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, Ryan pushes away slightly, though he does not try to break my hold. I help him sit up, before reluctantly letting him go. This touching thing could get to be habit-forming, and the last thing I need now is a new addiction.
My left hand no longer burns with the mark of Luc’s betrayal. For an instant, I’m mesmerised by the sight of my own skin, my own fingers — how long it’s been since I’ve really seen them and felt as if they were a part of me. They are as unmarked and smooth as fired porcelain. I’m reminded with a jolt of Carmen’s eczema-scarred wrists, Lela’s small hands, Irina’s slender, tapered claws. I’ve left them all behind me now, truly.
Ryan breaks my reverie by raising his head to face me at last. His eyes are pain-filled. He looks at me for the longest time; studying my features, my glowing, strong-limbed form. He told me, once, that he kept a picture of me in his wallet — something a sketch artist put together on the strength of Lauren’s description. But he’s never really seen me, the real me. He’s only ever known me as a sharp-tongued presence, a wise-cracking ghoul, inhabiting a stranger’s body. Is he … disappointed?
But there’s awe in his expression, and a dawning gladness. There’s something else, too, in his eyes. Some kind of new-found awareness that was never there before.
I wonder what he saw when he journeyed through the valley of the shadow of death. Whether he witnessed things that cannot be reasoned away. The path, for every person, is different, they say.
We sit staring at each other, side by side, our backs to the rough stone. I focus solely on Ryan, on his face. It’s weird, but so long as I look at him, the feeling that I’m about to splinter apart, seems to lessen.
‘What …’ His voice is like something carried back on the wind from the afterlife. ‘What just … happened? It felt like I was …’
‘On fire?’ I say quietly.
He nods, wiping the blood from his mouth with the heel of one hand. ‘From the inside.’ He struggles to swallow, grimacing when it causes him pain. ‘I died, didn’t I? I was d—’
I put a hand to his lips to stop him saying more, in case Azraeil should be reminded of how he was cheated and think to return.
Ryan turns his face into my palm. I want so badly to trace the line of his mouth with my thumb, but I quickly let my hand fall before I can give in to weakness.
‘It takes a lot to heal someone,’ I reply cautiously. ‘And I don’t have a great track record at healing things, so cut me some slack.’
‘You saved me?’ His voice is raw. ‘You mean you were responsible for that …