Wraith Read online

  It’s been two years, but she looks exactly the way I remember her from the catwalk in Milan when that ice-blonde demon — Gudrun — grasped her by the throat, ready to strike the fatal blow.

  It’s Mercy’s true form, what I’m seeing.

  She’s still tall, far taller than me — that’s a given, almost everyone is — but human-scaled now. Still beautiful in that strong-nosed, sombre way that always reminded me of a girl from a Renaissance painting. Broad-shouldered and long-limbed with big brown eyes and long brown hair hanging down past her shoulders: every strand straight, even and perfectly the same. Pale and luminous — light coalesces on her skin like she’s somehow made of it — but she’s clad all in black now. The absolute black of mourning.

  But it’s a black that’s strangely insubstantial. All of her is. I catch the faint outline of my kitchen table, the out-of-date calendar hanging by the light switch, right through her. It’s the way the kitchen fluorescent is hitting Mercy that is somehow a little bit…wrong.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I say, stepping closer, and there’s real fear in my voice. I find that I’m shaking.

  Her lips move as if she’s answering me, but I can’t hear the words. We could be separated by soundproof glass, or by a medium so dense that her reply is lost to it.

  So I say again, ‘Mercy,’ reaching out to do those stupid double air-kisses the way I was programmed to for years and years. But my hands pass right through her and, as they do, I feel a brief and terrible burst of intense pain and see colours, images, hear my name — Gia! — uttered inside my own head in Mercy’s anguished voice.

  When I look up from my stinging hands in horror, I see that the great sadness she carried with her in Milan, before Ryan found her again, has returned.

  She seems made of sadness. Sadness and light.

  Mercy holds her hands out, palms up, asking me to take them properly. I shake my head, remembering the terrible heat all along my nerve endings when I tried to touch her; like putting my hands on a lit stove. Her lips tighten with that familiar flash of impatience I recognise, and she squeezes her hands into fists then opens them again, palms up, demanding.

  Her eyes say, There is no other way to make you understand.

  Mercy makes fists of her hands again, opens them, palms up; the gesture is emphatic.

  I’ve never been a coward. I’m a multiple foster-home survivor, a fighter, an iron-plated bitch, and proud of it. I made myself out of nothing. I’m still here because of me.

  My eyes snapping to hers — challenge accepted — I reach out, my fingers closing on air, and she courses through me.

  She’s pure energy — energy without boundaries — and it’s as if I’ve been plugged into live current.

  Rigid with pain I see, hear, feel —

  Creatures with names like songs: K’el, Nuriel, Gabriel, Uriel, Michael, Jegudiel, Selaphiel, Jeremiel, Barachiel, Raphael, Azraeil.

  Each, each, each.

  I see them and know them and understand that some are gone from this world, will never return.

  Archangels all, Mercy’s voice roars through me. Elohim. My brethren.

  I twist in her grasp, convulsing in the stream of her broken memories —

  Of countless human lives lived without recall of what she once was.

  Of archangels protecting her from Lucifer, life upon life.

  Of Ryan and re-awakening.

  Of archangels in chains and demons of cloud.

  Of cities and ghosts of the ancient dead.

  Here, inside my tiny kitchen, I am swept by unearthly waves and see a great battle, fought in her name and her image by an army of angels: elohim, malakhim, ophanim, seraphim in order to give Mercy — I can hear myself shrieking thinly in agony — time to contain Lucifer, the Accuser, to this earthly realm forever.

  I gasp as I see Lucifer plunge his hand deep into Ryan’s chest; watch Ryan fall to the ground.

  Then I witness Azraeil — the only archangel with the power to give life or take it — sundering Mercy from her immortality in order to bring Ryan back from the dead and keep Lucifer earthbound, forever.

  A decision at once elegant and simple — irrevocable.

  I look up into Mercy’s face; my own contorted in pain.

  I kept my bargain. Her voice is in my veins. Those that fell from Heaven and sought to retake it will never leave this world again. Those of my kin that Lucifer had found and enslaved I avenged and freed — every one.

  I suffered, Gia, and I deserved happiness. But Ryan and I were only one step ahead. Always.

  I fall to my knees sobbing, unable to bear her touch or break from her grip. She’s burning me alive in order to make me understand, but I still can’t see —

  I’m suddenly lost in the roar of taxis and buses, tourist rickshaws and cars, the cries of flower sellers thronging a temple complex entrance. Asia — somewhere. I am Mercy, and I’m in her memory. The air is heavy with petrol fumes and the smell of wet foliage, incense and warm bodies. We’re crossing beneath a temple roofline which is a riot of pinks, sky-blues, ochres. There are human figures and monsters upon it, bulging-eyed deities and things with no name, all writhing and dancing, tier-upon-tier towards heaven. One figure is repeated among the rest: a blue-skinned, four-armed goddess, garlands of skulls and flowers around her neck, long, fanged teeth in her mouth, a skirt of human arms about her waist, holding a bloody scimitar and a severed head.

  ‘Kālī.’ I feel Ryan breathe against my long, unbound hair, his warm hand in mine as we gaze on a twenty-foot high statue of the fanged, blue-skinned, raven-haired goddess. For a moment, leaning into him, feeling his dark, laughing eyes on me, I feel a surge of longing so powerful I don’t know if it’s coming from me, or from her.

  Ryan continues reading the inscription before us in his deep, spine-tingling drawl, ‘Goddess of Time, Change, Power, Destruction: merciless, bloodthirsty, forbidden, a vicious slayer of demons…’

  He throws his head back and laughs and I see the strong, sleek column of his throat. ‘More than a little like you, then, Merce!’

  And I can feel it — how mortal she is, how her heartbeat flutters in the smooth column of her neck, the sweat where both their human hands are joined tightly together, the way Mercy is wearing her long straight hair forward across her shoulders, how her plain yellow sundress with spaghetti straps is sticking to the back of her legs in the heat. They’re just two people who love each other, among billions.

  Joy, I feel her joy.

  Then the world is just…gone. It’s no longer there, the way Ryan is no longer there — there’s just an aching absence.

  Then: a sudden flare of pain so terrible and obliterating that I wake — as she must have done — floating facedown in a wide black shining river, beneath the hand of Azraeil, the silver-haired Archangel of Death himself, the water as hot as blood against my skin.

  He raises me up now, choking, out of the black water, before a vast and gleaming crowd which stands silently watching upon one bank, and cries, ‘And she shall be my right hand — the right hand of Death. Once was archangel, then human — then wraith.’

  I hear myself gibber, ‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, make it stop, Mercy, please.’

  Then she lets me go, and I crumple forward onto the kitchen tiles.

  3

  I feel warm hands lifting me, laying me down gently on my hard and narrow bed. The room is unusually warm, too; the light beyond my closed lids a pale gold. I can feel him there, just out of reach. The watcher.

  Feverish, sensitised with remembered pain from Mercy’s touch, I whisper, ‘Archangel,’ because I know who he is now, the one of all her brothers Mercy loved best and who loved her best in return. ‘Whatever she wants, I can’t do it. Tell her…I’m not strong enough.’

  I open my eyes with difficulty into his brilliant, emerald gaze and am suffused instantly by love, longing, desire.

  Looking at them changes you. Being with them changes you and makes you want things t
hat are impossible. I can’t look away from where he’s standing at the foot of my bed, somehow shifted in scale to fit beneath the ceiling of my tiny house, but still maybe seven, eight feet tall. He’s dressed in proper antwacky, top-to-toe farm clobber complete with thigh-high wading boots, just like one of the local lads.

  Everything’s too…correct. So much thought and effort has gone into the human authenticity of his ‘outfit’ that I can’t help the laughter that bubbles up suddenly. As if he could ever blend in; be one of us. Then I’m suddenly laughing so much and so hard I can barely breathe, I’m almost crying into my hands. Rolling from side to side on the bed, racked by laughter, I peer at the glorious farm-angel creature through my fingers and see answering humour flare immediately in his bright emerald gaze.

  He has a sense of humour, too, I think. He’s perfect. But then, of course he is.

  ‘It’s the clothes,’ I gasp, filled with a pure, real joy I can’t ever remember feeling. I’ve never been a happy person; I don’t do happiness the way I don’t do camping or Pilates or raw oysters. But here I am, howling with laughter. ‘They’re too much! As a former ‘stylist-to-the-stars’, I should know. Those boots! Hasn’t anyone ever told you to take one thing off before you leave the house?’

  Then he laughs — the archangel Mercy calls Gabriel — and the sound is as ringing and golden as the light pouring off his skin. Without warning, the farm clothes he’s somehow fashioned of his own energy melt away, and he is himself. In sleeveless raiment so bright, so terrible and beautiful to look upon that I have to turn away sharply for a moment to shield my eyes.

  My laughter dies as abruptly as it began. ‘Where are your wings?’ I say softly, so dazzled I can barely make out the curve of the smile still lingering about his wide, mobile mouth. ‘You’re supposed to have wings. You did in Milan.’

  Gabriel’s reply is quiet. ‘Pray you never see them again, for they are mere symbols of our fury and serve only as a warning of the terror to come.’

  I sit up straighter, pulling myself up against the cracked wooden bedhead. ‘I’m a results-oriented person,’ I drawl, hating the hard, sarcastic edge that’s come back into my voice, ‘and Mercy knows that. That’s why she came looking for me, I suppose. I used to get things done. But I’ve sworn off your lot for good. And I’m not that person any more — the fixer.’

  My hand flies up automatically to the puckered edges of the scar on my neck and I have to force it back down. But Gabriel sees the gesture, because he sees everything.

  ‘I can’t even fix myself,’ I say lightly, crossing my arms to hold in the pain. ‘I’m permanently damaged.’

  There is a catch in my breathing when I think of Ryan holding Mercy’s hand, and about how there is no one like Ryan, on this whole earth, for me. To want and to have are two very different things. And I can want all I want. But I will never be fit to have, or to hold. Broken girls never are.

  ‘I just want to be left alone,’ I insist fiercely around the hard ache in my chest. ‘Tell her. Mercy will listen to you. You more than anyone.’

  Gabriel’s eyes are unbearably kind, but he continues as if I never spoke a word. ‘Lucifer has clothed himself in human flesh —’

  I raise my hands to ward him off.

  ‘I don’t think you’re quite comprehending me.’ We both hear the brittleness, the anger. ‘I can’t help you. Mercy gave up what she was to keep Lucifer here. She showed me that. She did what you wanted. You got your way — he’s our problem now, the way he’s always been our problem since the moment the Archangel Michael cast him down. Satan’s been contained for good, and the universe is safe again, right? But after everything Mercy did for you, even with all the powers she once had and your lot possess — something bad still happened to her anyway. She never got her happy ending. And if you can’t protect her, what chance do I…?’

  Suddenly, there is steel in Gabriel’s green gaze as he says, ‘But your world —’

  I stare him down, even though I’m quaking inside. ‘— Is a world of ants and monsters. We’re all like ants to you: plenty of ants to go round, plenty of monsters, too. I can’t help you, and I can’t help her. I told her once, I said —’ My voice is high and shaky, ‘that none of you were ever, ever, to come after me. All I offered her was a beer, if she ever came around again. One lousy beer. And yet, here you are, breaking promises.’

  Gabriel drifts forward until he is beside me, and I am so blinded by the heat and light of him — like golden summer in the room — that I focus on the edges of the rag rug on the floor instead of on that heartbreaking face. The air hums with his power.

  ‘Please go away,’ I whisper.

  ‘But don’t you want to get him?’ Gabriel murmurs above my bowed head.

  I shake it so forcefully that my long hair falls down around me like a sheltering curtain. ‘He’s not my enemy,’ I mutter. ‘Lucifer.’

  ‘But he is.’ Gabriel’s reply is swift. ‘He is horror and destruction, degradation, abasement and pain.’

  Every word he utters falls on me like a stone, for I know each word well.

  ‘He is the enemy of all life,’ Gabriel insists.

  I’m not looking at him — I’m refusing to look at him — so that when he touches me, just the lightest point of contact, like a feather drifted down across bare skin, I am wholly unprepared for the way the room vanishes around me and how time itself reels backwards.

  ***

  Not many people can tell you exactly where they died.

  But when I close my eyes? I’m right there — in this clearing filled with long grass and twisted yew and oak, the air dense with the scent of resin and the drone of insect life. When I came to, there was this sharp crust trapped between my skin and the cold, cold soil.

  Twigs and acorns, someone told me later. Like lying on a bed of nails, I’d imagine.

  Mama Kassmeyer had only just taken me in. I hated her — because she was obese and kind and cheerful and it was standard practice to hate everyone I’d ever been sent to — and I especially hated the long walk to a new school through a mile or so of dense woodland.

  She lived out on a farm built in 1912 with a cast of desperadoes — animal and human — that I pretended were all invisible. I didn’t learn their names; I looked away from all their faces, misshapen or otherwise. Two months more and I’d no longer need any of them, anyway. I’d be eighteen, and in fine family tradition, I’d vanish. That was the plan. The second my birthday rolled around? I’d shoot through without a goodbye and no one would have the power to stop me any more.

  So I came and went like an angry ghost when I was sent to Mama K’s, quickly committing another grid of village streets to memory, convinced I’d soon leave it behind for a new one because people always ended up saying I was Difficult and Trouble and Unable to play nicely with others.

  Two weeks, and I never saw a soul during my slog from the Kassmeyer farm towards Scenic Road and civilisation. But that morning, I recall the distant figure of a man coming through the trees, the already searing early-morning sun burnishing his shaved head, striking off the barrel of the slender silver torch he held in one hand.

  Lone guy with torch. Heading towards the river.

  I dismissed it, even though it made no sense, the torch, on such a bright summer’s day. All sorts of weirdos gravitated to the village where my school was; it was a sore point with the locals. It was a river town with a grand past and the summer tourists were easy pickings. Strangers everywhere in the summer taking all the good parking spots and tables, looking every which way, speaking every language under the sun. The same scenic river ran through the boundaries of Mama K’s farm.

  So I figured: sightseer.

  I paid the man no mind, striding on grimly, ignoring his soft Hey, baby as our paths intersected. I’ve replayed that a million times since. The steady closing-in he must have done; the oblique path he must have taken away from the river and through the trees to circle back around: to me.

  If I’d starte
d running earlier, well, maybe it would have been different.

  But only metres from the main road I looked up to see him facing me across a clearing — a big man, big as a wrestler, biceps, calves, forearms all corded with thick muscle — and that blazing look he gave me with his pale blue eyes was what sent me dodging through the tree trunks, trying to make it back towards the river bend where Mama K’s farmhouse stood. Some part of me knew that if I just made it back, Mama Kassmeyer would die trying to protect me and I would be safe.

  Back then, I weighed maybe fifty kilograms soaking wet, and sprinting — hell, sport — had never been my thing. I had no thing, like, literally.

  I had no breath left in me to scream when he ran me down. He just touched me on the soft skin at the back of my neck with the end of the silver torch. And I crashed to the ground in agony.

  That thing was no torch.

  It gave out pain, not light.

  He shocked me on my neck, my face, between my breasts. Any place with bare skin showing, he let me have it with that thing until I was suffocating inside my own body.

  When I close my eyes now, all I choose to see is the way the sunlight moved upon the flaming death’s-head moth tattooed across the man’s thick neck, stretching below his jaw from ear to ear, etched in reds and blacks.

  I do not admit sounds, I do not admit sensations.

  There was a woman’s skull, right in the middle of the moth’s jointed thorax. What was unusual, people told me later, was the fact she had long black hair twining out of her bone-white scalp. The long, twining hair forming an integral part of the wings on either side was what made the tattoo unique. There was no one on record, people told me later, with a tattoo exactly like that. I’d done well to remember, the officers said. It must have been bespoke, made-to-order, absolute murder to have done.