Chapter 23.1

Steve’s attempt to break the connection doesn’t feel like an interruption to Roisin. Rather, it feels like a hand tugging at her sleeve while she stands on the edge of a different world. His hand clamps around her upper arm again, harder this time, fingers digging in with a desperation he doesn’t bother to hide. She can barely hear him, despite him shouting almost in her ear. “Roisin. Let go of it. Now.” His voice is shrill and urgent, cracking at the edges.

He’s not trying to pull her back anymore, he’s trying to pull her out of whatever she’s sinking into, whatever decision she needs to make, but she barely feels his grip because the Nephilim’s awareness is still touching hers, and the contrast between the two sensations is so stark it’s almost painful: Steve’s hand is warm, frantic, and human while the Nephilim’s mind is cool, steady, ancient, and still holds the shape of her in its memory; like the single missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle of the galaxy.

Her world splits into two layers. She sees Steve’s face—pale, terrified, jaw clenched so tightly it trembles; she hears Paul’s ragged breathing behind him, she senses the Artist watching with the stillness of fungal spores on the damp timbers of a lake house.

And like the lake around the house, the second layer is the one beneath the surface; more than can ever be imagined. Beneath the surface of this one is deeper and darker and infinitely more familiar; it is the Nephilim’s mind. Somewhere she has already travelled, and it is a place where Steve cannot follow.

He pulls harder on her arm, so hard that, absently, she knows there will be bruising left from his grip. If she were to die today, they would likely match those bruises to his hand and only the angels would know the truth. “Roisin, look at me!”

She turns her head, but she can’t bring her sight down to focus on him. Instead, she is looking through him, as if he is the reflection in a shop window and she’s looking at the brightly lit display racks of a bakery.

Steve’s breath stutters. She can see drops of spittle describing airborne arcs through the space between them, leaving rapidly-cooling spots on her skin. His eyes are dry, as if he’s gone too long without blinking, and his voice sounds far away, as if he’d speaking through a pair of tin cans connected by string. “Don’t do this. Don’t let it take you.”

Roisin shakes her head slowly. Yesterday she would have made light of her distaste of the spittle on her cheek, made a joke about it perhaps. Today she doesn’t care. It is merely the secretion of a mortal when she is an immortal being in human disguise. Nothing mortal can harm her. “It’s not taking me.”

“Then what is it doing?”

She takes a breath to speak, but her answer that rises comes not from her but from the Nephilim. She feels it react to Steve’s proximity, as if he’s infringing its personal space. It doesn’t seem alarmed but the Horst it is carrying pulses once. In warning? In recognition? She doesn’t know, but the air tightens like wire drawn through a reducing machine.

Steve flinches, instinctively pulling Roisin closer to him, away from the Nephilim, but the moment he does, she feels a sharp, sudden ache in her chest—like a USB drive being yanked away from a computer port before it finished transferring data and she gasps.

She can see by his expression that he thinks she’s in pain, but the feeling she has is of becoming unmoored like a lifeboat in a storm. She speaks, but to the Nephilim rather than to Steve, and her voice comes out softly, with a modulation quite unlike her broad Laverstonian accent and sounds as different to her normal voice as a sound recording on audiotape. “Did I leave you behind?”

Steve freezes.

The Nephilim’s awareness expands, brushing her mind with a sensation like fluttering kisses on the bare skin of her back. It is neither accusation nor recrimination, but merely a statement of fact, as cold and precise as the evidence given in court at her brother’s inquest.

You left the mantle. Not us.

Roisin trembles, tears of regret welling up behind her all-too-human eyes. What rider would leave their horse behind? Just because she doesn’t remember what the quarters did when they hid the Nephilim doesn’t mean the memory of it isn’t buried inside her somewhere.

Steve shakes her arm, his voice breaking. “Roisin, you’re not talking to it. You’re talking to yourself. You’re— you’re slipping.”

She turns her head toward him and sees the fear in his eyes clearly. His fear of the Nephilim is outweighed by his fear that he will lose her to the mantle and the great war that will rage across the heavens.

Her voice softens and she forces her mouth to offer the hope of a smile. “Steve… I’m still here,” but even as she says it, she feels the falsehood like a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. She is here, but she is somewhere else, somewhere older and deeper, where the Nephilim remembers her. There is a palpable distance between them that even Steve can see as plain as fractals from a rabbit.

His expression cracks as she almost begs. “Then come back.”

Roisin looks at the Nephilim, at the thousands of years held in the depths of its eyes, and she realises she doesn’t know how.