Muse by Rebecca Lim Read Free Book Online

seen, or could ever give name to. Whatever you may be now, however estranged you have become from each other, you were all once created … equal.
    And to you all: the ability to speak in tongues, both new and ancient.
    And to you all: the power to bend matter and spirit, the laws of nature, to your will; to suspend time, move matter, occupy objects both animate and inanimate; mimic both the living and the dead; transport yourselves from place to place in the space between two heartbeats.
    The very embodiment of paradox.
    My eyes fly wide as I finally see — what I should have seen all along.
    Grief enfolds me suddenly in its wings, grasps my borrowed heart in its black talons. When I lost Luc, when I lost any notion of context, of history, of ‘home’ — that casual ability to bend the laws of nature to my will — I lost my way. In one moment, I lost everything.
    All of us were created with extraordinary abilitiesno human being could ever comprehend. And most extraordinary of all these? The ability to atomise and re-form at will. Like water, like an unstable element that can shift between phases, I should be able to change states in a heartbeat. To become permeating yet impermeable, boundless yet infinitesimal.
    It’s much, much more than just the ability to possess another living creature or to shape-shift. It’s — how do I put it? — the ability to turn the burning matter of which I am made into a weapon, a living sword, pure and directed energy. Will it and it is done.
    It’s something unique to all of us. We who are unkillable and immortal, unless one of our own kind seeks to destroy us.
    Ah, yes. The rules — and there are rules, one must know them in order to contravene them — come back to me, unexpectedly, from some long buried oubliette in my mind.
    The Eight. Even Azraeil. What they are, I am. What they are, Luc is, too.
    We elohim .
    We High Ones.
    We … archangeli .
    Archangels. It’s the name for what I am .
    At the realisation, I seem to catch fire within, and I wonder how it is that Gia and Felipe cannot see me burning.
    What happened to me?

    
    Gia and Felipe continue to argue over potential routes and traffic conditions, road surfaces and the forecast for rain, while inside Irina’s slight and mortal frame my spirit burns and burns.
    How had I not seen this before?
    How am I able to see it now?
    When I was Lela, it was as if certain things had been placed off limits by the Eight, were deliberately ringed around, in my mind, by fire. Just probing the meaning of the word elohim , even the name Carmen Zappacosta , had caused an electrical storm in my head, raw and immediate pain.
    But not … today.
    And soon, maybe, I’ll again be able to control that strange process of atomisation that happened tome once when I was Carmen, and once when I was Lela. And when I’m able to do that? Nothing will ever stop me again.
    I’ll be free.
    I’m suddenly gripped by a ferocious urgency. Luc thinks that I need negative emotions like rage or fear to trigger the process of atomisation, of unbecoming. But what I’m feeling now? Is a terrible sense of hope, of … possibility. And maybe that’s enough.
    While Gia and Felipe continue to argue, I turn inward, seeking to separate the burning strands of myself from the mortal vessel I’ve been forced into. I follow them down.
    Down.
    I am as a dark maze, a tangle of roots. Disorder masking some kind of pattern, deliberately broken, deliberately … twisted.
    Behind Irina’s eyes, within her rigid body, I’m shivering into a billion pieces as I reach out for that strange, dissociative state in which I seem capable of anything .
    Felipe’s and Gia’s voices, the contours, textures and colours of the real world, begin to bleach out as I dissolve inwards, fade down, even though concrete reality is in evidence everywhere around me — in theseated figure to my right lifting the teacup to her purple-stained mouth, in the museum-quality furnishings, the