After three hours of foraging, gathering wood, fire-tending, preparation and cooking, Gabriel and Audrey finally got their brunch around one o'clock, when the sun had reached its peak and began its descent to darkness once again. The fire crackled on below the table as they sat side by side, overlooking the pool while they ate.

Audrey sank her teeth into her second cob, butter dribbling down her chin. Wiping it away with the back of her hand, she looked over at her companion, who was in an even messier state than herself: a little string of creamy, yellow globules clung to the front of his black tunic. He'd been compulsively licking his pillow-soft lips, she'd observed, thoroughly entertained, as he tried to eat corn on the cob with any minute shred of decorum he could muster. Not that she'd been looking at his lips, specifically... it merely amused her to see the self-conscious way he tried to consume finger-food politely.

She watched his tongue emerge again and sweep unconsciously around the corner of his mouth, and it wasn't until he caught her looking that she realised she'd stopped chewing. Quickly, she disguised her gawping with a smile and bit into her corn again.

"What?" Gabriel asked.

Damn it!

"You—you have butter down your front," she remembered, desperately trying, and failing, to hide her smirk.

He looked down at the greasy trail on his chest and scraped it up with his thumbnail, with what appeared to be a light blush spreading across his cheeks. Audrey laughed, reaching out to give his wrist a little, affectionate squeeze.

"Are you always so stiff and proper?" She chortled as she raised her cob to her lips once more. He turned his attention to her, but said nothing. "Let's play a game. Whoever can finish their corn without licking their lips, wins."

Gabriel smiled at her ridiculous notion, already contemplating ways to suppress the instinct.

"What's the prize?"

Audrey considered it; she had nothing to give.

"I don't know. What would you like?"

"How about a truthful answer to a question of my choice?" Gabriel proposed.

Her brow furrowed slightly in uncertainty. She had lots of secrets – plenty to hide, especially from an angel. What could he possibly want to know about me so badly? She wondered, but almost instantly, she found that she didn't care. There was nothing she felt she needed to conceal from him, humiliating or not.

"Deal," she agreed.

"And if you win?"

She thought for a moment, reluctant to waste her prize on one of the many questions she had for him, because he'd probably answer truthfully anyway. He was an angel, after all.

"I'll get back to you on that," Audrey deflected, struggling immensely to keep her eyes above his nose. She knew precisely what she wanted, she just had no idea how he'd react. He was the single most expressive yet unpredictable person she'd ever met.

She raised her corn and took a bite, leaning forward so that the butter wouldn't drip on her clean clothes. As she chewed, lips glistening with butter, Gabriel bit into his own. She watched vigilantly, grinning as a droplet rolled down his chin. He stared back at her, his face a portrait of innocence, and wiped it away with the heel of his hand. Audrey couldn't believe it.

"Did you not understand the rules of the game?"

"You said without licking our lips," he retorted smugly. "You mentioned nothing of wiping them."

Audrey gaped in outrage. The nerve!

"You cheater!" She laughed, punching his arm playfully as she knelt to further attack his shameless defiance. "You knew exactly what I meant! Don't even try to pretend you didn't!"

Gabriel was thrown backward, roaring with laughter as he raised his arms in defence.

"You're an angel!" Audrey exclaimed indignantly, batting at any part of him she could reach. "You're not supposed to cheat!"

"Let's call it a draw, shall we?" He offered, still chuckling as he caught her wrists with ease in his large, warm hands.

"Draw!" She gasped in hilarity. "I was thinking more along the lines of forfeit, on your part!"

As her wriggling subsided along with their laughter, he allowed her wrists to slide out of his grasp, and she leaned her hands either side of his head, looming over him. His victorious grin lingered, drawing her attention back to his butter-glazed lips.

"Fine," Audrey conceded. "Then I'll take my prize now."

She picked up her hands from the floor and skimmed her fingertips over his eyes to close them, before bringing them to rest on his joy-flushed cheeks. Barely giving him a second to realise what was happening, she captured his lips in a sweet, chaste kiss.

Gabriel's senses shut down to the world around them, having been taken wholly by surprise. The afternoon sun beat down on them, but he didn't feel it. The fire crackled as the flames slowly expended the firewood, but he didn't hear it. All that existed in that moment were the wispy strands of her hair that brushed against his jaw, the feather-soft fingertips that caressed his cheeks and the delicacy of the way her velvet lips grazed against his own.

He'd been kissed once before – a long time ago, when a girl had begged him to cure her of her ailments, and sexual pleasure had been the only currency women had to offer – but it had been an entirely distasteful experience. This, however, was another matter altogether. She touched him with such reverence, igniting the first stirrings of something he'd never felt in all his four billion years, and it completely disarmed him.

He was just raising his hands to participate a little more when it was all over. Audrey was pulling away, leaving him feeling far more cheated than he thought justified for his minor deception. He opened his eyes to find her still very close, her luminous, turquoise eyes fixed upon him.

"What was your question?" She asked, almost whispering.

He blinked through his astonishment, not really hearing the words coming from her incarnadine lips.

"Sorry?"

"Your prize," she clarified, sitting up beside him. Careful not to pull his stitches, Gabriel pushed himself up too, not yet willing to let their proximity go. "What did you want to ask me?"

Returning to his normal self, he remembered the deal they'd agreed upon.

"If I hadn't rescued you last night, and you'd died, do you believe you would have gone to Heaven?"

"No," she answered, truthfully as promised, looking down at the corn laying, forgotten, by her feet.

"Would—"

"Ah-ah!" Audrey grinned, cutting him off with a forefinger to his lips. "One kiss, one question. You're such a cheater! Does God know how dishonest you really are?"

He laughed, but even as he did so, something occurred to her: all the heinous sins she'd committed, and here she was, corrupting something as spiritually pure as an Archangel. Was that what he was getting at? She suddenly felt horrifically cheap and dirty. Gabriel noticed the disappearance of her smile immediately.

"What's wrong?"

"You... I—I'm, I mean, that kiss wasn't... I wasn't trying to, like—" She stammered, trying to find some kind of steady foundation to voice her intentions – or lack thereof.

He caught on, reaching forward to clutch her shoulders.

"No, no," he cut across her. "That's not what I was trying to say." He traced the angle of her shoulders up to her neck, where his thumbs stroked her jawline beneath her hair. "What I was going to ask next was, would you think me presumptuous if I were to tell you that the pool is full of holy water?" Please, he thought, please don't be offended. "You began a clean slate today, so to speak."

As if magnetised, Audrey's eyes flitted across to the pool. Holy water? She recalled how he'd dangled his fingers in the revolting, green goop, and realised he'd granted her forgiveness for every wrongdoing she'd ever perpetrated. Relief flooded through her like a tsunami, followed by an equally powerful wave of adoration for he whom she'd considered a monster, not five hours ago. She could no longer think straight, and the smile that spread across her face was the only indication Gabriel had that her tears were those of happiness.

Mirroring her relief, Gabriel wrapped his arms around her. How attached he'd gotten to this girl, in the mere space of a day. How much she'd taught him already – not least of all, that kissing wasn't nearly as repugnant an activity as he'd previously believed.

He thought about the stuttering worry she never quite got out. Feeling the inexplicable need to put it to rest, he laid his cheek atop her head as he spoke again.

"Understand, you've done nothing to tarnish this new start. The stories of the Grigori – the angels who were cast out of Heaven for intimacy with human women – they're only half-truths, as with most Biblical tales. The Grigori were exiled for raping human women, which God could not forgive."

The sun was getting fairly low over the mountains now, streaking the sky with pink and gold. The colours bounced around under the pool-water and glinted off the edge of the metal poolhouse.

Gabriel's head snapped up. It's open, he realised, watching it like a cat crouched before a bathing bird. Sensing his sudden tenseness, Audrey looked up at him.

"Did you go in the poolhouse?" He asked her, already knowing the answer.

"No," she replied, twisting in his arms to look at it. The door stood ajar; her camisole was just visible behind it on the ground. "I swear, I never—"

"I believe you," he murmured.

"It – It might have come loose when... I got a little frustrated with my top and kind of threw it over there," she confessed.

"No. The door was locked." He got to his feet and touched the crown of her sun-soaked hair, his eyes never straying from the poolhouse. "Stay here."

Leaving her sitting by the fire, which was the only sound besides the cry of a red-tail hawk overhead, he moved towards the door. Why didn't I think to check? He censured himself. He could be anywhere by now.

He nudged Audrey's camisole aside with his foot as he stepped inside, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. There were no windows in the gloomy shed, and it was decorated only with cobwebs and dead spiders.

Recognising the vacant spot which had not been so before, he returned to Audrey's side, trying to keep his strides regular. There's no use in scaring her unnecessarily, he decided.

"Come," he bid, "let's go inside."

He helped her up with an easy tug on her hands and pulled her in close to his side, marching her straight towards the gate. Audrey let herself be shepherded across the courtyard, confused, but trusting Gabriel steadfastly.

"What's going on?" She wanted to know as they rounded the corner and entered the tiny reception area behind the burgundy door.

He didn't answer, however, because they were greeted by an odd hissing noise. His arm instinctively tightened around her waist, which unnerved her further.

"Did you switch the radio on, Audrey?"

She shook her head as he'd rightly predicted.

"Wait..." she whispered through the deathly silence. "It was on when I came down to bathe. I didn't think anything of it. Is the power back on?" She went to take a step towards the lightswitch, but his other arm came around her front to halt her.

"No, look," he pointed out. "The switch is down; it's on, but there's no light."

Audrey frowned in perplexity, unable to understand how the radio could be working without power.

"But how, if... batteries;" Audrey cottoned on, anxious now. "Someone's been in here." Her hand found its way unconsciously to her mouth. "Shit, Gabriel – someone was here while I was alone!"

And thankfully, he's only playing games, he thought to himself. This had merely been intended to frighten Audrey while he was away, except he hadn't bargained on her obliviousness; Gabriel would have laughed, were it not for the sobering revelation that Lucifer was not after him, but the young, warm-hearted girl by his side. So that's why he was laughing, he inferred.

"Shhh," he soothed her, running his hand over the back of her hair as he kept his eyes on the staircase. "Calm yourself. He can't touch you; the water cleansed you of any potential leverage he may have had over you."

"He? You know who it is?"

"It is my brother," Gabriel answered quietly.

"Another angel?" She relaxed slightly at the idea, only to have it replaced with the terrifying truth.

"He was once, yes. His name is Lucifer." Audrey's fingers grasped fistfuls of his tunic as she reeled in disbelief.

"That's... You mean, th–the Devil?"

"That depends on whether you consider Satan and the 'Devil' to be one and the same."

Her mind was too fraught to even begin to decipher the meaning in his words as he led her towards the stairs. The landing at the top was illuminated by the dying sun, making the lurid wallpaper almost neon as they approached the door behind which Gabriel had watched over her as she'd slept, the night before.

He feared no attack now, in light of the knowledge that Lucifer's little escapade at the motel had taken place before he'd encountered him at the farmhouse. He only worried for Audrey as he opened the door, without a shadow of a doubt what he'd find.