without flinching.
The light of the lamp has extinguished the strange glow of my skin. I turn to face the stranger warily, uncurling my fingers from inside my sleeves, senses on high alert.
Who is she? What does she want from me?
The day can’t come soon enough when I’ll never again have to grope forward through the fog of a stranger’s life, trying desperately not to give myself away.
The girl shakes her head in exasperation and tightens the belt of her patterned, blush-coloured kimono before heading purposefully across the room towards me. She stops a short distance away, looking me up and down critically.
‘You don’t need a PA, Irina, you need a nanny! You’ve got eight hours of fittings ahead of you today, and that’s just for starters. Hours of keeping perfectly still and taking direction, and we know those aren’t your best skills. Now let’s get you back to bed, okay? It’s called “beauty sleep” for good reason, and even people like you need it.’
The girl has unusual eyes, one brown, one blue, and a cute pixie face, strong dark brows, a precision-cut slanting fringe — sleek silent-movie-star hair. But she’s not, strictly speaking, beautiful. Not like … ‘me’.
I’m arrested by the reflection of the long, lean, exotic creature I see in the oval, gilt-framed mirror across the room. Touch the fingers of one hand to my face just to be certain that the young woman I’m looking at is me. Irina. Us.
Irina’s unusually tall — a fraction over six foot, without shoes — with pale, clear, downy skin, large, wide-set, dark, feline eyes and fine features, almost elfin ears. A wide, mobile mouth, a small, heart-shaped face and thick, poker-straight hair the colour of burnt caramel that falls almost to the waist, worn with a blunt-cut fringe that slices straight across her forehead above wickedly arched brows.
Irina’s clad in a fine, ivory-coloured cashmere sweater and bespoke matching trousers, very narrow, like cigarette pants, edged in pale blue ribbon. The most elegant sleepwear I’ve ever seen. Her build is lean and sinuous, narrow through the hips and shoulders, a swan’s neck, collarbones very prominent above the V-neck of the sweater. In the mirror, Irina’s knees appear wider than the midpoint of each thigh, and it’s no trick of the light.
I’m inhabiting a beautiful stick insect. A freak of nature.
Irina’s young. Younger than the stranger with the critical eyes.
But what’s more startling than all this is the reflection within the reflection. There’s another person framed in the mirror, even more preternaturally tall than the first. A ghost girl outlined in stardust, in moonlight. Who looks maybe sixteen on the outside, but seldom ever feels that way. With brown eyes, alabaster skin, a long, straight nose in an oval face framed by shoulder-length brown hair, each strand straight, even and perfectly the same. No will-o’-the-wisp like the other one, but broad-limbed, strong-looking. Stern-faced.
The second self, my true self.
The stranger laughs without amusement. ‘Admiring yourself again?’
It’s clear from her tone that she doesn’t see me — just the human shell I’m inhabiting today. The girl I’ve soul-jacked.
‘I suppose you can’t help it,’ she mutters, ‘with a face and body like yours.’
I think Irina looks like a doll-faced alien with spidery limbs, but there’s a sullen envy in the other girl’s words. She should sooner envy Frankenstein’s monster. For, despite her surface gloss, that’s what Irina is today — a composite being, cobbled together from remnants.
The girl standing there giving me the evil eye isn’t to know that the cycle that blights my existence has begun again: I’ve woken inside a new ‘host’ and am expected to rely on my wits, to hit the ground running, even though my entire world, my entire frame of reference, has shifted overnight. Though I call myself Mercy, I still don’t know what my real name is. And I’m invisible to the world entire. Undetectable to any, save my own kind.
My own kind.
I feel Irina’s brow furrow as I recall Gabriel disguised within the mortal, Sulaiman. The way I’m disguised now.
Eight of my own kind did this to me.
Unexpectedly, I’m assailed by monstrous images —
— of a steep, distant mountainside, a deadly crater upon one lonely slope, the soil scorched for leagues around, every tree, plant, animal and rock in the vicinity reduced to ashes, utterly destroyed.
— of a series of chambers, deep beneath the streets of an old city, piled high with the bones of the human dead. In the midst of this hellish domain — eight men. Each one unnaturally tall, preternaturally beautiful, youthful, ageless. Each one a being of pure fire, casting no shadow. They are gathered around a marble dais upon which something lies — blackened, twisted, burnt beyond recognition, barely alive.
What my inner eye sees there, upon that lonely tomb, brings another ringing scream to my lips.
The English girl covers her ears in pain, shrinking from me as if my cry has sharp edges to it, as if it’s a noise loud enough to wake an entire sleeping city.
‘Christ, Irina,’ she gasps when the sound finally dies away. ‘No need to scream the walls down! Everyone knows you can’t pass a mirror without looking at yourself. It was meant to be a joke, okay?’
My left hand is flaring in agony, and I jam it beneath my elbow, against my right side, so the girl will not see it glow with a pale, white fire.
That burnt and blasted thing I saw? It was me.
I’d gone to that place of nightmare to die. Years ago. Centuries. I’d woken, instead, to find my fate in the hands of that righteous cabal: the Eight.
And I’ve been under their absolute dominion ever since.
Let me name them for you, for their identities are no longer a mystery to me. I saw them in my mind’s eye, as Lela lay dying in Gabriel’s arms.
Picture them, standing there, judgment in their eyes, every one. Each as beautiful as the next, but all so different. In form, in temperament, in abilities.
Gabriel, the herald of mysteries. Flame-haired, emerald-eyed. The self-same Gabriel who disguised himself, centuries later, as the mortal, Sulaiman, in order to watch over me.
Uriel: in face, in form, identical to me — the real me — save that he was created male. Which is a mystery in itself, one I have no answer for.
Fearsome Michael, the leader of them all, his flashing eyes as dark as his curling, black hair.
Selaphiel, sandy-haired and serious, absent, courteous, gentle, his quiet blue eyes fixed on things unseen.
Jegudiel with the waving, golden hair and dark, steely gaze, whose weapon of choice is a triple-thonged whip.
Silver-eyed, auburn-haired Jeremiel, who possesses a voice like exaltation.
Dark-eyed, dark-haired Barachiel, whose province is lightning, and whose emblem is a white rose.
And to close the circle of all those who passed sentence on me?
Raphael, the healer. Sable-eyed, dark-haired and olive-skinned. Whose mouth was made for laughter and compassion. The ‘architect’, so Gabriel had said, of my misery. The one whose plan it was, all those years ago, to hide me inside an unbroken succession of human lives. We’d been friends once. We might have been more, given time.
But Luc had changed all that.
I back towards an elegant armchair and perch unsteadily upon one arm as the memory of him takes me over.
Luc. My golden beloved. My day star, I called him, because he outshone all the stars, even the sun.
Luc — the one I have longed for. Whom I can never have, whom I can never find, because the Eight have pursued a policy, over these interminable