Muse by Rebecca Lim
People fall back in surprise for an instant, before coming forward again like a wave with their questions, their cameras. The air is filled with voices shrieking, ‘Irina! Irina!’
Abruptly, the hail ceases. People look up, then at each other for a moment, then the questions begin again.
‘What do you have to say about today’s hair-raising near miss?’ I hear a female voice shout through the tinted glass.
‘Is it true that your absence from the Palliardi show last year was due to involuntary admission to the Abbey for psychiatric and addiction disorders?’ a man bellows.
‘Who are you seeing, now that you’ve very publicly dumped Félix de Haviland and Will Reyne in close succession?’ roars a third voice, also male.
‘Don’t listen to them,’ Gia says forcefully. ‘Just take a deep breath, and when the guys say go, you go. Head up, chin held high. It’s all bullshit and lies, okay?’
I turn in shock as a stocky young man with wet ginger hair pulls open the door on our side of the car and thrusts a micro recorder in Gia’s face, in mine. ‘What do you have to say about the fact that you’re cursed?’ he yells. ‘That you leave a trail of broken hearts and property damage wherever you go?’
Gia’s trying with all her might to shoulder the young man out again, and screaming at me to help her, but I’m paralysed with shock. K’el’s standing across the street between two parked cars, just beyond the wall of faces and bodies crowded around the limo. He makes no move to join the throng, to push in amongst them. He’s just there, in his hyper-ordinary clothes, hands in the pockets of his broken-in blue jeans, watching me with his steady, unblinking gaze. Just watching. Because he has to. Because he can’t help himself.
Vladimir’s face suddenly comes between us for a moment, his burly, wise-guy hands pulling the ginger-haired journo out of the way while Angelo grabs hold of the car door and kicks out at the people still holding it open.
The circus around the car suddenly seems to be happening in slow motion, to somebody else. I don’t hear the sounds of scuffling, of shouting, because my eyes are fixed on K’el’s face.
It’s unmistakeably him, although he’s like a scaled-down version of his usual self. And I realise that others can see him, too, because people are pushing past him saying ‘prego, prego,’ the way Italians ask a fellow human being to make way. Except that he’s not human, he’s faking it.
I hadn’t imagined it before: when he’d walked away from me, he subtly shifted the way he looks. His eyes and hair seem darker, his skin paler, almost matte, like human skin. That light that usually accompanies our kind, that comes from within, is no longer visible to ordinary eyes, although I still see a faint glimmer of it in the skin of his face and hands.
And I wonder what the trick is to blending in, to making yourself look like a pitch-perfect human being. I wonder if I could do it — if I ever get free of Irina. Could I shift the way I look? Shift the way people perceive me?
What do you have to say about the fact that you’re cursed? That you leave a trail of broken hearts and property damage wherever you go?
I shudder. The questions could have come from K’el’s own lips.
Without realising I’m speaking out loud, I say, ‘I am cursed. And you were right: it’s all my fault. But how could I have known that it would lead to this?’
‘I’ll quote you on that!’ a young woman crows triumphantly as she whips a recording device out of my face and pushes her way back through the baying crowd.
Gia lets out a loud ‘Oooooh!’ and kicks out with her booted feet, scrambling to pull shut the door from the inside as Angelo pushes on it from the outside. The central locking slams into place.
She turns to me. ‘What did you say that for?’ she wails. ‘It’ll go viral in ten minutes: World-famous Russian beauty admits she’s cursed. God, you have no sense. Don’t give them stuff they can use against you.’
Through the tinted car windows, I can still see K’el. His eyes never leave mine, even though by rights he shouldn’t be able to see me through the dark glass. I hear his voice in my head: Don’t try to leave Milan before the six get here, because I’ll find you.
Vladimir reappears at one of the windows and knocks on it with his scarred knuckles. There’s some kind of cordon forming out there now: two rows of men in black suits, each built like a gorilla, pushing back at the crowd on both sides to form a clear area. People are shrieking and slipping over in the slush, and going down like skittles, as a path is cleared for the bitch queen from hell.
‘Finally,’ Gia snaps. ‘Leave your coat and the bag — they’re ruined anyway. I’ll bring them. Oh, and give me that stupid hat.’
She twists it in her hands, punching at the crown, before she places it carefully back on top of my head. Almost tenderly, she arranges the ends of my hair upon my shoulders and grabs a small, gleaming gold cylinder from her capacious backpack. ‘Trout pout,’ she says, making a silly face at me, her lips pushed forward like a fish. I mirror her expression and she slicks the fiery red lipstick on me. Grabs a pencil with a brush on the end of it out of her bag and marks my eyebrows with quick, confident strokes. ‘Strong brows, strong lips and you’re good to go. It’ll reproduce nicely, whatever the medium. Now remember what I said: Don’t stop, don’t turn around. Head held high. Just get inside. You’re golden. You’re a superstar.’
The limo driver releases the central locking on a signal from Vladimir and Gia pushes me out the door. I do as she says. Step out of the car as gracefully as I can manage in the teetering heels. With Vladimir on my right and Carlo on my left, I keep moving, chin up, head held high, letting the questions about my love life, whether I’m a binger or a purger, whether I wear any underwear to sleep, wash over me.
Though I keep moving as ordered, towards the grand portico, the sliding glass doors etched discreetly with the words Via Borgonuovo, 22 that represent sanctuary, I can’t help turning my head to scan the opposite side of the street, beyond my abandoned limo. K’el’s gone. All I see in his place is the figure of a young woman in ordinary street clothes: a pale blue puffy down jacket, blue jeans, snow boots, a Fair Isle knitted cap jammed down low over the long, wavy dark hair that frames her sweet-looking face. She’s a little above average height, and slender. I wonder if she knows that she’s standing right where an archangel had been.
But then I look more closely at the skin of her face. To someone with eyesight like mine, there’s something just the faintest bit ‘wrong’ about it. It’s almost matte, like a human’s. Almost, but there’s a faint surface sheen to it, as if light is seeping out slowly through her pores, can’t fully be disguised.
And I know that I’ve seen her before, and I feel Irina’s heart kick into high gear with sudden, fearful wonder. My eyes fly wide in my pale face. The archangel Nuriel. My next watcher. She’s already here.
It’s who Justine Hennessy had reminded me of, when I was Lela. I’d seen Justine walking towards me in the stark, bright, noonday sun of an Australian summer dressed all in white, her long, dark, wavy hair unbound against the light and I’d thought then that I was looking at … Nuriel, I realise now. Nuriel.
Our eyes meet across the chaos in the street and I recall that we were friends once, the best of friends. She always had my back. Although that day — when Luc and I faced the Eight — she sided with Them, not with me. It had been the biggest betrayal, the biggest shock, of my entire life. The Eight — They took her away from me, too. It’s just one more thing to hold Them to account for.
Nuriel mouths: Keep moving, and gives me a heartbreakingly familiar smile as she suddenly vanishes, unnoticed by the crowd.
K’el had said that Nuriel had been assigned to watch over me in my next life, the one after this one. I start shaking as I realise that Nuriel’s here for a reason. Those that remain of the Eight are going to try and shift me again. Before Luc gets here.
Vladimir and Carlo each put a supportive hand beneath one of my elbows as I stumble beneath the graceful, r
We stand there for a few seconds, looking up into the lens of a camera trained on us from above, while security runs some kind of visual check on us from inside the building. Beyond us is a second set of doors exactly the same as the first. Finally, these slide open to allow us into the reception area of Atelier Re.
I’m standing in a light-drenched, music-filled atrium that is completely at odds with the blunt neo-classical stone facade of the building’s exterior. An intricately patterned mosaic floor stretches away from me in all directions, its thumbnail-sized tiles laid out in soothing sea greens and luminous blues, shades of ochre, white and black.
It could be the world seen from above. And I imagine the six that remain — Michael, Uriel, Gabriel, Jeremiel, Jegudiel, Barachiel — speeding here from all points across it, or maybe even the universe. To get to me. It could happen any moment. I might blink now and wake up somewhere else, as someone else, and have to start all over again.
K’el is ready to let me go. Nuriel’s ready to receive me into her care. How else to explain her presence here?
Then I frown, remembering that though it takes the might of many to place me into a new human form, it takes only one of them to draw me out of a mortal body. The six should be gathering where my new host is going about her daily business, oblivious to the fact that she’s about to experience a kind of spiritual lockdown. So why are they all coming here first?
Is it because there’s no time? I don’t think I’m mistaken in thinking that things seem to be speeding up; that the length of time between each soul-jacking seems to be shortening.
And why place me inside a new host whose life so closely intersects with Irina’s? My last five lives were all so different. In age, in circumstance, physical location, culture, everything. Why put me into a new life that has two, maybe three degrees of separation, at most, from Irina’s?
‘We’ll be on standby, Irina,’ Carlo murmurs in my ear. ‘If you need us, have them call.’
I nod distractedly.
At the peripheries of my sight, I see Carlo rejoin Vladimir, Angelo and Jürgen, and they exit back through the two sets of sliding doors, making for the limos, shoving a few of the remaining paps on the way, just for fun. For a moment, I’m on my own, listening to the music. It’s an operatic duet of thrilling beauty: two female voices, two soprani. The melody seems familiar, but I can’t place the language the voices are singing in.
I scan the atrium absently, ignoring the stares and whispers that form part of just being Irina. It’s space age meets art deco on the ground floor of Atelier Re. Everywhere I look, there’s an interesting interplay between mirrored glass and polished, curvilinear stone, rich-toned wood and black bakelite and chrome. Many of the polished, flowing surfaces seem to reflect the light that’s spilling from massive, organic-looking, many-branched light sculptures that hang from the ceiling. Though the space seems uncluttered, almost under-furnished, there are groups of pretty people in beautiful clothes conducting meetings at small, pod-like break-out areas, or taking calls at ingeniously designed workstations that are miraculously free of wiring, dust or knick-knackery. Even the computer screens seem embedded into the smooth lines of the tabletops.
It’s all breathtakingly elegant, and I’m still staring up at the small constellations of light bulbs, mesmerised, when someone calls out ‘Irina!’ and I lower my gaze to see an elderly man — maybe seventy? seventy-five? — standing in front of me.
He’s almost the same height I am in my killer heels, with a full head of artfully dyed, dark brown hair that’s slicked back in a retro, yet ageless style. He’s clean-shaven, olive-skinned, and his bright blue eyes are framed by quirkily rounded tortoiseshell spectacles. He’s a little paunchy now — his cleverly cut, Nehru-collared black suit can’t hide that — but he would’ve had a rangy, athletic frame in his youth; he would’ve been handsome. And there’s still great strength in his soft, wrinkled old man’s hands as he grabs hold of mine, taking me by surprise.
I look down sharply at Irina’s fingers gripped tightly in his and know that it would be rude to pull away. But I feel something like panic as my left hand begins to ache dully. It’s too late, the old man’s grip is too strong. There’s that sensation of a building pressure behind my eyes, then we flame into contact, and I see —
— Irina Zhivanevskaya as a sixteen year old, through the old man’s eyes. She has dyed-black, punky hair, wild eyes and ripped clothes; an even filthier attitude. I see her slouching into the room towards him, feel the sudden leap of his interest, see her deliberately bump into a tall, slender, blonde girl who’s just stepped down gracefully from a catwalk set up in the centre of the room under harsh lights, so that the girl stumbles and almost falls, then runs from the room in tears.
Then I see a woman with a pale, severe face and snow-white hair in a sleek chignon, all in black, sitting beside him. I hear her tell Irina to stand up straight, hear Irina snarl, ‘Go to hell!’ in her smoky voice, without missing a beat.
The woman turns and says angrily, ‘She’s no good, this one, send her away.’
But the man’s voice says kindly, ‘Walk, child, walk.’ And his hand indicates the catwalk.
Irina mounts the stairs and transforms into someone else altogether as she storms along the narrow white platform, head up, eyes wide, shoulders back, hands swinging freely by her sides, hips thrust forward, her freakily long legs easily covering the short distance before she pauses, stares, pivots, and stalks back the other way. And I see what the old man saw that day — a certain look, a feline, haughty walk. Together with her wide-set eyes and narrow everything, that go-to-hell stare, Irina is unforgettable.
That’s all I want to see, and I gently pull my hands free of the old man’s. The ache in my left hand, behind my eyes, fades away.
‘I feel a little bit … responsible, you know?’ he says with an apologetic lift of his shoulders. ‘For all the craziness. You walked for me, and then nothing in your life was ever the same again.’
I shrug. ‘In the end, we’re responsible for ourselves, for our actions,’ and I’m speaking for myself as much as for Irina. It’s something I think I’ve only just begun to appreciate.
The old man gestures at one of the pretty people standing at a workstation across the room. ‘Gudrun,’ he calls. ‘My cane?’
‘Right away, Mastro Re,’ calls out a beautiful ice-blonde in a high-collared red blouse, an artfully tailored navy peplum jacket and matching wasp-waisted pencil skirt.
Mastro. It’s a very old word, archaic now, rarely used. And it means artisan.
The woman detaches herself from the two men she’s talking with and heads our way, holding an elegant wooden cane with a bright gold handle in the shape of a resting lion. She’s of medium height, with sapphire-coloured eyes and blood-red lips, her hair pulled into a sleek and immaculate French roll. Somehow, she manages to look enviably businesslike and blonde-bombshell at the same time.
As she reaches us, she says in a neutral, Swiss-finishing-school, pan-European accent, ‘Irina, you’re looking well. All things considered.’
Her voice and eyes are friendly, but I draw back a little from her, as Giovanni Re takes the cane the young woman’s proffering and leans on it heavily. It’s not my imagination. She’s gleaming, the way K’el was, and Nuriel, even after they’d modified themselves in order to pass as ordinary humans.
Light seems to be seeping out of Gudrun’s flawless, porcelain skin. And I know it’s not illuminising powder that’s causing it.
‘Do I know you?’ I whisper.
Her face isn’t familiar, but she’s an archangel, too, I’m sure of it. The woman I’m looking at right now is probably only a pale approximation of what Gudrun really looks like. She must be glorious in her angelic form.
‘No,’ she smiles, ‘you don’t know me. Though, of course, everyone knows who you are. I’m new here, though I do believe we have a few … friends in common. M
Giovanni Re takes one of Gudrun’s shapely hands in his. I see that her nails are long and painted the same glossy blood red as her lips.
‘Gudrun’s been invaluable,’ he says gruffly. ‘When Ainsley left us so suddenly’ — there’s a sudden sheen in his eyes, an echo of shock and grief — ‘I was going to cancel the show, the documentary, the retrospective, everything. Ainsley had all the details of the set, the layout, the play list, the results of the castings, in her head. Luckily for me, Gudrun came along to sort out the mess. She convinced me it was possible to go on.’
Gudrun meets the old man’s eyes and smiles sunnily. ‘It’s been marvellous working for you.’ She’s suddenly so radiant to my eyes that I wonder how it is that no one else in the room can see how much she seems to shine. ‘It’s been like a holiday,’ she adds. ‘I am going to miss you when all this craziness is over.’ She gives the old man’s hand a squeeze then turns to walk away.
‘A holiday!’ he exclaims. ‘She’s priceless,’ he says to me. ‘Priceless.’
Gudrun’s eyes flick back to mine wryly. ‘That’s what they all say,’ she replies, ‘when they want something. Now, I’m here to keep an eye on you, Irina, so anything you need, just give a shout. Someone will know where I am in this warren.’
I watch her walk away. She must be one of Michael’s reinforcements, like K’el, like Nuriel. Maybe they’re all here because they’re afraid of Luc in some way. Or they wish to stop him, and force is needed.
With a chill, I recall Gabriel’s words to me as Lela lay dying in his arms. He’d said that I was fully justified in bringing Luc to the Eight to have him dealt with. That I was well within my rights to slay him myself. I feel the blood drain out of my face at the memory.