Author's note: Sorry about the wait, guys! I had a few plot-related decisions to make and I'm in the process of moving house and job, too, so things have been a bit hectic recently. I'm back now though, and we're starting to really move towards the core of the story. Enjoy! :)
Silently begging her forgiveness, Gabriel coasted on the clouds leaving Audrey standing, forlorn, in the arch of the cathedral doorway. He should have made it clear, but he had no intention of breaking his promise – not permanently, at least. The very notion was ludicrous; he couldn't imagine spending the rest of eternity wondering what else she might have taught him.
He didn't go far; he didn't need to. His destination was not the sort of place you could plot on a map. It was closer to what the humans understood as an alternate dimension: another version of the same place.
The clouds darkened into billowing smoke and he flew over streets and buildings no more. The ground was a sprawling blanket of ash punctuated by frozen lakes and strings of black mountains. He made straight for the colossal fortress built into the mouth of the volcano on the scarlet horizon, dodging and deflecting the tiny, dark specks that hovered in the dusty air around him.
The window of the topmost tower wasn't quite as darkened as it had been before; he could see the orange glow cast by the coal-lined floor inside. A silhouette appeared; Lucifer was waiting.
He increased his speed, building up momentum so that when he reached the fortress, he was able to pull in his wings and fling himself through the narrow window. Lucifer watched with an arrogant grin – Gabriel knew he wouldn't move. He dived headlong into him, sending them rolling across the scorching coals.
The blinding pain of the floor's extreme heat hit him in waves as they went; he yelped and let go of his laughing brother, pulling himself aloft with his mighty wings. Breathing hard from exertion and anger, he watched, dumbfounded, as Lucifer got to his feet, snickering to himself.
He'd never been inside the fortress before he'd rescued Audrey – he'd never had need to be – but he knew as well as any angel what was contained within its walls. He hung over his brother, his vast wings treading air to keep him afloat.
"Impossible," he breathed.
"Feeling a little guilty, brother?" Lucifer taunted, cackling as he brushed himself off.
"They don't burn you," Gabriel remarked, thoroughly perplexed.
"They never have."
"Then you're either so far astray you feel no remorse, or..." No, he rebuffed immediately. He's here for good reason; I witnessed his crime with my own eyes. "What did you say to her?"
Lucifer sauntered towards his seat before the black, stone divan. Gabriel followed, alighting atop the belladonna-bordered platform to stand over his unconcerned brother.
"I've no idea what you're talking about," Lucifer feigned.
Gabriel leapt from the divan, fury coursing through his veins, his sable wings bursting forth as he seized the Devil by the throat and lifted him high above his thorny throne.
"Whatever you've done," he whispered dangerously, "you've only marked her by doing it. You will fail."
Lucifer's laugh came in strained snorts, his face reddening by the second as he gripped the archangel's wrist.
"How ominous," he mocked, his voice a rasping mumble. "I'm flattered you think her marking," he paused, struggling on the little air he had left, "was my doing."
With immense willpower, Gabriel let him plummet to the coals beside his volcanic seat, where he lay spluttering and gasping amid his amusement, unperturbed by the heat.
"Then again, perhaps it was," he jibed. "We were getting rather cosy when you gatecrashed."
Landing on the island, Gabriel ignored his brother's desperate attempt at provoking him.
"You're lying," he accused. "There's nowhere else those prophecies could have come from."
"You really haven't heard," Lucifer chortled with disbelief. "What have you been doing with that little wench to have you so distracted?"
"Desinet dicere per enigmata!" Gabriel commanded, his bellow echoing around the cavernous room.
"I speak no riddles, brother," the Devil grinned gleefully. "The situation is intrinsically so."
Having recovered, Lucifer got up and resumed his seat, lounging sideways across it, one leg dangling lazily over the arm. He pushed his white-blonde hair out of his eyes, putting on a show with a yawn. He certainly seems boastful enough to be lying, Gabriel thought.
"We merely discussed our mutual resentment for your precious 'God'," Lucifer drawled. "That and the disgraceful little fact that He tossed her parents in here, even if only until He came to His senses."
"Of course," Gabriel seethed. "Of course that would be the first thing you taunted her with, you filthy, unconscionable—"
"Actually, it was she who brought it up, not I."
"And her marking?" He was answered by another fit of sardonic laughter.
"That was your doing, Gabriel," Lucifer spat, "not mine."
"I did nothing!"
"You fell in love," his brother rolled his eyes, as if it were the most obvious, abhorrent thing in all the Worlds.
Gabriel froze. It's plausible... he considered; could that be what dragged her into this? Thoughts of her shining, turquoise eyes and gentle lips, her compassion and capacity for benevolence and the way she wore her heart on her sleeve flooded his senses once more.
Lucifer's explanation grew more credible the more Gabriel reflected on it. What if I've put her in danger? He worried, blanching, but he knew there was nothing to be done now but protect her.
"What do you want with her?" He asked his brother, hostility replacing the shock.
"I want only what I've always wanted," Lucifer replied, his tone innocent until his last, menacing word: "Out."
"Never," Gabriel disparaged.
He could see his brother knew something he didn't, and he didn't understand any of the cryptic answers he offered, but as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. He turned and spread his wings, lifting himself into the darkness and dissolving away to the Midworld.
Lucifer swung his legs back over the arm of his chair to the ground and leaned upon his knees, watching the jagged ceiling long after his brother's departure. What a monumental waste of half a day, he thought caustically, his piercing, emerald stare boring into the rock above. A stalactite the size of a small tree cracked under the pressure of his furious scowl and fell in a brief moment of silence before shattering across the coals with a deafening crash that ricocheted off the distant borders of the room. Lava seeped up through the indentation it had made in the gravelly floor like a pool of thick, orange blood, smouldering in the shadows.
When he'd heard the prophecy spill from the motel owner's lips, the day before the Judgement had begun, he'd thought it was a warning. The key approaches; it could only mean one thing, he'd deduced. The key to peace; the defeat of all evil. The key to my demise.
He knew it wouldn't matter to his blinkered Father whether he was truly guilty or not. That decision had been made aeons ago. He'd survived thus far only through the strange, symbiotic relationship that had come to develop between himself and Satan: the collective convergence of all the malice, greed, vanity, salacity and pride that had been severed from every soul ever to have existed. He depended on it for protection, and in return, Satan used the former archangel to do its bidding – a figurehead at which the Worlds could direct their hatred. Such was his reward for loyalty to the Lord.
He curled his bare toes over the incandescent coals, feeling nothing but cool rock crumbling beneath him. He gave a disdainful snort at how Gabriel had reacted to the revelation that they didn't affect him, and wondered how long it would serve as a distraction from the fact that they did burn Gabriel. Clearly, he was feeling less than vindicated in his fulfilment of the Lord's will. Here, pain only came to those deserving of it.
Lucifer made sure of this on a daily basis. Every now and then, a soul would reach Hell's gates intact, having been condemned in its entirety by the bigotry of Heaven. Sometimes it took a closer look to determine the good from the bad – something that the Lord had shown patience for less and less frequently of late. In cohesion over injustice, Lucifer endeavoured to filter the intake of souls for the occasional nugget of gold, which he would send on its way back to the Light where it belonged – where he belonged.
He missed it terribly. The bright, bountiful garden; the bashful deer and the affectionate dogs and the mischievous otters in the river. The friendship of his brothers and the security of being a part of something. The warmth of his Father's love. Family. Two millennia had passed and the ache for his old life was still as potent as ever.
The coals hissed loudly as his feet crushed them to ashes below, and he almost missed it:
Lucifer.
He lifted himself up into a crouch in his stone seat and froze, listening.
Lucifer, the soft, tearful whisper came again.
It's her, he realised in astonishment. He glanced around; there was no sign of the dense, telltale blackness that was Satan – it was no deception. She's calling to me.
He closed his eyes, sinking back into his chair with his legs tucked up before him, and pushed through the nine veils separating them, to answer.
Finding himself sitting at one end of a long, narrow rowing boat, he saw that Audrey was curled up opposite him, her ankles crossed and her face buried in the circle of her arms which held her knees together. Her shoulders shook uncontrollably as she wept; she didn't seem to have noticed his appearance.
Slowly and deftly, he moved himself closer to the centre of the boat, absently taking in the still, endless water surrounding them: she was stranded. Doesn't she realise how unimaginably dangerous this is? Lucifer thought as he reached out to run his fingertips over the delicate, white ridge of her ankle. It recoiled a little as her head snapped up with a gasp of surprise.
Her tear-tracked face and her turquoise eyes shone in the silvery rinse of moonlight, and Lucifer stared back at her, thoroughly bewildered as he wondered why this beautiful, fragile creature would possibly have called his name, presumably for comfort, rather than his brother's. He said nothing, terrified of pushing away the only potential friend he'd found in over two thousand years, though he'd never, in just as long, have admitted it.
"Where am I?" She asked, barely louder than the rush of ripples sent gliding from the boat by her sudden movement.
"You tell me," Lucifer murmured; "It's your dream."
Audrey looked around at the bleak, isolating expanse of stagnant water. It was vast as an ocean, yet motionless as mirror, reflecting the starless sky. The silence was oppressive; she found herself sighing just to break it.
"I know you haven't led a perfect life," Lucifer asserted impassively, "but I didn't have you down as the Devil-summoning type."
"You're the only one who's not trying to pretend that God had good reason to murder everyone I ever cared about in cold blood."
He couldn't tear his eyes away from her plea; another tear fell from her glistening gaze as she blinked, and her sincerity overthrew him. She asked for no power, nor revenge, as was most common among those who dared to call upon him. She laid her trust down before him merely for his sympathetic company in return. He'd never encountered anything of the like in the entirety of his imprisonment.
A slow, chilly breeze rolled across the surface of the water, bringing his Hell-slicked skin to Audrey's attention as goosebumps appeared, raising the short, light hairs of his torso. No sooner had he shivered, a dark, fleece blanket materialised around his shoulders. They both stared at it in shock, but each for wholly different reasons.
Lucifer teetered on the edge of thanking her, but succumbed to the selfish hope that she wouldn't discover she was the one in control. Instead, he pulled the blanket higher over his neck and opened it at the front to share with her. Tentatively, she crawled forward, and turned to the side to lean against him.
It was awkward at first, but the rigidity of a hug between strangers gradually melted away until Audrey's head rested against Lucifer's chest, and his hands clasped together, providing a brace for her back in the shelter of the soft blanket.
"How did they die?" He asked her quietly, and waited patiently as she floundered slightly at the question Gabriel had been too afraid to voice.
"My dad was... bitten in the neck," she replied unsteadily, recalling that terrifying first encounter; "He was in pretty bad shape but we managed to slow the b... the bleeding. Then later on, they attacked dragged him away." She dropped her gaze from the horizon to a cluster of scars on Lucifer's bicep, not unlike the scratch of a claw. When she spoke again, it was in a barely audible whisper. "The next morning, we found him tied upside down outside, covered in massive blisters. One of our group from the diner died saving my mom when they burst; it ate clean through his flesh like some sort of acid."
She was sobbing in earnest now, and tears of pity formed in the Devil's eyes above her. He was no stranger to the Lord's temperamental nature, but this... This was more than just Judgement, he realised. This was retribution.
"My mom died long before Michael put a bullet in her head. I've never seen her so out of control; she was always so logical and composed, because she cared a lot about what other people thought. When Gabriel arrived, she totally lost it and snatched Charlie's baby, planning on handing him over and telling me to come with her. He broke down the door and..."
She couldn't finish, but she didn't need to. Lucifer knew.
"He used his little ecstasy trick and Michael was forced to prevent him from winning her over." Audrey nodded, turning in further to him as he pulled the blanket closer around her heaving shoulders. "No wonder the coals burned him."
It was a few minutes before Audrey registered his comment, and her tears relented enough for her to speak again:
"Burned who?" She wondered if he meant Michael, since Gabriel hadn't even landed when he'd rescued her.
"Gabriel," Lucifer clarified; "He paid me another little visit this afternoon." Something occurred to him – he spent a moment recounting her tale in his head, searching for an explanation, but came up empty. "What is it you feel guilty about?" Audrey pulled back a little to look up at him; his bright, bottle-green eyes were just as vivid even in the moon's dull gleam. He took it as a question. "I healed your arm when the coals burned you. They only burn those who feel they have something to repent for."
She broke her connection with his viridian scrutiny and shrunk into the depths of the warm blanket.
"It was all my fault."
"What was?" Lucifer enquired.
"My parents' deaths," she answered, her voice wavering again. Lucifer's body tensed around the weeping girl in anger.
"How, precisely, do you come to that conclusion?" His words were a low rumble of imminent danger, like distant thunder warning of the storm to come.
"I was the reason we were moving to Palm Springs. If we hadn't been moving we'd never have ended up at Paradise Falls."
Nothing could have prepared Audrey for the wrath of his reaction. Lucifer seized her shoulders and turned her towards him, gripping so hard she was losing the feeling in her arms.
"Stulte puella!" he raged, his face just inches from hers. The infinite emptiness surrounding them deadened the sound, making it all the more real and frightening. "Do not let your regrets blind you to the true perpetrator!" I wasted lifetimes upon lifetimes doing so, he seethed to himself.
Audrey was rendered speechless at his lightning-fast shift in temper. Her sobs of terror came fast and heavy, only igniting Lucifer's fury further.
"Cease your tears!" He shook her, rocking the boat violently beneath them. "Sistite!"
The vessel capsized, finally releasing her from his grip, and impenetrable darkness engulfed them both. A stab of something Lucifer had never felt before punctured his heart as he flayed frantically in the bottomless, black waters for a hand; a knee; a strand of silken hair – anything at all to salvage.
Glossary
Desinet dicere per enigmata : Stop talking in riddles