Fury. Rebecca Lim

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ