19.2

 Not physically — but perceptually, as though her memory cast a shadow over the present. “There was a nothingness,” she whispered. “A place outside time. A place between Heaven and the world. A place where the world waits to be told what will happen next.”

Paul stared at her. “You’re talking like— like you were there.”

“I was,” Roisin said. “I stood upon nothing and I was everything there was and everything there will ever be. I felt the heat of the Beginning. I felt the cold forever of the End. I felt the silence that comes before and after. And I felt… him.”

Steve’s voice was low. “The presence.”

Roisin nodded. “He appeared in a ball of light. So much light. Wings. Fire. Purpose. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t cruel. He just was. And he wanted me gone from the world. From existence.”

The assistant whispered, “And you fought him?”

Roisin opened her eyes. She felt neither satisfaction nor triumph. Only the quiet weight of inevitability and the sadness of a return to the Circle of what she once counted as a brother… or that Azrael once counted as a brother… It was hard to differentiate what she felt from what the angel inside her did. She looked down, the threadbare carpet below her suddenly teeming with a myriad of lifeforms. Carpet beetles, dust mites, several fleas, a nation’s worth of bacteria including E. coli and staphylococcus; and in the floorboards below. several woodworm, silver fish and wood lice. Each one a living being. Each one as important to the world as the galaxy of beings that made up every person alive. She raised her gaze up again to Paul’s magnificent physique, his face, like everyone’s, host to a thousand microscopic arachnids called Demodex mites, each one with as much right to live out their brief life as the angel of uncounted centuries whose spirit she’d released to the void. Her voice was the echo of a scream into the night sky. “Yes.”

Paul’s voice trembled. “Why? Why would something like that want to fight you?”

Roisin looked at him with a sadness that didn’t belong to her. “Because he wanted to stop what I am.”

Steve stepped closer. “And what are you?”

Roisin swallowed. “I’m the Release.”

The assistant backed away. “That’s what he called you. The artist. He called you the release, too.”

Steve scratched the stubble covering his cheeks. “Release? What does that mean? Release from what? And who – or what – are you supposed to be releasing.”

Roisin took a deep breath that turned without warning into a yawn. The day had felt too long in its execution, or the world had been too short. She didn’t even know how much time had elapsed in the void, or what the angel inside her had used to sustain itself. Suddenly she felt so tired she could fall asleep standing up. She shook her head, unexpected tears pricking her eyes. “Hell.”

 

No. No, you said—” Her gaze flicked toward Steve. “He said you were Azrael.”

“I was,” Roisin said. “For a moment. For a lifetime. For something in between. I don’t know. Time didn’t work there.”

Paul ran a hand through his hair. “Roisin, this is— this is too much.”

Roisin stepped toward him.

He didn’t move.

She placed a hand on his arm. Her touch was warm, human. The touch of someone who had shivered in the cold of winter, basked in the warmth of summer, grown up over the course of a twenty-two short years and gestated for ten thousand more. Above all else, she was human.

But the air around her felt thinner, as though she had carried a piece of the void— a piece of the silence that comes before a truth too large for just one world to contain. “I’m still me,” she whispered. “I’m still Roisin. I'm still the waif who came back to Wolverhampton looking for a new life and a new body of work, and perhaps my fifteen minutes of fame."

Steve watched her carefully. “But you’re also something else.”

Roisin nodded. “Yes.”

"You still don't have any fragments of soul coming out of you." The assistant’s voice shook. “Did you win your battle?”

Roisin looked toward the hallway, where the shadows trembled and the echo of a tiny demon still lingered for a brief moment of existence. “Yes,” she said softly. “But wasn’t a victory.”

Paul swallowed. “Then what was it?”

Roisin turned back to them.

Her voice was quiet. Steady. Final.

“It was the beginning.”