19.91

 

Steve’s voice was barely audible. “Roisin… you’ve lost me now. What have you got hidden inside you? I’m guessing this is not a euphemism for something.”

Roisin closed her eyes. “And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.”

“You have a trumpet inside you?” Paul grinned. “That must play havoc with the scanners at the airport”

Roisin could see Steve suppress a smile before saying “time and place, mate. Time and place.”

“Sorry.” Paul looked her up and down, much as if she’d been a single woman sitting at the bar in a pub. “Where? You don’t look big enough.”

Roisin rolled her eyes. “I probably don’t look big enough to embody an angel, either, but I guara-fuckin-tee you I am one.” She took a deep breath and for a moment, the light in the room bent around her. “When the seals are opened the trumpets herald the final seven woes to befall the damned. So naturally, they want the trumpet back. We, however, want to stop the seals from opening. To stop our own manifestation. To stop the world from ending.”

The assistant whispered, “So you were split apart and hidden amongst the mortals.”

Roisin nodded. “Yes.”

Steve stepped closer. “And now?”

Roisin looked at him. Her voice was soft. “Now the hiding is over.”

The distortion surged forward.

Roisin cried out as the pressure inside her chest flared — a burst of heat and cold and agony that made her vision fracture. The room blurred. The walls bent. The ceiling rippled like water.

Roisin collapsed to her knees as the hallway flared with a light that was so bright she was put in mind of old recordings of the flash after an atomic warhead had been detonated. Even with her eyes closed, blue after images were imprinted on her vision and she could barely make out anything in the room. She felt momentarily adrift, back in the void between the worlds where she’d fought Yabamiah. There was a ringing in her ears like a chorus of dissonant angels, each one very slightly off-key as they sang a hymn to the glory of Abaddon, He who is Chained in the Pit.

Paul rushed forward, the assistant trying to grab him by the leg as he rose, but he brushed her off in his hast to protect the one person in the room who least needed protecting. “Don’t touch her!”

“She’s in pain!”

“She’s in alignment,” the assistant hissed. “If you touch her now, it will use you to anchor.”

Paul knelt beside Roisin, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands. “Roisin. Look at me.”

She tried. Her vision flickered — the room stretching, contracting, the shadows trembling like something alive.

“Stay here,” Paul placed his hands on either side of her face and raised her  head up in line with his. “Stay with us.”

Roisin focused on his words He had a face that would have inspired Michelangelo with a long, aquiline nose and high cheekbones. It was such a shame he had red hair. She’d hate to have red-haired kids. She’d seen the suffering they endured from the taunts at school. Inwardly she laughed at herself. She was never going to have children. They would just add to the whole Nephilim problem and they had enough to deal with regarding the ones already here. So, there was no need to keep herself in check in that regard. She strained forward toward him.

The pressure rose to such a degree she thought her head might be crushed inward, then it pulsed again — a deep, resonant thrum that filled her skull with a colour out of time.

And then—

Another pulse.

Not inside her but from the hallway as the distortion bulged outward like a burst pipe behind a wallpapered ceiling, before exploding and disgorging another angel, though this one black as pitch and flowing through the doorway like a tidal wave of silence. Flickers of the void shimmered across its body, flowing from its feet into multitudes of ebony wings, billowing from its back and vanishing into realms beyond the one they were compressed inside like packing pellets in a parcel from Amazon.

Roisin could feel her ribs cracking open, stretching outward like forward-facing wings; like many fingered hands reaching to grasp the incoming angel and cradle it inside her like a second heart, a second soul, a second jigsaw-piece that went toward completing her full picture.

She felt the dark angel coming toward her and welcomed it.

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