Fury. Rebecca Lim

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      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, СКАЧАТЬ