20.8

 

She’s holding on but Paul is slipping away. She can see him going, bit by bit, synapse by synapse. He isn’t dying, or at least, his body isn’t. Nor is it collapsing under the pressure of the battle, he is just slipping, like someone standing on an outcrop of rock when it gives way from too much winter rain. His eyes lose their focus again, his breath stuttering like the racking sobs of a teenage girl whose heart has been broken, his shoulders judder in small, involuntary movements,

His heartbeat has an echo to it; the footsteps of an unseen predator following her home in the darkness, and she feels her own heartbeat answering his — not in sympathy, but in resonance. Her horse is calling out to her through every fibre of his being.

Her throat tightens. “Hold on Paul,” she whispers, but she knows she asks the impossible. He can’t hold on. He wasn’t meant to carry this horse. No human was.

The feeling of guilt is crushing her as much as her unconscious desire for the horse is pulling her apart. This is all her fault, her responsibility. Paul is holding her mantle for her. Her mantle. Her hunger. Her horse.

She hid from it. She ran from it. And in the final moment, she let it slip into the nearest open soul and now Paul is paying the price for her cowardice. Her eyes are stinging, although there are no tears to be shed; not for Paul, not for herself, not even for humanity, which will be destroyed if the rest of the seals are opened. And though she cannot cry she can feel her optic nerves breaking, trying to reform into lenses that can not only see the shards of a human soul, but can judge the weight of its purity also.

She steps forward despite herself. One step. Just one. Her body moves before her mind can halt the action. The pull between them tightens instantly — a snap of recognition, a surge of hunger, a rush of inevitability.

Paul gasps.

The Artist smiles at her movement, holding out one hand as if to guide a princess down a flight of stairs, or to help her mount her horse for a small canter in sunlit woodland. She doesn’t take it. She can’t.

Steve swears under his breath. She’s too close to Paul for him to risk getting between them. He would become the copper wire between two high-voltage electrode, and he would burn incandescently like the filament in a light bulb.

Roisin freezes. If she takes one more step, it’s over. She feels the truth settle into her bones: Paul is dying because she is hiding and the world will die if she stops. Her breath shakes as she whispers, barely audible, “I’m so sorry.”

She’s not apologising to the Artist, nor to Steve, or the world that might be torn apart because of her actions, but to Paul. Her friend and confidant, who stepped in to save her when she couldn’t, and sacrificed himself on the altar of a God he’d grown out of. Her voice was barely a whisper as she gave voice to her decision. “I choose—”

The flat shook. The walls rippled as one reality overlaid another, shifted, folded, merged, anticipated...

Paul clutched his chest. “Roisin—” His voice cracked. “It’s getting worse.”

Roisin felt it too — the hollow inside him pulling at her, calling to her, the echo of her horse reaching across the room like a hand searching for its rightful owner. She knelt in front of him. “Paul, look at me.”

He forced his face upward; forced his eyes to meet hers.

She saw it clearly now: the shimmer around him, the distortion in the air, the pulse that matched her own hunger — but out of place, out of rhythm; a heartbeat in the wrong body.

Paul whispered, “I can’t hold it. I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m not supposed to hold it.”

The Artist watched them with quiet satisfaction. “No. You’re not.”

Steve rounded on him. “You planned this.”

The Artist shrugged. “I encouraged inevitability.”

The assistant stepped forward, voice trembling. “You used him.”

“I used opportunity,” the Artist corrected. “He stepped in front of her at the exact moment the threshold opened. The horse reached for its rider. It found him instead.”

Paul’s breath hitched. “I didn’t mean to—”