the last day

*

Dream of better lives the kind which never hate
Trapped in a state of imaginary grace
I made a pilgrimage to save this human's race

-- the cure, “i'll melt with you”

*

To truly begin to understand the events of that final day, the nature of the community, the nature of the ages they lived through, and the bearings of all those involved must be taken into account. In no other time, among no other people could such a thing have taken place, nor did such things ever spin themselves into a similarity. The times that come also pass, and once passed cannot come again. This is the final echo of the last hours of the last day as it was heard and seen and lived by a handful of angelics staring white-eyed into oblivion.

The time has come. The time has passed. It cannot come again.

The city itself was an old city, although only by modern reckoning. It had stood in its present incarnation only since the ninth century, but despite its youth compared to several of its resident supernaturals, London had a fierceness to it, a vicious and burned in determination to stand through all things: fires, floods, and holocausts. It had been razed and burned half a dozen times, layers and layers of ash building up underneath it like a modern Troy. It had seen the blitz, a rain of munitions, dynamite and glycerin, from the sky pelting and pitting the sidewalks and streets like the plains of Sodom. It had held the Parliament of Hell in session for four centuries, been divvied and cut up by demonic aristocracy, traded around like bottlecaps in a collection. It had seen the Long Night, when the straggling remains of what had been the gravest of the city's night terrors were finally stamped out by the mortal populace. It had seen the second coming: angels come again and living openly among mortals, living in the city they'd bled for, living in the city they'd built from their own flesh, for their own flesh. The city had seen all these things, so in the end it was perhaps appropriate that it should also see the Apocalypse.

Of the seven angels who stood before the Lord, perhaps none of them knew the city so well as the one who had lived inside it for six centuries or more. Duriel had lived through the burnings and the razings, had seen the blitz, had watched Hell's Parliament rise and fall, had watched the city come to life again under the hands and feet of Normandy veterans. He knew the gray rain on Sundays, knew the taste of the soot and the ash and of the smog from factory chimneys. He knew the shift and bulge of eight million people in the city proper alone. He had watched them live and he had watched them die, and in past times he had wrenched the joy and life out of them himself. As a Lord of Hell he'd found a ripe garden in London. If there was one thing that the city knew well enough, it was pain and suffering. It had been a terrible abscess, a frothing pit of infection and pus. It had been a deep circle of hell, the City of Dis come again, the domes of the greasy black sky set with iron studs. Then, then Apocalypse could have come calling and no one would have wept, no one perhaps the softest of little girls who still loved the Green.

But Apocalypse had not come calling then – had been off, drunk or strung out, cowering somewhere in a back garret as the fires of Hell had burned out of control and unnoticed, unattended in the city the Romans had called Londinium.

Now the city had been lanced, cut open and turned out to the sun. There was music again in the city: harmony, life, love, children. There were his children in the city. He had seen the city burning, when no one cared to put out the fires. Now he would not let someone set a torch to wood that had finally gone green again. There would be no Sodom again, or else it would see him dead with the doing.

Such was the mind of Duriel, Angel of Clemency and once Lord of Pain.

For his wife it was somewhat different. She had not lived in the shadow of the city for a span of centuries, but she had nearly killed herself for it, and that made it her ground as much as Glastonbury had been, as much as Anagni had been. She had broken her fingers setting the foundation stones of this city right, and fought and cried and vomited misery. The world was a teacup that had shattered, and they had gathered all its pieces together and built themselves a new teacup out of it. For her there would always be some small part of beauty in misery, the shape of love in the sharp agony of pain, the blood of life in each drop of suffering that greased the axis of the world as it turned.

More than Duriel who had lived and breathed with them, had wrenched them dead, she saw the climbing spill of eight million lives, a tumble of green all tangled together, a beautiful and exquisite mess. The city was alive with waitresses and bus drivers and pigeons and dime store clerks and rats and divas and professors and children and musicians and cats and firemen and garbage men and jewelers and soldiers and lovers and mothers and fathers and families -- Life was a beautiful, miserable, nasty, wonderful, thing. It was something that could not be denied. It was something that could not be kept back.

Her husband looked to the past and wondered why the Apocalypse had not rained in the darkest years, when blood had been as water. She looked forward and knew that there would never be a time when she stepped quietly to the side and let Apocalypse rain because people deserved the suffering as much as they deserved their joy. It was the human condition: living. For her, Armageddon was the coward's way out, and Demeter Serraffield would let no man call her a coward.

So thought Gabriel, Countess Serraffield, Angel of Life and Compassion, once Archangel of the West.

As in life, so also in death, and it was as if Samael and Gabriel shared the same book of thoughts where he scribbled rude things in every margin and at the foot of every page. Eden Ardith had lived a hard life, glassy and bitter, a cold, salty sting under his tongue most days, the hours passed by and counted by the dark hollows under his eyes. He had seen death and been death, had walked the streets a scarecrow in leather, feathery brandy hair plastered to his forehead from the damp and the mildew and the rain. There had been days in times passed when he would have begged for the Apocalypse as a convenient solution to all the world's problems. As he had said, he was Death. It was just in his nature, kitten.

But he'd gone to Normandy the same as she had, and he still claimed he'd sodomized the Creeping Dark with a broom handle, or maybe the cool metal shaft of Tall Slaughter. When you bled for something like they had, like he had, when you give up everything hoping to burn out brightly like a star burnt against the dark and then you live through it --

He was too old and too stretched thin to believe fairy stories: bitter, broken, nasty, and unwanted. The world was too full of needles and old condoms and fleas and dirt and filth for him to go wishing for miracles. But then she'd said I have a place for you, if you'll have it. And then he'd had them and they'd wanted him, and he'd scrubbed toilets and mopped up snotty noses and put ribbons in the hair of all the little boys, and then they'd all gone into the sun together. It wasn't a fairy tale, not exactly, and sometimes it needed embellishments and a good scrub with bleach powder, but in the end it was close enough to count.

Samael loved his family, loved them hard and desperately so that the shakes got into his hands. The angel of death was not afraid of the apocalypse – he had that asleep somewhere in him. It was just a difference of degree, after all, and Samael had seen a lot of people to their deaths in seven thousand years.

Samael was not afraid of the last burn. He was afraid of what he might wake up and find himself responsible for when the last smoke cleared as the world fell down around them.

Rachel had been born in their Beacon City, the first of a generation born in peace and not war, the first block in the line of we can build something better. He had never seen the city burning, but he had seen other cities burning, and seen villages overrun by the darkness that still crept around the corners of the world. He had never sat in state at the Parliament of Hell, but he had heard the quiet, empty screams of the dead. He was his mother's son, and although he would never see the green burn that told of the living, he knew the living through knowing the dead. It was all the shambling dead wanted. It was all the restless dead wanted: life. If it happened, then it would be the world open-mouthed and staring, hollow and glassy eyed and wanting --

Beyond that, it was his family. It was his kid sister and his nephew. It was his mother and his father. It was his brothers and it was Eden. It was Shaktiel, and he had sworn an oath on his honor that he would splatter Azrael's brains all over his dead son if it came to that, had sworn it to Azrael himself.

Sometimes it was hard being who he was, coming from the people he came from. Sometimes it was hard being Duriel's son, Eden's by-proxy protogé, Jibreel's brother, heir to a legacy of assassins and murderers and bug collectors and they were his family.

As Rachel loaded his gun, he reflected that there was nothing quite so thick in your throat as blood.

The world had spilled open for Azrael, showing its belly filled with nothing but writhing worms. It was as if the world had drifted into perfect focus, and his eyes were open but not seeing. He was beyond seeing. It was beyond the time for seeing. It was his time and his place, and if there was ever a time for the fall, then it was now. He heard but did not listen. He knew but did not comprehend. There was no reason for him to comprehend. The world had fallen away from him like a spiral staircase that bottomed out in oblivion. He saw one face and heard once voice, but she did not speak, content to leave him alone to his thoughts.

Azrael had seen the world turn, wearing his boot heels down to nothing on the hard stone of the earth. All of his life as yet, he had stood by and watched it as it turned, stayed back, quietly, saved for other things, as the wars exploded like fireworks against a dark sky. Now it was his time.

He had watched the world turn, but he was nidhogg, who gnawed at the roots of the world tree. He would stop the world with his own hand as was his right. All the joy and color had gone out of the world, and he would put it down, sledgehammer in hand as the blood and meat of the world painted his leather apron and the carrion flies were glutted.

So stood Azrael, the Ragnarok, angel of Apocalypse. Rome would burn.

And Jibreel stood beside him, grave and silent, one step below, gatekeeper and key-bearer. She had lived a thousand lives, always put into the ground before her seventh year ended. She had seen a thousand terrors, and the lashings had been cut from her back and the thorns crowned her head – a thousand lifetimes of stigmata, penance paid. A thousand dead little girls, flesh cooling on the stone. On this rock I shall build my church. Do this for the remembrance of me. It would be done for the remembrance of him.

She was the nornir, the lived, the living, and the not yet, and she would hold the string clear for his cutting. She would be Mary, and be ravished by his divine love as the serpent was crushed under her heel.

And that was Jibreel, angel of mercy, whose final mercy was death to the world without covenant.

The body of the child was placed in his tomb on Good Friday. His soul descended into the realm of the dead to announce to the Just the tidings of their redemption. Fearing the body of the child would be taken, the priests set guards over his tomb. On the third day --

On the third day there was nothing.

*

The dawn of the last day found St. Sebastian's thronged like a church on Christmas day. Hospital security could not contain them, so the constabulary were called and they set up a perimeter and allowed no one through unless they could flash a hospital ID card or produce evidence that they were related to a hospital patient.

It was a hard day to die at St. Sebastian's if you were not of the angelic bent. The faithful were standing hushed along the sidewalks, carrying candles, waiting to see their miracles. The world had never before watched an angel die. The devout awaited resurrection or assumption. The curious waited to see what might happen. Angelics among the crowd or sitting tired and drawn in the upstairs hospital corridors already knew. Buboe's blood was red, the same as any other child's. When his life-support was cut, it would end. The time had passed for Glorious Mysteries.

Most of the angelics that arrived at the hospital did so as to avoid the crowds – by air, landing on the roof to be ushered down by harried hospital staff. Gabriel had been there since the late hours of the previous night, had shaken out her hair as she came down from the roof and melted into her soulclothes. It was not a time for Demeter Serraffield. It was a time for Gabriel, warmth of her halo and brush of her small feathery spurs and all.

When Raziel had arrived, no one could say. No one could remember him arriving by car, and no one had seen him come down from the roof – yet there he sat, arms folded one over the other at the end of the hallway, kept company by a depressed vinyl plant. He had not brought his children, not even the dark little shadow of his mimic. He sat with his head bowed and waited, and after a while Shaktiel came to sit by him, feet kicked into the chair across from her, chin braced by her hand. She had said that there would be no waiting at home and she meant it. Without thinking she had come in her orange organdy, butterfly wings light at the ankles of her bare feet. It was a stark contrast to Raziel's deep violet-purple drape, but they had come as themselves. Shaktiel chewed her lip and read dog-eared sections of Little Men to pass the time while her mother absently braided and unbraided her hair. Orfiel kept her hands busy, and every once in a while would catch the eye of Gabriel as she swept by. A pause, a bowed head, no words exchanged. They had been at Normandy together.

Gabriel spent her time occupied or occupying, bringing small things to her sons who all sat together in a line of scraped up vinyl chairs: magazines that no one would read in the best of times, and Zadkiel sat staring empty-eyed at glossy pages advertising cures for postpartum depression. Every once in a while Samand'riel would elbow him and try with the smallest of smiles, but they were all drops of rain in an oil spill. There was too much and there was not enough. Eden sat at the end of the line and smoked in complete disregard of the polite sign he sat under. He crushed out his butts on the arm of Rachel's chair, but no one dared venture near enough to the dark bundle of arms and legs and twisted gold malevolence to remind him of the no smoking policies. Rachel sat, chin propped against his hand, and leafed through magazines about home ownership. It was a good year to buy, urged experts.

The only minor disaster of the morning came when Caine, left unwatched and unattended for too long, cut his thumb open and scrawled in plasma and hemoglobin what he felt was a very poetic message on the wall near the entrance to Buboe's room.

In God we trust.

Gabriel saw Caine bandaged but could not bear to confiscate his sword so long as he kept it sheathed. The time would come, soon enough, when they would all need what they had on hand. Gabriel could not honestly say for sure if Caine would stand with them or against them when the time came – but then she stopped and reflected. In the end, there would be no for or against, only a great lot of murder and mess and death. She left Caine with Eden and hoped he'd be able to keep him out of trouble and went back to politely declining the many and varied angelic visitors who were dripping through the hospital in little uneven bunches, like water from a leaky faucet.

Yes, thank you for your kindness, deepest sympathies, yes, no we'd like it to be just the family today. Other arrangements will be made later in the week. We'll call you. I'm sure he knows. Thank you.

It was impossible to say if Duriel stalked through the halls of the hospital because one never saw him in the process of stalking – point A to point B. He was just suddenly in the periphery as things happened, looming, cool, collected, and purposeful, although to what purpose he moved, no one could say. He was either still or fluid, and Gabriel was reminded of lessons in economy of movement and combat rhythm that she had had at his hand so many spilled years ago. She felt instinctually that his soft presence at the edge of their collection was the primary reason that they weren't being accosted by either the media or the medical establishment. The angel of clemency was to be thanked for his little mercies.

When Azrael and Jibreel arrived mid-morning it was with no fanfare. They came in the front entrance of the hospital and the crowd parted around them to give them a wide berth. No constables asked Azrael what his business was at the hospital and he offered no explanation. He was in black, leather and chrome and a hundred belts dripping to his ankles. She was strangely in white, as if she had become Emily Dickinson: a simple dress, lace shawl, gloves. She could not stop for death, so she took the elevator with him.

There were no doctors in the hallways: they were still and white as the lord and lady approached, down the sterile royal carpet, feet crushing teal linoleum as they walked. The only thing that broke up the florescent whiteness was the blood-scrawl on the wall, which Azrael stopped and touched, red and white and everything black. Then he put his slightly bloodied hand back in Jibreel's, and they entered the open door.

All eyes were on them both, and all heads turned. Azrael, for his part, was still. There was something unutterably alien in his face, his glance, the dark abyss of his pupils, black wings trailing behind him and the only brightness on his body Jibreel. The way he regarded all the others was not kind or unkind. They were inconsequential. The shift of shedding had already begun.

He spurred his wings and sat. Jibreel sat beside him dutifully and read Dylan Thomas, her head bowed, one small white hand in his. There was no movement, as if they might have been a still life: plaster cast or marble carved. Gabriel stood in the doorway and watched them, her own hand a fist curled underneath her chin, her eyes thrown into their array. Her only tell was a slight catch in her muscles that was there and then gone. The force that drove the water through the rocks drove her red blood. She went to speak with him.

“Azrael,” she said gently, as if today were not a gallows day, “If you will, I'd like a chance to speak with you.”

The apocalypse angel looked at her. Then he inclined his head, just once, and stood, and touched the soft worked Viennese lace at Jibreel's shoulder before he held the door open for the woman who might have been his mother-in-law, aunt, blood, all in one. The door closed quite quietly behind them.

"This will be the only chance you get, Gabriel," Azrael said. "You must understand this."

She threaded her fingers together, a loom of flesh, and then she smiled, worn around the edges. There had been no talking to the Creeping Dark. This was a strange thing.

"You loved the world once, Azrael," she said thoughtfully, "For at least one moment of your life you loved the world, the living, the mess, and everything. There is still time. You can still love the world without smothering it. There are still beautiful, wonderful, terrible things left even with -- " She closed her eyes and slumped faintly against the wall, "She's carrying your child." Maybe it gave him pause: Azrael was so still she couldn't tell whether he stopped, whether he was looking at the wall as he thought about it, whether the contents of Jibreel's womb - two ovaries, fallopian tubes, one uterus, one fertilized ovum - mattered to him, mattered to what was happening. Nonetheless, there was a short silence.

"That doesn't matter now," he said. "It does not have to understand."

She caught his sleeve, touch soft as down, and when she looked up it was with a quiet, ancient smile. In the beginning, there was the Word. She was the Word. -- and there is a rosetree and she shall be called Rosamond, from the earth to the firmament and this is Yggdrasil --

“It will not happen, Azrael, and that is something you must understand.”

For the first time, her great-nephew smiled, gentle and fleeting and insubstantial as rain. He leaned forward, and he kissed both her cheeks: when he straightened up, his wings were already sliding back, up the web, up the branch, into the leaf as his halo sparked and he glowed like chains. Ofanim. He didn't really seem to realize what was happening, echoing green like a tree in full report, slipping and sliding and gone.

"The world was grateful for what you have done, Gabriel," he said. "But I abandon the cradle. Please don't come into the room."

She turned, she saw, and she understood, the pitch strike of her bare feet against the tile like a second heartbeat as she went for her kin.

It was, at least, better than waiting, the realization of the moment, of the now. Eden accidentally stubbed his cigarette out on his hand, but then it didn't matter, because his hand was fishnet and he didn't feel the burning: soulclothed, Samael, Zadkiel standing with the postpartum depression falling to the floor, Shaktiel crushing her toes on the linoleum as Orfiel put her hands on her daughter's shoulders and the air was all one indrawn breath. The apocalypse angel was coming unhurried behind the seraphim of life, but the air around him was changing. The floor was beginning to become a dark spill. The lights in the hallway were suddenly dim and flickering, as if somebody was sitting on the cord, but Azrael's halo was brighter than ever; and Azrael held out his hand, standing at the wall, eyes only and heart only and fingers only for Jibreel. The last supper waltz.

"I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers," Azrael said, and it was for the others, though his eyes were still on his lover's. "He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. She will sound her trumpet, and I will see the star that falls from sky to earth, and I will take the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. -

"Jibreel-Genesis, come to me."

When she moved, it was like water, and Dylan Thomas fell spine-splayed on his back. Someone had already jumped for her – a full body tackle from her elder brother – but her mind had already spun up to a higher level, and when she turned it was like lace borne up by a breath of steam from concrete, and he took the corner of the chair to his temple and he was swearing. It sounded like Catalan, but then there was the white noise of a thousand curtains drawn and she was and then it was white steel-fire, fittings in pearl, and she judged. She stood at his hand, clothed in the sun, the moon at her feet, and on her brow a crown of twelve stars. There was heaven and dust and she fell behind him, the bell of her dress, the spell of the moment, the binding of their Roche lobe. He judged; he rolled with black and blue fire, it danced in the empty sockets of his eyes, dripping drab and bleeding with it and the abyss of the purgatory.

"Oh, fuck this for a fuckin' lark on a fucking fuck fuck," said his father, and in his hand was the bloodied scythe. Azrael whirled Jibreel around to easily dismiss Samael's strike, only made in half-earnest anyway, blade whistling past as Samael rolled on the floor all jingling chains and pushed himself one-handed back to stand on the swirling floor beneath him.

"It doesn't have to be like this," Zadkiel said, but his lance was already in his hand.

"Yes," said the Apocalypse, "it does."

It was as if the room were suddenly filled with too many feathers, the split second rush that was Gabriel climbing, bare toes against bark that said on this day I was born and then there were roses and the green bleed into the tile and the tile bled into the green and she was six wings of seraphim. It was half a breath, the light and the color and Samand'riel staggering forward for his mother's hand – but then it was a snake strike, the heavy rattle of weighted chain on old iron and Jibreel turned her head just slightly to look at her father who stood in the doorway, lance bolaed in the lashing steel tongue of Organism.

“That will not work.” It was simple and expressionless.

Malakim. He destroyed. And then - and then Azrael was running to the back of the hallway, one dive, sliding down on the linoleum with his hands on the floor and his feet on the floor and then he Became again, and the end of the hallway was stuffed full and the walls shook with the enormity of the World Serpent. He defended; but what Jormungand defended was the Last Thing, and when he opened his gaping jaw full of teeth with the green eyes that made you stop in your tracks to take in your breath as your spine turned to ice in your back, he choked on his tail to spray down the hall a ferocious rush of turbid seawater, hot, boiling, acidic. Samael grabbed on to the light fixture to avoid the rush of it, scythe jammed through to hold him steady, as everything was suddenly seafire.

There was screaming and hissing and everything was turned into a burning mess and there was the muffled chant of Raziel, feeling up Judgment as high as he could go as he coughed and sputtered on the sick water and threw his circle, and Duriel wrestling to get a hold on the mass that was a snake and a mess of snakes – the maggot that ate Yggdrasil. Rachel had staggered under the force of it, still bleeding from his temple, shoving himself back on the ventillation unit, his partisan screaming against the tile and half melting in the acid boil, and then he'd drawn his gun and sighted. Eye shot. Nothing survived an eye shot.

Except the World Serpent. The eye bubbled and leaked fluid, and Azrael gave a piercing scream that shook the hallway and the walls and the ceiling: Orfiel, who had just been staggering to get up, slipped in the boiling fluid and screamed as it set her entirely on fire as she went ass-over-teakettle. Shaktiel, clinging to a bulletin board by the skin of her teeth, immediately launched herself towards her mother - but her mother, in her panic, had already reworked the Green, rolling in a patch of clover suddenly grown in the lino. The serpent thrashed, immobile, but shook himself until he could roll and deck Rachel bodily into the ventilation system until it cut a cross-pattern into his back and a sickening crunching sound made itself known underneath the howls. Deranged and maddened, the World Serpent spat again, bleeding poison-water. One jet dissolved a bench from its staples to the ground, flinging it in the direction of the gathered.

And then there was a whitewash of stillness as the draft of worldmercy touched the ground and it was quiet, the only rhythm the even rise and fall of her breath even as Azrael still screamed and pitched behind her. She ruled.

“You are too late,” she said, and it was the last seal.

Fire rained down as the world serpent beat down his back, the eternally curved spine with his tail in his mouth, and fire rained down in sticky dark globs from the ceiling to fall on them all. And then the tail came unraveled from the bite of his teeth: Azrael walked out to the white carpet that Jibreel had delivered and he Was, he Ruled, he Became. His darkness streamed out behind him as his six wings unfurled, at his ankles, at his back, at his temples. The building shook. The earth shook, just a little. There was a terrible, terrible cracking noise: Azrael took one quiet look at the others, and drew his finger across, and black fire spread up in a sheet to bar the way.

He took Jibreel's hand, and he lead her to the door where their son was. It was open. The angel of butterflies was jammed in it, butterfly caltrops stuck firm in the walls for her handholds as she made a last pathetic attempt for time and her mentor to come through. Azrael looked at her, and she flailed, terrified: he took her by the shoulders and he threw her back into the wall. And then Jibreel's hand was taken again, and he lead her to the bed.

Buboe was still asleep, as if nothing out there could have woken him up.

And a sound split the heaven as it had split the earth -- a ringing clarion call – the last silver bell of a trumpet.

It was the last mercy, and her mother, fire still crackling at the hem of her skirt, was almost felled by the sound alone and she wept, staggered, but then she flared like a star, feeling the Green that was left here, in this place. She stretched as far as she could, straining her body out into pulled tendons and the lines of torn muscles, and she could hear Organism sing through the air to break her back, but then she had found the catch and wrenched out the plug, and the soft atonal heartbeat hung in the air for a second and then faded.

Then his mind said: - o come ye now to old canaan and hear the wise -

Then his mind said: Wait.

Azrael pulled Jibreel close to him, by the cutting edges of the ribbons of Organism, until his hand bled. He only looked out the window. The sky was red from the silver sound of the trumpet call of the Apocalypse: Caine and Tadhiel would be there soon, the four riders, and then they would rend the earth apart. He did not look at the wires. He did not look at Gabriel. He only looked at the window, the window only, both of their reflections in the glass, their wings brushing each other like moths.

"Jibreel," he said, "Jibreel - Jibreel, are you really pregnant?"

And then there was the sound of Rachel's fifty-pence piece hitting the linoleum with a soft little clang. And only then, Azrael turned around.

It was like the first light at dawn, a pale graying around the edges of the night, a swaddled child sitting up, rubbing his fist against his eyes, bundles of nerves and feathers behind his ears twitching reflexively as the quilt slipped off the bed, a discarded shroud. It was the wake becoming waking, and there was a clear, young voice, slightly hoarse from lack of use, but it mellowed in timbre as he spoke, like a bather wading out of deep water.

“Even if all the days of the earth have already been burnt up and only one moment is left before the Judgment, then He will stretch that moment into an eternity until one comes forward to fill the world with peace,” and then he stopped, awkwardly, and struggled to sit up, shedding tubes and shunts like snow shaken off a dog. He was a faint dusting of gold, and then he smiled shyly, “I'm sorry that I was away.”

Then Azrael threw himself to the foot of the bed and wept like a child on his son's feet, howling, shedding himself - Malakim to Ofanim - until he was just Azrael, just Sefiros Hawkesby, just Raven Walks-With-Wolves and a man with long dark hair with his face buried in sterile hospital blankets. He sobbed openly enough to wash Buboe's feet with his tears, and the shaking stopped and the water disappeared like it had never been there. He wept himself breathless and hysterical.

Jibreel moved to take her son's hand, fingers lacing, a knit of small bones against larger bones, her other hand running over the pale frosty gold of his cranium, the empty box that had held his broken brain, folding him up and pressing him against her throat, her pulsebeat. “You were dead.”

“I was afraid,” he trembled and leaned against her, bones and feathers and she was melting away too, melting into a brittle little woman who clung desperately to her son, “It happened and I ran, but then when it was time to come back it was almost too far. I was so afraid. I couldn't come. I had lost the way. But then, just now, I heard you calling for me, and I knew I had to come home. I saw the light. You were holding the light, and papa was holding the light.”

Somehow Raziel had managed to stagger against the door frame, and as he leaned there, battered, his hair in his eyes and acid holes burned into his robes, he had only one thing to say, “Apocalypse,” he laughed, raspy and tired, as if he had finally understood the last line in the most secret of jokes, “Was never intended to happen without Covenant.”

Gabriel got to her feet by pulling herself up against the bed, knuckles dug into linen, and then hung there for a moment like a beached seal. Then she smiled at her grandson, rosetree-to-redeemer, and then she went limping off to see that no one in her family had been maimed beyond fixing. She touched Azrael's hair as she went.

Azrael looked up at her, just once, still like a wild thing - and then he buried his face in Buboe's ankles, as if there was not quite anything in the world to be aware of but the thin sterile blankets and his son's bird-bones.

"Almost," he said, muffled. "Almost, but not quite."

She passed Caine in the doorway, slouched and comfortable, miraculously reappeared from wherever he had secreted himself away, and the angel of rapture grinned his deathshead smile, as if he were proud of his dental work, and then raised one finger to balance it against his chin, “Aleleuia,” he said, “Isn't it true? We live in the best of all possible worlds.”

He didn't wait for an answer, as if none were expected to such a question and absurdly, he offered his half brother a wink and then shoved his hands in his pockets and sauntered off down the hallway, his voice rising in a warm tenor.

“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving. In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees, and the voices of those who stand looking -- “

And Jibreel started to sob, burying her face against her son's neck as her whole body quaked.

God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.

*