiness as I struggle to draw myself together. ‘Don’t you dare disappear on me again. I know what we have is impossible to rationalise, but once I met you, my old life was over anyway. I was dead inside. All that stuff, that Ryan, they were already gone, already past. Only this matters. Don’t leave me.’

I want to lean into him and draw upon his solidity, his indescribable, peculiar energy that I could pick out in a crowd, anywhere, but I’m falling again, falling.

I’m caving in, I’m vertigo.

‘All that exists,’ I gasp, as if saying the words will somehow protect me, ‘is this present.’

It’s something I told myself when I was Irina and believed that Luc was dead, and I’d never see Ryan again. Maybe it’s the only thing capable of being true in a world like this one; that the moment we inhabit, is all we can ever really be sure of.

‘That’s it, that’s it exactly!’ he pleads. ‘All I want from you is more time.’

The laugh that escapes me has the quality of hysteria. ‘We need to carve something out for us,’ Ryan exclaims. ‘The big guy with the big sword said so himself. He ordered me to take care of you in the human world, which tells me that your time on earth is nowhere near over. And he thinks I can help. Somehow.’

The screwed up look on Ryan’s face is almost comical and it hits me that he’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever known. Then the world begins to spin in earnest and I feel his hold on me slip again.

‘We take this moment, this now, and we draw it out, we turn it into a chain of time that will keep us together,’ Ryan insists.

When I reply, my voice is almost inaudible. ‘The “big guy with the big sword” is the Archangel Michael, and he overestimates his jurisdiction where I’m concerned. I’ve been taking care of myself in the human world for a very long time without recourse to anyone. Every time They put me into someone new? It all came down to me: me doing the starting over, me making things up as I went along. Being with me will only get you killed. I can’t be responsible for losing you, the way I almost lost you tonight.’

The sense of vertigo is so bad now that Ryan seems fuzzy, as if I’m seeing him through a veil of light.

‘You’re already responsible,’ Ryan implores. ‘I’m a marked man. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. With you, or without you, I’m marked for death. And I’ll take my chances with you. In any life, given the same choice, I would choose you. Are you hearing me?’

Ryan could be a being of fire, light is scattering off his skin. I reach out and touch his face with my fingers, feeling the energy spike beneath the surface of him, his iron self-control wavering. So much passion in him, so much life, all for me.

‘I know what you’re trying to do,’ I whisper through the pain sweeping through me. ‘And it won’t work. This isn’t a game, Ryan. Run, or die. Those are the choices. Am I worth that much to you?’

‘I’ve got your back,’ Ryan vows fervently, ‘if you’ve got mine. You know it.’

He wraps his arms around me as if he would bind my energy to him. And the bright glow that my skin gives off seems to bleed into him, or draw tight around him, so he glows brighter to my dazzled eyes. It’s as if we are bound together by light. Light is refracting off us onto the walls, the worn handrails, the uneven stone stairs, like some kind of chemical reaction is happening.

Ryan’s breath is warm upon my face. ‘Now, are you done throwing out challenges?’ he asks. ‘Maybe I lied a little when I said that all I wanted was your time, because I’m greedy for whatever you can give me. I’ll steal what I can. Because there’s something I’ve had to wait more than one lifetime to do, and I’m not waiting any more …’

Before I can divine his intention, shore up my defences, Ryan tips my face up to his, curving me into the hard line of his body, lowering his lips swiftly to mine.

My eyes fly wide then shiver closed.

I am love, and desire, and fear.

I’m suffused with a roaring heat.

Those things are inside Ryan, too, surging beneath his skin.

We are two disparate energies colliding and the light around us, in us, through us, seems to build and build.

So potent a mix are we that the mere act of being, of holding myself together, becomes untenable and I shatter into a billion pieces, into ragged motes of light, like an exploding star, instantly dispersing.

Ryan is buffeted by a blast wave of heat and energy, it ruffles his dark hair, his clothing, and he’s left to grasp the empty air, howling just one word, ‘Mercy!’

Thinking me already fled, gone, departed, as I have done so many times before.

I am the hurricane that was promised.

I am boundless.

There’s nothing to stop me penetrating these stone walls and go slipstreaming into the night.

I am insubstantial, yet indivisible.

I feel inviolate, all-powerful.

It is as it should be. It is as it was.

But something holds me here. It’s like an itch, a small and nagging cut dragging at my attention.

I know it. I can almost taste it: some messy human emotion I should put behind me forever, but cannot now ignore.

It’s grief, Ryan’s grief radiating into the icy air.

To every action, a reaction; it’s something my people dismiss. We look down on all those below us and think that our actions, our inactions, have no consequence.

But mortals live in a storm of consequence, and Ryan has been hurt enough for one lifetime.

Somehow, that thought draws me back.

I am clumsy and unpractised, and my whole being yearns to be and remain weightless light, but still I pull my fractured energy together like a swarm of angry bees. I force myself to become a perfect simulacrum of a human being once more: fleshy, dense, solid.

Then I’m facing him again, and Ryan’s eyes are still wide with horror and sorrow. He’s close enough to touch, but neither of us makes a move towards the other. Now he knows what I have known all along: that touching is dangerous. It invites the unwanted.

I see suddenly, blindingly, how love and loss are two sides of the same coin. To know one is to know the other, even before it has come to pass.

Ryan pushes his hair out of his eyes. ‘I thought you were … gone.’ His voice cracks on the word. ‘This time for good. It’s never going to be easy for us, is it?’

I shake my head.

‘You scare me, Ryan Daley. Even more than those demons outside that scream for my death. How is it that I want what you want? I’ve spent an eternity feeling powerless. Love did that to me — robbed me of all control. I never expected to feel this way again. I don’t want to feel.’

‘Neither did I,’ Ryan rasps, ‘because feeling anything at all was dangerous. If I let myself feel, then maybe I’d have to believe what everyone was saying — that Lauren was dead. But from the moment I laid eyes on “Carmen”, you kept getting under my skin. At first, all you did was irritate the hell out of me, bailing me up that way outside my house, inviting yourself along for the ride when all I wanted was to be left alone. But that irritation turned into curiosity, which turned into something else, becoming this chain of, of … feeling that brought me here. I dropped everything for you. I veered left. And I’d do it again in a second. That’s what “feeling” does. It tells you you’re alive, it gives things … I don’t know, proper meaning. You’re still trying to maintain some veneer of independence? Toughness? Do words like that even apply to you? But I see through it, Mercy. I see through you. You’re not that different from me after all, under your armour. Crumbs, Mercy, that’s all I’m after. Just crumbs. It’s not a lot to ask for.’

Ryan steps forward and tries to catch hold of me again and it’s reflex what I do next.

I slam up a force-field between us, a seamless web of energy the way K’el reminded me was possible. And Ryan hits it with just his outstretched fingers. A crackle of intense, blue-white light is thrown up at the point of contact and he rocks back on his heels, cradling his stinging fingertips in his other hand.

He stares at me, wounded, before laughing ruefully. ‘No sudden moves from now on, I promise, if you promise me something back.’

‘What?’ I say warily. ‘I suck at keeping promises, remember?’

‘Just promise,’ he says, ‘that you’ll take me with you this time. You won’t just fade out and leave me behind again. Just let me be with you, just stay for a while, that’s all I’m asking.’

It hits me once more, that he’s the sweetest thing. But I don’t move any closer, though I want him more than anything.

What I want is impossible. And Ryan’s given me the answer to this mess, the only answer that makes any sense.

The thought of what I’m about to say fills me with an ache so powerful that a terrible sense of dissolution returns.

‘You might not need me,’ he insists hotly. ‘You might not want me, but you’ve got me.’

That force-field, that protective shell I’ve cast about myself, I let it drop. I hold my right hand out to Ryan, and both of us can see that it’s shaking.

Hesitantly, he takes my fingers, then grips them tight, as if he will never let me go. I have to tune out everything I can feel beneath his skin, everything about him that unsettles every particle of my being, in order to speak.

‘It’s the one thing I can’t do, Ryan: stay.’

He shakes his head violently and I whisper, ‘Hear me out, please.

‘I never took Luc’s side in his rebellion against God. I was exiled before I could be forced to choose. So now — call it luck, call it chance, call it accident, because I will never call it fate — I remain elohim. Not demon. I still have a choice. And there’s a way to keep Luc in Hell forever; a way that will mean placing duty before desire the way the Eight always have, and always will. I have to leave, don’t you see? It’s something that part of me yearns for. I’ve been stumbling towards the light for the longest time, and now? I might actually return. I might actually be able to go home. If Luc can’t find me, he’ll always be contained here.’

Ryan releases me, shocked. ‘You’d just abandon us to him? Aren’t we worth saving?’

Such a tiny word, us, conveying so many things. ‘But Luc would be trapped forever,’ I say pleadingly. ‘He’d never be able to leave, never be able to turn everything beyond your world —’

‘Into a wasteland,’ Ryan says fiercely, ‘the way he’d do here if he ever discovered you were gone.’

‘This place is already a wasteland,’ I murmur. ‘One law for the lion and the ox is oppression. That’s just the way it is. How things were laid down.’

The words slip out before I realise I’ve uttered them.

Ryan reels back from me as if I’ve punched him in the throat.

‘So just go,’ he chokes. ‘Throw us to the lions, or whatever. Save yourself, your home. Just forget I laid myself on the line. Forget I spoke, that I pleaded with you on behalf of my entire species.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I say quietly.

‘Oh, I understand very well,’ he replies. ‘The greatest good for the greatest number, right? They hammered that one home in sociology one year. We humans are … what, just one rung above the animals? But when Luc takes out his vengeance on all of us because you slipped through his fingers, just remember what you sacrificed, Mercy, because it will all be your doing. Having more than a little personal experience of sacrifice, I’m guessing you won’t want that on your conscience. It’s a coward’s way out. And you’re no coward,’ he spits. ‘Or do I have that wrong?’

Every word hits me like a blow, and I’m hardly surprised when we are rocked by another blast wave of heat and energy that knocks us both off our feet.

Sprawled where I am on the ground, I only have enough time to raise my head before the Archangel Nuriel steps out of a vortex that seems to have opened upon the stairs just above us.

She’s so beautiful.

Her long, dark, wavy hair snakes out around her shoulders as if she’s a living Medusa. Her dark eyes are wide and unseeing, and she seems made of lightning; so bright in outline I can barely discern her form, the sleeveless garment she wears. She’s weaponless, and there’s an expression on her face that looks almost … vulnerable. All of the joy I’ve always associated with her, is missing.

Ryan’s face is tilted up towards her, enraptured, and I know the same look is upon my face.

‘Soror,’ Nuriel pleads. ‘Salva me.’

Sister, she’s saying. Save me.

Though I kneel up and reach out to her, she does not meet my eyes as she drifts, weightless, above the stone. And I realise that this is a vision of some kind. She’s a projection, she’s not really here. Luc showed me that such a thing could be possible.

I rise and approach the vision cautiously, passing my fingers through the edges of Nuriel’s constantly shifting, fraying outline. I feel nothing. She could be a hologram.

‘Festina,’ the vision whispers, ‘ne delear ut K’el deletus est.’ Come quickly. Or I will be destroyed, as K’el was destroyed.

I close my eyes briefly in renewed horror at the mention of K’el’s name.

‘What is she saying?’ Ryan says, getting up cautiously.

But I’m torn by the memory of Nuriel siding with Michael, with all the others, against me. And I do not reply.

‘Salva me, soror.’ Nuriel’s voice is eerie and emotionless. ‘Salva me.’

Then there’s a jump-cut moment — like a break in transmission — where I imagine for a moment that Nuriel’s outline wavers, rippling outwards. Then she winks out of being, leaving Ryan and me circling the space between us warily.

‘You could hear her,’ I say bluntly. ‘See her.’

Ryan nods, still puzzled. ‘But she could have been speaking backwards. What did she say?’

‘She was speaking in Latin. She wants me to save her.’

Ryan’s face is, instantly, transparent with hope. ‘So you’ll stay long enough to free her?’

‘It’s a trap, Ryan,’ I say flatly, and his face falls. ‘The last time I “saw” Nuriel, Luc was chasing her down, above the waters of Lake Como. Luc’s got her, I heard him say it. This vision is an elaborate kind of bait. Some measure of coercion was used. Torture.’

‘But she’s a friend of yours, right?’ Ryan’s voice is almost pleading. ‘And she’s in trouble?’

‘Yes,’ I say tightly, realising where this is heading.

Ryan challenges me with his eyes. ‘So do it — if not for me, then for her. Stick it to Luc one last time. Defy him. I know you want to. If you’re not going to hang around to defend us, at least leave us someone who can.’

I’m stung by his words. ‘It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a set-up! You don’t “get” what we are, what we’re about. We’re not in it for you. Anyway, Luc’s not going to just let me walk in and take her. Even if I did decide to help her, I forbid you from going anywhere with me, so don’t even think about it, it’s non-negotiable.’

‘So you’ll do it?’ Ryan says eagerly.

‘I didn’t say that,’ I growl. ‘I’m still thinking about it. You could die.’

In that string of non sequiturs is all my unspoken fear for him.

‘It wouldn’t matter what you said,’ Ryan argues. ‘I’d just follow you anyway. You can’t stop me. I’ve had years of practice. You picked the wrong guy to mess with.’

‘You have no idea what I’m capable of!’ Worry sharpens my voice to a keen edge. ‘And don’t be ridiculous, you wouldn’t know where to go. You couldn’t do what I do, you’d never find me.’

‘I’d just follow the trail of destruction,’ Ryan says triumphantly. ‘You’ve made a mess of things so far, all of you. It’d be a piece of cake. I’d just follow the trail of burning buildings.’

Or burning humans. I recall, with horror, those images of a fiery, melting world that Gia Basso and I had watched, side by side.

‘Luc would squash you like a bug,’ I growl to hide my fear. ‘You’d be completely unprotected, trailing around after me with demons on the loose.’

‘So let me go with you then,’ Ryan says guilelessly. ‘I could stand behind you when things get nasty.’ He grins. ‘Got no problem with that.’

‘The sensible option would be to leave and never come back. Right now. You know it.’

‘But where would the fun be in that?’ he murmurs. ‘And we’re both due a little fun.’

‘Fun?’ My reply is incredulous. ‘Walking into an obvious trap set by a bunch of first-order demons isn’t defiance, it’s not even fun. It’s just stupid.’

‘But we’re a stupid and obstinate species.’ Ryan grins wider at my expression. ‘Argumentative. Tenacious. Just go for it. You’ve got to love that about us.’

‘It’s not “love” I’m feeling right now! You could die,’ I say again.

‘But I’d be less likely to die if I was with you,’ Ryan wheedles. ‘Because you’d do everything in your power to keep me alive. I know you would.’

‘You’d just get in my way,’ I bluster. ‘The way you got in mine?’ he shoots back. ‘And see what happened? You found Lauren. You saved her life. Good things happen when we’re together.’

He moves forward, taking my hands in his. ‘So you’ll let me turn the tables on you? Let me tag along this time? One last joint mission before you leave me forever?’

I stare up into his face, troubled, seeing demon fire that resists water; that turns flesh to an ash so fine it can be borne away on the wind.

‘With one condition,’ I murmur. ‘If we do this, if we try to go after Nuriel together — you’re free to leave at any time. You don’t have to stay to see how it pans out. You have my permission to run when you feel like running. I won’t hold you to anything.’

‘Free to bail,’ Ryan agrees solemnly. ‘No strings.’

Though there are. We can feel the ties that bind us together, even if we can’t see them. Our words are at once empty of meaning, and brimming with it.

He folds his arms around me and places his lips against my forehead, tentatively, half-expecting me to scatter into a formless cloud of light, before looking down into my eyes with a crooked grin.

‘You know I’ll just keep chipping away at those defences,’ he murmurs, ‘working up your tolerance levels, taking you outside your comfort zone. Consider yourself forewarned.’

He feels me shiver in answer, and gives a low and sexy laugh. Is about to say more, maybe even kiss me again, when the night is shattered by a chorus of nightmare: a score of voices shrieking wordlessly, converging from many directions at once, speaking no language ever devised by the elohim.

Ryan and I clutch each other in mounting horror as light begins to punch through the windows of the tower in a staccato, scattergun motion. Searing light, with a sickly grey tinge at its heart, like a cancer. Demonlight. Time seems to speed up and slow down all at once as the metal window frames ripple and flex, then fly inwards, propelled by some unimaginable force, their glass exploding a second later, shredded into a powder so fine it fills the atmosphere.

Ryan turns his head away sharply, coughing, as the glittering, granular powder disperses through the air and the warped window frames hit the stone with a sound like gunshot.

The light streaming in through the windows, the high-pitched shrieking, grow and grow until they are almost unbearable and I know that he’s out there, Luc’s out there.

Ryan stumbles away from me suddenly, up the stairs, tripping and cursing as he rounds the corner, out of sight. And I fall to my knees, my arms wrapped around my head in agony, wondering if the noise has driven him out of his mind the way it’s invading mine.

Through the monstrous screaming, I seem to hear Luc whisper in my ear, almost as if he’s standing over me. I’m coming for you. If not now, then soon. I am wolf to your hart, hound to your hare, and I will bring you down. Believe it.

An incredible surface pressure suddenly builds, as if the atmosphere is somehow twisting and condensing, pushing down upon me. It’s as if the air around me is becoming molten. I feel an indescribable rage, a terrible malice. Luc cannot physically touch me, but he’s manipulating the air itself into a kind of weapon, the embodiment of his anger. It pushes at me from all directions, reaching in through the paneless windows as if it would kill me where I lie.

‘Ryan!’ I cry out, fearful it will crush his mortal frame.

The light outside, the heat, the screaming, all build and build. There’s a crack, a sonic boom so vast I wonder that it does not level the city, this cathedral.

An instant of light, so searing it’s like being at the heart of an atomic cloud, and then darkness returns. The pressure begins to recede rapidly, like the tide turning. The air grows cool and thin, the way air should be. And I know with absolute clarity that Luc is gone, for now, taking his demons with him.

I spring upright, screaming, ‘Ryan!’

I am the only visible thing left in this place. The darkness inside the tower is absolute. The cold air streaming in from the open windows is like needles against my skin, though the night is still and silent now. There’s no snow, no sleet, no wind. The storm that has been raging all night, the storm to end all storms, it’s over. Gone with Luc.

I feel Ryan before I see him: his familiar energy, the hum of him growing stronger to my senses. His boots strike the stone stairs with a clumsy sound, then a crunch and slide upon powdered glass as he turns the corner. He collapses beside me on the landing, breathing heavily.

‘I headed higher up,’ he gasps, ‘thinking the view would be better, but all the windows are so high and narrow. I couldn’t grab on to any of the window ledges — they’re cut so that they slope down.’ He grasps my arm, his gaze and words feverish. ‘I had to jump to see out properly. And I’d just left the freakin’ ground when something gripped me hard, like a fist, holding me there. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I saw all these streams of light twisting together like a rope that got sucked back into the hole in the roof of that Galleria place.’

I feel his thoughts running hot beneath his skin; let myself see how it was through his eyes.

‘They were … demons, right?’ He swallows, still unable to grasp the physical existence of such creatures. ‘How could something so beautiful be so … evil?’

Again I get that disorienting flash of Luc — superimposed over the features of the young man before me. I shiver, whispering, ‘Take it from me, it’s possible.’

Still shaking, I head up several steps to the window above our landing, needing to see for myself. The narrow aperture lies just beyond reach, uncovered now against the night air, the glitter of pulverised glass beneath it. Ryan described it accurately: the window is set in deeply, and impossible to keep a grip on. But I tell myself fiercely: You can do it, you can do anything. Then I leap lightly into thin air … and I’m floating. My feet aren’t touching the ground.

Will it and it is done. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Yet, I am vertigo. I am panic. I am nausea. It feels too much like flight for comfort. I wonder if it will ever feel natural again: leaving the earth behind me.

As I drift there, unsupported, I glimpse black smoke still pouring from the ruined roofline of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele; the steady pulsing of the lights of the emergency vehicles parked haphazardly behind hastily erected crash barriers on the Piazza; tiny figures getting slowly back onto their feet, gesticulating at the sky in fear and wonder.

My view is truncated by the decorative angles of the Duomo, but at the horizon I see the faintest lightening. Daybreak is coming at last.

I land as lightly as I left the ground, though I stumble as my feet reconnect with the stone. Ryan stares at me in silence, his eyes reproachful at the reminder of the chasm that lies between us.

I voice the thought I’ve been carrying around inside me. ‘We can’t stay here. I make everything around me a target; enough has been done to this city, to its people. The demons are gone for now. Michael, Gabriel and the others must have drawn them away somehow, long enough for us to leave here. So if you really want to do this, if you want to try and carve out some time for us, pull off one last “joint mission”? We’ve got to get ready to go. It’s almost light.’

‘How?’ he asks. ‘We can’t just walk out of here. They’ll see us. There’s nowhere safe in the world when they can destroy something without even touching it.’

He shudders. I take his face in my hands, letting the warmth bleed from my skin into his, hoping he will mistake it for confidence.

‘We can,’ I whisper. ‘We have an advantage they do not possess. We have the ability to think like mortals and act like mortals in this mortal world. It’s something none of them — angel or demon — has ever really “stooped” to do; at least not in the way I’ve been forced to. They persist in treating you like unthinking cattle when you’ve demonstrated, over and over, that you are capable of rationalising the mind of God. You are miraculous.’

I lean my forehead against his and he closes his eyes at the warming touch.

‘When it grows light and the tourists begin to spill out into the streets,’ I murmur, ‘we’ll move. Everyone loves a catastrophe. The Piazza is already crawling with people. And more will come. A tide of humanity is going to flow up this staircase today. The Galleria has become a tomb for the dead still inside, and this roof provides the best view of it. The reporters and thrill-seekers and ghouls will flock here. When the first sightseers begin to leave, we’ll leave, too, hidden among them.’

Ryan pulls away from me, his laughter disbelieving. ‘And I’m asking you again, how?’ He backs away up several more stairs so that he’s staring down on me from above. ‘Have you looked at yourself lately? You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You’re electric. And you’ve got as much chance of slipping out of here unnoticed as, as …’

I see his eyes grow round, see him fall backwards in genuine fear, as I do what K’el, what Nuriel, what even Gudrun reminded me was possible.

I shape-shift.

Permutations, combinations — they should flow seamlessly, one from another. But I’m rusty, still fighting the feeling I could fly apart at any second. So it seems to take a lifetime to finetune and discard, add and subtract, borrow and enhance, drawing on shattered memories, old abilities, forgotten powers, until I’m satisfied with the eyes, the nose, face shape, hair colour, height, the works.

And while I do all of it, Ryan’s face reflects his own fascination, and nausea.

When I’m finally done, I’m an equation, I suppose. A strange amalgam.

I look sixteen, maybe seventeen at most, because it’s the way I’m feeling inside: so strangely confused and vulnerable and unformed.

What I remember distinctly? Is being young, and so in love with Luc that I couldn’t see beyond that. Then whole human years, whole human lives, must have intervened between the creature I was then — the creature who fell — and the thing I am now. But all I can clearly remember out of all that lost time — years that could have happened to someone else — are recent memories. Like waking as a battered wife called Ezra, with blood caking my face, a hairline fracture in one eye socket.

So in honour of Ezra, I’ve given myself her sun-kissed skin. And I have gifted myself Lucy’s green eyes because I’d look every morning into the cracked mirror in her stinking apartment and wish I was somewhere else. I have Susannah’s dusting of freckles across the bridge of her long, narrow nose. And I have her dimples, one beneath the apple of each cheek so that when I smile, I appear open-faced, uncomplicated and friendly, the exact opposite of Susannah’s nightmare of a mother, who made her life a kind of hell. I have Carmen’s wild, black, curly hair and I’m wearing it bound back in the kind of low ponytail that her nemesis, Tiffany, used to favour. I have Lela’s fine bones, elegant wrists and ankles. But I have Irina’s heart-shaped face and long, tapered fingers, her long limbs and her height, because I would miss seeing the world from her vantage point, miss being able to place my head on Ryan’s shoulder without having to strain to do it.

But there’s something of my own strong build and features in this new persona I’ve created: an in-joke for an audience of one. Irina looked breakable, which is something I will never, ever be, or permit myself to seem.

I could pass as a citizen of almost anywhere; I’m both anonymous and unique, interesting to gaze on, but just shy of true beauty. I’m a deliberate collection of quirks.

‘Who the hell are you supposed to be?’ Ryan says, staring into my face.

‘Close your mouth,’ I tell him, laughing softly. ‘What do you think?’

I do a little twirl on the spot, resting my hand high upon the curve of my left hip, the way Irina would.

I’m wearing ordinary-looking clothes: a black, hooded goose-down jacket over a heavy, black, rollneck sweater, skinny, dark grey jeans and soft, sand-coloured, flat-soled boots that end just below the knee. They’re all fake, of course, all props, shifted out of the very energy of which I’m made. Here because I need them.

Ryan blinks several times as he studies me. ‘This isn’t funny — I don’t know you like this,’ he says finally.

I frown as I drift slowly up the stairs towards him. ‘Look closer. You recognised me inside Carmen, inside Lela, in Irina, when you shouldn’t have been able to. I’m the same person I always was. It’s just a shell. I’m still here,’ I insist. ‘You know me.’

I sit down beside him, but he shifts away, as if horrified by what I’ve done.

‘What else are you people capable of?’ he breathes. ‘Every time I think I’ve come to terms with what you are, what you can do, you freak me out all over again. I just got you back, damn it! I just got you back and you go and do this.’

‘They won’t be looking for someone wearing this face or form,’ I say sharply. ‘It’ll keep us alive.’

Ryan’s eyes flash. ‘That may be. But you’re still glowing. They’re gonna see that, right? If you could, uh, dial down the whole shining thing, well then, maybe it would work.’ He flicks the fingers of one hand at the gleaming surface of my skin.

I freeze, astonished that I could have forgotten such a fundamental detail.

‘What would I do without you?’ I murmur, staring down at my luminous hands.

When I was Carmen, I’d only ever glowed very faintly in the dark, when there were no other sources of light around. In the daylight, I’d looked like everyone else. But I can’t afford to do even that now — glow in the dark — not when the stakes are so high and any tiny slip up could get us killed. Ryan’s right: I need to ‘dial down the whole shining thing’ altogether. But can I do it?

I bend my will inwards, the way I’ve relearnt to do, imagine locking the light away inside me, the way my soul was anchored deep inside the human vessels the Eight procured for me over centuries. Ryan gasps as the glow that surrounds me begins to dull and fade until I’m indistinguishable from the darkness inside the tower. I hold the light cupped inside, buried so far down that only I could know it’s there.

‘What do you think?’ I ask again softly, my voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. ‘Dialled down enough for you?’

Ryan is silent for a long time. His eyes appear blind as they struggle to pinpoint me. I realise suddenly that he can’t see me at all.

I can feel his apprehension. He thinks I’ll leave him behind, because he’s useless. But he’s so wrong. He’s my reality check, my secret weapon, the only real reason I’m still holding myself together. Everything I value in life is right here beside me, close enough to touch.

‘I’m lucky to have you,’ I say fervently, and I mean it.

Ryan replies flatly out of the darkness, ‘I don’t see how. I can’t do what you do. I lost everything at the Galleria — I left my duffle bag with the coat-check girl, dropped my pack, which had a tonne of things in it, useful things. All I have is my phone, my wallet, passport, a folded-up picture of you that looks nothing like you, not any more. I’m bringing exactly zip to this little “mission” of ours. I can’t do any … magic,’ he ends falteringly, ‘not your kind, anyway. I’ll just hold you up. Get you killed.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Ryan,’ I whisper, reaching out and taking his hand unerringly in the darkness. ‘Right now, I couldn’t do this “magic” without you, and that’s the truth.’

He gives my hand an answering squeeze, and I feel his relief.

‘So you’ve still got my back?’ I remind him sternly of his words.

‘Always,’ he replies without hesitation. ‘Even when I can’t see a damned thing.’

I laugh and pull him to his feet, and he’s suddenly take charge, like the Ryan I remember from Paradise.

‘We need to get our bearings,’ he says, gripping me tightly, not letting me withdraw. ‘Work out how we’re supposed to get out of here without attracting any attention. But this place won’t open for hours. So, first, I want to see how far we’ve come, where we crash-landed.’

‘You crash-landed,’ I say sheepishly, turning him in the direction of the roof.

Ryan’s usually possessed of a natural, athlete’s grace; strength in every sense of the word. But the darkness has robbed him of any certainty and he stumbles as we begin to climb up the winding, uneven staircase in the dark. Even our linked fingers, my own unfaltering eyesight, can’t make him see where the handholds, steps and landings begin and end. In the light, the staircase defies logic. In the dark, to human eyes, it’s an impossibility.

‘We need to get back to the lakeside town I saw in my dream,’ I say over the laboured sound of Ryan’s breathing, the scuff of his boot heels on the stone. ‘I think I know where she is; there was a villa there, a large estate, with a smaller outbuilding of some kind, and a pier, on the water. I can still see it all in my head. We’ll work our way from there, okay?’

The plan sounds better than it is. Ryan can’t know that, at this point, there are way more holes than plan. What town? What villa? Where do I even begin to locate them when all I have are visual cues I picked up in a dream in the dead of night?

I’m pounded by another sudden wave of dizziness, and am so shaken, overwhelmed and nauseated that I think I will pass out. I don’t think I’ve ever been more afraid of the task ahead, and it makes me miss a step.

Even sightless as he is, Ryan catches me before I fall, his strong hands grasping me around the waist unerringly.

He turns me to him clumsily. ‘Forget what I said before,’ he breathes, feeling for the contours of my face. ‘Glow or no glow, whatever you look like, you’re still beautiful, and I’d know you anywhere.’

In the dark, Ryan can’t see me searching his face. He can’t see in my eyes all the fear I feel for him. Before I can change my mind, I reach up and pull his head down to me, kiss him lightly, lingeringly, upon the lips, before drawing back.

I ignore the lick of fire that thrills through me like live current that seems to whisper: Forbidden.

It’s just a kiss, I tell myself fiercely. I must have done so much worse, in my time.

Beneath my hands, Ryan is shocked into stillness.

What I feel for him is so different from what I felt for Luc. Loss, sorrow, regret: these things are already built into every word we utter, every glance we share, accompanying us moment by moment, like spectres at a feast. They only serve to heighten the complex, hard-won love that has somehow flowered between us. People say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But I do know. What we have is precious and rare, and so utterly terrifying.

I can tell that Ryan hadn’t really expected me to kiss him again. Not after what happened the last time. He’d actually meant what he’d said about crumbs being enough. He’d been teasing me when he talked of tolerance levels and comfort zones.

His love is so humbling that I’m suddenly glad he can’t see me.

‘Maybe that’s the secret to working “us” out,’ I laugh awkwardly to cover my terror, ‘taking it one tiny step at a time.’

‘Here’s to more steps like that one,’ Ryan answers shakily.

‘You deserve so much more than this,’ I murmur. ‘Than me.’

I can’t bring myself to tell him I love him, for fear it’ll all go to hell the way Luc and I did. I’m cursed, and maybe I always will be.

‘I couldn’t even dream up someone like you,’ Ryan mutters, his hands tightening on me, drawing me closer, wanting more, in the human way of things.

But then I hear the sound of something mechanical, far, far below us. A noise so faint it could be the sound a pebble makes hitting the bottom of a dry well.

‘What is it?’ Ryan says, confused, as something primal flares in me, some instinct for danger.

Fear propels me instantly into motion. I start moving upwards again, hauling him along by the front of his leather jacket.

‘C’è qualcuno?’ a man says below, faintly but clearly in Italian. Is anyone there?

‘Cosa c’è?’ another voice replies sharply, also in Italian, also male. What is it?

‘Noises — listen,’ the first man replies.

Ryan’s footfalls, his laboured breathing, sound so terribly loud.

‘I hear nothing; you’re jumping at shadows,’ the second voice says dismissively after a pause.

‘I tell you, I heard something,’ the first man insists.

‘Pietro’s voice is loud enough to wake the dead,’ comes the reply. ‘He’s probably on his way to meet us with the others.’

There’s the faint sound of tapping. The noises move steadily closer, and I’m starting to pick up the interior buzz the two men give out, as if each carries a hive inside him: of thought, feeling, imagery, energy.

‘Ryan,’ I say, my voice low and desperate. ‘You have to hurry. We can’t be seen here. We can’t be questioned.’

‘By who?’ Ryan says, exasperated, unable to hear the echo of footsteps from below. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I tell you, there’s someone up there!’ The first voice is insistent. ‘Pietro?’ he calls.

‘We can’t be found here, Ryan!’ I hiss, exploding back into motion. ‘I won’t allow myself to be trapped again.’

We stumble towards the doorway that leads out onto the lower level of the roof. As we exit beneath the stone lintel onto the north-facing walkway, I’m immediately hit with a sensation of vertigo so powerful, I have to lean against the inner wall, let Ryan take in the jaw-dropping view on his own until the world ceases to buckle around me.

When my sight grows clearer, I see a faint pink line streaking the far horizon, growing steadily all the time, eating away the edges of night, the roofline of the Galleria smouldering to our left. Though there are miles of open sky all around me, I feel like a rat in a cage.

‘We have to hide!’ I tell Ryan pleadingly.

Ryan doesn’t turn, still awed by the whole of Milan spread out before him. ‘Not before we get our bearings, Merce, there’s still time. There’s no one up here and a million places to hide.’

He tries to draw me towards a double row of intricate stone lacework, the stones set one behind the other like shark’s teeth, that forms a kind of natural barrier to the dizzying drop below.

‘Come see,’ he says, leaning out, looking down. ‘It’s so beautiful. You’re never going to fall. Not when you’re with me.’

I shake my head, look back fearfully at the doorway we just came through. But Ryan takes me by the hands and draws me in front of him, crossing his arms around my waist, pulling me against him so firmly that I cannot move, cannot fall.

His cheek is against mine as he says, ‘Look. Just look. It won’t erase what he did to you — nothing could ever do that — but every time you face down your fear is an act of defiance.’

Just for a moment, against my better judgment, I let myself lean into Ryan. And though I must close my eyes briefly to overcome a chill horror at the distance we are from the ground, little by little I find myself gazing further outward, taking in the march of rainwashed streets and buildings that appear to crowd right up to the horizon in every direction. Milan seems to radiate outwards from the Duomo as if the cathedral is the city’s literal heart.

I turn in his arms and point shakily to the north, at the line of hills I see there, purple in the wintry light, the jagged line of mountains rising behind them. ‘That’s where we need to be.’

I peer down at the northern edge of the Piazza del Duomo so far below. Immediately to the Galleria’s right, opposite us, stands an undamaged stone building roughly the same height, with a series of imposing arches marking the ground-level entryway. Solid and austere, it has a modern rooftop terrace with a curve-fronted glass and steel structure rising behind it. Both are deserted at this hour. A barrier of live greenery about chest height runs along all three sides of the terrace, and there’s a head-high barrier of glass and steel that stands between the hedge and a collection of outdoor umbrellas and groups of matching tables and chairs, set out in neat rows.

‘Seems close enough to touch, doesn’t it?’ Ryan says, echoing my own thoughts. ‘It’s like we could just step down and take a seat. If you ignore the, uh, massive drop.’

Then time seems to slow, and speed up, at the same time.

For I see three men appear on the stairs at the far end of the walkway, all dressed in plain, black, heavy robes and shapeless black overcoats, a small stain of white at the base of each man’s throat. They are framed in a succession of flying buttresses with identical rectangular doorways set beneath them, each doorway cut to the exact same dimensions as the next; the whole vista so detailed, so dreamlike, it could have been lifted from a work by Escher. The old men stop dead at the sight of us, just standing there. The one in the lead gives a shout.

I feel Ryan’s arms go rigid around me as he sees them for the first time.

‘State lì! Stop! We would talk with you!’ the priest says, flinging one hand out towards us.

My head fills with the sound of their distinct energies, their peculiar human signatures, drawing closer and getting noisier as they move towards us along the walkway. I take in the terrifying drop before me — almost one hundred and fifty feet down — and feel the chill wind of vertigo sweep through me, that sensation of falling as if I will never, ever stop.

The elderly priest, arm still outstretched, shouts from the other end of the narrow corridor of stone, ‘Che vuole con noi?’ What do you want with us?

‘Pietro? Is that you?’ I hear from inside the stairwell.

I feel that sense of convergence strengthening, the cacophony of five separate living beings moving towards me, all set at different frequencies, concerned with vastly different issues, their thoughts a mixture of the alarmed and the mundane.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan gasps, turning his face in the direction of the new voice, then back towards me. ‘What do we do?’

I turn to face him, grip him fiercely by the arms. ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ I say feverishly. ‘You and me?’

‘You know it is,’ he gasps, ‘but why do you ask?’

His last word turns into a yelp as I grasp him tightly beneath the arms and vault onto a carved stone finial that forms part of the first of the stone barriers. We teeter for an instant as I take in the way the tiled roof drops away from me into the second barrier and then into empty … space.

‘Mercy!’ Ryan yells, unable to process what he’s seeing: the ground so far below. I’m doing the impossible, balancing here, taking the whole of his weight easily when there’s no solid ground beneath his feet, or mine.

But Ryan’s with me, and if he’s with me, I won’t ever fall. That’s what he told me and it’s what I tell myself now.

I turn my head for an instant, the chill breeze lifting the curling ends of my dark hair, my eyes narrowing first on the astonished trio of men clustered at one end of the roof, then on the young man with dark eyes and close-cropped dark hair just emerging from the stairwell to my right.

Then I snap my eyes forward. Look at the place I need to get to, where I need to be. It’s funny how desperation feels a little like love. Makes you do things your conscious mind would never countenance.

But I am what I am, and that means I will always have a choice.

And then I throw myself into thin air, Ryan held fast in my arms.

‘Mercy!’ he yells again, feeling the magnetic pull of the world beneath us.

Though I am beset by fears that none of my kind has ever faced before, I soar — against gravity, against all reason.

Freedom is all that matters. Freedom, and Ryan.

As I cross the abyss that lies between one solid surface and another, I know that I am power, and that I’m back.

I land badly as usual, on the rooftop terrace beyond the double barrier of greenery, glass and steel I’d glimpsed from the roof of the Duomo, almost taking out a row of chairs and tables. One seat teeters for a moment, then makes an iron clanging sound as it falls over. It sounds like an explosion.

We were there, and now we’re here, and it’s only taken seconds. I’m exultant, half-disbelieving, yet also strangely clear-headed. Ryan was right. Every time I face down my fear is an act of defiance that can only make me stronger.

I release my death grip on Ryan, who sways a little on the spot, wordless at feeling a new surface beneath his feet. I look back at the Duomo and see five figures in black gathered beyond the barriers of stone that resemble shark’s teeth. They’re waving their hands, discussing us heatedly. I see the younger one, the one from the stairs, run back up the walkway and disappear. The old priest stares down at us across the chasm, awe and astonishment on his lined face.

‘Where … are we?’ Ryan slurs, feeling around for a chair and sitting heavily. ‘When my brain is … working again, you’ll have to tell me what the hell just happened. You have this way of making me … lose my grip on reality. Being with you is like being in a dream —’

‘You can’t wake from?’ I finish softly. ‘Welcome to my world.’

Ryan looks up at me for a moment, as if he’s imprinting my new face, my travelling face, upon his memory, or making his peace with it.

‘Ready?’ I say quietly. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’

Ryan blinks, taking in the silent terrace around us, the overturned chair, his eyes widening as he spies the watching men gathered on the roofline opposite. ‘What are we still doing here!’ he exclaims. ‘Let’s go.’

There’s the sudden wail of an alarm being triggered, then the snick of a lock or bolt, a door opening.

I turn my head sharply to see a man in uniform emerging out of the curved structure of steel and glass behind Ryan. The young man is of average height, with a slight frame and receding jawline that makes him seem even younger. Beneath his peaked cap, he’s breathing heavily and nervously training a handgun on me.

Between us, there’s a sea of rain-speckled tables and chairs. He takes in our clothes, our builds, weighing us up. I get snatches of the panicky argument he’s running against himself in his head: thieves? he’s thinking. Or … terrorists?

Ryan stiffens as I murmur aloud, ‘They’re saying maybe the Galleria was a “terrorist attack”, he thinks we’re armed.’

This is some kind of high-end department store, I realise suddenly, getting a flash of the building’s interior as the man relives the heart-stopping moment he spotted us from the inside, through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

‘Police!’ he calls out shakily in Italian-accented English over the blare of the alarm. ‘Raise the hands.’

I feel his intense fear. He’s only a few months into this job, and he was supposed to go off duty in twenty-two minutes precisely until his commanding officer ordered him to respond to some nonsense from a bunch of priests about people on the roof. I skim all that out of the white noise in his head, and his name, too, because he’s yelling at himself in the third person. Humans are like radio transmitters; it’s hard to think with the air jammed so full of their noise. I know I should be afraid, but for the first time in a very long while, I feel an absolute calm.

‘Vincenzo,’ I say loudly, and the young man gives a start, goes pale, at the mention of his name. ‘You need to let us leave.’

His eyes widen and he shouts, ‘Impossible, signorina. Raise the hands.’

Without taking my eyes from Vincenzo’s face, I draw Ryan to his feet. The chair legs scrape a little as he straightens up and turns around slowly. Vincenzo’s expression flickers fearfully as he looks from me to Ryan, now standing side by side. We both have our backs to the barriers now.

Vincenzo moves closer. ‘There is nowhere to run,’ he says anxiously. ‘Raise the hands, or I will be forced to shoot you. Not to kill, you understand,’ he adds almost pleadingly, ‘only to wound.’

Still holding his gaze unwaveringly, I take another step backwards towards the head-high glass wall, the screen of trees behind it, one hand on the sleeve of Ryan’s leather jacket.

‘What are you going to do?’ Ryan mutters, sounding panicky. ‘He’s got a gun. You know what happened last time.’

‘What happened last time happened to Lela,’ I say fiercely. ‘It’s not going to happen to us. I need you to go with whatever I ask you to do. I need you to trust me.’

Before Ryan can reply, a burst of static issues out of a black device clipped to Vincenzo’s belt and I catch the word ‘localizzato’; located.

Vincenzo fumbles for the receiver, his gun hand wavering a little. While he’s distracted, Ryan and I keep inching backwards.

‘Not far now,’ I say. ‘When you feel the glass screen behind you, move right. Whatever you do, even if we’re separated, just aim for that corner.’ I see Ryan nod out of the corner of my eye. ‘Wait for me?’

Ryan’s eyes fly to mine, and I remember: wait for me were the last words I ever said to him when I was Lela.

A second man in uniform suddenly charges through the door Vincenzo left open. He’s stocky and tall, with a dark, even tan, massive shoulders and arms like sides of beef. One of his big, broad, black-gloved hands is wrapped around a semi-automatic identical to Vincenzo’s. He thrusts Vincenzo aside and snarls: ‘Get down! Get down! Or I shoot the boy first, and then I shoot you.’

I let the flow of his thoughts wash through me and I know he’ll do it. In his world, everything can be solved with guns, with beatings, with violence. He’ll take Ryan down first, because he’s bigger, more of a threat. Then me.

I feel Ryan’s fingers tighten around mine, his palm slick with apprehension. Something dangerous rises in me and I push Ryan back behind me, the fingers of my right hand still linked through his.

‘We’re leaving,’ I say loudly and slowly. ‘We don’t want any trouble. We’re just going to walk away and disappear. You won’t ever see us again.’

I feel Ryan pause for a moment before beginning to move slowly to the right between the glass screen and the outermost row of chairs and tables.

The second officer narrows his eyes, not bothering to reply. Then he points his gun up into the air and pulls the trigger. One shot, skyward. A flock of pigeons explodes upwards, scattering and wheeling in all directions. Even over the shrilling alarm, the gunshot is very loud and seems to reverberate in the air for the longest time. This place will soon be swarming in uniformed men.

‘Ryan!’ I say sharply, looking back at him. ‘Go!’

I see his unwillingness to leave me: it’s in his eyes, in the tense line of his body. Then he releases my fingers, bends low and sprints full tilt towards the eastern corner of the terrace without looking back. In that single, telling gesture is all of his faith in me.

I keep drifting slowly in the same direction, my eyes never leaving the faces of the two policemen, the gap between Ryan and me widening all the time, making myself the target.

‘Get down!’ the bigger one screams, his neck muscles cording, the ropy surface veins along his temples swelling with angry blood. He points his gun at Ryan’s fleeing figure, then at me, uncertain who to take aim at now. ‘Get down!’

From the peripheries of my sight, I catch the outline of my left hand … a flicker. As I raise it to my face, it begins to ache. An argent bloom moves over the skin, envelops the fingers, and that voice inside me, my inner demon, whispers: Cave. Beware.

The instant I raise my eyes to the second officer’s face, I register the tiny muscles around his eyes tighten, see the sudden flare of his nostrils, his lips go white. As my eyes widen in realisation of what he is about to do, he pulls the trigger — not to wound, but to kill — and the air in front of me seems to displace with the heat of a thousand suns.

Both men cry out, fall back. There’s a long, flaming broadsword in my left hand, its blade rippling with a pale blue luminescence. Giant, gleaming wings unfurl across my back, catching the light, intensifying it. As if the shot itself were a call to arms. I look down at my burning left hand upon the sword’s grip, study the elaborate pommel and cross-guards of its double-edged blade, uncertain if I can remember how to wield it. The sword weighs nothing at all, yet it is absolute power, a physical manifestation of my anger, indisputably mine.

As I gaze at its blazing hilt, I see the bullet enter my abdomen almost in slow motion, slicing neatly between two press-studs on the front of my black, goose-down jacket. The surface of my jacket seems to swallow the small, superheated projectile before growing smooth once more. The bullet leaves no trace, makes no impact upon me. But if I were the ordinary human girl he believes me to be, I’d be dead now, dead like Lela. I suffer a genuine moment of déjà vu, so terrible, so chilling, that I have to remind myself that this is a different time, a different place, altogether.

I level the tip of my flaming sword blade at the man who shot me as if it were an extension of my arm. ‘On your knees!’ I roar, and my words ring with a sonic after-bite that causes the men to fall to the ground, dropping their weapons, clutching at their ears in agony.

‘Use violence against me again,’ I snarl, ‘and you will suffer violence.’

The sword vanishes into my palm, the shining wings dissipating with a shredding, swirling afterglow of energy. I turn towards Ryan and see the black-robed men on the Duomo roof lined up like gaping crows, their hands clasped before them as if in prayer.

I cover the distance to Ryan in seconds, and before he has time to speak, I slide an arm around him and take us up and over the barriers, over the edge of the terrace, across the entire breadth of the Via Santa Radegonda.

This time Ryan just yells in the kind of visceral terror that goes beyond words as I throw us almost blindly through space. We land badly on the rooftop adjacent to the department store, Ryan crying out as I skid over the edge of the stone railing, losing my footing, almost pitching us both headfirst onto the narrow, open walkway running along the front of the building.

As I haul him upright by the hem of his leather jacket, Ryan chokes, ‘Being with you is going to kill me!’

I don’t trust myself to answer; it’s the very thing I fear. I just touch his face reassuringly and keep moving, knowing he’ll follow.

There are loud sirens on the Piazza below, as if we have stirred up a nest of wasps that are now questing in our direction. The facade of the building we’re crossing is longer than the one we just left, and irregular. Looking back over one shoulder, I can no longer see the watchers on the Duomo roof. We’ve left the cathedral behind, as we’ve left behind the Duomo Square and its sea of milling officials, flashing lights and cordons.

I’m debating whether or not to just keep going across the rooftops of the city when Ryan passes me unsteadily, heading left around the corner of the building. Surprised, I swerve left, too, almost running into his back.

He turns to me, eyes wide and bloodshot, face pale from exertion. ‘There’s no way down from here,’ he mutters, a clear note of panic in his voice. ‘No way down. I can’t, Mercy, I’m not like you. I don’t think I can keep doing this.’

His eyes dart fearfully across to the next building, his sides heaving. I can see he’s reached some kind of physical limit. He’s only holding himself together, only submitting to the crazy things I’m putting him through, for me.

There were always more holes than plan, anyway.

I make my decision almost the instant I say gently, ‘There’s always a way down.’

Though I wish there were an easier way for me to return us quickly to solid ground, I pull Ryan to me tightly with my left arm, cover his mouth with my right hand, and take us up and over the edge of the roof. Down, down, into Via Agnello. I can feel him bellowing through my fingers as we plummet to earth, making no sound as we fall from the sky.

I count six floors on the way down. The windows we pass show rooms full of merchandise, mannequins, furniture, but are otherwise empty of life. It still isn’t opening time in central Milan, luckily for us. But in one hour, two at most, people will be clamouring to be let into the Duomo, the Piazza, into all of the surrounding shops and buildings that remain undamaged by fire, untrammelled by tragedy or death, because life goes on. It can do nothing else. We have to hurry.

The only person on the street below is a woman with a dark, wavy, shoulder-length bob, wearing a fashionable tweed overcoat, skinny jeans and slouchy tan boots, a striped tote bag on one shoulder. She’s heading away from us to the northwest, past a couple of parked cars pointed in the same direction. But as I land, I stumble against a stationary bicycle that’s been leant haphazardly against a parking sign located right by the wall. The commotion as it falls over causes the woman to turn and look at us. We’re clasping onto each other like drunks, Ryan and I, and she stares at us for a while, before turning and moving away again, slowly, jerkily. There’s something awkward about the way she walks, as if she’s in the grip of some kind of degenerative disorder, though she can’t be more than thirty, thirty-five.

I take my hand away from Ryan’s mouth and he starts yelling. ‘Don’t you ever —’ Then his shoulders sag and he mumbles, ‘“Don’t” isn’t really a word that applies to you, is it?’

‘It’s all new to me, too,’ I say softly into his exhausted face, ‘just having you here. Till now, it’s always been me fighting some impossible corner on my own. I’ve been battling my own set of major …’

‘Adjustment issues?’ Ryan mutters.

‘Something like that,’ I say ruefully. ‘You’ve noticed?’

‘And I thought it was the effect I was having on you.’ His laughter turns into a fit of coughing.

I shake him gently. ‘We’ll try and do things your way for a while, okay? We’re going to find you somewhere safe to rest.’

It starts off as an empty platitude, but then a tiny idea takes root in my head. It seems so outlandish at first that it couldn’t possibly work. But if it did? It could mean help for him and help for me. And I’m more than willing to take advice these days, provided it’s solid. I’ve been on my own for long enough.

Ryan shivers, weaving a little on the spot. ‘So cold,’ he says absently.

There’s a deserted underpass across the street, bisected by a zebra crossing; an empty bar beside it with a torn, maroon awning flapping a little in the breeze. Melted run-off thunders through subterranean pipes somewhere far below our feet. I look into the distance. Via Agnello, with its pizzerias and public car parks, cheap souvenir shops and menswear stores, didn’t look like this when I was last here. But I know with unerring certainty where we are and where we have to go. I point up the narrow, one-way street in the direction the woman is walking.

‘Think you can go just a little bit further?’ I say brightly.

I’m lying through my teeth, of course. We’re going to have to go the long way around to avoid the mess around the Galleria, but Ryan doesn’t need to know that. And we have to hustle. The streets around here are an illogical warren laid down over centuries, but people will still come looking for evidence of the crazy turisti who leapt off the terrace of one of the most prestigious department stores in town. They’ll be looking for body parts. It’s only a matter of time.

Ryan closes his eyes, and I feel him shivering uncontrollably inside his clothes. ‘You’re like some kind of learner archangel,’ he mutters. ‘Like that guy who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. That’s you. They could’ve been describing you.’

‘Free to bail,’ I remind him quietly.

He coughs a little as he opens his eyes and I see that they’ve grown unfocused. ‘Can’t,’ he slurs. ‘Can’t escape fate.’

I give him a shake, appalled at his words. ‘I’m not your fate, Ryan. I’m your choice. Remember that when everything is going to hell around us.’

I’m not sure if he can hear me any longer. I pull his arm across my shoulders again and we stagger forward, trailing that lone woman who shoulders her stripy tote as if it contains all of the sorrows of the world. I don’t get any sense of what she’s thinking, and I’m glad of it, because all I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste is Ryan’s bone-deep exhaustion. His eyes are fixed on the ground below his stumbling feet and he can’t stop shaking. If it weren’t for me, he would already have fallen. He needs things I can’t give him. We have to hurry, though doing things Ryan’s way — the human way — is always going to take longer.

I march him on ruthlessly while I warm his icy hands in mine. I describe all the buildings we’re passing in a low, cheerful voice while I scan the rooftops continuously for any hint of demonsign. Ryan eventually ceases to respond, and my sense of quiet desperation grows.

As we turn right into Via Ulrico Hoepli, I catch glimpses of faces and forms moving about at upper-storey windows. This late-rising city is beginning to stir. I get the sudden buzz of a middle-aged man in an elegant overcoat, scarf and suit exiting a coffee shop just across the street, something about the end of the world in his thoughts. Then I pick up the ambient thoughts of a couple of men wrangling a new armchair into a delivery van outside a furniture store we’re passing. They hate each other, hate the armchair, and can’t understand why, after everything that’s happened in this city, they still have to deliver it. Today.

I turn left up Via San Paolo, with Ryan braced tightly against me, his every footstep dragging. As we move along the upper edge of the Piazza della Scala, I begin to pick up a tangle of human energy: thoughts expressed in a multitude of languages, emotions that grow louder and more insistent the closer we get, amplifying in timbre, volume and complexity, all the time.

Then I see the crowd of shouting people gathered around a police roadblock at the southern end of the square, a larger crowd milling around another roadblock on the western side.

Something else across the square makes me freeze in my tracks. Ryan sways against me, exhausted, his fringe of straight, dark hair falling forward over his eyes, body on autopilot. I’m staring directly at the northern face of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the building we’ve been trying so hard to go around. Two banners hang one on either side of the giant archway that serves as an alternative entry point to the vast shopping arcade. The left banner is badly damaged; you can barely make out the playful model with the striking eyes and sky-high beehive wearing an evening gown from the 1960s in Giovanni Re’s signature red, rosso Re. But the right banner is largely intact, and I stare at the mesmerisingly powerful image of a warrior-sorceress with her burnt caramel-coloured hair wild and loose, wearing a long, flowing gown of molten gold, her hands wrapped around the pommel of a bejewelled sword. I gaze into Irina Zhivanevskaya’s huge, smoky, smouldering eyes and feel for a disorienting moment as if I’m staring into a giant mirror, so recently have I fled her body.

I’ll take it as a sign that I’m doing the right thing.

The air smells of burning. If I concentrate hard enough, I can actually taste ash on the air. As Ryan and I stagger on past the roadblock facing onto Via Santa Margherita, the handsome, copper-skinned, hard-faced policemen behind it wave their arms dismissively, shouting, ‘Go back! Go back!’ in Italian, in English, as people try to argue their way into the restricted zone.

The street we’re moving down now is packed with banks and insurance houses that occupy elegant, towering mansions standing shoulder to shoulder. A few people begin filtering past us, afflicting me with their thoughts, their random energies. The dark-haired woman is only a little ahead of us now, and her gait has grown so slow and torturous that we finally overtake her.

‘Not much further,’ I tell Ryan distractedly as I glance at the woman’s shuttered face in profile, note her youthful features and strangely clouded blue eyes.

It hits me a few feet later. The wrongness about her. The way her old-woman shuffle doesn’t sync with her smooth skin and shining hair, her robust frame and fashion-forward clothes. I stop and look back at her over my shoulder, wondering why I get no sense of her at all: of what she’s thinking, or feeling, or even any sense of her peculiar life force, her human energy. What I do feel is something incredibly faint, but insistent. Almost … familiar, that’s setting up a distant, almost painful hum in my bones.

Then, without warning, the woman crumples forward onto the footpath. The palest, gleaming blur, like a mobile patch of sunlight, seems to shriek away from her still figure — as if ejected, or rejected — darting and rebounding off all the faces of the buildings, the street signs and manhole covers, before fleeing back in the direction we’ve just come from. It’s rapidly lost to sight.

What I want to do is run, but I don’t. Not yet, because I need to be sure.

I tell Ryan to wait, and force myself to walk calmly towards the woman lying facedown on the pavement. I kneel beside her and turn her over, relieved to see she’s still breathing. I place my hands against her chalk-white face and she gives a great choking breath, her eyes opening. I’m sure that the fear and panic in her eyes are mirrored in my own.

She looks up at me as I cradle her head off the ground. Her blue eyes are clear again, though huge, in her pale face. ‘Where am I?’ she asks in Italian, and when I answer her gently in her own language, she says, bewildered, ‘But what am I doing here?’

People have seen us; they hurry towards us from both sides of the street. I leave the woman in the care of a small, gesticulating crowd and return to Ryan, who is standing exactly where I left him, with his head bowed, hands in the pockets of his jacket, feet planted shoulder width apart to stop himself from toppling over. All I can do is hug him to me tightly, in horror.

The malakhim are blunt-force instruments with none of the subtlety of the elohim about them; so-called lesser angels, they were created to do our bidding, and they will always leave signs that my kind can read. That woman’s flesh contained a signature, and I am certain it was left by the same tormented creature I came across when I was Lela, and again when I was Irina — something that was once angelic, but is now no more than a shattered remnant. Weak as it is, can it somehow still sense me? It came to Milan with a warning for me from Michael, about Luc. What warning does it bring me now?

As Ryan and I enter Via Victor Hugo, a sense of déjà vu returns so strongly that my eyes fly at once to a three-storey, grey stone building across the road. I study its graceful Palladian roofline intently, half-hoping to see K’el still outlined there by storm clouds of such brilliance they could be a portal to another world. But of course he’s not. The pale blue sky is cloudless from end to end and I have to take the sudden anguish I’m feeling and drown it deep within me, like the light I have hidden away, that is the essence of being elohim.

I see her before she sees me. She’s standing beside the bonnet of a familiar-looking black limousine that has more doors than a normal car and rides a little too low to the ground because it’s armoured. She’s arguing fiercely with someone, as usual, because she’s tough and resourceful and it’s her job to stand up to tyrants and crazies on a daily basis. The bruising along one side of her face is still a livid purplered, and there’s a nasty red weal on her neck, like a burn, but she looks surprisingly well for someone who somehow survived a celestial firefight inside the Galleria.

A passing car draws her gaze, and her eyes widen when she takes in Ryan and me standing still and silent across the road. She recognises him first, of course, because I’m a stranger to her. She’s never seen me before, not like this.

She steps without hesitation around the front of the limo in her artfully studded, black patent-leather biker jacket, her precision-cut, glossy China-girl hair blowing across her eyes in the stiff breeze. She shoves it back impatiently and shouts, ‘Ryan? Ryan Daley?’

When he doesn’t answer, doesn’t even lift his eyes to acknowledge her, she looks at me, really looks at me, and says, tentatively, ‘Mercy?’

We cross the road towards her, and she tells the scowling, balding, suit-wearing gorilla she was arguing with that he just has to wait, she’s got no orders. ‘It’s just too bloody bad.’ Then she moves towards me briskly and slings Ryan’s other arm around her shoulders without me having to tell her to.

Wordlessly, we haul him together up a grand circular driveway lined with luxury sedans and limos, and through a revolving front door of high-shine glass and bronze. It spits us out into a palatial hotel foyer crowded with antiques and chandeliers, and I’m immediately assailed by muzak and human noise, the smells of disinfectant, air freshener and the kinds of expensive, towering floral arrangements that I’ve come to detest.

The male concierge in maroon and gold livery standing behind the immense, marble-topped reception desk almost steps back from us in disgust. Ryan’s hair is a little matted now and he could use a shave. He looks wasted beyond redemption. But the concierge recognises Gia Basso immediately and says, icily, ‘Signorina,’ his pale grey gaze flicking from Ryan to me, before he favours her with a small smile, an almost imperceptible nod.

When the lift doors open, Gia fumbles a security card out of the back pocket of her skin-tight, black, waxed jeans, shoves it into a slot on the control panel and punches a floor number.

The brass and mirrored lift reflects us back to ourselves from all angles; we three appear infinite. Ryan’s head keeps lolling into the crook of my shoulder and there’s a rip in his jacket, running up under the right arm, that I think I might have caused. It’s clear from the way Gia’s wrinkling her nose that Ryan could use a shower.

‘Jesus,’ she mumbles, looking over his bowed head at me, unable to tear her unusual eyes — one blue, one brown — away from my face. ‘You’re both still alive. When the shining giants with the swords and, uh, wings appeared,’ she shoots me a sharp glance that seems to come back at me from everywhere at once, ‘some clumsy idiot smacked me in the face and then the whole place just exploded in flames. I’m ashamed to say that I lost sight of everything except getting to the nearest exit. I’m glad you made it. You look …’ she hesitates, ‘… good. Uh, different. But good.’

From the strange expression on her face, I can tell that she somehow recognises me, though my features, my voice, my body, aren’t even remotely familiar. There’s no doubt in her mind about who I am.

‘So do you,’ I reply, almost suffocated by sudden gratitude, a fierce affection for this prickly, practical woman. ‘Nice,’ I say, indicating her body-hugging, shiny jacket bristling with shoulder spikes, buckles and intricate quilting because that kind of stuff seems to matter so much to her. ‘It’s so very … you.’

She bares her teeth in a sudden, shark-like grin and lifts up a cone-heeled, patent-leather, black ankle boot for my inspection, which also bristles with matching short, sharp metal spikes all over the toecaps and heels. ‘The jacket I had on yesterday was trashed beyond salvation. It smells like a barbeque. I felt like I needed armour today — I’ve been kicking heads since the phone rang this morning at three seventeen. I figured, if people didn’t pay attention, I could just impale them with my footwear.’

We grin at each other for a moment, and Ryan shifts restlessly against me, his head against my cheek. And it hits me how little time we have left together, and how it’s things like this I’ll miss most: friendship, the warmth of human contact, love. Just the small things.

‘Too sophisticated,’ Ryan mumbles suddenly, struggling to focus on Gia beside him, and she looks obscurely pleased by the comment.

‘He looks the way I feel,’ she notes almost kindly. ‘Seedy.’

‘Considering I almost killed him twice today already,’ I say quietly, ‘he’s doing all right.’

Gia’s face is suddenly serious. ‘You didn’t decide to drop by just to approve my wardrobe choices, did you?’ she says in her cut-glass British accent.

I shake my head, and indicate Ryan between us. ‘He needs food, sleep, the usual things.’

‘Human things,’ Gia says sharply. ‘And what do you need?’

‘Help,’ I say immediately, and her strong, dark eyebrows fly up into her glossy, slanting fringe in open disbelief.

The lift doors slide open, and we’re walking under the same Murano glass chandeliers, across the same elaborately patterned royal blue and gold carpet I strode down yesterday on my way to the catwalk parade, as Irina. And it’s completely disorienting to be returning like this when everything I am has changed beyond measure.

I get an echo of my own thinking from Gia, but her thoughts are indistinct and hard to read, as if she’s somehow trained herself to hold her cards close, even from creatures like me. She’s like a steel trap, this one. Good at keeping secrets.

She clears her throat delicately. ‘Irina still hasn’t come around since you … left. She’s like Sleeping bloody Beauty. There isn’t a mark on her, not a scratch. All the vital signs are good, she’s breathing unassisted. But she might as well be dead. It’s like she’s just a shell; zero response to external stimuli. We’re debating whether to move her or wait it out. But the medicos say that if her vegetative state persists the body’s going to …’

‘Die,’ I finish.

‘It sounds as if you know what’s wrong with her,’ Gia replies. ‘I was hoping you might.’

‘I have a few theories,’ I say grimly. ‘I want to leave,’ Gia says suddenly. ‘Leave this city, leave Irina, leave this bloody business for good. But I’m not going to do it while she’s frozen inside her own body like Snow White after eating the apple. She’s a “beeeetch”, the queen of bitches, actually, but she’s got no one right now. Burnt too many bridges. And don’t look at me like that.’

‘What?’ I say, straight-faced. ‘Like I was about to accuse you of having a heart? Never.’

Gia hoists Ryan’s heavy arm up awkwardly while she punches her security key through a brass slot by the door to Irina’s suite. ‘I’ll do what I can to help you,’ she says in a low voice. ‘You know I’d do it anyway. You were a good boss, better than what I’m used to.’ She favours me with a crooked smile. ‘In return, all I ask is that you do what you can for me?’

I nod without hesitation and Gia throws wide the door. ‘Welcome to the madhouse,’ she mutters, then calls out loudly, ‘Carlo! Your assistance, please, dead man walking,’ as we wrestle Ryan into the formal sitting room.

The sitting room is full of people. There are a couple of youngish suits I don’t recognise, both speaking in English, both on their mobile phones and perched uncomfortably at different ends of a long, low, French Empire-era settee that doesn’t seem sturdy enough to hold them. A thin young woman with shoulder-length, curly auburn hair in a navy pantsuit and sensible shoes moves past with some fluids and medical instruments on a tray. Juliana Agnelli-Re is there, and her impeccably dressed family physician, the man who treated me after I leapt off the roof of a moving limousine, cutting up Irina’s feet badly.

Carlo and Jürgen, from Irina’s personal goon squad, surge to their feet at the sight of us and move forward to brace Ryan while Gia opens the door to her own set of rooms, then pulls down the covers on her own king-sized bed.

‘Boots off, lay him down,’ she orders. ‘Gently does it. He’s been through the wars.’

Carlo and Jürgen meekly do as they’re told, and Gia pulls the covers back up to the level of Ryan’s waist. ‘Dottore Pellini?’ she calls out through the doorway of her bedroom. ‘If you’d be so kind?’

The doctor moves towards her.

I’m still standing by the front entrance, taking everything in. The suits haven’t given me the time of day, and Juliana … I survey her forlorn figure sharply. She’s staring into space, still dressed in the burnt-orange pantsuit, filmy chartreuse blouse and vintage-looking lime and dark green Mary-Janes she was wearing at the haute couture show. Her crazy two-tone hair — dark roots, bright yellow ends — is looking pretty rough. Like Gia, she’s carrying a few bruises, cuts and weals around her head and neck, but she’s surprisingly whole for someone who made it out of the Archangel Michael’s presence alive.

‘She’s taken over global design duties at Atelier Re,’ Gia murmurs beside me. ‘Private Label, Black Label, resort, diffusion, menswear, accessories. Everything rests on her shoulders now. Effective today. Board rushed it through, unsurprisingly. She was the Chosen One, in any case. Only now it’s official.’

I’m so surprised at the news I can’t stop myself blurting out loudly, ‘But what about Giovanni?’

At the mention of her uncle’s name, Juliana looks across the room at me with tear-reddened eyes. Gia places a restraining hand on my arm; the gesture tells me all I need to know.

Juliana calls out in her heavily accented English, ‘Were you a friend? He had so many friends.’ She looks down suddenly to disguise the sheen in her eyes. ‘It was instant, they say. He was already very sick.’ She gives a loud sob that she instantly tries to swallow.

I can’t help walking over to her and placing a hand over hers where it lies on the dining table. Just touching her gives me a brief window of access to her memories: the technicolour past seems to flash up at me in stereo, from out of her head. I see, feel, hear, exactly how it was to her the moment her uncle died. She was standing just a few feet away when he was crushed by a portion of steel beam the size of a car. He hadn’t stood a chance.

I am Juliana as she tries in vain to move the steel pinning down Giovanni’s bloodied figure. Flames tower over us and we’re gasping for air, constantly buffeted by a fleeing, hysterical mob that’s been reduced to impulse and reflex alone. For a moment, at the periphery of our sight, there’s a tall figure dressed all in black, a lock of his long silver hair falling forward as he bends his youthful face low over Giovanni Re’s prone form, touching him only briefly. The stranger vanishes before we can beg him for help and is lost again in the sea of constantly shifting faces, lost in Juliana’s memories. Just one among many. Azraeil meant nothing to her; she doesn’t even consciously remember him. But the Archangel of Death was there, in the chaos. It has always been his way to come and go unheralded. He would have been busy last night, beneath the Galleria’s palely blue-lit dome.

I release Juliana’s hand and the memory vanishes instantly. ‘Giovanni didn’t suffer,’ I say quietly, with absolute certainty.

She doesn’t answer, crying in earnest now. She covers her face with both hands, her shoulders shaking with raw grief. The men on mobile phones grimace at the sound she’s making and get up from their settee, move towards the door.

Gia raises an eyebrow. ‘While the going’s good?’ she reminds me.

I nod and approach Irina’s bedroom, place my hand on the gilt-edged wooden door panelling.

One of the suits looks up sharply from his conversation and says, ‘Miss, you can’t go in there. Did you hear me, Miss?’

‘This is an old friend of Irina’s,’ Gia retorts. She crosses the index and middle fingers of her right hand and holds them up. ‘Until yesterday, these two were like this, okay? Inseparable.’

I see her mouth twitch; she may be trying to suppress laughter.

‘Irina will not even know I am here,’ I pipe up in Russian-accented English, making my voice sound young and naive.

Gia looks at me, startled at my pitch-perfect inflection, which is a little bit Irina herself, a little bit Dmitri Dymovsky.

‘Well, make it quick,’ the man huffs. He waves a hand dismissively before returning to his call.

We enter Irina’s bedroom and I recognise every single thing in this insanely over-decorated space, other than the saline drip and feeding tube, the pushcart filled with meds and dressings, and the unused respirator machine standing in one corner.

Irina’s lying in silent state on the king-sized bed beneath a crisply mitred blanket and top sheet pulled up to just above her waist. Her roses and cream complexion is unmarked, and her narrow chest rises and falls steadily below her unflattering hospital-style gown. It’s the strangest feeling to be standing here looking down on the body I was last incarcerated in.

Irina’s so beautiful, even in sleep, with her caramel-coloured hair loose and shining all over her pillow. But this is no ordinary sleep. I have to concentrate hard to even feel she’s alive, her soul’s buried so far down. When Luc wrenched me free of her body, he didn’t bother to release the strange slipknot that keeps her soul captive inside her.

The nurse bustles in behind us, deposits the now empty tray on top of the fussy, bow-fronted armoire near the en suite, before leaving again. Through the open door behind us, I can hear the two men winding up their phone conversations.

‘We don’t have long,’ I tell Gia, and she crosses quickly to the door and shuts it, before moving ahead of me to the bed.

‘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.’

‘Props?’ 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.