Muse (15 page)

But all our driver does is flick on his high beams so that I see the man turn, shielding his eyes against the light, his face full of fear as he registers, too late, the car bearing down on him, registers me looking down at him from the open sunroof, horrified, and in the instant his eyes fly wide, I see, I see —

Ryan.

It’s Ryan on the road. In the same beat-up leather jacket he was wearing when I last saw him in Australia. Layered tees, one blue, one grey; indigo jeans, scuffed boots. He might have stepped straight out of my memory into this place. And all I can think
as he turns his head away from the car, the car that’s going to run him down, is:
Oh God, he came for me anyway
.

Ryan throws his arms up as if to shield himself from the impact. But it’s too late, it’s useless, he just goes under the front wheels.

I don’t think, I don’t even breathe, I just pull myself out onto the roof in one smooth action and somersault off the moving car and onto the road, screaming his name as I land on my bare feet — like a cat — looking around wildly.

The others don’t have my reflexes.

Our limo travels another hundred feet at least before the driver brakes suddenly, tyres squealing. The second limo almost runs me down where I’m standing, frozen and gaping, in the roadway. At the spot, the very spot, where Ryan was hit.

People explode out of both cars and slip and slide across the icy surface towards me. Five burly, dark-suited men, a couple with weapons drawn, and Gia, who’s screaming in the way people do when they go beyond the point at which there are any words to express the horror they’re feeling.

‘What were you thinking?’ she sobs, grabbing hold of my upper arms. The men circle me warily, as if I’m wired with explosives and might blow at any moment.

‘You killed him,’ I say dazedly, craning my head to look around them, over them. ‘Didn’t you see? Help me look for his body.’

But even as I say the words, I know that I just witnessed an illusion. Something a demon might send to taunt me, to make me question my sanity.

Vladimir shines a narrow, stainless-steel torch in my face, then plays it across the slick and uneven surface of the road around us, up the sides of nearby buildings and over parked cars. ‘What body?’ he drawls in his heavy Russian accent.

Gia’s voice is shaky. ‘Irina, what are you talking about? There’s nothing here.’

‘No blood?’ I say tonelessly, already knowing the answer. ‘No body?’

Six people shake their heads, shuffling uneasily, shooting each other covert looks.

But I saw him go down.

‘The driver says he didn’t see or … um … feel anything,’ Gia adds softly.

I wheel about in the snow, and shake my fists at the sky, shrieking, ‘What are you playing at? What are you waiting for? Come and get me!’

And I actually try to run. In my bare feet, I try to break free and run from the vision of Ryan being
mown down by the very car I was travelling in, run from all the horror and devastation I’m feeling inside. What I told Bianca was true.
All I have left are feelings.

I try to run from them all: from beings both seen and unseen; even from the watchful, lowering sky that, once, could never have mastered me.

‘Come and get me!’ I shriek, taking Angelo by surprise and shoving him out of the way so hard that he sprawls to the ground, his weapon clattering against the raised stone kerb. I dodge Vladimir’s outstretched arms and scramble away up the road on my scratched and bruised bare feet, almost losing my balance, then recovering it as I stretch out Irina’s long legs and
run
.

‘Are you seeing this?’ I shriek. ‘Any of you? Come and get me! I dare you! Show yourselves!’

I’ve almost made it past the hotel driveway when I’m crash-tackled to the ground by someone at least three times Irina’s body weight. Still facing down, the surface of the pavement moving past me in a blur, I’m carried at a run, under the arms, by the ankles, back through the emergency exit doors we came out of this morning, through the laundry room, the sound-deadened luxury lift, as if the day is being rewound all around me.

Someone throws open the door to my suite — every light inside blazing bright — and I’m set down, none too gently, on hands and knees on the floor. My damp hair hangs down stringily on either side of my face. I can feel that the soles of my feet are cut up and wet and filthy.

I look up to see a man in a suit standing over me, with a kind face and a courteous manner. He’s stocky and paunchy and clean-shaven, with a leonine head of grey, wavy hair and a tie like a stockbroker, all the stripes running upwards.

‘I’ve never seen you before,’ I say, squinting at him as someone helps me to stand. ‘Gianfranco?’

‘No,’ he says kindly in Italian-accented English. ‘But Gianfranco
did
send for me. And if you’re a good girl, you won’t ever have to see me again.’

Moving quickly for someone so large, he adjusts something just out of my line of sight and I feel a small stab of pain in one arm.

And just like that, I’m gone.

There’s the sensation of rapid movement, of leagues being eaten up in the space between two heartbeats. I’m flying, oh God, I think I’m flying. Something that’s been denied me for so long.

In the instant I recognise what I’m doing, I feel an intense wave of almost paralysing fear, but, also, exhilaration. And the two emotions could not be more distinct.

I’m looking down at the distant snow, so far below, a dull white in this moonless night. The air whistling past me is colder than any mortal could stand, but I’m moving through it easily, as if I’m a bird. Or an angel. Soundlessly, with purpose.

Watching the great distances pass beneath me, I feel my gorge rise, as if I’m going to be sick. I’m suffused with fear, almost rigid with it, and yet I fly on, under cover of darkness: over snow, over standing stones, ravines and valleys, one mountainous pass after another on which ski lifts and cable cars stand idle, all the floodlights out for the night. There’s no movement, no light, in the houses that I soar over unseen. The humans inside, they’re asleep. They’ll wake later, never knowing I was even here.

Am I … hurt? There’s a slight dragging pain in my side, as if I have a stitch, or I’ve been wounded. Not gravely; more of a flesh wound, a deep cut.

I’ll live. But it’s slowing me down, everything’s getting in my way, and I’m suddenly pierced through by so much rage, so much frustration, that I turn
my head to find a target for my fury. I see a double-storey house with a steeply pitched roof and quaint paintwork, empty flower boxes at all the windows, and a winding drive. There’s a collection of outbuildings, built in the same style, gathered around it. Humans and animals all asleep within.

I narrow my eyes at them. That’s all I do.
And set them all on fire.

The buildings burst into flame simultaneously.

Will it and it is done.

The night air is suddenly rent with screaming, the bellows of trapped beasts, the sounds of breaking glass, but I fly on. Torching anything, everything, I see. Because I can; because I am of a mind to do it.

Snow-covered trees with bare, frozen limbs as hard as iron; byres, barns, farmhouses, cars, convenience stores and cathedrals — all gone in seconds. Roads, cobbled laneways, truck stops, turn-offs, flyovers — all these become rivers of flame, the asphalt turning liquid, like mud.

Things that should not even burn — I set fire to them all. And I laugh.

A ringing laugh. Masculine.

There’s a sudden sensation of distance — as if I’m zooming out, refocusing, before zooming back in —
and I realise that it’s not me doing this at all. Someone else is turning the world to fire and I’m just seeing it
through
his eyes. I’m somehow getting his feelings and mine, together. Unshakeable confidence versus sheer terror; triumph versus horror.

Of course, all the negative emotions I’m feeling are mine.

I know that laugh. Amusement tinged with cruelty.

How often did I hear it with my own ears when I was me, inhabiting my own body? How often have I heard it in my dreams?

Luc?
I scream silently.
Desiste! Stop!

But if Luc hears me, he gives no sign. Everything seems so real, it’s as though I’ve been given a temporary line into his head, as if I’ve hijacked his senses, shrugged on his skin. But what I’m seeing is unspeakable. The night sky lit up with flames, with suffering. It can’t be real, can it?

I’m hit by a sudden recollection. Of a time when the universe was young. Of Luc disrupting the settled orbits of planetary bodies, sending them careening into each other, displacing objects billions of times our size, mass and density, just because he could. Life had been an endless game to him, the universe his
playground. But back then it had not teemed with the life it teems with now, and what he’s doing at this moment screams
wrongness
to me.

Luc crosses a final peak and soars down the heavily populated flank on the other side of the mountain — house after house built in terraces down the steep incline. In the distance I see a large body of water, a handful of lights gleaming upon its banks.

As he flies unerringly towards the vast lake in the darkness, he picks out main streets, town squares, winding highways, clock towers, restaurants, cafés, villas, jetties, pontoons, sailboats and cruisers and casually sets fire to them all. The lakeside is soon surrounded by a wall of flames reaching high into the night sky and sirens quickly fill the air, the lights of emergency vehicles wind up the twisting roads into the foothills, people spill out into the streets, into the gardens of their homes, to see the skies lit such an unnatural, incandescent red. Red laced with a blue so pale it is almost white.

Holy fire.

Except it can’t be holy fire because these people are not our enemies. They have done nothing to deserve our wrath. How could anyone even justify using it this way?

It’s the dead-heart of winter, with everyone inside away from the cold. Maximum damage, minimum effort. The loss of life would be terrible, if this were not a dream.

Luc continues, following the main body of the waterway until it splits into two tributaries. He chooses the right fork, flames rising in his wake along the right bank.

Through his eyes, I look back at each town or village that has been claimed by fire, feeling both exultation and nausea, his emotions still weirdly entangled with mine. I can’t understand how this is happening — how I can see what he sees, feel him,
be
him.

I know our connection is strongest while I lie sleeping, but this is something else altogether. Luc has always been so guarded, so unknowable. But tonight, I think I’m actually inside his mind, or what my sleeping self imagines his mind is like. And what I’m seeing there is utterly repellent.

When I knew him — when he and I lay entwined beneath the fragrant boughs in that hanging garden he created solely for me — I could never have imagined him capable of any of this.

This
Luc? I don’t even know.

I’m so busy looking backwards at the devastation Luc has wrought that I don’t see her until she is upon me,
us
, with a rush of air, of silent fury. I am buffeted by her wings, the giant wings that are unfurled across her back like a warning of the terror to come.

I know those dark eyes, that wavy hair, that face that is as familiar to me — and as dear to me, I realise — as my own face. My true face. It’s Nuriel.

She’s moving so quickly that I only catch a glimpse of her. Her wide eyes are dark with anger as she cries in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘You may go no further, Luc. No further.’

She seems to draw a flaming sword out of nowhere, out of thin air, it’s suddenly just there in her hand, and she’s suspended in the air before him — before me, the ghost in the machine — with contempt and righteous anger in her eyes.

She’s more beautiful than the sun, and completely terrifying. Every part of her seems made of electricity, or lightning; the locks of her dark, wavy hair snake out around her face as if she has suddenly turned into that gorgon of myth, the Medusa. I can’t reconcile the gentle, playful creature who was my friend with this vision of terror and beauty. She seems ready to slay Luc, or die trying.

Luc laughs again, hatred in his voice as he replies, ‘I was the highest of you all. You were
nothing
before, never my match! Why dare hope that you could stop me now?’

‘I’m only the first line of defence,’ she tells him fiercely. ‘Even if I am defeated, they gather to end your misrule.’

‘If they believe
you
will buy them all enough time to reach Milan, their confidence is
misplaced
,’ Luc sneers.

Suddenly, the air before him — before me — seems to displace with the heat of a thousand suns. The air itself bursts into flame and there’s a flaming sword in Luc’s hand — in mine — and there are giant wings flaring across his back — as if they are mine, too — and Luc rises into the air and falls upon Nuriel without warning, sword upraised.

I scream at her:
Fuge!
Flee!

But my cry is silent, and goes unheard, and Luc slashes down without hesitation, his burning blade driving at a point between her right earlobe and her jawline. He follows the blow swiftly with all his weight, as if he would strike Nuriel’s head from her neck in one blow.

She was his friend once, too, a long time ago. But there’s no glimmer of past affection. Certainly, no mercy.

It’s true that her strength did not ever equal his, because I glimpse genuine fear in Nuriel’s eyes as she brings up her own blade, clumsily, just in time, so that the two cutting surfaces meet with a crack of energy at impact, like a lightning strike. Her blade is caught at an awkward angle between their two bodies.

Luc and Nuriel grapple together, their blades locked for what seems an eternity, spinning and falling through the air in a dance both graceful and deadly. And the whole time, I’m completely disorientated, because it feels as if it’s
me
fighting Nuriel.

The cold air whistles past us as we fall and tumble through the icy winter air, the whole world red with flame at the peripheries of my sight. Nuriel’s eyes bore into mine with contempt, with barely concealed terror, and she bares her teeth against me, crying,
‘Haereticum!’

Heretic. The word causes a little catch in my breathing. What could she mean?

Luc drives down inexorably upon Nuriel’s blade, pushing it in towards the sweet curve of her face. I
sense her beginning to falter as he bears down upon her with all his ferocity.

‘If they are all as weak as you,’ he hisses, eye to burning eye, ‘then your rule is truly over and mine? Begins now. I ascend even as you
fall
.’

He roars the last word, and the light of his blade seems to leach into the light of Nuriel’s. His blade is beginning to cut through. In seconds, she will be dead, her energies scattered.

But I
know
Nuriel.

And even before my eye catches her doing it, I sense her flow away from the point of weakness, the breach, until almost the only thing left of her is her broken blade, and then that, too, unravels and dissolves. Nuriel has become a slipstream of particles so fine and luminescent, Luc can’t hope to catch it or bend it to his will.