I step through and enter a vast room with liquorice-black marble floors and sloping floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the sprawling megacity of Paris Nouveau. The room is quiet and, worryingly, empty. I expected a sprawl of Reapers, hundreds of them, waiting. The men in suits in their visors. Not this emptiness. It sends a shiver up my spine.

And that’s when I notice it.

The object in the centre of the room. Not an object. Something else.

Raised above three steps is a huge spherical blackness suspended a metre or two above the polished marble. At the edges it shimmers brightly, emitting little solar flares of light. A crackling noise, like static, comes from it and the air around it vibrates. The darkness inside the sphere is a dense, profound blackness. A yawning mouth, waiting to feed. I stand in front of it, mesmerised. Then I reach out to touch it and feel an immediate current, pulling me to the hole, sucking me in. The hairs on my arm stand up. A chill runs down my spine. A feeling of impending doom.

I look up. The stone ceiling, high above, converges at a point right above the centre of the room. Around the edges stands an assortment of relics and busts and various artefacts. On the walls hang extraordinary paintings. I recognise them from art class. Here’s the swirling madness of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Here is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Three extraordinary panels, ranging from heaven to hell, and a weird panorama of paradise lost between them. And here is Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. A grisly, macabre painting. It shocked me the first time I saw it. Saturn emerges from the darkness and, with wide mouth and bulging eyes, he goes about consuming the corpse of his own son.

“Impressive, is it not?” a cold voice says behind me. A hint of sibilance.

I swing around.

Here stands the god and the devil. And he’s like nothing I imagined.

For starters, he is a she.

“Some call it monstrous,” she says. “But I see only beauty.” I assume she’s talking about the painting, but then I’m not sure. She might just as easily mean the dark pulsing mass, suspended in the air. Or even herself.

She wears a long robe, like the kind Gabriel and the masters wore at the council meeting in Ares. Her hair is silver-grey and shorn to the skull, like a Buddhist monk. Her eyes are sharp and as green as the sea. She’s small. Of indeterminate age. A Japanese woman you might pass on the street and not give a second thought about. Yet, despite her unimposing physical size, she has a presence. She takes up space in the room. She feels potent somehow, a figure of terrible beauty and power. Undoubtedly, this woman is master Kei Shinigami.