Wraith, page 28
I watch Amon wrench Ryan off his blade, throwing him against the back wall of the chamber. Ryan lands with a shocking sound, lying still near where Gia Basso lies, and Shaun’s eyes dart to the right, distracted. In that instant, Amon surges forward, reaching for Shaun’s throat and Shaun brings his spindle-shaped stick up between them, sketching something clumsily in the air before man and demon disappear entirely from the chamber.
Daughtry stumbles forward towards Lucifer, but Gadreel steps between them and the big man stops short of the burning demon’s reach. ‘Take them —’ she indicates Gia and Ryan lying barely alive across the room, ‘and go. Live to fight another day of your interminable life. This is no argument for mortals to settle. I can say no fairer.’
Lucifer’s eyes gleam as he studies the shivering mastin narrowly over Gadreel’s shoulder. ‘But open season on you, Knight, when we demons are done here. Fair warning, as your kind say.’
Daughtry looks to me for confirmation and I nod. If only one of us can survive this, let it be Ryan, I say into the space behind the big man’s eyes. He lives. He must.
‘No tender goodbyes,’ Lucifer spits. ‘Take them and go, Knight, or find yourselves, all three, wraiths in Sheol this night.’
Daughtry backs awkwardly away towards Gia, his breath coming out of him in short, pained gasps that stain the air white. With one more searching look at me, he grasps Ryan’s and Gia’s wrists in one big hand and, with a rapid movement of the sharp double-ended spindle in his other, all three mortals fall out of the world and are gone.
The sound of Lucifer’s laughter rings, true and seductive, through the stone chamber. ‘Didn’t your “master” tell you? You can’t kill me because he can’t. You’re the useless agent of a wingless archangel, the Great Eunuch of all the greatly exalted elohim— a creature created without the power to finish what he started. Death is no greater than evil,’ Luc snorts. ‘Azraeil has ever been misguided. Death is a dark horse running in oblique parallel to all that matters in this world. Death cannot stop me. Nothing can stop me. He’s not even here in your hour of need, wraith, because he’s so busy running after the human dead that he cannot be present to keep me from destroying his protégé — his so-called “weapon” and “right hand”.’
He turns and looks at Gadreel. ‘Kill her,’ he says simply, and I stand my ground as Gadreel comes at me with her burning sword shaped like the sinuous horn of a great beast, atomising at the moment her blade meets the energy of which I am made.
I reform, whole and unharmed, across the room before the wall of clear acrylic with the hairline crack running up its face.
Lucifer cannot hide his shock, but Gadreel’s expression is a more complex thing. I can almost see her thoughts shifting and re-calibrating, as if I have proven something which was only theory.
‘It is true that my powers can no longer compare with yours,’ I murmur. ‘Indeed, they cannot be measured on the same scale. It is a subtle thing you have wrought in me, Lucifer, my love. By destroying my human body you rendered me immortal — in the way all human souls are immortal.’
I see Gadreel’s eyes widen as she drifts almost imperceptibly away from Luc. ‘Kill an angel or a demon and they are gone forever,’ she murmurs as if thinking aloud. ‘Returned to a heartless God. But kill a human —’
‘And they gain more than the world they left, yes,’ I hiss.
‘But what use is such an empty immortality?’ Lucifer spits.
‘I had hoped you would tear each other apart so that nothing of you remained,’ Gadreel addresses me, as if Luc is no longer in the room. ‘But there is still a way.’
I nod, saying, ‘I know it,’ and Lucifer turns to look at her sharply as if sensing a new duplicity.
‘But open season, no matter what happens,’ Gadreel adds.
‘Fair warning,’ I agree grimly.
Then Gadreel collapses into a ball of flame, as red and vicious as a suspended, unsleeping eye, before vanishing into motes of light that within seconds are nothing more than an afterglow.
She is no longer in the room, and I know that matters will remain unresolved between us until she can find a way to destroy me utterly. A problem for another time and another place.
There is an achingly familiar bravado in the way Lucifer holds his head high, his gaze upon me unwavering. ‘You make a pretty ghost, Mercy,’ he sneers. ‘But you can’t destroy me and I can’t destroy you. Stalemate, then. We no longer cohere.’
‘We never did, demon,’ I say quietly. ‘It took you killing me the first time for me to realise that.’
The light of which Luc is made begins to draw inward, begins to gather up as Gadreel’s light did. I will lose him if I do not move quickly. He is weak, but he is the Devil. And there are yet enough dark places and warm bodies in the world in which to hide.
So I make time stop then, the way Azraeil showed me was possible.
For a moment, I let the raw power surge in, let it build, let the door to the endless rooms of arcane knowledge fly open. I hold this moment of time separate and apart from all others so that none but I am outside it. I suspend not only time, but life itself, because I can.
I raise my open hands high, calling down the singular power that I have been gifted, standing framed before the kind of bright, living Eden Luc and I would once have been entwined in, together. I spread my black wings wide across the last view he will ever have of this world, God willing.
I am death passing over.
Haud misericordia! I cry.
No mercy.
The sound of cracking is immense. I feel the pressure build at my back as the fissure in the vast window behind me widens. Within that stopped bubble of time, I imagine Luc’s mouth forming a scream.
And water pours in through the breach I have opened — not the cold waters of the Atlantic, but the hot, black waters of the river that is Sheol’s heart’s blood. It is true that I cannot kill him, not now. But I can hold him prisoner in Sheol — forever, if I have to.
The waters rush around me and through me, reaching for him as surely as I once pulled him into my arms.
I open a bridge between two worlds and let the river at the start, and end, of time drag Lucifer, drag me, down, down, down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
28
Epilogue
When I open my eyes, I’m right there — in that clearing filled with long grass and twisted yew and oak, the air dense with the scent of resin. When I come to, there’s a sharp crust trapped between my skin and the cold, cold soil.
It’s like lying on a bed of nails.
I try to move, but everything hurts. There’s something wrong with my right arm. It won’t respond when I try to shift it so that I can push myself up.
I gasp in pain as I roll and sit up awkwardly, bracing myself on my left hand, my right hanging useless like a dead thing. As if I’ve fallen through a black hole in time, I know where I am.
I’m sitting fully clothed in that clearing where I was taken by that monster just shy of my eighteenth birthday; the hard perspex baton still jammed at the base of my spine. I go cold when I realise that there’s an emaciated man drawing shallow, panting breaths beside me and I look down at the wet mess of Ryan’s abdomen and cry out in horror. He’s been run through with something both deadly and burning. Ryan’s not going to make it if I don’t move now.
I stagger back through trees I haven’t seen for years, cradling my shattered right arm with my left. I know I’m retracing the run I tried to make before that man chased me down, all those years ago.
I come out of the wooded edges of her sprawling, cluttered farmstead, tripping up the front steps of her sagging wooden veranda. As they always did, a cast of desperadoes — animal and human — come spilling out the front door as I stumble up to it.
‘Help me,’ I croak and all the faces crowd around me as the sky begins to whirl overhead. ‘There’s a man called Ryan, in the clearing. I think he’s dying.’
‘Gia,’ Mama Kassmeyer breathes as if I’ve never been away. ‘Darling, show us.’
And her foster son — the big, beefy one with Down Syndrome whose name I never bothered to learn — lifts me up in his strong arms as if I weigh nothing, and I take them to where Ryan is.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to my loving husband, Michael, and our beautiful, constantly hilarious children, Oscar, Leni and Yve — who put up with my uneven cooking and general disorganisation on a daily basis, but continue to love and humour me, regardless.
With thanks also to my dear friend and editor, Hilary Reynolds, who has ushered my chaotic stylings into the world on more than one occasion since we first worked together in 2008. The next feast of dumplings is definitely on me.
While this is a work of fiction, it was written for all the Jamies: the ones who survived, and the ones that didn’t. Every female life matters.
I also wrote this for all the readers of the Mercy books over the years who have reached out to me from places as far away as South Africa, the Netherlands, Brazil, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada, Portugal and the Philippines with questions and comments and enthusiasm. Wraith is for you, with love and gratitude for embracing the freakiness and just going with it. There are no rules.
Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed Nuriel deliberately misquoting from The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Gadreel quoting from Act II, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
All of the names, characters, descriptions and events in this book are entirely fictional, and all opinions expressed by the characters are expressed by the characters; whose preferences and attitudes are also entirely their own. Any errors are entirely mine.
Certain authorial liberties may have been taken with those buildings and places that do actually exist in the real world and, for those, as always, the author apologises and begs your leave.
Rebecca Lim, Wraith
