Muse

She’s on the verge of shutting the door when I call out, ‘Wait!’

Gia gives me a wary look through the gap. ‘What? What now?’

I scan this stranger’s sea of belongings ruefully. ‘Why don’t you … help me?’ I say.

Gia goes incredibly still. ‘Help you?’ she says finally, wrinkling her nose and stepping slowly back through the door. ‘Like, what, physically dress you? I’m not supposed to touch “the presence”, remember? And the last time I suggested you weren’t rocking the outfit you had on, you threw a McQueen armadillo at me.’

I shake my head, bewildered by almost every word that’s just emerged from her mouth, doubly bewildered by the sheer volume of clothing in the room. Working out whether I’m ‘rocking’ my outfit has always been the least of my troubles when I wake up in someone else’s body with no memory of how I got there.

I look around the room, with literally no idea where to start. Most days, I have enough difficulty trying to blend into my immediate surroundings convincingly, without adding ambush photography to the mix.

‘I’m not having a good day,’ I plead, tapping the side of my head. ‘Help me to look —’

‘What?’ Gia shoots back, hands on hips. ‘Like a cashed-up, colour-blind rock chick meets vintage-boho, Euro-princess slut?’

‘Say that again?’ I’m taken aback at the venom in her words.

She shrugs. ‘Well, you asked. And it makes a change from having my opinion completely ignored. The way you dress may have made you famous, but it’s a little too schizophrenic and look-at-me for my tastes. You may have the “best body in the business” to go along with that “face of the century” of yours, but you kind of put too much information out there, if you know what I’m saying.’ Gia’s expression is a weird mix of envious and dubious.

She sighs. ‘You’re right though — you actually do need help. You’ve started appearing at the top of “What’s Not Hot” lists in fashion magazines lately. People are saying you’ve lost your fashion mojo. Bad news in your line of work, darling.’

She moves through the sea of cases and bags with a critical eye and picks out a narrow pair of soft, leather trousers, low-rise, long and lean, in a warm chocolate colour. Then she rifles through some kind of jumbo-sized duffle bag on wheels and pulls out a crew-neck, long-sleeved, body-skimming, dusky-olive cashmere tunic that falls to mid hip. ‘These will have to do.’

She comes to a standstill and scans the room for several minutes until she finds what she wants — a hard travelling case that comes up to just above her waist, filled to the brim with shoes stored in neat pairs. ‘Just what I was looking for,’ she says as she draws out a gleaming pair of black patent heels — so shiny, I can see my face in them — with criminally high heels, six inches at least, and bright red soles.

‘I can’t move in those,’ I protest. They look like the claws of some alien creature.

‘You’ll have to,’ Gia replies, distractedly. ‘You know as well as I do that flat shoes won’t lift the ensemble the way these will. Plus, you’re Irina, and Irina never wears flats. Wedges maybe, clogs at a stretch.’ Gia wrinkles her nose at the idea.

‘Always something with a heel,’ she insists, ‘to make you seem even less like the rest of us mere mortals when you stalk by with your head in the clouds.’

‘Where is it?’ Gia mutters, as she grabs a matched set of silky, floral-print lingerie and throws it at me, too. ‘Did we pack them in the medium trolley case? Or cram them all in the hatbox?’ She laughs triumphantly as she unclasps the fastening on a hatbox as big as a bass drum and draws out a midnight-black felt cloche hat with intricate pleating extending over one ear so the leading edge extends upwards slightly, like a bird’s wing.

‘Perfect. It’ll look fantastic against the warm, neutral tones and all that long hair of yours. And let’s finish it off with that long, black, military-style shearling overcoat Andreas sent you from his studio in Madrid last winter. It’s the only one he ever made in that particular design. You’ve never worn it and I know that hurt his feelings enormously. When I ran into him backstage at the London shows this year, his lips were practically trembling as he asked after you.’

Gia locates the overcoat in a huge case that opens outwards like a mini wardrobe complete with hangers. She drapes it over her arm with the other pieces she’s selected for me, the little hat perched over one small fist. ‘Hop to it,’ she says, wending her way back through the cases and holding her selections out to me.

‘What?’ I say, startled. ‘Right now? Here?’

It’s Gia’s turn to look shocked. ‘You’re, like, a model?’ she exclaims mockingly. ‘You stand around in your underwear all day — if you’re lucky — while fifteen people work on your hair and make-up and shove fabulously expensive clothes over your head. I’m the one who’s always telling you to put some goddamn clothes on, remember? So, needless to say, I’ve seen it all before. But I’ll look away from “the presence”,’ she snorts loudly, ‘if that’ll help.’

I have no choice but to scramble out of the cashmere sleep suit I’m wearing and into the things Gia’s chosen for me, in record time. She looks at me clinically when I’m done, turning me in the direction of a full-length mirror set up in the corner of the room. The colours she’s selected highlight Irina’s cream and roses complexion, her toffee-coloured hair and huge, wide-set, dark eyes fringed by extravagant dark lashes.

Gia tugs the black cloche hat onto my head, twisting and pulling at it until she’s satisfied with the angle of the delicate bird wing arcing above one brow. She pulls a set of bobby pins from a large, monogrammed vanity case and secures the hat firmly.

‘Fabulous,’ she murmurs as she jams the last pin in place. ‘And put these on when we get outside or you’ll be sorry.’ She hands me a soft, sleek pair of short, hand-stitched, shearling-lined, black leather gloves.

I shove them into a pocket of my ankle-length coat and climb reluctantly into the shoes, feeling as if I’m going to tip forward onto my face at any moment.

‘I can’t do this!’ I exclaim, screwing up Irina’s small and exquisite nose.

Gia frowns as she takes in my awkward, slump-shouldered, turtle-necked posture. ‘What you mean is, you can’t do this unmedicated. Well, tough, because it’s not my job to facilitate your self-harming tendencies. Stand up straighter, and it won’t seem like you’re falling downhill. You need to redistribute your weight. I can’t believe I’m telling you this — your memory really must be shot to hell.’

I make subtle adjustments to Irina’s posture until Gia stops frowning.

‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘It’s perfect. A little bit rock and roll, a little bit minimalist-with-an-edge, and the hat is just quirky enough to signal that you’re a fashion insider, you speak the language. You couldn’t take a bad photo in that outfit. From any angle.’

‘It feels like torture,’ I respond dryly, feeling my feet going numb.

Gia laughs. ‘Beauty hurts.’

She’s about to say something else when a doorbell peals so loudly, I almost jump. I’m reminded of the small matter of locating Ryan Daley, which completely slipped my mind during the insane amount of time it took us to find me something to wear. Irina’s heart gives a sudden lurch.

‘You promised you’d help me find him, find Ryan,’ I remind Gia.

She shakes her head warningly, already heading towards the door. ‘Not now,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘That will be Felipe, and Felipe is not accustomed to being ignored.’ Her tone is derisive.

I trail awkwardly after her in the crippling, shiny heels she picked out for me to wear. When she flings open the door to my suite, I see a handsome, sun-bronzed, strong-featured young man standing there. Mid to late twenties, with black, slicked-back hair. He’s shorter than I am in my absurd footwear, and broad-shouldered, muscular, powerful-looking. He’s wearing a single-breasted charcoal grey suit over a black turtleneck, a camel-coloured overcoat and expensive-looking, spit-and-polish black lace-up brogues. He’s carrying a pair of cream and tan, perforated leather driving gloves in one hand. As he follows Gia into the stately sitting room of the suite, I see open admiration in his dark eyes. For me.

Even though I consider myself impervious to all forms of flattery, I find myself blushing suddenly under his appreciative and unblinking scrutiny. Even Ryan never looked at me the way this guy’s doing now. Like I’m good enough to … devour. I don’t know whether to feel pleased, or revolted.

‘¡Querida!’ the young man murmurs in a low, musical voice like an auditory caress. ‘Cómo ardo al pensar en su belleza, a pesar de su maldad infernal.’

Gia shoots Felipe a scandalised look.

I feel Irina’s face suddenly flush with a strange, hectic blood, her heartbeat kick into higher gear. It’s Spanish. I actually recognise it.

But I don’t recall any past facility with Spanish at all. So where is this coming from?

Literally, the guy had said —

Darling! How your beauty sets me on fire, despite your infernal evil.

I don’t know how it’s possible, but when I reach out for the words I need, the words I want to use, they’re somehow there.

‘Qué simpatico … como siempre, querido Felipe,’ I reply tersely. ‘But let’s speak English, for Gia’s sake, ¿le parece bien?’

There are accents on all the wrong places, accents where there shouldn’t be any, but from the looks on both their faces, I’ve just made perfect sense in a language I shouldn’t even know.

‘You’re speaking English for my sake?’ Gia says disbelievingly.

The confident smile on Felipe’s handsome face falters for a moment, before it’s smoothly re-established. ‘Your Spanish, Senorita Zhivanevskaya,’ he says, his perfect white teeth showing, ‘he has improved very much.’

‘Yes, “he” has,’ Gia mutters. ‘Out of sight. So tell me again, Irina, why you insisted on hiring that creepy translator for the Costa Rican swimsuit shoot last month?’

From the look on Gia’s face, it’s clear that the only languages Irina’s supposed to have are Russian and bitchy conversational English.

‘Sit,’ I tell Felipe, still pretending I didn’t hear Gia’s question. I gesture at the two pairs of elegant winged armchairs facing each other either side of a monumental glass and steel coffee table bearing porcelain cups and saucers and a sleek, silver, lidded jug.

Gia and I take our places across from Felipe and, for a moment, I do not hear the icily correct small talk that the two of them are exchanging. Lela Neill hadn’t spoken Spanish. Neither had Lucy, or Susannah. Or Ezra before them. But with a name like Zappacosta, I’m guessing that Carmen might be able to. And now I can, too? Even though I passed through Carmen’s body … two lives ago? Or does this ability come from somewhere else, some when else? Some ‘life’ even further back than the time I was Carmen?

The cool-hued room seems to tilt. There’s a sudden sensation that I’m freefalling, though my physical body sits here, unmoved. What’s inside always so very different from what’s outside.

As if from very far away, I hear Gia enquire frostily of our guest, ‘Tea?’, before picking up the silver thermos and pouring a shot of hot, dark amber liquid into one of the crested white teacups on the table before her. It’s a trait so peculiar to the English, and as I direct my unfocused gaze at the steam coming off the surface of the drink, I can almost make out every particle rising.

Felipe shakes his head dismissively, unfolding a road map from a pocket of his overcoat. He spreads it out on the table between us with his tanned, long-fingered hands, before uncapping a gold and onyx fountain pen.

Something tugs away at my subconscious, begging to be made plain. That small voice inside me, that’s always one step ahead of my waking self, murmurs: Gabriel, Uriel, Michael, Jegudiel, Selaphiel, Jeremiel, Barachiel, Raphael.

Eight names more familiar to me than my own. Eight names that could be a poem. Or … a prayer.

Inexplicably, that YouTube clip of Uriel walking on water, the one Ryan had told me to look at, replays itself in my head. He was gliding across the surface of an icy Scottish loch, searching for something or … someone?

And on the heels of that thought — the recollection that when I touch someone — someone unguarded, someone human — their thoughts and emotions, even their memories, become like an open book to me.

How are these things even remotely connected to the fact that when I’m pushed to the brink I can hurt people with my bare hands?

Twice now, I’ve almost torn myself free of the body I’ve been placed in. It happened once when I was Carmen, when I was wild with fear and anger. It happened again when I was Lela. I’d placed a hand upon Lela’s mother as she lay dying and had somehow seen inside her cancer-ridden body. I’d even tried to heal her from the inside out — before I’d been forced to return into Lela.

I hadn’t been able to save Karen Neill, because Azraeil had already marked her for his own.

Azraeil. I frown.

Like the Eight, he’s one of the elohim. But one thing sets him apart from the others. His touch can bring … death. Or restore life in equal measure.

Traits. They’re all traits, I realise suddenly. These things I can do that I can’t explain. Even that strange ability Azraeil has, which no one else possesses — mastery over death itself. All these are traits. Peculiar to our kind. In us, when we were first … created.

I squeeze my eyes shut, chasing down thoughts that refuse to come clear.

Gia turns to me and queries, ‘Irina? What do you think of braving Via Broletto today? Too risky?’

I shake my head blindly, waving at her, at Felipe, to decide.

When I was Lela, I met a rogue malakh — a kind of supernatural messenger — who’d chosen exile on earth rather than fulfil the task for which it was created. Somehow it had glimpsed me inside Lela’s skin; had claimed that it could detect the protective mark of the elohim upon me. It had begged me to intercede with the elohim on its behalf because it needed a human body in which to live out its days. For in turning away from its original purpose, it had doomed itself to an eternal and painful half-life as a wandering, formless spirit.

It had envied me — me! — and the fact that I was constantly being reborn in a succession of mortal bodies.

Elohim. When I was Lela, even probing the meaning of that word had caused me unimaginable pain.

But now, that small voice inside me, which is always, always, one beat ahead of my waking self, whispers: Most holy, most high. Together with a thousand others that no mortal alive has ever seen, or could ever give name to. Whatever you may be now, however estranged you have become from each other, you were all once created … equal.

And to you all: the ability to speak in tongues, both new and ancient.

And to you all: the power to bend matter and spirit, the laws of nature, to your will; to suspend time, move matter, occupy objects both animate and inanimate; mimic both the living and the dead; transport yourselves from place to place in the space between two heartbeats.

The very embodiment of paradox.

My eyes fly wide as I finally see — what I should have seen all along.

Grief enfolds me suddenly in its wings, grasps my borrowed heart in its black talons. When I lost Luc, when I lost any notion of context, of history, of ‘home’ — that casual ability to bend the laws of nature to my will — I lost my way. In one moment, I lost everything.

All of us were created with extraordinary abilities no human being could ever comprehend. And most extraordinary of all these? The ability to atomise and re-form at will. Like water, like an unstable element that can shift between phases, I should be able to change states in a heartbeat. To become permeating yet impermeable, boundless yet infinitesimal.

It’s much, much more than just the ability to possess another living creature or to shape-shift. It’s — how do I put it? — the ability to turn the burning matter of which I am made into a weapon, a living sword, pure and directed energy. Will it and it is done.

It’s something unique to all of us. We who are unkillable and immortal, unless one of our own kind seeks to destroy us.

Ah, yes. The rules — and there are rules, one must know them in order to contravene them — come back to me, unexpectedly, from some long buried oubliette in my mind.

The Eight. Even Azraeil. What they are, I am. What they are, Luc is, too.

We elohim.

We High Ones.

We … archangeli.

Archangels. It’s the name for what I am.

At the realisation, I seem to catch fire within, and I wonder how it is that Gia and Felipe cannot see me burning.

What happened to me?

CHAPTER 4

Gia and Felipe continue to argue over potential routes and traffic conditions, road surfaces and the forecast for rain, while inside Irina’s slight and mortal frame my spirit burns and burns.

How had I not seen this before?

How am I able to see it now?

When I was Lela, it was as if certain things had been placed off limits by the Eight, were deliberately ringed around, in my mind, by fire. Just probing the meaning of the word elohim, even the name Carmen Zappacosta, had caused an electrical storm in my head, raw and immediate pain.

But not … today.

And soon, maybe, I’ll again be able to control that strange process of atomisation that happened to me once when I was Carmen, and once when I was Lela. And when I’m able to do that? Nothing will ever stop me again.

I’ll be free.

I’m suddenly gripped by a ferocious urgency. Luc thinks that I need negative emotions like rage or fear to trigger the process of atomisation, of unbecoming. But what I’m feeling now? Is a terrible sense of hope, of … possibility. And maybe that’s enough.

While Gia and Felipe continue to argue, I turn inward, seeking to separate the burning strands of myself from the mortal vessel I’ve been forced into. I follow them down.

Down.

I am as a dark maze, a tangle of roots. Disorder masking some kind of pattern, deliberately broken, deliberately … twisted.

Behind Irina’s eyes, within her rigid body, I’m shivering into a billion pieces as I reach out for that strange, dissociative state in which I seem capable of anything.

Felipe’s and Gia’s voices, the contours, textures and colours of the real world, begin to bleach out as I dissolve inwards, fade down, even though concrete reality is in evidence everywhere around me — in the seated figure to my right lifting the teacup to her purple-stained mouth, in the museum-quality furnishings, the lovely costly floral arrangements that already smell, to me, as if they are in a state of advanced decay. My perspective grows hazy and the room, the voices, seem to stretch and warp in different directions around me as if time, space, light, sound, all can yield, all can bend.

And I know that it’s happening again, that I’m actually pulling it off, and it’s no accident. I’m beginning to atomise. I’m following the linkages, the switchbacks, the false trails and complex whorls and spirals, the broken pattern that the Eight have somehow cast me into. As if I am a cave diver, a pearl fisher, seeking a source.

And I find it. All paths lead to a point that cannot be followed further, cannot be unravelled. Irina’s body slumps against the seat back as I reach towards that anchor point and try to pull myself free.

But, though I’m like mercury now, like vapour, some part of me remains knotted tightly in place, tethered to Irina’s body, by some diabolical means I cannot unravel. Though I gather myself over and over with increasing desperation, I cannot sunder the knot that keeps me chained to her. And I know that it is the vital part, the part that is keeping me earthbound.

A small choking sound escapes Irina’s lips.

So small that Gia’s cup pauses only momentarily on its way to her mouth, before she completes the action and leans forward to point at the map spread out before her.

As I rage through the nerve endings and sinews, the flesh, wet matter and bone that Irina is made of, seeking a way out, a flaw, a loophole, I feel Irina’s soul in here, too. Locked away tightly, like a kernel, a hard knot, her soul twisted and turned in on itself, like a möbius strip. To keep it out of harm’s way. To free up this vessel for my use.

And if I am released? I have to hope that her soul will be freed at the same instant. Or the body will die.

Abruptly, the weird sensation of unbecoming reverses, as if I am pulled back by a cord, by an elastic band, and I coalesce again inside Irina’s skin, behind her eyes, as if I am her, and she is me, and there is no gap, none at all, between us.

How long have I been gone? A heartbeat, maybe. Surely nothing more. But I’m breathing heavily and my sudden anguish burns so fiercely and so bright that I must jam my aching left hand inside my coat so the others in this room will not see it glow with that telltale flame that is as corrosive as it is lovely.

But Gia sees that something is amiss — from Irina’s posture? The muscles of her face? — because Gia has sharp eyes and is paid to see everything about her employer.

‘You look so pale!’ she exclaims. ‘What’s the matter, Irina? Are you unwell?’

Unwell?

I have to cover my mouth with my right hand so that the scream building inside me won’t escape and destroy the physical world.

I want to tell them that I was never supposed to be here, that it’s all some terrible mistake. That I’m still paying for something I did once, a long time ago, that I can’t even remember.

And the ones who are making me pay are the eight most powerful beings in the universe, the highest among us all that were first created, the ones to whom all but Azraeil must bow down, because death bows to no one, death is a force unto itself. Only these eight archangels might guess at what is in the heart and mind of our absent creator, for They were formed to be His regents, His princes, and to call us all to order. It is They who have done this to me.

I hear Gabriel’s voice again, as clearly as if he were here, now, in this room: I would rather have been put to the sword myself than endure what you have.

What crime? What crime did I commit to deserve this?

I want to tell Gia all of this, but there’s no point, because she would never understand. Never believe how it could even be possible for a vessel as small, as narrow, as a human body to contain everything that I am, everything that I was before. I’m like a centaur, a gorgon, a harpy. Something ancient, mythical, made up. A cautionary tale, a fable. Unreal.

I’m bent over my burning left hand, struggling to contain the pain, and Gia reaches out to me, but I pull away sharply. When I’m feeling this way, I’m dangerous, and people invariably get hurt.

Once — two lifetimes ago — I made myself a promise that my time would soon come. That one day, not too far away, it would no longer be about just surfing the next wave, just holding on, just surviving; it would be about me. And that time is now. Because staying safe, doing nothing, keeping out of sight, has never been my way. I know it now for a truth. The Eight have forced me to be so many things that I’m not, for far too long.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ I tell Gia and Felipe fiercely through my pain. ‘If I don’t get out soon, I’m going to go mad. You both work for me, right? I hold the purse strings, I call the shots?’

Gia nods, frightened by something in Irina’s expression. Felipe is very still, watching guardedly with his dark, arrogant eyes.

‘So you’re going to start doing things my way,’ I rasp. ‘I’m done with waiting. I don’t care how you do it, or what it costs to make it happen, but I want you to find someone for me and bring him here. Now. His name is Ryan Daley.’

Gia’s unusual eyes widen at the unexpected request, and her dark brows snap together as I rattle off Ryan’s mobile number — committed to memory two lives ago — and the URL for the social networking site Lela Neill befriended him on.