Chapter 49
"Not that I'm eyeballing your guy or anything," Lena chattered amiably, "but … damn girl! How can you resist?"
Audrey glanced over to where Gabriel and Gunn were practicing a new self-defense move Gunn wished to learn. Gunnlaeif had taken to braiding his beard into two long braids on both sides of his chin to alleviate his discomfort at the late-summer Texas heat, giving him an appearance of an ancient Viking. Both men had stripped down to the waist, sweat accentuating their muscular torso's rippling in the sun. The slight paunch Gunn had possessed when they had first met him was long gone, while Gabriel had never possessed anything but a six-pack of hardened piston-like abs and ripped-out pectoral muscles. Watching the two former soldiers engage in their daily practice was quite … pleasant.
"He fears the Father will punish me," Audrey said softly. This wasn't the first time she and Lena had had this conversation.
"I thought Gabriel was getting over all that 'sin' stuff the Father preaches," Lena asked. "Thou shalt not this, and thou shalt not that."
"It's not about sin," Audrey said wistfully. "Gabriel now understands that loving another is not a sin. No matter what the Father says. It's about what they made him do to his brother."
"Michael?" Lena asked. "You said the Father made him kill him."
"Lucifer," Audrey whispered. "This is about Lucifer."
"Evil bastard," Lena said. "That's what happens when you turn into the devil. Gabriel's nothing like that."
"Gabriel's exactly like that," Audrey said. "The Father had them rewrite history to exaggerate what Lucifer did wrong. When the Father sent Lucifer to Earth to oversee humanity, he didn't forbid the taking of mortal wives. Lucifer hated us. It never occurred to the Father that his favorite son would fall in love."
"Oh," Lena said. "The bible kind of skips that part."
As they watched, Gunn got a good grapple on Gabriel and nearly threw him. Only the beating of his wings prevented Gabriel from being tossed to the ground. The two men broke apart and banged knuckles before crouching to get into another match. Had Gunn been eight inches taller and possessed wings, he would be a match for any angel in heaven.
"Lucifer is the key," Audrey said absent-mindedly, seeing the haunted angel who stared across the battlefield at her each night in her visions, all the sorrow in the world in his eyes, before turning away from his brother. "I don't know how, but he is the key."
"What do you know of Lucifer?" Lena asked, her bored oogling gone, replaced by curiosity.
"Gabriel won't talk much about him," Audrey said, "but the Father made him and Michael throw their brother into the deepest pit of Sheol as a test of their loyalty."
"Gabriel obeyed," Lena said. It was a statement, not a question. They all knew of Gabriel's former obedience, each member of their little group silently cheering each small act of defiance Gabriel now took, whether it be the occasional beer, or the infrequent occasions when Gabriel would let slip a curse in the ancient heavenly tongue.
"Gabriel loved his brother," Audrey said. "The same way he loved Michael."
"But he obeyed," Lena said, frowning. "It said Lucifer taught men to make metal weapons and women to be harlots."
"Lucifer taught his children to defend themselves," Audrey said. "The Father sent Lucifer to babysit us so we didn't self-destruct, so Lucifer taught us to create civilization. The Father was preoccupied with other issues at the time. He really wasn't paying attention to what Lucifer was doing. He didn't really care until he ordered Lucifer to return home and Lucifer refused."
"And now Gabriel has gone and done the same thing," Lena guessed. "But you two haven't …" Lena left the last statement unfinished.
Gunn rushed at Gabriel and then grunted an expletive as Gabriel flipped him straight up into the air like a WWF wrestler, and then brought him crashing down onto his head, pulling his punches at the last moment so Gunn didn't land hard enough onto the ground to do anything but knock the wind out of him. Gabriel still wasn't back to the level of bulk he had possessed when Audrey had first encountered him, but he'd been going out of his way to perform exercises which would help him regain his former strength. Since much of that training was opposite Gunn, the biker was also becoming increasingly muscular and hard. Like two gladiators training to someday fight lions.
Or Grigori…
"The Father didn't just punish Lucifer and his men for refusing to return home," Audrey said, turning back to Lena. "Lucifer's children didn't take too kindly to the Father taking their own father and throwing him into the nastiest pit in hell. They were half-angel. They were capable of accessing the higher realms. It started a war."
"So they nearly destroyed the Earth," Lena said.
"The Father was the one who nearly destroyed the Earth," Audrey said. "Not Lucifer's children. Lucifer's children lived here. The last thing they wanted was to see it destroyed. After a while, the Father's own angels began to question the Father. To eradicate them, he sent the flood."
"The one Noah survived," Lena guessed.
"Gabriel said a lot more than Noah survived," Audrey said. "Noah is a metaphor for certain tribes of people the Father cherry-picked to worship him. The rest, he condemned to Sheol. The Father killed so many people and condemned them all to suffer that he fractured off a third of heaven to create Sheol to contain them all. Sheol never really existed until then, just the Keep."
"Isn't, like, all-that-is, this," Lena said, gesturing to the desiccated landscape that surrounded them, "really part of the Father's own mind?"
"I don't know how it works," Audrey said. "I don't think Gabriel does, either. We think of angels as these powerful creatures because they exist closer to the Father, but they're really not that much better off than we are. In many ways, they're worse off. At least we get to tell the Father to piss off and do what we want."
"And pay the price," Lena snorted.
"There's another deity involved," Audrey said. "The Mother. Gabriel knows very little about her, but it appears she prevents the Father from interfering with our ability to choose."
"But she doesn't prevent him from punishing us if we choose wrong," Lena stated, disgust lacing her voice. "Gods … can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em."
Gabriel's torso glistened with sweat as he paused to chug down water from one of the canteens. Drink. So simple an act. So difficult for Gabriel to learn. How far he'd come since she'd first encountered him broken at the bottom of the cliff. How far the both of them still needed to travel to get where they needed to be.
"I don't know how it works," Audrey finally said. "Gabriel thinks that whenever they disagree, they form some sort of wager to see how things will turn out. The Father doesn't like losing."
"Like Job?" Lena asked. "That book of the bible always gave me the creeps."
"I don't know," Audrey said. "I've never asked Gabriel about Job. Getting information about his past out of him is like prying open an oyster. He doesn't like to talk about it."
"Ahhhh!" Lena laughed. "But once you pry open the shell, there's all that sweet, gooey goodness inside."
Audrey laughed. "That describes Gabriel."
As though hearing her thoughts, Gabriel looked in her direction and smiled. Not a great big smile. Gabriel almost never allowed any emotion to register in his face, as though he was still uncertain about even having emotions in the first place, but more and more he appeared to be enjoying his stay here on Earth.
"So back to my original question," Lena said, her voice becoming husky and deep in her best lounge-singer demeanor. "When are you going to pin that boys' wings to the ground and have your way with him?"
Audrey glanced at Gabriel as he stretched like a great lion, his muscles rippling in the sun, ruffling his feathers as he stretched before crouching into another fighting stance opposite Gunn. Beautiful. Gabriel was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Beautiful … and strong. His wings were just … icing. She found it hard to believe she had once looked at the strong set of his jaw, the broad high cheekbones, the firm nose, and thought him to be brutish. His lips … were made for kissing. The soft lips of a lover.
"Soon," Audrey whispered.
