The Key

109

Liv was fading fast by the time the helicopter tipped forward and started racing east towards the main compound. It frightened her how quickly it had come upon her. She’d felt fine in the cave and on horseback. Now it was as if someone had pulled a plug out and her life force was rapidly draining from her. She raised her eyes to Gabriel, sitting opposite her in the cramped cabin. The expression on his face told her she must look as bad as she felt.

Through the window behind him she could see the sky beginning to lighten and the thin sliver of moon fading away, just as she was. When the sun rose, both of them would be gone, she felt sure of it. She was resigned to her fate. It gave her some small comfort to think that at least she would not make it as far as Ruin and be locked back in a cycle of torture and pain, imprisoned in the darkness of the mountain.

She could feel the thing she carried, curled up and still in the pit of her stomach, its dead weight pulling her down the way a star collapses to create a black hole that sucks everything into it including light. Maybe that’s what would happen to her. Maybe that was what the end of days meant.

Below her the dusty desolation of the desert stretched away, and a memory surfaced that she knew was not hers. It was of the world when it was young and the land beneath her, green and fertile — and she walked free upon it. There had been a man there too and she looked up at him now and felt the warmth of his being and his strong arm around her. And he was here still, smiling down at her now: Gabriel.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but the helicopter was too loud for her to hear.

She shook her head and the vision of him dissolved in tears. There was nothing to forgive. She knew he understood the pain of separation and she was going to make him feel it again soon. She had loved him too late and for too short a time, but her destiny was not hers to choose.

The helicopter banked and began its descent to the desert floor. Through the window the sky and the earth tilted like a preview of the end of the world.

Then she saw it, squatting on the desert floor, its long black neck stretching out from a body of spines and plate with fire coming out of its mouth.

It was the dragon of her nightmares: the dragon of the prophecy and the Book of Revelation — waiting to devour her and the Sacrament inside her — and they were dropping down towards it.