Wraith Read online

  Rebecca Lim

  Wraith

  First published by The High Street Publishing Company in 2017

  Copyright © Rebecca Lim, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-0-6480392-1-1

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise for the Mercy series

  Also by Rebecca Lim

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  I. Part One 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

  II. Part Two Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  III. Part Three Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Cover

  About the Book

  It was a new world to which we were confined because of a bargain I’d made with Death himself: no paradise for Luc and the exiled, and none for me.

  But the moment I made my choice, I was marked for sacrifice, as was Ryan. A price was settled; a debt, escalated.

  Time. There would never be enough.

  It’s been two years since Gia Basso witnessed archangels and demons waging war upon each other beneath the dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. Traumatised, Gia has been in self-imposed exile on the English coast.

  But the sudden reappearance of Mercy in her life, in a new and terrifying incarnation, draws Gia into a desperate struggle to locate Lucifer — who holds Ryan Daley captive in order to keep him from Mercy, his beloved, forever.

  Tasked by the archangels to destroy Lucifer, and by Mercy to help her trace and free Ryan, Gia is pushed to the limits of human endurance as she traverses the earth — with the help of friends old and new — to do the impossible.

  For Lucifer and his demons have discovered a new way to move freely in the human world. And Mercy and Gia must bargain with the Archangel of Death himself, Azraeil, to get what they want.

  Wraith is the fifth dark, thrilling and genre-defying instalment of the much-loved Mercy series from the acclaimed author of The Astrologer’s Daughter.

  About the Author

  REBECCA LIM is a writer and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia. Rebecca is the author of seventeen books, including The Astrologer’s Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and Notable Book, CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers), Afterlight and the bestselling Mercy. Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Aurealis Award, INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award and Davitt Award for YA, Rebecca’s work has also been longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese and Polish. She is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative.

  Praise for the Mercy series

  ‘A sinister and rather fabulous world’ — The Age

  ‘Gripping … by the end, you can’t help but wonder who this angel of Mercy will become next’ — Sunday Herald Sun

  ‘This thriller has a creepiness that keeps the pages turning.’ — Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Mercy[’s] sarcasm, courage, and determination will hook readers.’ — School Library Journal

  ‘Subtly beautiful and utterly intriguing, Rebecca Lim’s Mercy series brims with mystery and romance that pull readers through the veil between worlds real and mythical.’ — Andrea Cremer, New York Times-bestselling author of the Nightshade series

  ‘A page-turning mystery with touches of romance … beautifully written prose; and a dark and twisting plot that kept me guessing’ — Laurie Faria Stolarz, bestselling author of Touch and the Blue is for Nightmares series

  ‘What is compelling about this novel is not only its tightly constructed plot but the lyric quality of the writing … Not to be missed’ — Reading Time

  ‘In her U.S. debut, Australian author Lim opens her planned series with a dark and chilling mystery, where the supernatural meets every parent’s nightmare. Vivid prose highlighting Mercy’s sense of isolation will draw readers in … while dramatic tension and the mystery of Mercy’s Quantum Leap-style body-hopping ought to keep their attention’ — Publisher’s Weekly

  ‘A racy story of good and evil in a world where angels aren’t all sweetness and light’ — Sunday Herald Sun

  Also by Rebecca Lim

  Mercy

  Exile

  Muse

  Fury

  The Astrologer’s Daughter

  Afterlight

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Sweet Life

  Cover Girl

  Sista Fashionista

  Star Style

  Whiffy Newton in the Case of the Dastardly Deeds

  Whiffy Newton in the Riddle of the Two-Tone Trousers

  Whiffy Newton in the Affair of the Fiendish Phantoms

  Whiffy Newton and the Mystery of the Marble Beach Mugger

  Five-Minute Tales Messiest Monster Ever

  Five-Minute Tales Bravest Princess Ever

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  First published in 2017 by The High Street Publishing Company

  Copyright © Rebecca Lim 2017

  The moral rights of Rebecca Lim have been asserted.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978-0-6480392-1-1 (ebook)

  Cover design by Karen Scott

  Cover photograph by Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock

  Dedication

  To the readers who loved Fury — Wraith is dedicated to you.

  Epigraph

  Oh sinners let's go down

  Let’s go down, come on down

  Oh sinners let’s go down

  Down in the river to pray

  - Traditional

  Prologue

  My memory is a cracked and treacherous thing, but I remember —

  The silence of thousands as the sun went dark above the Andaman Sea and an aurora flamed across the hot noonday sky in vivid bands of red and green. The ground had begun to shake beneath our feet — as fluid as the skin of some vast, waking animal. People fell
to the earth. Then the screaming began.

  And as Ryan and I crossed the equator, chasing the heat, chasing life, I remember —

  The evening sky suddenly peppered with light: hard, bright flashes filling the horizon from end to end. One after another, pop, pop, pop, high overhead as if the stars themselves were exploding. Cars, buses, people — everyone stopping to see, to wonder at the signs.

  I recall that some days, whole streets ruptured without warning. Overnight, buildings shook to pieces without cause, inland waterways drained dry, small atolls vanished without trace; the earth, the sky, everything was chaos, and we would all draw breath in terror, then pick ourselves up and move on. Because that’s what humans do. We survive. We…evolve.

  It was a new world to which we were confined: Luc and his daemonium, all of us. Confined forever to this sphere because of a bargain I’d made with Death himself; no paradise for Luc and the exiled, and none for me. No return.

  I would do it all again to save my brothers, the Eight.

  And Ryan, who loved me when I did not know myself — or what I was.

  But the moment I made my choice, I was marked for sacrifice, as was he. A price was settled; a debt, escalated.

  Time. There would never be enough.

  I gasp now as a hand draws me up out of black water, the liquid heavy, hot and viscous as blood. It streams off me, and I cry out to see my exposed skin glow once again, luminous in the half-light that falls across the wide, dark river in which I kneel.

  It must mean —

  I look up into the Archangel Azraeil’s glorious face, youthful, everlasting — a power unto himself, a power greater even than evil — and know that I have entered the kingdom of Sheol, and that I am dead.

  I

  Part One

  You ever at a loose end, you look me up, you hear?

  1

  I know that angels and demons exist. I’ve seen them.

  Now? I’m nobody.

  But once, I knew people.

  I was never beautiful — I just spoke the language. But everyone around me was, and they were surrounded by so much beauty that after a while they failed to see it. Or be it.

  I’m short, and thin. Sharp-featured, sharp-tongued. Most people remember me by my eyes — the right one is brown; the left one, blue. I used to dye my hair jet-black and have it cut into these razor-sharp lines to suit the person I had to be because I worked for a monster — one of the one-name It girls, Irina. A model so infamous and lovely that her life was a revolving torment of appearances and commitments, walk-outs, bitch-fights and broken stints in rehab. I don’t know who she’s sleeping with these days, or what she’s putting up her nose now, and I’m so glad.

  I made things happen. I got people places. I was the one who made sure the bookers and the rivals, the luxury conglomerates, the excommunicated lovers and the baying paparazzi, never pressed assault charges or sued for breach of contract or slander.

  But I walked away from all that after Lucifer himself appeared at an internationally-televised fashion show beneath the glass and iron ceiling of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan — and tore it down around my ears. There was death and fire that night, administered by shining, winged giants who walked among us with flaming swords and burning eyes.

  I blame Mercy for what happened. But a part of me misses her too, because she got me. It’s weird to say this — because we knew each other for such a strange, brief time — but she was my friend. She actually cared whether I lived or died. And she brought Irina back because I asked her to — when no human power on earth could do it.

  These days, I manage the general store for an organic farm outside a small town called Craster on the English far north coast. All you need to know is that it’s as far removed from my old jetset life as it’s possible to be. There’s sea and there’s space. When it’s cold, nobody comes around unless they’re lost — which suits me just fine because I’m permanently over the people and the crowds. Nobody here calls me darling, or wants me to hold their stingray hide bag, or their thirty-thousand-dollar jacket. I’ve let my hair go back to the nothing-brown I was born with, and it’s long now, and snarled at the ends. I wear it in two plaits — just like a real farm girl — and I’ve got calluses on my hands from mucking out the animal pens, and corns on my feet from all the walking. I can also list hangnails and moles, freckles and wind-burnt lips. I’ve even dropped that stupid cut-glass high-class accent I used to affect. I’m unrecognisable.

  Or I thought I was.

  See, Sunday morning, I was bagging up new potatoes behind the shop — the wind cutting straight through me the way it always does here — when I imagined I felt a breath of fire: just a hiss of energy.

  I imagined that I saw someone standing right at the peripheries of my sight, by the goat pen. No joke, just a flash: of someone tall, male, powerful-looking, with dark red hair, wearing a worn Barbour coat over an unremarkable assortment of farm clothes. Little details I was once paid to notice. When I turned to look and there was no one there, I told myself it was a fast-moving tourist and kept right on weighing and bagging.

  But I knew. Because once you see them, you can’t ever unsee them. You’re just never the same.

  Then yesterday I was at the post office, sending a parcel of mixed preserves to an address in Buckinghamshire, when I saw him again, the same one; he was standing in the doorway of the butcher’s shop across the way. When I turned to look at him properly, all I saw was the winter sun reflecting off plate glass. Kid you not.

  ‘You’re bloody mad,’ I said out loud to make myself feel better. As mad as all the things that had been happening in the news lately: tidal waves and heatwaves and unseasonal snow, UFOs and mass shootings and cavernous blowholes at all ends of the earth. The whole world going to shit, and me in the best place to avoid it all: on a small hobby farm just outside Craster. Safe, the way houses used to be safe, solid rock used to be safe, safe as the sun rising of a morning.

  But something catches my eye now, in the darkness outside my kitchen window. I’ll never get used to it: 3.19 pm in the afternoon and it’s as black as pitch out and I’ve closed the shop early and walked home to my humble stone gatehouse beside the main road in my five-pound wellies, because no one’s coming to look at jams and artisanal cheeses on a biting, howling dark afternoon in the north, are they?

  But as I glance outside at the wind shaking all the branches of the trees, my heart stops. I drop the saucepan full of cold water I’m holding. It hits the slate-tiled floor with the force, sound and feel of an icy, drenching bomb, spraying up the legs of my mud-encrusted jeans, the ends of my dark-green plaid flannel shirt.

  Out under the row of towering pines that separates my home from the road, there’s the giant figure of that man, still wearing the same picture-perfect, broken-in Barbour coat. He’s not attempting to hide from me now. He’s the tallest, most perfectly proportioned person I’ve ever seen, with long, dark red hair spilling in waves down his broad shoulders, emerald-green eyes that are as piercing as jewels, and long, muscular limbs, pale as marble. He’s standing beyond the reach of the kitchen light, in the very face of the gale, but nothing about him is moving, not one hair. His arms are crossed. I can see him as clearly as if he’s standing in a patch of sunlight, or is lit from within, I can’t explain it. But I know what he is.

  Mercy was the same way. She didn’t announce herself the day she took over Irina Zhivanevskaya’s body. She remained oblique — was simply there — until I caught her out, play-acting at being someone else. She gauged the world silently before making her move, the way he is now doing.

  He’s an archangel, I realise, my skin tightening. Them with the burning swords. He was right there in the thick of it when the roof fell in Milan, wings shredding curls of energy, hair like living flame. Unforgettable.

  The old me would have rushed out there shrieking, all claws and bravado and outrage. But now I’m so paralysed by fear and wonder that I can’t move away from the window. I
touch my fingers to the icy, brittle glass, as if in doing that, he will feel it on his skin. Across my straggling kitchen garden we stare at each other, the giant and I. The burn scar on the back of my neck, in the shape of a crescent moon, begins to pulse with remembered heat.

  Around me, the room suddenly grows so bright I am forced to turn, shielding my eyes.

  And then I understand, at last, why he is out there.

  I turn to confront her —

  The one the watcher is really guarding.

  ‘Mercy,’ I whisper.

  2

  Gia, she says, her lips clearly moving to form my name, but I don’t hear it.