21.3

 

A moment ago, everything in Paul was straining toward her—toward the true rider, toward the mantle that recognises her as its origin. But now the pull veers sideways, toward the bedroom, toward the tall, emaciated figure of the Nephilim she made a portal for. Now she feels the shift like a rope snapping taut in a new direction.

Paul jerks. It is a sudden, involuntary jolt, as though a bone inside him has turned whilst its connective tissue is still attached to the others supporting it. He gives a heave, the one so well known from student days when one had taken something to excess and the body wants rid of it before further damage is caused. His head tilts like a dog straightening it oesophagus to eject the three-quarters of a rat its just bolted down

His breath catches and his eyes widen as Roisin sees the hollow inside him pivot, centring on the Nephilim instead of her. It feels like time has come to a halt as the air around him loosens. The distortion that had been tightening around Paul’s outline begins to thin, like fog pulling away from a lamp. His shoulders drop a fraction. His fingers unclench. His breath, though still ragged, stops stuttering.

Roisin sees the relief before he feels it.

The horse is about to leave him.

The Nephilim’s pull strengthens. He leans forward; a giant made of building blocks about to obey the call of gravity. Its presence begins to distort the space around it; an Instagram filter expanding the point of origin and dragging it across the background, causing the doorway around it the bend like a palm tree in a hurricane. The edges defining him press its presence harder against the surface of the world. Charcoal muscles ripple, deepen, darken, as though ink is being poured into them from the other side. Alabaster-painted skin colours and darkens, stiffens into contours and hollows, hardens into flesh the absent colour of the void.

Roisin feels the pull like the moon on a Pacific tide. Slow. Steady. Inevitable. She is the shore crab being pulled helplessly out to see, and it is only a matter of time before it is sent back at full speed to be smashed into its component shards against the rocks surrounding the bay. Why did she become an artist? Why can’t she have just taken up something easy to do like medicine of corporate law?

The horse responds.

Paul arches, then softens. His back lifts in a sharp, involuntary arc—one last surge of resistance, or perhaps the mantle’s final attempt to hold onto him. Roisin sees the flicker in his outline again, the momentary doubling, the sense of two rhythms trying to occupy the same body. He heaves again, a dry retch reminiscent of her father, the morning after a big night out when the toilet bowl fills with all the things he’s forgotten he d eaten: chips, curry, burgers and kebab meat in long, spiralling streams, aided by a waterfall of acrid-smelling, partially-digested beer.

He collapses forward onto his hands, breath shuddering out of him in a long, shaking exhale. The shimmer around him thins almost to nothing, and the stream that issues from his mouth is neither the black smoke of an old Supernatural series nor the rapid, pea-soup ectoplasm of The Exorcist, but a long stream of mucus and hair like she used to pull from the clogged shower drain in her communal student years, and it smelled about the same, too.

And Paul shouts — not in pain, but in sudden relief of a dislocated should suddenly clicking into place, or the crossing of a finish line after a gruelling triathlon. The horse inside him frees itself of his mortality. She can feel the moment when the hollow detaches, its coldness sliding past her like a shadow without form, a stream of icy hair and mucus and skin and shards of meat and bone as it surges toward the waiting Nephilim, settling into the space with the opened chest like a child nestled into its mother’s open arms.

Pauls sinks to the ragged carpet, the Assistant rushing to his side to cradle his head from the hard surface. He folds the way a person does when a weight they didn’t know they were carrying is suddenly lifted and all their muscles, held taut for so long, finally relax. His breath comes in short, stunned bursts and his hands tremble on the floor; a manifested deity to the myriads of tiny organisms, naked to the visible eye, that live there.

His outline stabilises, his breath deepens, his eyes focus, and he is finally himself again. Fragile, shaken to his core, but is whole once more and blessedly alone in his body.