Audrey's scream pierced Gabriel's ears and heart when her eyes fell upon the rotting corpse inside. As he turned her around to face him she dissolved into overwrought tears.
The man, whom he'd found slumped over the desk downstairs early that morning when they'd arrived, and locked away in the poolhouse to keep Audrey safe and calm, looked to have been in his mid to late fifties. Frozen by rigor mortis, he'd been propped up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, wearing Gabriel's discarded armour and a wide-eyed, leering grin. One half of his grey-stubbled face was dark purple, where his blood had pooled and congealed in his veins when he'd died; the other side was covered in dried blood that had seeped from the head wound responsible for his demise.
Gabriel bent and scooped Audrey up diagonally across his broad chest, then turned and made his way back outside. She reached her arms up around his neck as he spread his wings and took flight, leaving his armour behind. He didn't need it; come hell or high water, he needed nothing more than his body and his God to protect her from his brother.
He wondered what Lucifer could possibly want with the girl as he veered west, to escape the desert altogether. He knew there'd be far more survivors among the cities, meaning damage would be better dealt with, making them less vulnerable and harder to find.
As the sun began its final golden soliloquy up ahead, disappearing behind the horizon, Gabriel cradled Audrey closer. Her bare arms and legs were freezing in the high altitude and the rapidly waning light. Though her tears abated, he could feel her damp eyelashes flicker against his jaw, perpetually alert, and all the while her fingertips ran circles through the short, soft hair at his nape, seemingly as soothing to her as it was to him. His eyelids felt heavier the further they went; he hadn't slept in over forty-eight hours and his body ached in protest.
They'd gone some seventy miles before signs of civilisation began to appear. Grids full of dots and stretches of green crept into view, and Gabriel began their descent. They passed over a main road jammed with stationary vehicles, some still containing their late drivers, but Audrey's eyes reflected only the star-strewn expanse of indigo above.
A golf course clubhouse with stucco walls and terracotta coloured roof tiles was boarded up at the windows and door, while its fairways grew untended outside. The sidewalks beyond were littered with glass, where people had broken shop windows in the panic to gather supplies in preparation for whatever was to come next. Here and there, bodies had been left where they'd dropped, but they were casualties of chaos rather than God's wrath, he knew, because they still looked relatively fresh.
Looking out over the city, he saw it was set into the now shadowy canyon that tapered to a close at the far end, and at the back, in the very corner, stood a small cathedral. It was a narrow building, being restricted as it was by the rock, but its spires towered almost as high as the gorge itself. The front was adorned with a grand, circular stained-glass window, above a set of three tall, pointed arches, the one in the centre sheltering the enormous, wooden door.
Sadness weighed on Gabriel's heart as he alighted and walked the remainder of the long, palm-lined path leading up to it. How materialistic it's all become, he thought with disappointment.
Audrey watched the avenue shrink away over his shoulder until the darkness of the doorway drew over her. He set her down beside him, before the ornate, iron windows in the wood, shuttered on the inside, and beat his fist thrice against the door. It was flanked by sculptures in the stone wall, of deferential saints with devout hands, intricate halos and humble smiles.
As they waited in the twilit archway, Audrey leaned nearer to him, nervous and shivering slightly in the cooling desert air. She wasn't sure whether she was desperate to get inside or to turn tail and run, but Gabriel's wing wrapped around her like a warm blanket and his hand enclosed around hers, making it difficult to be afraid of anything.
One of the shutters creaked open a fraction of an inch, revealing a dull, green eye surrounded by wrinkles. It squinted at first in suspicion, surveying their faces with caution, before it fixed upon the black, feathery embrace Audrey was held in, and widened.
"We seek shelter," Gabriel asserted, at which the eye blinked in response.
"Lotta weird stuff been going on around here," came a gruff but gentle voice. "Don't s'pose you'd mind showing me your teeth?"
Audrey grimaced in compliance, while Gabriel merely stared back. With a little persuasion from a squeeze of his fingers, however, he showed off his dazzling smile. The old man seemed satisfied with their credentials, and his eye disappeared while the sounds of bolts and barricades echoed from behind the door.
The window was a little higher than Audrey's eye level, but through it Gabriel could see an entrance hall, glowing orange in the flickering candlelight. The heavy, wooden doors swung open, revealing the full picture, and they were welcomed by the loud click of cocked guns.
On one side of the old priest stood a young, uniformed sheriff with an innately friendly face that looked out of place behind his firearm; on the other, a beautiful, caramel-skinned woman who didn't look particularly in the mood for taking prisoners. Both appeared unperturbed by the ostensibly impossible sight before them as they stared the newcomers down.
Tension solidified between them but Audrey felt only a fleeting brush of panic before the dark archway flooded with a blinding tranquillity so bright and powerful that her knees buckled beneath her, and she fell, breathless, to the concrete steps.
"Lay down your weapons," Gabriel commanded them; "We mean you no harm."
Her fingers still entwined with his, Audrey received the full force of his blissful subjugation, while the others simply let their guns clatter to the floor, glittering tears of awe gathering in their wide eyes. The priest's timeworn hands clasped over his heart, where the gold cross hung from his rosary.
As the euphoria faded, Audrey remembered where she'd seen this before: vivid images of an unearthly, white light gleaming through a doorway swam to the front of her mind. A gasp; the crack of a gunshot; the trickle of ruby-red blood from her mother's forehead as she collapsed.
She pulled her hand from Gabriel's and wrapped her arms around herself, doubled over at his feet. Agonizing enlightenment swallowed her up whole; it made sense to her now. She'd been so, incomprehensibly angry at Michael for pulling that trigger. She'd thought there must have been another way – that he could have pulled her out of the way with his far greater strength, or talked her down, even in that last second before their doom arrived – but she understood now: she'd already been prepared to hand the baby over, and with the addition of Gabriel's divine influence there'd have been no stopping her. He did what he had to do.
Gabriel turned his attention to Audrey, who sat weeping in the spill of warm light from the doorway. Crouching in confusion beside her, he placed a concerned hand on her back. This had never happened before; the technique was supposed to elate, not crush.
"Audrey?" He tugged gently on her shoulder, encouraging her to sit up, but she could barely draw breath between sobs. "What's wrong?"
He'd seen some experience a lull of drowsiness after an Apparition, their bodies overwhelmed by the serene sensation, but never a wave of sorrow such as that which currently reigned over Audrey.
"Mom," she managed to convey; "My mom."
He thought back to his entrance to the diner – the last occasion on which he'd used his gift – and recalled the lifeless heap of a woman he'd stepped over, having heard the gunshot from outside. The pieces fell into place and his heart ached for her. She's been through so much, he thought; lost so much. How can I ever hope to make this right?
He lifted her curled-up form into his arms and stood, turning towards the open door, where the priest and his previously armed guards moved aside as he approached. His footsteps echoed quietly against the marble-tiled floor, which led him under a magnificent arch and into the majestic main hall. The ceiling towered in gothic vaults above, sprawling from the peaks of the pillars bordering the nave. People huddled in timid clusters among the pews; some were laid out across them, injured and covered by blankets. Their symphony of whispers grew into a cacophonous hiss that bounced around the vast atrium as he ascended the steps to the chancel, continued past the empty choir stalls and set Audrey down on the altar.
He felt so useless; this was the one kind of wound he could not mend for her. What was done was done, and time was a constant, irreversible flow of interlinking, overlapping, riotously proliferating events that even God Himself had no control over. It was the foundation upon which life bloomed and death recycled.
In his idle redundancy, Gabriel took her head in his hands, oblivious to their spectators, and tilted her chin up as he bent to meet her lips. It was the only thing he'd ever experienced that had the power to make one forget even that which seemed critically important only moments ago. He imitated the sweetness and gentility she'd shown him, hoping desperately that it would ease her pain, if only for as long as he held her there.
Audrey's mind was a labyrinth even she could make neither head nor tail of, full of blazing, phosphorescent meanders and bottomless pits of darkness that threatened to drown her in their vacuous depths. An instinctive need to try to fix the gaping holes in her heart surmounted her latent logic and her fingertips climbed his cheeks, before smoothing over the recesses of his temples and following the fluffy fringe of hair that skimmed the tops of his ears. She let her tongue glide over the arc of his upper lip and felt the warmth of his tremulous breath as his reservation crumbled under her touch.
Somewhere behind that dogmatic masquerade, she knew, was a vibrant creature not unlike herself, though in many ways he was still very much a child, yet to learn right from wrong, having never been given the opportunity to make mistakes. He possessed the same congenital sense of morality as she, he'd just never dared to question authority as she had, and had it not been for her flagrantly disobedient ways, she'd have turned out just as weak-willed as her nevertheless beloved mother.
She kissed his lips once more, and retreated, despite her racing heart, to look at him. Keeping his face securely in her hands, she wondered how God had dreamed up such a shade of blue, when even the clearest summer sky couldn't compare.
"You've been so kind to me," she whispered, her thoughts disjointed and her eyes tired in the wake of her torrent of tears.
"And yet I still feel I have not paid my penance," he replied, pushing her hair back over her shoulder.
Audrey's forehead creased with sympathy for the repentant angel who had brought devastation upon the world. She could see he felt he had everything to answer for, but in her eyes, it wasn't he who was the sinner. She leaned aside and grazed her lips tenderly against his earlobe.
"I forgive you."