Chapter 19.1

 

The flat was too quiet.

Not the ordinary quiet of late evening, or the uneasy quiet after an argument — but the kind of quiet that feels like the air is waiting for something to arrive. Paul paced the living room in tight, anxious circles. The assistant sat rigidly on the harder of the two chairs, hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. Steve stood by the window, staring out into the dark garden as though expecting the night itself to knock.

None of them spoke.

The only sound was the creaking of floorboards as Paul paced, paced, paced and the battery-operated tick of the clock in the kitchen, amplified by a trick of the architecture and the sound-enhancing quality of the landlord’s cheaply applied decoration.

Until the temperature changed.

A soft drop — not cold, not warm, but empty, as though the air had been hollowed out. Paul stopped pacing. The assistant’s breath caught. Steve turned from the window, eyes narrowing.

The floorboards in the hall groaned with a sudden weight that wasn’t there a moment before.

Not loudly. More like the sigh of an old house as it remembers those residents it once loved.

Paul made it halfway to the door before Roisin stepped through it, moving around the corner from the direction of the kitchen. His face lit with relief until he paused to look at her properly, then it fell, slowly; the slow-motion film of a piece of fruit as it decays over a period of time, until it was an illustration of the taste of a shrivelled fig.

Roisin did not look like someone who had simply come home.

Her clothes were the same. Her hair was the same. Her face was the same — but her presence was different. The air around her felt thinner, stretched, as though she had walked through a place where the world had neither weight nor consequence and brought a piece of it back with her.

Paul was the first to speak. “Roisin… where did you go?”

She looked at him and he took a step back. Not because she frightened him — but because for a moment, he couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or through him. Her eyes held a depth that hadn’t been there before, a stillness that felt older than the room, older than the night, older than her. Her gaze was the thousand-metre stare of a young combat soldier in the Vietnamese war, no longer concerned with the mundanity of every life, for it knew that nothing could challenge the ending of it all.

“I had to finish something,” she said softly.

Steve slipped on his glasses and stepped forward. “Roisin. What did you see?”

She blinked slowly, as though returning from a long distance. She could feel herself as the two separate halves, although this time she was the earthbound one and the other – the one who could cut an angel into a dozen pieces – the one inside her head, barely conscious of the flesh-bound half attached inexorably to Mundis. “See? I saw nothing. I did not see. I was. Am.”

Steve’s laryngeal prominence bobbed as he swallowed hard and looked away. He took off his glasses and slipped them back inside his jacket pocket.

The assistant stood abruptly. “What does that mean?”

Roisin turned her head toward her. “I wasn’t just watching.”

Paul swallowed. “Watching what?”

Roisin’s breath trembled. “A battle.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “Between who?”

Roisin hesitated.

Then said, “Between what I was… and what I could have become.”

The assistant shook her head slowly, staring at her. “Roisin, you’re not making sense.”

Roisin stepped further into the room. The shadows shifted around her — not dramatically, not supernaturally, but subtly, as though the light couldn’t quite decide how to fall on her.

“I wasn’t Roisin,” she whispered. “Not there.”

Paul’s voice cracked. “Then who were you?”

She looked at him.

Steve spoke, his voice barely above a whisper but still loud enough to silence the entire room. Almost loud enough to silence the street, the city, the whole county. Low though it was, his voice came with the quiet certainty of a truth too large for denial.

“Azrael.”

The assistant gasped.

Paul shook his head. “No. No, that’s— that’s impossible.”

Roisin didn’t argue. She didn’t need to. The air around her carried the echo of something vast — not violent, not cruel, but inevitable. A presence that had stepped out of a place where endings were not feared, only understood.

Steve approached her slowly, carefully, holding out a hand as though he was approaching a wild animal that might bolt or break. “Tell me what happened.”

Roisin closed her eyes.

And the room dimmed.