the fifth day

*

I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold

- sting, "fields of gold"

*

They awoke far before she'd set her alarm; holding each other in the darkness, perfectly still, barely a heartbeat between them as London woke up. Their lovemaking was the same kind of breathless anticipation, even now a self-defense mechanism to wipe themselves and their brains, before he pulled away from her and went to take a shower in her bathroom. It was hard to move away; he sat on the bed and stroked every joint in her fingers, carpals and metacarpals, before he could get out of the sightline of her face, her big quiet eyes, their tenuous forever-alliance. He didn't want to leave the room. Azrael barely wanted to leave her side.

In a way, it was going to be harder now. He clumsily kissed her before he went to wash, a mouth-to-mouth bump as if they were both twelve, young and idiotic.

And, in a great great great many ways, he thought that it was going to be easier.

She lay still in the warm hollow of the bed for what seemed to be a long time, but what proved, after a glance at the old brass windup alarm clock, to be only the barest over four minutes. She still felt ancient and in some ways bloodless, but it was as if the scenery around her had shifted, as if she had suddenly grown into it, like the assumption of a mantle, the heaviness of a bag of skin. Perhaps, in a way, this was her Becoming. She was nacreous and veined, like a moth come out of cocoon, split down the back, weary from the push to live, starving. It would take time before she was ready to flurry out into the world as this new self -- Jibreel Eisenreich, as seen through a lens colored Azrael.

She almost followed him into the shower, a blind little lamb on a ribbon, but then she had reflected that it was perhaps not the most sound idea for them to occupy every empty moment with the open-fingered caresses that slid so swiftly downhill into locked heels, knuckles kneaded into skin, and indiscriminate needy fondling. After all, she had to get dressed herself, and she did have her beetles to see to, and she really needed to throw out some of the older things in the fridge before they became sentient and carried away the food that was still viable --

And she found herself again gnawingly empty, raw, hollow -- hungry as a termite or a seventeen year locust.

For the first time in days, Jibreel felt compelled to actually prepare something for herself. For Azrael. For the both of them. Mensae coelestis participes faciat nos. It was the blessing of two.

She made pancakes.

The expression on Azrael's face when he came out, shirt undone and trousers half-belted, toweling his hair, neared that of awe; obviously pancakes plus the angel of mercy were a holy combination the likes of which brought the angel of the apocalypse to his knees, or at least to the kitchen when he followed his nose. He was too damp when he nuzzled into the back of her neck, kissing the nape of it, opening the fridge to get out the orange juice he'd bought a day or so before in vain; he looked at her askance, as she cooked.

"Are those really pancakes, Columba?"

They were not the most elegant of pancakes. Not entirely circular because Jibreel did not bother to use the pancake rings her mother had pressed upon her some time ago, the were Rorschach blots of batter browning solid, a little too thick and not so much airy.

"Just from a box," she confessed, shaking her head, "I'm not really sure what's edible in the fridge, if anything. Pancakes seemed at least marginally safe," she flipped a too-dense pancake onto the serving plate where it landed with something like a crispy thud, "The milk wasn't expired," she hastened to add.

Azrael buttered it almost by way of punctuation, lifting it up with the tips of his fingers and half-burning them as he took a bite. "S'goodsh," he assured her, before he swallowed. "Much better than Achaiah's."

Jibreel raised a skeptical eyebrow as she poured another round of batter onto the griddle, "Flattery will get you everywhere, carus Deum, but I don't see how that's possible," she paused, "Unless he cooks like Zadkiel."

"Your brother isn't the best cook?" Azrael reflected on Zadkiel. "Well, no, I suppose he isn't, but - " He ate the pancake Cattulus-style, gulping it down as if it was his last meal. Eating it with Jibreel, knowing she was about to eat, made it taste better. It was a little heavy. "It's good."

"Zadkiel isn't allowed in the kitchen with the intent to cook," she explained, flip-dropping another cake onto the plate, "Not since the incident." He thoughtfully toweled the last damp bits of his hair; he looked like a fretful porpentine, strands of burnished dark everywhere, a long entanglement. "You can't say it like that without telling me, Jibreel. Now I have to know."

She turned the gas off with a click and set the griddle off the range and onto a trivet, turning to brush her fingers thoughtfully over the trail of his wet hair, "Greater men than you would tremble at the barest echo."

She spread hers with jam and decided it was not half bad, although rather leaden as it settled in her stomach, "He nearly put his eye out when a baked potato exploded. Had to go to the emergency room and everything," she noted, around bites, "Hasn't been trusted around food preparation since. Is still a little cross about it. Very sensitive should you bring it up in conversation."

Azrael obviously thought about it a long while. "I suppose he could say his chips were up."

She sputtered around her pancake, nearly choking on it as she did. She coughed and pounded herself lightly on the chest once or twice. When she finally managed a clear breath, she shook her head and noted serenely, "Your puns are still horrendous."

"I think they have something to do with the apocalypse, Jibreel," he agreed, straight-faced. "Maybe one day I'll make one so awful that the world will end."

"The final mercy," she added very seriously, "Saving the world from your terrible jokes."

His head was on her shoulder, quiet, and he still smelled like her shampoo. "Not yet."

When it was just him, it was easy to pretend that eight years had not fallen between then, lost and passed, that this morning had not been the first time she'd been called Columba in ages out of mind, that her her son had not already been born, grown, lived -- that he was not now a bug on a pinboard, kept still by the wires and tubes that fed in and out of him like nails. He could be asleep in the other room, there was still time before school -- was it even a school day? She had lost track. Azrael would take him so she would have time to get the cream to Bartleby. He would remember his Spanish homework this time. He wouldn't cross the street. She'd be waiting at the gate to pick him up. He'd tell her that he wanted to enter the spelling bee. He would spell 'infinitesimal' as proof of his skill. She would tell him he was bound to be the next great spelling bee athlete in the world. He would tell her he wanted to be a spelling beetle just to make her smile.

"Not yet," she agreed, voice as soft as linen.

Perhaps not ever again.

*

In many ways their arrival at the hospital was almost dreamlike. She'd just hung onto Azrael's arm as he hauled them through the press that hung in the lot like carrion birds. Inside the building, it was quiet, it was still. She walked very close behind him, first with her hand on his jacket, and then with her hand captured in his. It was like a fairy tale, or one of the late night movies they'd been watching so much recently. They'd go in to see their son, newly reconciled and now deeply reaffirmed, and he'd open his beautiful cherry red eyes and laugh, and then there'd be an autumn wedding and everything would be full and good. It was how it was supposed to happen. It was the only way things could happen.

But it was not the way things happened.

She knew something was strange when they came to the door. It was slightly ajar, but what was stranger was that the interior was dim, hazy, unknown. Someone had turned the lights off in the room and her stomach twisted up with a thousand fragmentary theories and fears and she grasped at Azrael's hand, but he was already pushing into the room, pulling her behind him. She screwed her eyes shut and waited, but there was nothing except the gentle electronic chorus of life-support technology. This gave her enough courage to tentatively open her eyes, as if she might have simply gotten dizzy, starry eyed, from the shift between light and darkness.

At first she could not figure out what unsettled her so. The first place she looked was the bed where her son still quietly slept like Snow White in a glass coffin of crystalline tubing and rubber bound wiring, but he was as he had been for the past several days, which now seemed to mark the entirety of her life in shallow pillbox entries. He was . . . at least no worse. The lights were off. The room was empty except for her son.

She could not understand it.

And that was when she noticed Raziel.

He was leaning in the corner of the room farthest from the window, the blindspot that was not immediately visible when one entered through the door on the same wall. He was silent, close lipped and staring, arms crossed and as unmoving as stone. She shivered and almost fell back a step, as if she wanted to hide behind Azrael -- although this would then put him into harm, so she held her ground, trembling. There was something almost unnaturally still about Raziel. Absurdly, although she had known him her entire life, at that moment he primally terrified her.

She wasn't the only one. Azrael, who was five thousand years old and scared of very little, felt more than a chill go down his spine; something clenched in him, absolute and undying horror, and the want to go and wrestle the man who had once been Idumea away from his son's hospital bed. It was as if the room was dead; as if his son was flesh and meat, and as if Raziel himself was nothing, a rock, a stone -- old malevolence. His hackles practically rose. It was as if a wolf had suddenly slunk into camp; his only want was to get him away, hit, kill, maim, push, the total and alien urge to obliterate.

He wanted him away from his child.

"Raziel," he began, and was ashamed at himself for how much it came out a snarl; he had to school himself, grit his teeth. He wanted to run over and check Buboe. He wanted to check his heart. Gentler: "Raziel."

It was a slow shift, Raziel's eyes from where they lay heavily on the child moved ponderously over and fell then on Azrael, and, by association, Jibreel. At first there was no recognition, just a deep sort of blankness that seemed to signify that he was lost in thought -- lost in the serpentine labyrinth of his brain. At that moment Jibreel did not doubt that his mind was filled with dark and choked places still, swollen with hatred, scored by bitterness. Her father had once told her that the term 'unfallen' was a misnomer when attached to his kind. They has fallen hard and far and had only been caught lately, at the bottom of an endless shaft, and nothing between heaven and hell could draw them back up along the line. It was as impossible as living your life backwards, grave to cradle.

At that moment, Jibreel could feel the innate, black heaviness that Raziel still carried with him as his constant companion and his prop in times of worry. She could almost smell Idumea on him, could almost see him blur around the edges.

And then at once light seemed to kindle behind his eyes and he smiled thinly. He looked at them, the way they stood, Jibreel having backed into Azrael at Raziel's attention shift, and then his smile quirked at the edges.

"Well, turtledoves, you look better this morning."

"How long have you been here?" What are you doing. There was still too much wariness in the younger man's eyes.

Raziel kicked off the wall and stretched his arms languidly over his head, "Only about ten minutes. Gabriel left to pick up something to eat, and since I was here, I offered to watch the boy so she could have a few moments to herself." What illness that had read over his shape had gone now as if the light had suddenly shifted. He now seemed as harmless and familiar as he had ever been -- a self-absorbed, self-interested literary critic who referred to his children by number so to more efficiently keep track of them.

"... Thank you." He was still guarded, but Azrael's eyes carried less of the shocking and sudden loathing. "She works herself too hard. She has things of her own she could be doing."

Jibreel finally managed to detach herself from where she hung against Azrael's arm and moved to lay her hand over his son's bare forehead. Miracles had yet to happen. He was still dead to the world. She pulled the chair that now seemed to be an indivisible facet of her self closer to the bed and settled in it. There was a Turkish crossword puzzle book in the seat that could only belong to her mother. She noticed that someone -- who she could not imagine was anyone other than Raziel -- had made several corrections and comments in red felt tipped pen. Sometimes she wondered if her mother had kept company with the fallen for so long that she had ceased being sensitive to the miasma that hung over them in tense moments. Raziel -- Idumea -- was always welcome at her table, to say nothing of her husband. Jibreel loved her father with something kin to worshipful devotion, but there were still times he did not seem quite right.

Raziel shrugged, "She wouldn't know what to do with herself if someone tried to keep her from prying into everyone's business. She's used to being queen of her castle. Besides, I doubt they'd have her back on the St. Christopher's Sixth Form Lacrosse team at forty three, even if she can still fit into that little plaid skirt."

Jibreel made an queer face, "You know, I almost think she'd go back if they'd have her back. My mother is strange."

"She's eccentric," the angel of the apocalypse said loyally. "My father is strange. I don't think that's very arguable."

He moved to sit in the chair he always sat in, leaning back in the uncomfortable plastic, almost insensible and deaf now to the hum of the machines. His son had an electric heartbeat, measured, a dull beeping monotone, keeping time. "I wonder if they'll start coma therapy today."

The briefest of unreadable looks crossed Raziel's face, and then he slowly circled the bed to stand at the end of it, "I'm sure that a total lack of intervention cannot last forever. Counter measures will be taken," his eyes narrowed for a moment and his voice faltered, "This place, here, it reminds me of Cassiel." He shook his head suddenly and his neatly kept hair flurried around his head, "Which is very stupid. I think Cassiel used to skin cats for his own amusement," he noted, bemused.

Azrael looked at Raziel for the first time with something resembling sympathy, a dull-eyed connection; he wasn't the only one who had - was losing - wouldn't lose - had had something happen to a child. Buboe would come back. Cassiel had come back. But Raziel had never loved Cassiel from the start. "Sandalphon died in a hospital."

Raziel raised one hand gracefully and snapped his fingers, eyes sharp and glassy, "What an astute observation, little Ragnarok. As I recall, your mother did as well. Gabriel on the balcony, poisoned by her own child, your father dismembered brutally by your little dove's father. A great many people died in a great many bloody ways. It is," he smiled again thinly, "You could say, the only way we know how to go -- bloodily."

Sexton Delaney idly slipped his hands into his pockets and waved at them over his shoulder as he went, calling behind him without bothering to look back, "Such is our lot. A cycle of repeating death, but perhaps also a cycle of endless life. I leave you to your own devices, turtledoves. I trust you will find your own ways to cope. We all do."

Glass and fire and arrogance -- that had ever been Raziel's way of coping. Jibreel was striving to find a new way that did not involve a rim of poison around the sunken edge of a glass.

She sighed after Raziel had gone, "Sometimes I wonder if I might not have turned out like him, if things had been different."

Azrael's hand had crept into hers. "For one thing, Jibreel, I don't think I would have gone to bed with you. You would have handcuffed me to your radiator."

"If I were like Raziel I would have possibly handcuffed you to my radiator whether you were amenable to this arrangement or not. Or at least kept clippings of your hair and things and done violent things to anyone else who expressed interest in you. You know, no one likes to talk about it, those things that happened -- I wonder how they learned to cope. My mother and Kerensa, I mean, with men who were so obsessive over them that their lives were forfeit. I can understand that they did. People have, after all, learned to live with worse things. I just wonder how they did it. What it is they tell themselves in the morning and late at night when they lie in bed beside men who've killed them stone dead?"

"I think they tell themselves, 'I love them,'" he said, watching his baby, eyes quiet as ever. "I think that's all you can say. It's not like abuse, I don't think. Not any more. It's not a case of 'They'll hurt me again.' It's the disservice that was done to them in the past. Some people don't forgive. I don't think my mother forgave Duriel for any of it. But she's different now. I don't know about my father. But they don't have to lie beside them, I suppose. What do you think Gabriel thinks of you?"

She smiled briefly, humorlessly, "If you are discreetly asking me what I think my mother thinks about my mixing her an arsenic cocktail, then I would say guilt more than anything. She blames herself, as is her usual reaction to most things. I have always made my own decisions, even when I was a child. Do you know, my father actually thanked me for it? Death is also sometimes a mercy, Azrael."

He laughed, equally humorlessly. "I know that, Columba. I know that."

She closed her eyes and sighed, "It seems like we're forever in the garden of forking paths. What do you think you would have done, Azrael?" she asked, leaning back into her chair, folding the crossword puzzle book over her lap, "If the world had been different."

Azrael leaned back, braid swinging over the arm of the chair. For a long while he just sat, the light from the window coming in blind-slatted rectangles over his face; the room was heavy with the morning, and with the machines, and with themselves. "It all depends, Jibreel. On what happened. What world we were in. If I grew up in the Keep, with you? Metatron only knows. I was never meant for battling the Dark. I was just the end key, the last switch. I would have been useless in the war. And... I would never have had my son."

She opened her eyes slowly and studied the pebbled contour of the institutional white ceiling, "Is that what you think, then? If we had all lived happily ever after on Glastonbury Tor?"

"Is there ever a happily ever after?"

"There are no such things as happy endings," she said thoughtfully, "Because there are no such things as endings. That's a line from one of my favorite story books. I read it endlessly as a little girl. Would you have met me then, and not loved me? Are we victims of circumstance?"

"I might have loved you, but would we have been able to be together without your father murdering me in cold blood?" His hair had fallen over his face again. It seemed to do so naturally. "Maybe you would have married Pazriel and taken over your mother's seat in the West."

She looked pained, as if she had swallowed one of her hissing, clicking beetles, "And maybe I would have hung myself from the rafters in the library – I am not made for dealing with people I think, although Pazriel is – well, he has his difficulties that are quite divorced from me. You know, I don't think my father dislikes you because we're cousines," she said thoughtfully, "I think you're too alike. You rub each other wrongly. I couldn't be an archangel, Azrael. I'm not likable. I'm more morose and stony. I don't inspire confidence. I inspire mild nausea I think."

There were a few moments of choked laughter. "Don't be so self-deprecating. You're lovely, mysterious, grave. You would have been Gabriel's daughter. They would have handed the West seat over to you on a silver platter. You could do - I don't know, strategy, what do archangels do when they're not hugging people - something. You would have been a pretty picture." His voice was sardonic. "I think too much of the Holy War was pretty pictures, at times. Would they have had me in the collar? I'm not as wide-eyed and trembling as Lucifer."

"A man is far too arrogant who thinks he can collar apocalypse," she shook her head, "Who could collar you, Azrael? Who would dare? Lucifer is light. Even Metatron - Epiphany. That is nothing to sit next to Apocalypse. You are not a linear progression but an exponential one. It is not something it is within the rights of anyone -- high council or not -- to attempt to limit. It is also more than mildly stupid. To collar apocalypse is to invite disaster."

"And yet: would they have collared me? Imagine if I Fell, Jibreel. Who would stop me then? I would be a walking time-bomb, and I doubt I'd be such a genial one as Metatron. Or Lucifer. I was old when I was three. I used to watch Acheliah rolling in the flowerbeds and wish that she'd put her clothes on, because I was getting embarrassed."

She frowned, thin lips pressed thinner, "I don't want to think about if you fell, Azrael. I don't want to think about it at all. The fallen frighten me, and it's not a difference-fear, it's a sameness-fear, it's because I think there's a part of me that's far too accepting. You know, I used to follow my father when he made his rounds at the hospital, skipping along behind him as he went from room to room leaving only torment and agony behind him. That is a wrong thing to happen, Azrael. I get too disconnected sometimes, I think. Nothing seems real at all," she closed her eyes again, "Maybe then I'd be the one who ended up chained to a radiator. But then, you always have your sister."

"Isn't it ironic?" It carried hardly any inflection. "I know you know. She wouldn't be with me out of love, but she would if she had no soul, I think. Am I that repulsive?"

She laughed and it was very soft and gentle, not hard edged as her previous laughs had been, "No, but I often think you are remarkably innocent for a man who's over five thousand years old."

"Hey." It was definitely a pout; his fingers edged into hers again, calloused fingertips from too many guitars. "Hey, I was there when they invented spray-on latex."

"You can be decadent and innocent at the same time," she petted the back of his hand as if it were a small cat, "I have no doubt that you could heap numerous articles of evidence into my lap to ply your case as the jaded Wandering Jew who has seen everything and done everything in such amounts that nothing tastes fresh any longer. However," and there was always a however in situations like this involving Jibreel. It was something she had inherited from her father, "If you think Acheliah's hangups concerning you are involved in some personal faults that you have, then you are an idiot. You are a very sweet and gentle idiot, but you are still an idiot," she confided pleasantly, "Reflect on this well, worldsnake. We are but the children of the gods."

"Columba," he said. "I've been walking this world for five thousand years and you still make me feel approximately seven, and I love you. For that. For everything."

"You had better," she cocked her head languidly, "I took rhythmic gymnastics for seven years. Perhaps you are not aware of this, but I wield a fearsome ribbonstick."

"I'll let you hit me with it if you wear a leotard while you do."

She pitched her voice slightly higher, so it carried, "Chickadee, your father is making very improper advances towards me involving the sport of kings and Romanian waifs. Please take notes for when you begin dating."

Azrael raised his own, dark-eyed and stony-voiced. "If you listen to any improper advances I make towards your mother, kid, you're grounded. Also, you're not dating until you're twenty-one."

"You know," she said comfortably, "I think all men are very stupid. For example in this case," she raised one slender finger as if she were lecturing, "My father married my mother -- twice, I might add -- when she was sixteen, but then was extraordinarily unpleasant when you and I became involved -- at sixteen, may the court's attention be thusly drawn again. Which, I think, is a more than adequate age for dating."

"It's different when you're a father, Jibreel, a state of being into which you will never enter unless you have a complicated operation. You don't want your child to be married. Mothers are different. They all want sons-in-law or daughters-in-law. Look at your mother."

"My mother is a horrible example."

"Think of how upset she is with no real in-laws. She has... me." Azrael racked his brains. "And she has... I've gotten on well with your brother, lately, is it too cruel of me to say 'Shaktiel'? All right, your mother is a horrible example."

"She adopts any strays she can find. She doesn't care if they marry into the family or not," Jibreel rolled her eyes, but perhaps not entirely unkindly, "I think Shaktiel invited herself in and no one has thought of a clever way to tell her to leave, least of all Rachel, who is as socially apt as a grizzly bear on stilts. In a dress. Dancing the hula."

"With no legs or arms. I could always set him up with my sister."

She stopped flatly at that and looked at him for a long time, her expression unreadable, "I think it is the very dark part of my soul that wishes me to encourage this. I might yet be the maiden of -- what is mercy exactly, fallen?"

"The Maiden of Horrifying Blind Dates."

"I'm warning you. Apocalypse meets ribbonstick, ribbonstick wins."

"I'm utterly at your mercy, Jibreel."

"Lord of Atrocious Puns."

"Maiden of Slightly Heavy Pancakes."

"Lord of Only Dates Women in his Family."

It was at this inauspicious moment that Demeter Serraffield again fluttered into the room, hands at her neck, untying the silk scarf that bound up her hair to keep the drizzle off, "You mustn't speak ill of Caine, Jibreel," she noted serenely, "He can't help being what he is," she made a face that was somewhere between guilt and the discovery that the milk has gone sour, "Most of the time, at least."

Azrael looked extraordinarily guilty, as if he had been caught with his hands down Jibreel's top, and pulled his hand away from hers with all the casual surreptitiousness of a raging elephant. "I don't think Caine can count as dating, Aunt Gabriel. He hasn't taken anyone in the family out."

Jibreel looked sidelong at Azrael, and did not make a comment. Gabriel looked sidelong at Jibreel and did not make a comment.

"Darling," Demi said easily, patting Azrael's head as if he were a little boy, "Caine doesn't want to take us out. He wants to take us in, and therein lies the subject of much Freudian dilemma. Raziel's already gone then?"

Her great-nephew nodded, vaguely uncomfortable. "He... It was nice of him to watch."

Jibreel crossed her arms, "He was staring. With the lights off. It was disturbing, mother," she looked down at the book in her lap, "And he's made rude comments all over your puzzle book."

It was Gabriel's turn to roll her eyes, "Yes, that does sound like Raziel," she remarked dryly, then she shook her head, "You mustn't let him upset you darling. He's been very . . . unsettled lately."

"Why?" Azrael's eyes were narrowed. "If he were unsettled over something other than what's in this hospital, he wouldn't be here. What's wrong with him, Gabriel?"

"It's nothing you need to worry yourself over, moppet," Gabriel soothed, straightening the detritus that was accumulating in the room from the sheer number of people who were coming to sit and stay, "Raziel often gets strange fancies in his head. They don't mean anything. He gets upset when when the weather doesn't turn out the way he's planned. It's nothing important, just him being fussy. If he's upset you that much, I'll have a word with him."

Azrael was silent again for a long while, staring in the direction of Buboe rather than the conscious parties in the room. "... Thank you for sitting with him this morning."

Gabriel smiled, gently, perhaps a little worn around the edges, "He and I have a grand old time together, don't we, bobbin? We do. I tell him all sorts of terrible stories from my youth. He loves the story about Sams marrying the donkey."

"I thought it was a goat," Jibreel spoke up but her mother shook her head.

"No, that was a different time. The goat left him standing at the altar."

Her nephew tilted his head. "What happened with the donkey?"

"Personally I think he asked it for something rude. It kicked him in the head."

"Didn't the goat kick him in the head?"

Demi raised a slender eyebrow, "What does that tell you about your father and his relationship to domesticated animals?"

"More than he wanted to know, I'm sure," her daughter grimaced, "You know, I don't believe half the stories you tell about Uncle Samael."

"They're probably lies," Azrael agreed. "Probably."

"Oh moppet, I could not make up things half as interesting as the things that I know are true fact concerning your father. I was there," she said pleasantly, "You were three. He was always assuring Jibs that they'd elope once she turned ten. Was always promising to buy her garter belts to match her hair ribbons."

There was far too much of a possessive look in her nephew's glance for Gabriel - if she had not before - not to know immediately what was up; they were all too consanguineous; he had Duriel's blood in him, which meant murder for even suggesting somebody else had claim over his. Violent, slow, brutal murder. "I don't think garter belts and hair ribbons have quite the same effect on her any more."

Something else probably did.

*

Surprisingly, this time it had been Jibreel who'd stood suddenly and announced her intention to take a walk, startling both Azrael and her mother whom she actually had to invite twice before the thought registered behind those eyes, everblue as linarite. Azrael hastily agreed to sit with the baby after he'd awkwardly stood when Jibreel had risen, as if the thought of her wandering the halls of the hospital alone troubled him. It was charming in a very pathetic way, Gabriel thought. It was clear neither of them really wanted to be out of the other's line of vision for longer than it took to go to the toilet or for Azrael to sneak one of his outdoor deathsticks, so therefore it had been surprising when Jibreel had falteringly asked her mother to go walking with her when the invitation clearly did not include the dark-eyed angel of the apocalypse.

They left him picking out the chords of the fairy lullaby, looking at the hardwood of the guitar and not the silent, empty mess that was his son.

After having proposed this walk, it became very clear to Gabriel that her daughter really had no idea where they could walk without fear of molestation by the press, so Gabriel gently commandeered her daughter and steered her again into the patiently off-white staff elevator. This time they shared it with a drowsy looking resident whom she called by name. He tensed at first and then relaxed and even answered a question as to the health of his baby girl before stepping out at Radiology. Her daughter remained polite but aloof for the rest of the ride.

The top floor of St. Sebastian's Hospital was restricted to staff, but Demeter Serraffield had been an old hand at ignoring such regulations when she had been sixteen, and now at forty three she did nothing but idle down the hallway and up the short flight of stairs to the roof, mild and self-possessed as a queen. They were not challenged, although they did pass several people who probably had rights to challenge them. Demi had been a regular at this hospital for what was now pressing against thirty years; her husband had been head of Oncology for even longer. She was an expected and respected fixture, even barring the dove white bundles of feathers behind her ears.

The fire door to the roof was stuck -- and by 'stuck' here we of course mean locked in the euphemistic language of archangels. An unapologetic whack with her mace unstuck it in such a manner that did not entirely and irrevocably wreck the hydraulic hinges on which the door balanced, so she was satisfied that a minimum of property damage had been done, threw her shoulder to the door, and led her daughter out onto the windswept roof of the hospital.

There was only one other person on the roof -- one of the medevac helicopter crew -- and he actually threw up his hand to order them back down into the stairwell until he saw exactly who it was he was addressing and dropped his hand and shrugged. Demi waved pleasantly at him, spared him a smile, and then dragged her daughter off to the lee of an impressive set of ventilation equipment which kept most of the wind off of them but still offered them a tolerably acceptable view.

They stood in silence for a few moments, two different shades of brunette whipped around in ropes and fans, and at last, Jibreel spoke falteringly.

"Azrael and I," she started shyly, as if she were still getting used to both of the words in her mouth at once and joined by a positive conjunction, "Azrael and I, we're back together again."

"Oh, I know," Gabriel said comfortably, without really thinking about it.

All the expression drained out of her daughter's face and left her standing there as if she were newly discovered of the 'kick me' sign on her back, "Why is it that you seem to take every opportunity to make every conversation we have as difficult and strained as possible?"

This time Gabriel could not help but laugh easily, "Jibs, that's my line."

Jibreel sighed as if she had been martyred on the cross at Calvary, and Gabriel shook her head.

"I'm happy that you've found each other again, Jibs," she explained, "I really and truly am. I'm happy that Azrael seems more relaxed. It's easier now, isn't it? Everything, I mean."

It was a few moments before Jibreel spoke, her hands pressed deep into her pockets, "It is. Everything is. Before it was like I was a piece of rope, or something else, cloth, pulled all different directions to the breaking strain. It was so hard. Everything was hard. I couldn't think. I couldn't do anything. It was like I was autistic and had forgotten how to do all the things that you do when you live because there was just so much -- so much so fast and I felt backed up against a wall, with nowhere to go -- "

"So you just shut down," Gabriel supplied, leaning forward to brace herself on her arms, against the high stone railing that rimmed the roof. She had thrown herself backward off that railing a hundred thousand times it seemed in times past, always at night, always in the dark. Her youth was a series of hide-and-seek games played with demons on dark roof tops.

Jibreel nodded, her eyes out-of-focus, "It was easier to do than try to fight it all off. I just stopped doing everything. But then, it was as if I looked up and he was just standing there, waiting for me. Waiting for me despite everything, for always. Kyrie eleison. It was more than I deserved. I never thought I needed it that way, having someone else, having him. I never thought I was weak, dependent. I thought that living was something I could do alone, without help. I still think it was the honorable thing to do, but Iesu Christi, it's like I couldn't remember how to walk without him, like my whole self had been sanded smooth and featureless. I couldn't find myself. "

"Jibs," Gabriel began gently, curling a careful arm around her thin shoulders, "No one can live alone. It's not weak to need someone to lean against. You've been isolating yourself for too long. You won't let anyone get close to you. No man is an island, Jibreel Eisenreich, and no woman either. It was bound to break at some point. I'm just glad he was there to catch you."

"I don't know what I would have done -- " she started, trembling.

"You would have seen your shadow and crawled back down in your isolationist hole for another six years," Gabriel assured her, tugging at the shoulder seams of her blouse, "You are the emotional equivalent of a wretched ground hog and you are as stubborn as a stone donkey."

"Stubborn like my father," Jibreel said a little more confidently.

"Stubborn like me," corrected Gabriel insistently.

To this Jibreel had no retort, simply wrapped herself up in her own spindly arms and shrugged into the wind before asking, "How did you know?"

"Body language," Gabriel again replied automatically and then chuckled softly, "It's not all that difficult to spot, Jibs. You were so very close together, and the way he was looking at you -- not that he doesn't always look at you that way -- but well, it was less than subtle. And he's braided your hair this morning," she added, reaching up to tug at the banding that bound the top of one of the long coils of hair, "You always start you braids under-tucked. He's started them over-tucked."

Jibreel's hand followed her mother's up the brown tangle of her braid to protectively cup over the banding -- twisted ribbon -- as she smiled very faintly, "I love him so very much."

Gabriel relaxed suddenly, letting her chin rest on her daughter's shoulder, "I know you do. You always have. That's why I gave up trying to tell you to do something different with your life. At this point, doing something different -- something without Azrael -- would be wasting your life, and wasting it miserably. You've been so unhappy. I think you are monstrously perverse, and that most assuredly comes from your father."

"It comes from you," Jibreel said stubbornly.

Demi laughed again, easily, "Now you're just being contrary. Also a trait of your father."

"No," Jibreel denied sharply, and then paused and shrugged again as she admitted, "Yes." She leaned back against the elder angel just the barest bit and closed her eyes, "But I mean, before, it seems like I loved him so differently, so incompletely. I was so stupid then, and I didn't really understand anything, I certainly didn't understand him, not the way I thought I did. He was so magnificent," her voice faltered suddenly and she seemed very small, as if she were again newly six, "El Shaddai, Apocalypse, Heaven and Sky, Ragnarok. He was everything, and he was so different from anyone or anything I had known. He was Azrael. He was a seraph. We had both been at Glastonbury. He treated me as if I knew so many great mysteries. We were of the same kind."

The whole time Jibreel had been talking, Gabriel had been digging easy fingers into her braids, soothing, humming softly to herself. After a moment of listening to the tuneless music, Jibreel continued.

"But I was so wrong about everything. Well, I was right, but not for the reasons I thought -- not for any of the reasons I thought. And now when I look back, the things I did, the things I said to him, they all seem so hollow, like wrong things. I didn't understand anything," she shook her head sharply, and the movement tugged the braid out of Gabriel's hand. She caught it again and tucked a comforting arm around Jibreel's middle.

"Love does nothing but deepen, Jibreel," she answered, smooth as cream rising through milk, "It deepens every moment. It deepens exponentially. Loving someone is giving yourself to them as best you know how. Just because today you know how to give more of yourself -- to understand more of him -- than you did yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, it doesn't invalidate what you gave before, and it doesn't cheapen it either. It doesn't change the fact that you've always loved him as hard as you can, as hard as you knew how. He knows this, Jibreel. Whether or not he knows that he knows this, he does. They do. I am sure if you ask him, he will tell you that he was never insulted by the way you loved him."

"Now it's so different. He's so -- himself," she said, shaking her head as if she herself could not make sense of her words, "His puns are terrible. He puts jalapeños in chicken noodle soup. I swear he doesn't know how to use the dishwasher."

"Consider it Highlander Syndrome. Your father still cannot be taught to use anything in the kitchen with a higher mechanical complication than the toaster, and even that only came with Eden's goading -- and yet he can adjust a dialysis machine, and I haven't the faintest idea how that works."

"It's more than that, it's all of that, like the summation doesn't equal what it should logically, like all the pieces rise on a curve," Jibreel had raised her hand to dance along this logarithmic ascension in the air in front of her, as if she might have been a lecturer at Oxford, "He is himself. He is Azrael. He wears these horrible old faded sweat pants that I think he's had since the early eighties. He calls me Columba. Sometimes he tastes of ash, and I'm not sure if it's heaven-ash, earth-ash, or just nicotine-ash. Quis est iste rex gloriae Dominus virtutum ipse est rex gloriae diapsalma. Benedictum Cor eius sacratissimum. El Elyon. I have walked with God. Maman, " she finished breathlessly, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to say, "I have Become. "

She said it as if it were a strange code that only her mother would understand, nameless, uncalled, unexplained. Gabriel knew instinctually what she meant, as if the nephilim had invented the word for them and them alone. "I Became twenty-five years, eleven months, and fourteen days ago," she confided, thoughtfully pulling at the ribboned ends of her daughter's braids.

"You've kept that close an accounting?" Jibreel asked slowly, and this time when her mother laughed it was sweet and heavy as butter.

"I know how old my children are."

Jibreel shook her head slightly at this and waited a moment deferentially before continuing, "I am defined. I am called. I am named."

"Self-actualization," Gabriel nodded into the bony warmth that was Jibreel's shoulder, "Self-definition. It is a powerful thing."

"He has named me," Jibreel contradicted, and again Gabriel shook her head.

"You have named yourself, but you have done so using his alphabet."

Jibreel was silent again before commenting deliberately, "You are a very strange person."

"O kettle," Gabriel chirped, squeezing her daughter suddenly around the middle, "Thou art quite black. The apple rarely falls far."

Jibreel ignored her this time in favor of her own musings, "He is everything. His is everything that ever was. He is everything that ever will be. He is totality. He is universality. He is immense. Mystery. Union. Boundless. Depthless. Unchained."

"He is your lover," Gabriel clarified evenly, as if she might have been discussing tea at a garden party, as if such conversations were the most natural things in the world to have with one's only daughter, who was estranged at that, "And he is your best friend. For you, that means he is all of these things. It is both easier and more difficult, to have one soul on whom you depend."

At this Jibreel became very still, as if she was considering something very carefully, "Lover. Best friend. It's not the same for you, is it?" It was as if she were weighing the thought in her hands, as if she were about to sit judgment, as if she had such rights. In some ways, at that moment, Gabriel wanted to sweep her up and spin her in the air like a little girl, and plant a dozen kisses on her forehead. Sometimes she was sweetly adorable in her abiding stupidity.

"It's not the same," she agreed, "It has never been the same."

"You are too libertine," Jibreel said, and Gabriel could read the expression on her face without seeing it -- a thin, firm line; a line she had inherited from her father.

"That's a fine comment to hear coming from you," Gabriel laughed, moving away finally to run one hand through her windswept hair as she struck a broody pose and imitated her progeny very accurately, "I have no use for modern morals."

Jibreel wheeled to face her. "Solidarity is not a modern moral. I am loyal."

"Jibreel," Gabriel began gently, one hand cupping the side of her face, "When you have waded through five thousand years of bloodshed and torture and agony and murdered the Platonic form of Evil with your own hands -- and all for one man -- then perhaps you will have ground to lecture me on solidarity. I love, Jibreel. It is how I was made. I can do nothing different. Your father understands that. He always has. He would never think to ask me to stop loving the people I care about. He has never been that cruel. The fact that I love Raziel and Orfiel and Fremiel and Amatiel and Shaktiel and Azrael and the children, it doesn't mean I love your father any less. It doesn't mean I've betrayed any of the trust he's put in me. Loving all of them, all of you, it's part of who I am."

"That's not who I mean and you know it," Jibreel accused, but Gabriel did not seem overly distressed by her daughter's tone, simply raised her hands lightly in defense.

"You will find it is a difference only of degree," she answered mildly, slipping her hands idly into her pockets.

"Are you in love with Samael?" Jibreel asked abruptly, face drawn, eyes dark.

Gabriel's smile was strange, but nigh on beatific, "I find that the boundaries between what is defined as merely loving someone and being 'in love' with them to be largely artificial as well as ill-defined. I also find that when such demarcation is forced, being 'in love' is often the shallower emotion. Perhaps you would have said that previously, 'I am in love with Azrael.' Now you simply love him. Adoremas. It is an issue of semantics, perhaps, and not one of affection or emotion."

This seemed to break the strain between them like an ax through ice, and Jibreel slumped as if acknowledging her beta status, "Now you sound like me."

Her mother cocked a slim eyebrow and crossed her arms, "No. You sound like me. I prefigure you. It is my privilege. I came first."

"I am myself," Jibreel huffed, and if she had been a cat, her tail would have perhaps stood out like a bottlebrush.

"I am glad you have finally realized that," Gabriel agreed and suddenly spurred her wings, scrambling less than elegantly up the stone wall that stood between them and the sheer drop, the belled dress that accompanied her climb these days ribboning into being around her. She leaned down to offer her daughter a hand up, "Now come on. Neither of us came up here to get a lecture."

Jibreel stared at her mother's hand as if she did not quite understand it, as if her mind could not parse the meaning. But then she smiled nervously. She had Become.

Her own wings unspurred and the ribbons of her climb falling around her, she took the archangel's hand and together they stood on the wall, looking down at the city spread below.

"You have to be careful on the other side of the building," Gabriel confided conspiratorially, "Where the heliport is. You can't see it, but there's a bounding fence on that side, just below the drop off, and it'll catch you and tangle you up something terrible. Your father had to climb down on more than one occasion and pull me loose. This was while he was the Lord of Pain, mind you," she sighed, soft and sweetly delighted at the same time, as if she might have been as newly sixteen and as newly enchanted by her husband as so many who had just met her often thought, "That man -- "

And as if she found that fitting punctuation, she leaned back suddenly and fell off the roof, wings catching the air and flurrying to beat and bear her up as she swept off.

After a moment, Jibreel followed.

*

He'd entered too many churches in his life; monasteries, temples, shrines, cloisters. He'd been Catholic enough times - had the ash put on his forehead, and everything - to know better than by heart what to do; he entered with Jibreel's hand in his, feeling very awkward and very solemn in the wake of the gazes of the rest of her family. Azrael felt almost-defiant, as if he were a teenager still, and smiled to himself at the thought; and just kept his lover's hand in his own, her small fingers locked within his, and bore it.

It smelled like incense, even in the foyer, waiting for Gabriel to get out the car and look as immaculate as if she'd just showered and dressed. Gabriel always looked like her eyelashes were sparkling. It was odd. His aunt - mother-in-law? - was always clean, even when she wasn't clean.

"Jibreel," the angel of the apocalypse murmured. "I don't think I have been Catholic for a while."

Jibreel stretched on her toes so that she could murmur almost in his ear, "There are two things to remember then. The first is to be properly guilty, no matter what it is you've done. The second is to be properly penitent. And remember to say your Hail Marys. In this family, Hail Marys are important."

Gabriel's step on the stone and carpet behind them was light as a breath and she had crept up on them like a shadow shortening under overhead lights, "You might consider it a form of job security."

Unfortunately, that made Azrael burst out laughing, and he had to make the effort to stop himself. His shoulders shook, dark hair shivering in the braid down his back, biting off the inappropriate noise; eventually he quietened, clearing his throat, getting back some semblance of dignity as he turned his head to look upon his mother-aunt.

"Do we go in?" he said, almost a whisper as if trying to make up for the outburst, colored by cigarettes. "Is everyone here?"

Again it was like the fog on little cat feet, although how hard-soled oxfords were that silent on stone was a difficult question to answer as the patriarch appeared silently behind his wife and swept the coat from her shoulders. He looked at Azrael for what seemed to be an endless and telling moment before answering, "Everyone is already here, yes."

Jibreel squeezed Azrael's fingers the barest touch, as if it were an attempt to settle him in this, one of the eldest Eisenreich haunts. Again, Duriel gave no tells to his inner thoughts, simply turned his attention to his wife as she slipped her arm through his and he spoke very softly.

"Father Wilkston has already gone back. He's asked us to stay after the mass."

"Then let's go."

Duriel looked up for a moment, one eyebrow raised in an expression that clearly stated he was unused to children talking in situations where they should be seen and not heard. Still, he did not offer any open statements, simply affixed a steady eye on Azrael before escorting his wife through a tertiary Gothic arch, down the aisle to the heavy oak pew that was peopled with nothing but Eisenreichs, from Rachel's dark head, bowed over hands that were more clenched than folded; Peter, deigning to be something near man-sized, one hand dug deeply into the feathery whiteness of his snowshine hair; Eden at the end of the pew, looking as if he desperately wanted a cigarette; Zadkiel, his eyes on his shoes; Samand'riel beside him, studying the hymnal until he caught them out of the corner of his eye and looked up to offer a reassuring smile that died on his face as soon as he caught sight of his sister. Zadkiel looked up sharply, as if he could read the sudden unease in Samand'riel's movements, but if he could determine what had startled his younger brother, he gave no signs of it. Gabriel nested into the pew beside her two younger sons and her husband moved to sit beside her with the ease of a man who has held this particular position for some years and knows both its blessings and its pitfalls.

Jibreel hung back behind Azrael, as if suddenly shy of her own family, and tried to think of what to say to them, when all eyes -- a mixed pallet of blues and greens, violet and cranberry dark -- were suddenly on her. It had not really been such since -- since her baby had been born.

Her lover had been in too many churches to be disconcerted in yet another; he and Acheliah had taken to the foxholes of the earliest, clumsiest angels carved out of stone, ever since Christianity had made its molasses-slow descent, he and his twin sister clutching the altar as demons raged in the street outside. He had gone to chapel with Buboe, watched him sing in the choir, feeling slightly dislocated as he always did. Fuck, he'd been in his share of monasteries. Sometimes Acheliah had been weighed down with - with something - after too many nights of sleeping naked next to him, as if they did anything other than sleep, and joined a cloister of unwary nuns. He'd never joined. He'd never been a priest. Some egotistical cancer within him told him that it was not his place; he was the worship, not the worshipper. Faith and not faithful. Feared and not fearful.

It was strange to see the family lineup; Samand'riel and Zadkiel looked not so much Gabriel's scions as Gabriel's imprints, the mixing of their blood, but Rachel was too disquietingly close to him to be mistaken as anything other than first cousin. Azrael knew he looked like Duriel, the same cheekbones, the same broad forehead and the arch of the nose. It was his blood. His kin. Flesh of his flesh.

He'd never had that. Not with his sister. Never not really. Even now Acheliah left only constant messages on his answering-machine; a sort of hanging-back, a stillness, as if she was waiting for Buboe to die so that she could step into his wings. He couldn't blame her, even as he blamed her at the same time: she had always seen his son as some kind of faithlessness for thousands of wedding rings and no consummation.

He slipped into the pew in almost a stupor, the space beside him for Jibreel, staring forward nigh-on transfixed and still hearing his son's canary-clear soprano. Qui tollis peccata mundi; dona eis requiem. Dazed, caught, he crossed himself without thinking.

Huddled down between Azrael and her father in a blackberry dark sweater and skirt, her knees tucked close together, the familiarity of this building swimming all around her -- for had she too not lived on the grounds of this church, curled up in Demeter Serraffield's bed, the six-year-old cuckoo-child to a sixteen-year-old girl, still in her school kilts, still smelling of grass and sweat and lacrosse. Compline, this was familiar. This was safe. This was her home. She knew vespers in this place. She knew matins. She had learned Latin at the knee of the man who would say the mass tonight, after her mother decided him a safer tutor that her fourth cousin, the perpetual library-master who found all religion 'largely tiresome.'

It had started before she was entirely aware of it, St. John's soft, deep voice carrying like a clarion bell across the stillness of the nave. Sacre Couer had had no lack of flock in all the years since a line of pale firefly-glow halos were to be seen from time to time in the forward wings of the church. It is easier to feel a closeness to God when one sits at mass with the angelical.

Aperi, Dómine, os meum ad benedicéndum nomen sanctum tuum: munda quoque cor meum ab ómnibus vanis, pervérsis et aliénis cogitatiónibus; intelléctum illúmina, afféctum inflámma, ut digne, atténte ac devóte hoc Offícium recitáre váleam, et exaudíri mérear ante conspéctum divínæ Majestátis tuæ.

As his son was thinking in a sort of dislocated way about how St. John's accent was off, Eden Ardith had crumpled up a little bit of paper and was passing it down the line of Eisenreichs. Duriel did not deign to pass the note; Gabriel had to stretch it across to grab it from her son, and pass it to her daughter, who had to unfold it from the crumple. It was written in bad biro.

you got laid!!! smile!!!

It was as if such occurrences were common at Eisenreich masses, for upon reading this note Jibreel was digging all over herself as discretely as possible for a pen. When she found none in her own pockets she began seriously going through Azrael's without any sort of invitation to personal space invasion. She found a stub of a pencil in his pocket and spent some time very carefully scribbling a response.

Fratres: Sóbrii estóte, et vigiláte: quia adversárius vester diábolus tamquam leo rúgiens círcuit, quærens quem dévoret: cui resístite fortes in fide. Tu autem, Dómine, miserére nobis.

Her script was prim and only slightly muddy from being composed against her stockinged knee.

Deus Meus, Is nothing a secret in this family?

It rustled along the line again, obediently, an obvious and normal practice for the Eisenreich brood to make with the familial postal service. When it got to Eden once more, he scribbled with his Bic, and it was only a few moments for the note to be passed back to her.

no!!!!

She looked as if she were deeply considering writing a more lengthy response to this self-assured statement, but then she caught Azrael's eye and thoughtfully folded both the stub pencil and the crumpled note away in her pocket and leaned against him the slightest bit, her eyes only for him as her voice raised softly to join the others in called response.

"Deo grátias."

Which was no secret-keeping anyway; all the family saw her lean against him, exhausted and boneless lover-intimacy, and Zadkiel and Samand'riel gave each other one of their Looks in the psychic Esperanto understandable only to them. There were no more notes; Eden had slipped in a stick of gum to his mouth in some sort of desperate move to not smoke everything in sight, like the hymnbooks or the pew, and Azrael lost himself in the murnurous haunt of Latin and the quiet old man at the altar who called out the rhythms of God.

Buboe had always liked chapel. He had understood the meaning. His father didn't. All Azrael knew was that there wasn't enough Christ to go round.

The church was warm from the combined heat of all the bodies, candle-shadow lit, incense burned, the host ensconced in its own votive shrine. Here there was meaning, even if it was all personal comfort, the words of the man who had always been like a grandfather to her -- the man she knew had said the final words at her last funeral. The Lord be with you, and also with you. Let us pray. Let them all pray. To who or to what Jibreel could not say, for she held no Gods truly sacred but the ones she numbered as her fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters. Their family tree itself seemed to be the Tree of Life, their own Sefirot to climb, the tree of life, the tree of death, the tree of knowledge. They were deeply East of Eden.

When she spoke it was so whisper soft that no one besides her father or Azrael could have heard it, even had they been listening and not caught in the sea-even rock of the celebrant's words, "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring to you."

She wanted her son.

The service went by like mixed torture and blessing, fleeting and cruel; kyrie, eleison, christe, eleison, and Azrael and Jibreel's fingers touched with a sort of needy fervency as if they were making love with them all over again. They were screaming out for touch underneath the dark blueberry of her sleeves.

May the Lord almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.

No Communion, not at Compline, thank God, because Azrael didn't know if he could handle seeing Eden going through the rite of choking down Jesus and rolling his eyes at St. John in the particularly awful way he always did. As the members of the parish filed past the Eisenreich pew, some reached out their hands to very gently touch the end of the dark oak; as if in solidarity, or superstition, their subtle bow to the halo. Azrael bent his head as if that meant he would not be seen.

Jibreel stared at the round toes of her shoes, her wingspurs in the deliberate droop that kept them mostly behind her ears. The row of Eisenreichs sat still and relatively quiet until the last of the hangers-on had finally drifted out of the church, then Demi stood, brushing lightly past her husband and daughter, having to press herself against the pew slightly to get past Azrael's knees even as he awkwardly stumbled to give her room. She offered him a thoughtful smile and then let her hand drop to tousle his hair.

St. John was already in the aisle, black and collar again, the vestments left idly swinging in the closet of the chancel. Time, although it had touched him as it was not fond of touching those of an angelic bent, had treated him kindly, and in the years since Demeter Serraffield had walked these halls as the she-who-was-before-Gabriel, his hair had turned from wheat to silver and he had gone very soft around the middle. Otherwise he was as ever, perhaps a bit more wrinkled and a bit slower as he ambled down the aisle to meet the woman who once had been as his foster-daughter.

Meeting Demi, he took her hand and kissed her third finger, as if she might have been a Cardinal. She smiled at him fondly and then stepped aside to welcome him closer into her circle. He offered Jibreel a smile that trembled around the edges, as if he were unsure of his element, of his office, of his authority in such a situation, as he ever was before this family. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was Jibreel who spoke first, voice tremulous and reedy.

"God never closes a door that he doesn't open a window."

St. John's brow clouded at this and he seemed lost in memory for a moment, but then he nodded, the slightest bit more relaxed, father-confessor to a dynasty of the winged and haloed, "Yes, child. That is what I told you."

"Do you still believe it?" her voice was lost, desperately so, and she was casting about like a blind man for the path that she was meant.

"Jibreel," Gabriel chided, as it was not good manners to question the faith of a priest in his own church, but St. John merely waved her down gently.

"We are all here together now, aren't we child? Can we call it a bad path, if it is the path that has brought us here? I believe it, Jibreel Eisenreich."

"I believe that you believe it," Jibreel answered him softly.

Eden was already standing to lean against the pew, chewing another piece of gum furiously, his fishnets all black as if to move with the theme of the church. They had never been able to get him into church clothes. Church clothes for Eden were no asspants. "So whose soul are we prayin' for? I vote Jibs. No use prayin' for Buboe, it's like Mormons visiting Jesus. Or we could always pray for that gigantic tit down in the remand center. Whaddya think, Sinjin?"

St. John's smile quirked again, mildly, apparently thoroughly acclimated to Eden, "The prayers of the church are universal. They are for all men and women, the just and the unjust, the pious and the prodigal. What prayers you keep in your own hearts -- they are your business, your contract with God."

"Can we pray that Kincaide sucks dick in hell?"

There was a discontented noise from Zadkiel. "Uncle Eden, you never know when there might be recorders or newspapers about. The confession box or the church is the first place they might tap. Far be it from me to be overly paranoid, but - the last thing we need is a legal case."

"Ta, Ally McBeal."

Demi looked slightly pained, as if she felt a headache coming on, "Do behave yourself, Eden, at least while we're in public. Zadkiel is right. Legal complications would just make everything harder." There was something past stress in the push that was built into that word. Gabriel was preoccupied and it was obvious.

"I'm not sure." Her nephew's voice was almost dreamy. "There comes a point in time when everything is at the point where it can't get harder, when you're backed up against the brick wall. I don't think that anything could possibly make anything worse right now. Not even if the Creeping Dark came back. It wouldn't matter."

This statement caused a number of wordless looks to be tossed among the other family members as if it were a rousing game of button-button-who's-got-the-button. Rachel grunted shortly and stood, dusting himself off, as if he could dust off the weight of such a long day.

"Hawkesby. Walks-With-Wolves. Whatever you're calling yourself these days. Come on. We're going on a walk."

Azrael brushed a kiss against Jibreel's cheek, as if to anchor himself, and turned to his cousin without a word. Both he and Rachel made towards the back of the church together; as the elder opened the door to the foyer, they could hear Eden saying fondly, "They look so alike. They should have had sex."

It was deep into night when they went outside. The angel of the apocalypse walked a little way into the graveyard and dug into the pockets of his coat, taking out his cigarettes, cupping it from the breeze to light one. As an afterthought, he offered the box to Rachel.

"It's hard to cope," he said eventually, pieces of dark hair that had escaped from his braid whipping at his cheeks. "Sometimes I forget how. I don't think I was made to cope very easily. Want a cig?"

Rachel's eyes roved once around the graveyard, half out of focus, looking past Azrael, looking past everything, stones and trees and neatly kept green that was shadowed navy in the dark. He whistled softly and then seemed to relax, settling against the peak of a stone, one foot kicked against it as if he might have been at home on the couch. He shook his head. "No, don't smoke. Never did. Can't. Not with Pops being an oncologist. My skin would be on the wall. Thanks anyway."

Smoking was Azrael's nervous habit, convenient as something to do with his hands and mouth during lulls and breaks in awkward conversation. As the silence hung between them for a moment, Rachel drew his own social crutch and began idly cleaning it. It was an old-style Webley, easily close to being a hundred years old. Rachel shook the bullets out into his hand and studied them silently for a moment before carefully thumbing each one back into place.

"I'm not so sure coping is something anyone is really made for. I think it's something you have to learn. And I'm not saying it's an easy thing to learn, but I don't think anyone is born with it."

"I haven't needed to cope," his cousin admitted frankly. "I haven't been able to cope. I didn't care much about anything. Nothing but Acheliah, and she didn't push me. Not like this is pushing me. I thought that maybe it was the way it was meant to be, organically - " a deep lung-pulling breath of smoke - " - that my coping mechanism was, well, not coping, my coping was the death of everything. I think that that was, though, when I was generally the world's most pretentious asshole."

He fiddled with his cigarette the way that Rachel was fiddling with the bullets. "Being a parent is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. Don't do it."

Rachel affixed him with one steady eye through the white hair that fell into his bent face, "I wasn't planning on it. Me, I don't really think I'm the sedentary type. Dunno what I'd do with a kid. Maybe drop it on its head too much. Bet it'd come out like Caine just to spite," he nearly spat, then turned his attention again to the revolver, "So maybe you've stopped being the most pretentious asshole in the world. Maybe that means I've stopped having to hit you so often."

"I noticed that," Azrael said vaguely, and took another drag. "It all - it changes when you become a father. And a husband. I mean. Not that I ever became the husband. Your center of gravity changes. Most of my life was about me and I liked it that way. And then Jibreel and Buboe came and... I drank the potion that stopped me from being a self-centered, unutterably smug jackass. Don't marry my sister," he added suddenly. "Please."

The younger man jumped suddenly as if someone had shouted ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST right in his ear and the bullets that were left in his hand rattled down into the grass like a rain of steel and gunpowder. He swore loudly and went down on his knees to find them, patting at the grass like a blind man. Silver bullets were not cheaply made or easily found unless one melted them oneself. After a moment he'd found the three that he'd dropped, had said 'thank you' surreptitiously to the thin air, and had seated himself again on the headstone, trying to look as calm as previous, although there was the barest bit of huntedness around the corners of his eyes.

"I really wasn't planning on it," he said evenly, and slotted the remaining bullets back into the gun, "And you had better marry my goddamned sister or I'm afraid I'm going to have to start hitting you again. It's nothing personal. You know. Just family stuff."

"I was planning on that one," Azrael countered. "And I asked her to marry me before Buboe was born, only she wouldn't. I think that Jibreel will agree now. I'll ask her again when..."

He faltered, and leaned against a more sturdy tombstone, and sucked on the cigarette as if it was a pacifier. It was disconcertingly close to the way that Eden did it. The wind blew; there were a few pregnant moments between them that gave birth to embarrassed seconds.

"I'm just saying not to marry Achi because it would be easy," the seraph said eventually, and he massaged his temples with his free hand. "I've always been taking the easy way out. It's just that - fuck, I don't even know what I'm saying any more these damn days."

Rachel seemed to consider this for a long, slow second and then asked honestly, "Would it make you feel better if I hit you? I dunno, sometimes it seems like it should. Sometimes taking one hard to the chin gives you a few seconds where the most important thing you can think of is trying to count how many teeth you've maybe lost and planning exactly how many teeth you're gonna knock out of the guy who just decked you," he seemed hopeful for a moment, and then shook his head, "No. I dunno. I guess not. And 'easy' is not the way I'd put Acheliah. Well, yeah, maybe, I guess, like that. Uh. Not uh, in a disrespectful 'I just kind of called your sister a whore' way. More in an 'O gee she's friendly,' way, right? And I don't go for family. I think I must be the goddamned only one."

"You noticed that, too?" Azrael appeared to not, in fact, notice any evidence that Rachel had called his twin sister easy; it rolled off him like a duck rolled off another duck. In the old days it would have prompted strangling. Loving Acheliah no less, his cousin had mellowed a great deal. The angel of the apocalypse took another drag. "I mean, I don't know if Aunt Gabriel has noticed the fact that Zadkiel and Samand'riel are ten to one fondling each other, but considering they made her I suppose they get amnesty."

At this, Rachel coughed very seriously into his polishing cloth and did not look up, as if his gun was intensely interesting, much moreso than the topic at hand, "We know."

His cousin looked as if he was reflecting very deeply on the nature of teenage boys, and gave a quick nod. "Makes sense."

Some cicadas chirruped in the bushes and the flowers. Azrael looked out over the graveyard; somewhere there was buried the body of the woman that he loved, the life before, a young girl he'd only very briefly met and recognized instantly. Lumina Calloway. Buboe - Buboe was - their ages were very close. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.

"Rachel," the dark-haired man said suddenly, and very slowly and deliberately, "my left side is my weak side. It makes for the weaker stance. My hair is a conceit that should never be left unbound, and if it is, it's a convenient hold. I have a habit of locking my elbows when I grapple. I'm poisonous in cherubic form, but I also can't move." He flicked his ash away. "I'm just saying."

"Mother-fucking Christ All-Mighty Goddamned Shit-Eating Idiot," Rachel's laugh was an agile thing, live and low as it scattered out amongst the gravestones, "Now I goddamned know you're an official member of the family. You've just asked me to fucking 'take care of you' you know, like Tarantino-Scarface-Say-Hello-To-My-Little-Friend-take-care-of-you. Fucking welcome to the family," he pointed a very deliberate finger at Azrael, like sighting down the barrel of a gun, "And don't fucking think I'm not going to fucking abuse the shit out of this secret knowledge that you're a goddamned sissy girl on your left side the next time you make a disparaging comment about -- " he stopped for a moment and seemed to consider, "I dunno, about somebody."

Azrael thought about this a long while and ground his cigarette into the gravestone beside him, all the while giving Rachel a beatific smile. "Your hair is stupid, your relationship with Amatiel way too homosexual, and I hope Mia Naaktgeboren gets pregnant and blames you."

"Your hair is more stupid and you cuddled up naked with your sister and I hope Liseli Naaktgeboren gets pregnant and blames it on you. Like Omen IV shit or something. Oh, and your dad wears skirts," Rachel crowed, as if he might have been newly sixteen and drunk on a rugby championship, "You suck, Azrael. But maybe I can stand you. You're going to have to take the pink mallet at croquette. Nobody wants the pink mallet. Not even Buboe wants the pink mallet."

"Caine lives in your basement," the seraph retorted, and what thusly followed was a rapture of punching and kicking as Rachel's gun dropped harmlessly into the grass and they grappled like brothers. Both of them discovered that the other punched hard; they pressed each other down against one of the blocky granite tombs with both of their white forelocks falling into their faces until they realized that their positioning was the sort of stuff that the aforementioned half-brother would be apt to lyricise about and then try to join in with a tin of banana-flavored lube. Azrael gave Rachel one last vicious dutch rub in response to Rachel elbowing him in the stomach, resettled his hair, and laughed.

"Well," said Rachel deliberately, rubbing his fist under his nose as he collected and safely reholstered his gun, "I hope you like poisoned grave dirt for Christmas," he paused, "Cause. That's what I'm getting you. Yeah."

"I'm not even getting you grave dirt," the elder grunted tranquilly, attempting to brush himself down and failing rather miserably. "I'll order those Japanese comic magazines of you from the Internet. The bad ones. Where you have eyes the size of dinner plates and no muscles."

"You do that and Liwet will goddamned have to invent a machine just so Jibs will be able to find the teeny-tiny pieces that are left of you, Melancholy and the Infinite Dumbness," he replied remarkably amiable for someone who has just been threatened by what he considers a form of personal Kryptonite, "You fuck with an Eisenreich, there's never much of you leftover."

"Are you begging me to make off-color statements about your sister, Banshee Dundee? I can. I will. She had my baby."

"Yeah, well I still think she found him in a cabbage patch. I think all that shit with you and her is just a cover story cooked up so my mom won't go out looking and bring like, ten million cabbage babies home."

Azrael sighed, deeply and unashamedly martyred. "Your sister and I were involved in coitus. Face it. Your sister and I multiplied. I did things to Jibreel's fallopian tubes. We - what's today's slang - 'got down'. We were copacetic. On a roof. Five times."

Rachel stared at him expressionless for a few beats, "What you want me to give you a goddamned prize for it? Cause I don't think they give prizes out for it. At least I've never gotten any. Not for -- " and here he let out a string of Portuguese curses, "Not for like, with Jibs right? You know that's not what I meant, right? Shit. Fuck. Goddamnit."

The other man proceeded to laugh again until he had to sit down on somebody's gravestone, hands on his knees, braid unraveling down one shoulder as he uncharacteristically snickered. "I am undone. I don't know whether to take the route and accuse you of being with Jibreel, in which case I'd have to leave you in a storm drain after applauding your good taste, or laugh at you for your other sexual escapades."

"I'll leave you in a storm drain for, uh, shit. Uh. I goddamned hate you."

"I'm making a bet that you bring home a nice zombie girl called Griselda. Your mother will sit down in her favorite chair and cry."

"Well, at least I don't have a five thousand percent chance of having a second child that the family will all call 'Webby.'"

"Unless you wake up next to Caine."

"That's you."

"Would you prefer I tease you about Caine, or about the girl who cries when your name is mentioned as if you stuck your hand down her underwear without asking consent?"

Rachel rolled his eyes in a way that seemed almost painful, "Yeah. Shaktiel. Always a victim. Way to fucking get to the heart of the situation there, Galactus."

"Look. Let's just say I don't want to know that you took her virginity, I never want to know why you took her virginity, but the party must have been dark and you were drunk and you thought that she was Harahel." His cousin looked faintly wistful. "I once had a mortal girlfriend like that. She once tied me to the shower rail. I had to wait until she died."

Rachel did not look amused, "Don't tell me shit like that."

Azrael laughed again, at Rachel's expense, which was the best sort of laugh. "You'll learn something about women one day. Me, I'm going to enjoy the fact that I get pancakes in the mornings and that my child is past the age where he will jump on our bed."

"I'm going to adopt five Romanian babies for you. Named Ethel."

"They'll be zombies. You and Griselda can keep them."

*

It was well into the young hours of the morning when Demeter Serraffield finally managed the settling of things at home -- between her eldest son still newly home from abroad and the near-incoherent string of worries that came from her youngest son concerning his sister, and simply seeing everyone properly to bed, properly resting, when really they all wanted to be in the parlor, fighting over the worn path around the piano, which was a favorite family thoughtful spot, pacing the hours into nothing as they brooded. They really were a family of brooders. Well, at least now she was assured that they would brood to themselves in bed.

The children, at least, were in bed. Duriel could not be persuaded to rest. He spent his time between his wingchair and the shuffled-thin tread near the piano bench, which most closely matched his own stride. There were thoughts lying heavy along his mind and spine like lead, she knew. He had been in attendance on a short and closed meeting, earlier that day. He knew what tomorrow held. He knew that they were assuredly beginning the slow one-step descent toward the end -- one way or another.

In many ways, tomorrow would tell the difference between heaven and hell. Duriel did not seem hopeful. Gabriel was not sure she blamed him. Everything was drawn and thin and they all knew it. Eden washed china teacups far into the night for want of something to do with his hands. Duriel paced. She went back to the hospital.

After the services, she had insisted that her daughter and the man who had shouldered a space open to be her newest son go home to their dark, beetle-filled apartment. It seemed that was all she did these days, spend her time telling them to go home, to go rest, to go take solace. It was a hard day. It was a hard world. These were hard lives. And it wasn't as if they protested much any more. There was a dead kind of need in Azrael's eyes when he looked at Jibreel, and a broken lostness to Jibreel when she stumbled after him like Mary's lamb. They needed the aloneness, the lack of judgment, the forgetting. Her hands trembled over the knitting needles that glimmered dully between her fingers like chopsticks in old noodles, useless and needless. She needed it too, hard like fire, or like a knee to the gut, but she and Duriel had not really managed to be in their own home together at the same time for more than the barest span of minutes since this had begun. Such was their duty and responsibility, such was her grace. She would have to do without the crutch, the salve. She could not spare the time to catch her breath, to lose herself in it, nor could he. She was needed, ever needed, and he had now devoted himself to the consideration of the problem: the final scenario.

Lindy's head had been bent over her sewing when Gabriel had come quietly sweeping into the room to relieve her, lost on beautiful embroidery stitching around the cuffs of a coat and rambling idly about the differences between Egyptian thread and German thread and the dye inconsistencies between different lots of floss. Buboe was silent, patient, and dead as a stone, the lightest of pale golden down beginning to lightly dust the top of his bare head again, spurs limp as if they were wet plaster and paper mache -- soupy loose as clotted cream. Lindy had smiled at her, they'd traded niceties, tics at the corners of mouths and eyes barely showing, and then there'd been a brief and unplanned hug as Lindy had brushed past -- a terrified hug, like five-year-olds who feared daycare, two children grasping and hanging on one another like they've been told that their father is missing in action. The shots that rang round the world were still echoing in the two of them. Demi had smiled again, wan, and Lindy had squeezed her arm as she slumped, slung under with her sewing basket, and then they had both turned away and that had been the end of that.

Now, sitting there alone in the absence, her only company the caterpillar sack that was her wordless grandson and the quiet monotonic symphony that was his life support, she again felt very old and very tired. She had sat vigil at too many deathbeds in too many lifetimes not to know when one was upon her. She let her hand fall to rest gently over his -- pinioned and wired as it was, as if he was cybernetic, more machine than boy. She had rarely been anything past mildly atrocious on any sort of musical instrument, but her voice had been a comfort to no few. She was not a great, rising soprano, ringing notes that bounded the highest edges of holy light. She had never been first voice in the angelic choir, but she was herself and she loved. As she had told her daughter earlier, it was not a thing she could help. It was the way she was made.

Her voice faltered at first but then found itself, steadied against the low hum of the respirator, and soft and full as fried breakfast apples in molasses, she skipped up, as if she was herself climbing ascension's ladder in her mind as her eyes went out of focus and her fingers splayed loosely over his hand.

I'll be your candle on the water. My love for you will always burn. I know your lost and drifting, but the clouds are lifting. Don't give up you have somewhere to turn.

He was a beautiful pattern of green, thick strands and small, delicate branches all bound up, woven, tethered, built again from her desperate stitching job. It was a matrix, a multiplication table, an equation built of green strands that she knew that the chaos angel on one level understood, that her own father-son the fertility angel could almost touch without properly seeing, and that few others could really begin to understand. He was beautiful. He was perfect. He was alive-in-death. It was abomination.

Her fingers skittered over the tubing that fed him intravenously, up to the heavy bag that hung from the steel and nickel IV t. He was on painkillers, half a hundred probably. There was much pain to kill, even if his little brain was still broken, broken-mended, an empty box. I'm sorry, your puppy is dead. Her voice swam with the soft echoes of too many children, dead in her arms.

I'll be your candle on the water. Till every wave is warm and bright. My soul is there beside you, let this candle guide you. Soon you'll see a golden stream of light.

It was strange to see how the pattern had begun to right itself, even over her clumsy and hurried stitching. It was strange to see the green in it swell and absorb, like greenwood eating up the scarred tissue. When you looked at his pattern he was alive, he was dancing, spun and turned and laughing at the world in all its wonder. His pattern could not tell his story. His pattern did not tell the cold wetness of his hands, still as drying slugs, or the never-againness of his eyes with pupils that did not contract when exposed to light. It did not tell the story of the death that had crept into this little boy despite the lushness of the pattern. Her truth was lies, lead from gold, and her hopes as empty and brittle as glass spun too hot in winter air.

Her slim finger raised to trace along the solitary line of his green -- the key note; the binding thread. Perhaps it would be easier --

A cold and friendless tide has found you. Don't let the stormy darkness pull you down.

And it would just be an easy pull, one gentle tug and it would have been the same as if she hadn't been able to find the last catch, the last green, as if she hadn't been able to pull enough from the little beetles and birds and creeping things that the earth had already begun to take back into itself, mouldering them into loam where they fell, quicken-killed. It was one touch and there would be no more discussing, only the world as it was, as it had been, as it would be, for better or for worse.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

I'll paint a ray of hope around you. Circling in the air, lighted by a prayer.

And he would just sleep, it would be easy, gentle -- the cessation. Eden had said it. Everybody dies. He would die. It was only half of the truth. Everybody lives. He would live. She felt for the key-thread and wound it up around her fingers as if she might have been burying them in kitten fur, soft as down.

It didn't even have to be a tug. She could just worry the thread apart with her fingers, rolling it loose until it could no longer hold itself together. It was quiet. It was sweet. It was safe for the baby. He would know. He would understand.

I'll be your candle on the water. This flame inside of me will grow.

Sandalphon's eyes, so soft-lined around the edges, her own belly swelled under her hand as she softly mouthed the words that Gabriel already knew, had already known since the moment she'd doubled over in the garden. I'm sorry Gabriel. We couldn't do anything. The baby is gone.

Keep holding on, you'll make it

It was premature birth. They called it still birth, months too early, even though he'd been breathing. He'd only lived a few minutes. She hadn't even been conscious. Sandalphon had not let her see him.

Here's my hand so take it

It was hyperviscosity and hemorrhage, Miss Serraffield. We couldn't do anything. And I'm going to have to ask you to leave until her guardian arrives. It's a legal issue. I'm sorry.

Look for me reaching out to show as sure as rivers flow,

It was just one pull. One tug and it would all be over, and she had held so many dead children, her own and others. Her flesh by birth or association or simply by province. All the world's dead children were her own, hollow alone in the empty womb of one desperately small and desperately broken woman.

I'll never let you go

Her hands shook until she couldn't hold the pattern anymore, and the thread slipped from around her fingers and retangled itself in the endless green of his shape. She could not pull the brake. It had been once too many times.

Demeter Serraffield held her head in her hands and wept.

*