Fury. Rebecca Lim

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ