Wraith, page 6
After I return, Summer teaches me the basics of blocking. (‘Both hands up like blades! Protect your head! Watch my elbows to see where the hits are coming from! Keep it loose! Move, move, move, move, MOVE.’) She gets a crowd of eager young men to come at me from every angle — front, sides, back — teaching me the basics of side-stepping and deflection until I stop tripping over my own feet in my rush to get out of striking range. When I don’t think I can stand it a moment longer, Summer then cements all the theory by rushing me repeatedly with a red body-length punching shield until the act of defending myself, and maintaining my stance, is almost automatic. If I don’t defend, I fall to the ground. Simple as that.
There’s stinging sweat running into my eyes, pooling between my clavicles, but it’s like Summer is made of solid iron. She’s not even breathing hard as she pummels me with the shield, repeatedly driving me right off the mats so that I fall on my arse on the hard ground. The thought occurs to me more than once, as I’m flung off balance, that Irina Zhivanevskaya, with her sharp pivot-turn-flounce manoeuvre, aggressive hip and shoulder moves and bitch-slapping tendencies, would have been a natural at this stuff.
I don’t always manage to stay on my feet, but I’m finally throwing both arms up to protect my centre line, my head and my ‘gates’ the way Summer’s been screaming at me to do all afternoon. I’m not quick enough to sidestep everything that’s coming at me, or turn the deflections into attacks — mainly because I’ve broken through the zero-energy barrier — but I think I’m starting to understand the basic mechanics.
Shaun doesn’t appear again until the light coming through the glassed-in ceiling begins to fade and all the fluorescents snap on, one by one.
‘Walk you back to Jamie’s?’ he offers casually.
I’m too exhausted even to snarl, ‘And where have you been?’
We don’t really talk on the way into or out of Curry Dhaba, although I do make him stop at the Tesco Metro so that I can pick out every flavour of pre-made blended soup I can find, for Jamie to try.
It’s a re-run of the night before when we get to her place. But at least I manage to coax her into having some of the soup and am rewarded with the fleeting, twisted grimace that passes for her smile.
***
Every day, over the next few weeks, I feel myself getting stronger and faster. I can use a short wooden baton now — without much elegance, admittedly — and Summer’s taught me a clutch of illegal raw combat moves like how to crush someone’s elbow and shoulder joints, or fracture the knee or the ankle, to slow the attack down. She’s got me doing weird combinations — punch, knee, sweep or block, knee, elbow-to-the-base-of-the-skull — and I’ve even perfected the flowing tai qi-looking move that’s supposed to result in twisting someone’s head right off their spine.
The day I manage to tip Shaun’s best mate and business partner, Danny Alizhad, right off his feet — just for a second, before he rolls over and springs back up as lightly as a cat — I get even Shaun’s grudging respect: a single grunt from the sidelines before he walks away. Danny is the same sleek, darkly handsome, Iranian-born troublemaker weighing over two hundred pounds that I remember from seven years ago, and I feel a burst of fierce pride before he comes right back at me with a series of aggressive hooks and crosses like the professional boxer he used to be.
‘And here I was thinking you was all mouth and no trousers,’ Danny grins as I duck and weave, one of his fists glancing painfully off the side of my face because my block is just a fraction too late.
But it’s true — I’m not all talk now. I feel stronger. I can handle a level of pain the old A-list me wouldn’t have tolerated for a second.
‘You’re a beast,’ Summer puts it one night as I’m leaving. ‘You’ve officially attained beast status, bitch,’ she grins at me through her grills, ‘and you owe me a bloody big beer, for starters.’
***
I’m in my tee-shirt getting ready to climb into bed, everything aching, bruises up the wazoo, when there’s a light tap at my closed door. Glancing at my clock radio, I see that it’s just before eleven. Jamie’s always downstairs working on her computer at this time of night, so whatever it is she wants to tell me must be important.
I open the door warily to Jamie in her loose cotton pyjamas and bright pink pressure bandages, which over the last few weeks she’s taken to putting on before I even walk in the door.
‘I have to show you something,’ she says, and there’s a strange hush in her voice.
I start for the stairs leading down to the study thinking the something must be on her computer, but Jamie stops me with one of her pressure-bandaged hands. ‘No, this way,’ she urges.
I watch as she walks into her dimly lit bedroom, past her neatly made-up double bed. She heads for the barred window that looks out onto the street below and hitches up one corner of the heavy blind.
Instantly, my skin goes hot. ‘Is someone hassling you again? Is he out there right now?’ My voice is shrill with tension.
I pivot immediately, crossing the landing for my phone, about to call Shaun, maybe the cops, when Jamie says hoarsely from behind me, ‘He’s not here for me, Gia — he’s here for you.’
I stop dead and turn back slowly and, I swear, my heart skips a beat before I feel it pounding again, faster than before. Being back here with Shaun, training at his place in the East End, I’ve almost convinced myself that I’ve been in London all along these last seven years, and that Irina and Mercy — and the rest of it — are all things my diseased mind had made up.
As I drift back into her bedroom, Jamie draws me to the window and says gently, ‘It’s not my angel that’s here. It’s yours. Mine only ever told me you were coming and would need my help. But he said that when yours showed up…’
The woman in the skull-shaped bandages looks at me gravely with her one good eye as she indicates the street below. ‘It would be time: to do your best.’
8
As Jamie lets me out of her house, I catch sight — through her open study door — of a bright humanoid blur on one of the computer monitors in the bank of machines across her workstation. It’s like the thermal image of an exceptionally tall, well-proportioned man, picked out in a blazing spectrum of reds, oranges and yellows.
A man made of fire. No — of pure energy.
When I get outside, and cross over to where he’s standing, he nods at me gravely but doesn’t speak or try to take my hand, and it’s a relief. My heart is too full for words. Seeing him again, feeling the crackle of energy that the Archangel Gabriel sends into the air around me, sends waves of feeling across my skin. It soon becomes clear that we’re headed back towards the Pound and it has to be a miracle of some kind that the streets we walk to get there are completely empty. No one sees me limping along beside a flame-haired giant whose outline seems to shift and blur and curl into the night air. Part of me could walk beside him forever this way — just the two of us — the unyielding world beneath our feet.
My angel. If only.
The stars are cold and brilliant in the sky as I push through the swing doors of the boxing gym. As I walk across the gym mats, my trainers making small scuffing noises, I see that the place is in darkness save for a thin sliver of light shining from the partially open door of Shaun’s tiny office.
‘Hello?’ I call out, stopping in the centre of the mats, wondering what it is that I’m supposed to be doing here just past eleven o’clock at night; if it’s someone’s idea of a joke.
Behind me, as Summer had done, Gabriel suddenly breathes, Be kind.
When I turn towards him in confusion, I see that he’s gone, and that the air between me and where he was standing has begun to tease apart.
I step back in horror from this small point of nothing that’s growing in the air before me — first along the vertical, then the horizontal, as if something’s gone wrong with my eyes, like maybe I’m going blind — only to see a flash of colour that should not exist, within it.
As the rift begins to grow — sucking any remaining heat out of the air — I get a glimpse of an overarching, dark violet sky scattered with bright stars in formations I don’t recognise, the gleaming bend of a serpentine black river winding below. The river, the sky, the stars, all obscure the wall of the boxing gym that I know should be right there.
Blinking rapidly does not dispel what I’m seeing: one world inside another.
Just over my left shoulder, a familiar figure throws wide the door to the office and my heart plunges as I hear him gasp.
I raise my hands frantically to indicate he should get back inside immediately and bolt the door.
But Shaun never does anything Shaun doesn’t want to do. He moves closer to me protectively so that when she comes through — stepping out of the black river like a vengeful siren, the water sheeting off her body and leaving a sheen of silver in its place on her skin, in her long dark hair, in her eyes — Mercy sees him first.
And these burning blades, I swear, they come out of her hands and she surges towards him through the gap that shouldn’t be there and before she can kill him with them — I can feel it in her, Death, moving — I throw myself straight at her.
Subsuming her.
***
The pain. I can’t describe it.
There’s a sharp, awful flare deep inside me — as if something damaged in me recognises the same thing in her — and we come together as if we are magnetic.
There’s a clash and a convergence.
She’s stronger than she was before, at the farmhouse in Craster. I can feel it. In the intervening weeks, she’s evolved into something new, she’s come fully into this new state, and every muscle in my body is straining to keep her in check because it’s her and me both trying to be in the same place — the same body — at the same time. And I feel like I’m dying all over again, but I’m somehow also holding her back so that she can’t touch him because I know that if she touches Shaun he will no longer be.
I feel her twist within me, her banshee scream pouring from my own mouth, and I catch Shaun springing away from me — us — looking up and up at a point well above my head, as if I’m over seven feet tall. Whatever this thing is that I’m doing, it’s imperfect. She’s bleeding through me, or she’s trying to, because the feel of Mercy moving through me is like the feel of the blades she was holding in her hands.
But with every muscle of my body, with that strange scar that’s somehow knotted deep in my soul that sees the scar in hers, I keep her anchored.
‘He’s a good man,’ I pant. ‘He’s done nothing to you. He’s. Not. The. One. You. Want.’
The flare inside me pulses like lungs drawing breath as her scream echoes from the rafters. ‘Then who is he to me?’
She tries her best to shake me loose and the world becomes monstrous: every sense taken over as if by electricity, the world amplified and reverberating in waves of discordance as I thrash in place like I’m fighting my own nature.
But somehow I do it: hold her away from Shaun with every inch of my being.
‘Leave. Him. Alone,’ I gasp, imagining that I am the net in which she is caught. It’s all I can do.
A net made of remembered pain.
Caught in the weave of me, shrieking, we burst into flame.
A kind of pale blue fire laced with silver is pouring off my skin now, lightening the air around me. I stagger backwards, away from the breach that opens onto the black river that runs through Sheol, struggling to keep Mercy from Shaun; who’s retreated to the edge of the gym mats, fists up around his face, eyes huge as he tries to take in this thing that I’ve become.
I am flesh and blood fused with a cold, pure fire.
How is it that I’m still alive?
I know Shaun can somehow see her within me or around me because his eyes are darting everywhere, taking in distances and potential weapons, escape routes. All the things he’s had his people drill into me for the last few weeks has been made absolutely real in this moment — except he’s the one under attack now. She fights me every inch of the way, trying to get away from me to get to him.
For a moment, it’s me speaking, me in control. ‘Shaun — ’ my breath comes out in short, painful bursts, cloudy-white in the icy air, ‘get out while you can. I can’t…hold…her…for…much…longer.’
I feel the net — made of my own remembered agony — beginning to slip.
Through me, I feel Mercy pause and study Shaun — really look at him, seeing him — and then she…stretches.
I get a shocking sense of how it would have felt to be her when she was alive. How incredibly strong she was, the way she would have stood, breathed, laughed, used her hands — everything so very different from me. There’s some kind of shift, too, in her mood and her restless, questing energy, as she continues to look at him.
I am suddenly flooded with a cold clarity so powerful it’s like a drug: I can feel the short blades she wields as if they are in my own hands, feel how they are made of her somehow, how she can see down into every particle of everything in this room in a way no human being ever could. I can’t read her thoughts exactly — she won’t let me in — but I know that she is calculating…something, I can feel it. Consequences.
Something here is being tried and tested.
Faster than I can believe, Mercy pivots — so I do, too — making a gesture of negation with the blade in her left hand. The rift in the air behind me just closes and the heavy, purple, star-filled sky, the black river of Sheol, all wink out of existence and there is only one world again.
Mine.
Immediately, the air seems ten degrees warmer, the vast space lit eerily by the electric light spilling from the open door of Shaun’s office and by the hypnotic fire that’s rolling off my skin in waves.
Suddenly, Mercy springs back into motion and I cannot stop her — me — lunging again towards Shaun with a hyper-fast, predatory grace.
Like a sprinter leaving the starting blocks, Shaun explodes across the room — arms and legs pumping — vaulting discarded weight plates, wooden boxes and mini tramps, throwing himself up and under the triple layer of ropes surrounding the boxing ring. Before he’s even managed to scramble across the surface of the ring she — we — have sliced our way clean through the ropes, almost catching Shaun by the ankles before he has time to slither and fall out the other side onto the floor. Vaulting over the nearest turnbuckle and landing easily on the ground, we duck the gloves and hand weights Shaun throws in our path with negligent ease, sidestepping the peanut-shaped double-ended punching bag he slings in our direction, destroying a small army of freestanding bags on stands, stalking him calmly and deliberately as he tries to lose himself in a forest of suspended speedballs, heavy bags and wrecking balls.
It’s like her blades are made of some corrosive element. Everything they touch — leather, synthetic, steel — shears through. We leave an exploded trail of sand, pebbles and dry maize in our wake, broken chains rattling as we pass.
Finally, in the far corner by the battalion of armless human torsos mounted on pedestals, Shaun has nowhere left to run.
We stop mere inches away from him and raise the short, luminous blade in our left hand so that the wicked point is levelled at his jaw. Flames lick from it in waves of silver-blue as if drawn towards his living energy. ‘These blades were a demon’s weapon of choice once,’ she whispers through my lips. ‘And now they are mine.’
Shaun’s wild-eyed gaze flickers from point to point as he tries to take in me, her, the blades, the shattered room. I can feel his thoughts like trapped birds, beating against my skin. And then he surprises even Mercy — I feel her surprise — by dropping out of reach of the deadly point of the blade in her left hand with a swiftness that makes me catch my breath, sweeping me off my feet with a powerful kick.
Pain explodes through my legs. I feel the unyielding concrete rush up to meet me as I crash to the ground, badly winded, sending the forest of human-shaped torsos around us jittering on their stands. But Mercy laughs; a terrifying sound with such a strange, sonic afterbite to it that Shaun staggers, clutching at his ringing ears, as he struggles to regain his footing.
Mercy propels me to my feet — the room tilting crazily — in one fluid move, like a gymnast. But at no speed any earthly gymnast could match.
And I am standing again.
Shaun grasps at the only weapon within reach — a long steel bar discarded by the base of the wall just like the one I was deadlifting only hours ago. He grips it like a staff, putting it between me and him. But Mercy lunges forward abruptly, hissing like a snake, and it’s me swinging the blade at Shaun’s head only to have him duck and sidestep instinctually with only millimetres to spare. With preternatural speed, Mercy forces me to lunge again and the second blade we’re holding catches Shaun’s steel bar on the upswing, slicing it neatly in two, just nicking him across a cheekbone before he has time to fling his head backwards. For a shocking moment, the cut ends of the bar glow bright red before Shaun drops the burning steel rods with a cry, reeling backwards into one of the dummies, fingers curled over his scalded palms, blood running from the small cut on his face.
‘On your knees,’ Mercy growls. And I am suddenly light-headed, imagining it to be him at last — the one who cast me down unto this earth — that I have him within my power after all these years of searching. I am giddy with this feeling of power and it’s hers, too, because I am in her thoughts now. If only for this moment, we are one; as is our need for vengeance.
