23.2

 

She shifts her weight backward—just a fraction, just enough to signal intention—and the air around her thickens, her vision shifting slightly, as if she’s seeing two versions of herself a second apart from each other, though whether she is the first one or the second, she has no idea. It’s purely a visual illusion, not a physical one like a force holding her in place. It’s subtler than that, it feels like trying to step out of her own reflection.

Her body leans backward but her foot doesn’t move. It feels like her muscles are doing everything she requires of them – contract, lift the foot, shift weight – but there is no alteration of her position in space. The world stays exactly where it is in relation to her. A soft pressure gathers at her sternum, not pushing her forward or pulling her back but simply holding her in the exact spot where the Nephilim’s hand meets hers.

Her eyes narrow as she exhales. “Let me go,” although she isn’t sure who she’s speaking to. The Nephilim? The horse inside it? The Artist, who seems to have orchestrated all this?

The Nephilim’s mind steadies her and pulls her out of the sudden panic that threatens to overwhelm her with a tide of what-ifs and regrets. She feels it as the sensation of a hand on her back, encouraging her to breathe gently and regain her balance. It is reminding her that she is standing between two worlds at once: the mortal world, where Steve has his hand on her arm, where Paul wants something he can hit in order to help, and where the assistant exists in some unknown state between life and death and the Spiritual world; the ancient memory of the Nephilim, the Artist and the other Quarters like herself.

It is reminding her of the simple truth that she cannot step back from her own self, but hasn’t she already? Her brief flash of life as a mortal has changed her. She may no longer be Roisin, the girl who wanted to be famous, but nor is she Famine, one of the infamous Four Quarters of the Apocalypse. She has become something else entirely.

She takes a deep breath and tries again. Muscles contract. Her heel lifts, she shifts her weight to back away from the Nephilim, but again the world refuses to let her go. She has become the endlessly spinning gyroscope, fixed in one position.

Steves pulls on her arm harder, as if he can tell she’s trying to move, but instead of eliciting and reciprocation from Roisin, it is he that is brought off balance, as if he’s been trying to move the pillar of a cathedral by pulling it toward his chest. She is rooted to the floor as firmly as Catholicism into Italian culture as if the space around her has decided that she is exactly where she should be. “Roisin—” His voice cracks. “Roisin, please. Come back.”

She turns her head toward him and he flinches from the look she gives him. She is not entirely present and reflected in his eyes she can see her own, and it’s like looking at the binary stars of Sirius. Part of them are the green eyes she was born with, but part of them hold the ancient darkness of the cosmos. Haff of her is here, in the shape she’d occupied all her short life and part of her is there, held in the memories the Nephilim has of her.

A tear slips out, burning across the curve of her cheek, hotter than the drop of Steve’s spittle was cold, burning like the fires of Tartarus, “I’m trying.” She really is, but the truth is more terrifying than Steve could ever imagine in however long his life has been. She cannot step away because the Nephilim is stopping her. It is herself that is preventing her from returning to the mortal world.

Now the Nephilim senses her struggle, and the touch of its mind is confused. Its thoughts whirl faster and more nebulous than a galaxy, but she can feel its question pressing against her consciousness. It wants to know why she is trying to escape her own Self.

But the truth is simple and another tear confirms her resolution. “I’m not that anymore.”

The horse inside its chest pulses once more, a deep, resonant thrum that vibrates through her bones and Roisin gasps as she realises she cannot step away because to do so would be to deny the ancient history she embodies. The shape she thought she had abandoned is still the shaper of her, no matter what its size and form might be. It is still her. Her body. Her essence. Her.

The part of her she has been ignoring for years, the part she buried under human routines and small comforts, and the soft anonymity of an ordinary life is only a shadow of her Self. When she tries to pull her hand from the Nephilim’s, that buried part rises like a tide under a full moon, and she feels it settle into place with a quiet, devastating clarity.