In his flurry of solicitude, Gabriel almost landed in the water. His attention was solely focused on Audrey's inert form, curled up on the poolside with her back to him. As he righted himself before he plunged into its depths, she stirred. The beating of his wings and the clatter of the basket as he dropped it to the ground had broken the oppressive silence she'd been hiding from with memories of her parents. He alighted forthwith into a crouch before her and a pair of glassy, reddened eyes met his. When he reached out to touch her face, her cheek was cool from the stone she lay upon but her rosy lips were unmistakeably flushed with life. She was unharmed.
With a profound sigh of relief he let his frantic heartbeat steady itself as he pulled her into his arms. Bewildered, but grateful for his soothing embrace, Audrey wrapped her arms about his middle and tucked her head under his chin. The warmth he radiated was so much friendlier than the sun's harsh, midday rays.
"Your heart's racing," she pointed out, listening closely even as it slowed beneath her ear. "What's wrong?"
"I thought..." Gabriel started, but shook his head almost indiscernibly. "I worried for you. I shouldn't have left you alone."
Audrey didn't question him further. His every word was a riddle to her, and she suspected a lot of it made no real sense anyway. At least, none that she could ever hope to understand. Instead, she stroked the contours of his back, up between his wings where the muscles flexed as he surrounded them with his impervious feathers.
"I'm alright," she promised.
Gabriel lifted her wet hair from the damp patch it was creating on the back of her clean, white top and laid it over his arm. She was safe. Lucifer couldn't touch her now she'd bathed in holy water, and neither could he trick her as long as Gabriel was there to prevent it.
Remembering the basket, which lay on its side a few feet away, though still contained all but an escaped pomegranate, he pulled back to look at her.
"Do you like corn?" He asked hopefully.
Audrey smiled up at him, stabilising herself by hooking her hands over the soft crooks of his elbows.
"I love corn," she answered, somewhat amused by his benign question.
Upon hearing this, he set her aside and got to his feet.
"Firewood..." he thought aloud. He hadn't considered how they'd cook it. He pulled Audrey up from the ground by the hands, turned his back to her and knelt down again. "Put your arms around my neck."
Audrey hovered, not liking where this was going at all. She wasn't particularly afraid of heights, but it was easier to deal with when her support was stationary. Imagining the ground zip by below her with nothing fixing her to Gabriel but her own arms had her feeling decidedly nauseous.
He twisted to glance over his shoulder at her, and captured her hand in his.
"We won't go far. I saw a tree that must have collapsed in the storm not a mile up the road." Still, her hesitation lingered. He gave her fingers a little squeeze in reassurance. "I'll stay low. I won't let you fall; I swear it on God's name."
"That's a pretty serious promise," Audrey affirmed, a smile tugging at her coral pink lips.
"Is a promise not, by definition, something one is extremely serious about?"
He said it with such sincerity that she found herself stepping forward, won over. Nestling between his wings, she reached right around his neck with both arms, securing her grasp nervously on his collar. His herculean arms locked her thighs to his sides as he stood and unfolded his wings, preparing for flight.
"Hold on ti-ight," Gabriel bid, his last word cut off by her constricting grip. He stretched an arm up, chuckling, to loosen her grasp a little. "That's the second time you've tried to throttle me," he teased; "To strangle an angel to death would be a damnable offense, you know."
Audrey opened her mouth to respond but he leapt into the air before anything coherent could come out. Clinging to him for dear life, she shut her eyes tight and rested her mouth on the ridge between his ear and jaw. As his wings crested with each beat, they cradled her against his back, and she felt the resolute fulfilment of his promise in every move he made. Her hair streamed behind her like a flag, drying quickly in the breeze that caressed her bare arms and legs. Weightlessness commanded her senses as they soared, empowering her to look down. Gabriel felt her lips stretch into a smile against his skin, and couldn't help but grin with her.
They were only as high as the tallest trees; branches flew by them, tipped with bunches of green, spiny leaves. Across the road up ahead lay the one Gabriel had mentioned, having had its narrow, slightly top-heavy trunk snapped in the wind. He lowered their course as they approached it and settled smoothly into a walk, tucking his wings away behind him once more. Audrey lifted her head and placed her hands atop his shoulders.
Bending his knees so the drop was shorter, he relinquished her legs and she slid down to her feet. He turned to find her smirking, seemingly a little chagrined.
"Don't even dare say I told you so," she advised.
"I wouldn't dream of it."
They laughed together as they got closer to the fallen tree. Gabriel stooped to fish a small knife out of the side of his right boot and wasted no time in selecting a branch to dissect. The tiny blade sliced through the wood as if it were cucumber, and Audrey's lips formed a perfect, gaping 'O'.
"What kind of metal is that?" She crouched beside him as he worked, watching again, how the knife sank effortlessly into the solid branch.
"It's made of an element the Earth has yet to produce naturally."
She held out her arms in absent amazement as he passed her the logs he severed. When they'd gathered a bundle, he replaced the blade within the metal sheath built into his boot and went to take the wood from her.
"No, no;" Audrey pulled the pile out of his reach. "I'll hold onto these. You hold onto me."
With one arm around the logs and the other around Gabriel's neck, Audrey was raised above the treetops once more. She kept her eyes open this time, watching as the ground fell away. As they neared the motel, they swept higher to clear the boundaries of the courtyard, then circled down onto the sunlit paving.
Gabriel stepped up onto the veranda of one of the rooms by the poolside and picked up a small, slatted iron table while Audrey watched in confusion. He set it down next to her and took the firewood from her arms to place it between the four curved legs. Shifting as if bracing himself for something, he rested his hand over the logs.
"What are you doing?" Audrey asked, utterly perplexed, but Gabriel didn't reply. He knelt there, waiting, until suddenly he whipped his hand away, just a fraction of a second before the wood burst into flames. Dumbfounded, Audrey propped her hands on the back of her hips.
"Quite the not-so-little miracle-worker, aren't you?"
"It's merely a case of knowing how to manipulate matter," he shrugged, rising. Audrey stared at him like a toddler in an Advanced Biophysics class. "Come now," he grinned, "humanity has advanced enough to know by now that there's no such thing as magic."
"I have to beg to differ," she replied, smiling to herself as she went about rummaging in the basket.
From the selection of food he'd brought back, she picked out the five corn cobs and sat cross-legged on the flagstones, pulling the leaves apart and rolling away the silky strings inside. Gabriel joined her and pulled one of the ears from her lap.
"So what happens now?" Audrey asked as they prepared the corn for grilling. As blissfully distracting from the pain of her situation as he was, they couldn't camp out in the back yard of an abandoned motel forever. She had so many questions, but she just didn't know how to ask them. They all sounded so ridiculous in her head.
If someone had told her a week ago that she'd be dining with a real, living angel – an Archangel, to boot – on a makeshift meal of maize and bread, she'd have asked if she could have some of whatever they were on. The things she'd seen in the past couple of days may not only have changed her life irrevocably, there was a possibility they'd changed the world.
"I don't know," Gabriel answered. "What happened when you found Renoir?"
Audrey couldn't look at him. The fistfuls of string she held felt like cotton wool as she watched them roll between her fingers. She never forgave me, she thought. That was the last time we spoke.
"We volunteered at a rescue shelter, with all kinds of different animals. So we could... you know, learn more about them, and how to take care of them, so it'd never happen again."
She wanted him to stay; this much she knew for certain. He was the only friend she had left now. She didn't even want to begin to contemplate what she'd do when he, inevitably, returned to Heaven.
"What a beautiful lie." Gabriel stilled his fingers a moment, before reaching across the short distance between them and enclosing her hand in his, stopping her preparatory efforts too. She looked up at him now, terrified of what he might say next. "I'm not going to leave you, Audrey."
"You don't have to go back to Heaven?"
"The Lord led me to you for a reason," he told her, "and until that purpose is served, I'm going nowhere."
Audrey felt as though she were back in the air, sailing on nothing but sanctity.
"Promise?" It sounded childish even to her own ears, but it was all she could do not to beg and cry hysterically.
"I swear it on God's name," he pledged.
Knowing that to Gabriel, the name of the Lord was the most sacred thing that existed, she heedlessly let the leafy parcels in her lap roll onto the stone as she kneeled to hug him in speechless gratitude. He held her as she had done for him that morning, stroking her hair with the utmost tenderness.
He knew it was what she'd needed to hear, because she knew he wouldn't take such a promise lightly. It didn't take an omniscient God to see she was alone in the world, and far more lamentably, alone in her heart. There was a bitter derision in the way she spoke of miracles, and he'd seen the mockery in her eyes when he'd first told her she had nothing to fear. She held no love for her creator, nor His outwardly fickle, unjust ways.
As he scooped her glossy, fawn hair back over her ear, he wondered if that was his mysterious objective: to restore her faith in God, as Michael had restored the Lord's faith in humankind. It seemed fitting, that since Gabriel had failed to recognise His true needs, he should be tasked with polishing the more difficult side of the coin.
She's right, he thought, resting his nose on the slightly off-centre parting of her hair and breathing in the scent of macadamia; if we're to prevent history from repeating itself, we must understand why it happened in the first place.
He reached for an ear of corn, his path chosen and his love unconditional for the sweet, audacious girl he cradled in his arms.