I covered my eyes with my trembling hand, trying to block everything out. But it didn’t work. There was this terrible ache… deep within me. Perhaps isolation, after all, was the better way in such a world… I actually felt the moment when something snapped.. then I alarmed even myself with the raw despair in my sobs… How very naive I’d been to think I could feel no more pain. This was what it felt like to lose someone you loved. This was what Anna’s children had felt because of me. This was what I had done to people every day. God was punishing me. Punishing Casey because He knew how much I’d loved her.
‘It’s because I don’t have a costume, isn’t it?’ I wept. ‘You can’t be a real superhero without the spandex suit and the mask and the fucking cape! I promised her, I promised her. Why did I do that? Why? ’
‘ Don’t make the promise lightly, Gabriel.’ That’s what she’d said to me. ‘ People can get hurt that way.’
And then there was a comforting hand on my shoulder. Someone kneeling beside me, talking consolingly in a soft voice. ‘You kept your promise, Gabriel,’ Mephisto said. ‘You said you’d be there and you were.’
‘I was supposed to… save her… at the last moment-’
‘You’re not still comparing yourself to a superhero, are you?’ Mephisto asked. ‘You mustn’t do that, you know. After all, superheroes only ever fought super-villains, not angels. If nothing else, at least you were there for your friend when she needed you.’
‘But what difference does it make when she’s dead?’
‘All the difference, Gabriel.’
‘I should have taken her to a hospital myself.’
‘It wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still have died.’
‘How can I believe you?’ I asked, turning to look at him at last. ‘When all you’ve ever done is lie to me?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. There was the odd bit of truth in there sometimes, wasn’t there?’ he asked with a smile.
He shouldn’t have been able to comfort me, he was a demon. But still, in that moment, I was grateful to him for trying.
‘You didn’t kill her, Gabriel,’ Mephisto said softly. ‘I know you quite enjoy blaming yourself. But not everything can be your fault all of the time. Sometimes God takes all the credit, I’m afraid. And maybe it’s for the best. Life is about pain. Death is about the end of pain.’
My hands were so cold, up there at the top of the cathedral, so high above the city… To think that I had come here before and felt safe, closer to God… and now tragedy shrouded the icy cathedral, the bell was silent in its frozen tower, and bleak misery settled on me softly like ash — ash from the remnants of something that had once been so precious to me…
‘You must kill the child,’ Michael said firmly.
‘Yes,’ Mephistopheles agreed, standing up. ‘Throw her from the tower, Gabriel, and finish this.’
‘Don’t you mean throw them?’ I snapped, looking round to where the second baby was… or should have been. I froze, staring at the empty bloodstained coat she’d been wrapped in only minutes before. ‘Where’s-?’ I began, and then froze in horror as I saw Lilith dancing around on the wall once more, her black wings spread slightly, gazing down dreamily at Casey’s first daughter wrapped in her arms.
Michael and Mephisto followed my gaze and I heard Michael’s sharp intake of breath. ‘There are two of them?’
Mephisto swore softly under his breath. ‘Lilith,’ he began, taking a half-step towards her. ‘Please don’t do anything stupid.’
I wanted to jump to my feet, run to Lilith and wrestle the baby back from her. But I forced myself to stay kneeling on the ground, somehow sensing that if I made any move towards her at all, she would leap from the wall, fly away, and I would never see that baby again. Michael, too, seemed to sense that the best chance of stopping Lilith was to let Mephisto talk to her, for he was still as a statue, the only movement coming from the steady dripping of blood from one of his wings.
‘Give her to me,’ Mephisto said softly. ‘She’s not one of yours.’
Lilith looked at him sharply. ‘They’re all mine,’ she hissed. ‘All of them.’
And then she stepped backwards off the edge of the wall. I was back on my feet with a cry of horror within moments, but in the seconds it took me to reach the wall, she and the baby had disappeared and I knew that Lilith had taken her back to her own realm. The guilt I already felt intensified so painfully that I was only dimly aware of Michael shouting at Mephisto behind me. My head was throbbing unbearably, like it was about to split open, and all I wanted was to crawl into some dark, silent place until this nightmare ended.
‘ Shut up! ’ I screamed, whirling back round to face Michael, who was still shouting unbearably loudly. ‘Shut up, shut up!’
‘Well said, Gabriel,’ Mephisto remarked mildly, looked quite unruffled by the angel’s anger.
‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ Michael snarled, looking very much like he wanted to hit me. I almost wished he would, for it would have given me an excuse to hit him back. But, of course, if he broke my neck, I wouldn’t be able to snap it back as Mephisto had done — and there was no way that I was going to let go of Casey’s second daughter, even for a moment.
I was pleased to see that Michael’s wings were covered with streaks of slick scarlet blood, staining his white feathers and sticking them together where the blood had dried there. I inwardly applauded Mephisto for managing to physically hurt Michael. I hated that angel and I could only feel glad at the sight of him bleeding.
‘You must throw that thing from the tower as you should have thrown its twin!’ Michael snapped.
‘I will never- ’ I began, pressing the baby closer to me.
‘Give her to me, then,’ Mephisto said. ‘I promise I’ll look after her, but not here. If I take her from this world, she won’t be able to destroy it. Trust me, Gabriel.’
‘No, you must give her to me,’ Michael insisted. ‘Demons already have one of them. It is only right that angels should have the other.’
For a few moments, I gazed at the two angels, paralysed by an awful uncertainty, as if I were a child again myself. When I gazed up at the night sky, I thought I saw those shadowy outlines of angelic and demonic armies, no longer fighting each other… but simply staring down at me in silence from their ranks. Staring, staring, waiting… All this over one tiny little baby…
I was taken aback by the savagery of the desire when it rose suddenly inside me, as I glanced down at the city so far below us, and felt the strong longing to follow Lilith. To fling myself from the top of God’s cathedral… He would not catch me, oh no, I knew that now …
… Darkling I listen…
But it hardly mattered when everything precious to me had been shattered, even my illusions…
… and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death…
How I envied Casey the ease of her death! Why did no such release come for me? I didn’t want to do this any more. All there ever seemed to be was pain… Hadn’t I earned the right to die by now? I don’t know where it came from, or indeed whether anyone else heard it, or if it was ever even really there… but I’m sure I heard the sweet song of the nightingale there at the top of St Stephen’s Basilica, even as further verses from Keats’ ode to the bird flew unbidden through my mind:
Now more than ever seems it rich to die…
What was there for me here now anyway? Nicky and Luke were gone, and their loss seemed no less painful for the fact that they’d never been real to begin with — they had been real enough to me. And now Casey was gone as well… I was so tired of it all. I had tried; God knows I had tried to do the right thing. Casey was dead. I hadn’t killed her. This one at least was not on my shoulders. But what difference did it make? What difference did it make to Casey? The dry sob alarmed me and brought my mind back to reality and the two angels watching me and waiting, waiting for my decision… I couldn’t make it. I wasn’t fit to decide what was best for anyone, much less the entire world. I mean, Christ, if I made the wrong decision, that could lead to global apocalypse and I didn’t want that kind of guilt. Wasn’t it bad enough that I had spent my life murdering people for a living? I glanced again at the low wall round the edge of the tower.
‘Gabriel!’ Mephisto said with sudden sharpness.
But I had already scrambled up onto it and jumped over the edge.. almost seeming to hang there for a moment, like a bird in the night sky suspended high above the cathedral, frozen stars sparkling coldly in space above me, and frozen air blowing past me to grace the bell tower in so many thick ribbons of twisted ice, like candy canes..
