19.4

 

Paul scowled. “Hardly the same thing, is it? I paid a lot of money for that.”

“Only with your expendable income. The ten-year-old who made it got paid just enough to keep her alive for a day.”

“Boys! Enough.” Roisin held up a hand as a warning. Her tone was sharp enough to make both men pause and look at her, then follow her gaze toward the hallway were the shadows shifted like coal smoke on a misty morning, seeping and gathering beneath a heavier presence.

Something moved.

Not loudly.

Not visibly.

But undeniably.

Roisin whispered, “Something else has come.”

The flat seemed to hold its breath. The air itself seemed to pause, as though the molecules had stopped vibrating. The hair on Paul’s arms rose; the primal response of the body to make itself look bigger and more of a threat to fight, despite the state of mind of its incumbent soul. The ends of the assistant’s fingers turned white as they dug into the chair cushion. Steve stepped instinctively closer to Roisin, his glasses back in place despite the threat of blindness from the strength of the fragments contained by not one, but possibly two angels.

Roisin didn’t move. She stood in the centre of the room, eyes half‑closed, as though listening to something far away. Or very, very close.

Paul swallowed loudly. “Roisin… what’s coming?”

She opened her eyes and for a moment — just a moment — they weren’t her eyes at all. Not glowing or inhuman, just ancient as if they had seen the soul of the whole world and judged it wanting. “Something that followed me back,” she whispered. “Something that recognised me.”

The assistant’s voice cracked. “Recognised you as what?”

Roisin looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “As Azrael.”

The assistant flinched.

Paul shook his head. “No. No, Roisin, you’re not— you’re not some… angel of death. You’re you. You’re—”

He stopped talking the moment Roisin took a step toward him. Not that her presence was especially threatening. It certainly wasn’t violent. It was simply too large for the room — like standing too close to a cliff edge, or a cathedral ceiling being restored under several stories of scaffolding, or walking through an open field the moment before a storm breaks.

Once again, she touched his arm gently. “I’m still me,” she said, her voice as soft as a summer breeze through clean linen hanging on an outdoor line. “But I’m also what I am inside.”

Steve’s voice was low. “And the you inside is attracting something.”

Roisin nodded. “Yes.”

The shadows thickened further, gathering like the smoke from a wax taper inside a jam jar. The air grew warmer as the pressure increased; the way a summer storm forces compresses the oxygen in the air until everyone complains of a headache. The walls seemed to lean inward, as though listening.

Paul took a step back. “What the hell is happening?”

Steve stepped forward a pace, as if he could protect Roisin from another angel, then sighed, admitting his helplessness in such a situation. “It’s manifesting.”

The assistant whispered, “Here? In the flat?”

Roisin’s breath trembled. “It’s not bound to a place. It’s bound to me.”

A soft sound drifted from the hallway.

Not footsteps.
Not breathing.
More like the rustle of a moth’s wings brushing battering at a surface that only existed in the imagination of a bat.

Paul’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Is that… the angel? What did you call him? Yabba Dabba?”

Steve’s laugh earned him a scowl from Roisin. “Yabamiah.” She said, shaking her head. “And no. I destroyed him. This is something else.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “Then what is it?”

Roisin looked toward the hallway.

Her voice was barely audible.

“The part of me that didn’t come back.”

The assistant stared at her. “What does that mean?”

Roisin pressed a hand to her chest. “When I was Azrael… I wasn’t whole. I was divided. The part that returned with me is the part that remembers being human. The part that stayed behind is the part that acts upon the will of God.”

Paul’s breath caught. “Acts how?”

Roisin swallowed. “As the Ending of All Things.”

The hallway darkened further.

A shape began to form — not a figure, not a silhouette, but a distortion, like heat haze in reverse. The air bent around it. The shadows recoiled. The temperature rose another degree.

Paul picked up the piece of stone he hadn’t touched in weeks and stepped in front of Roisin. “Stay behind me.”

Roisin didn’t move. “You can’t protect me from myself.”

Paul squared his shoulders, hefting the half-hewn lump of sandstone and cradling it into the hollow of his shoulder like a shot-putter at the Russian Olympics. “I can try.”

The assistant plucked at his arm. “Don’t go near it.”

Paul didn’t back away.