Chapter 35
Six trumpets played high from the clouds, but Gabriel didn’t touch his own.
Immediately after Satan had been imprisoned by Michael, he and Raphael received the order from Metatron to descend to the Earth again, continue with the apocalypse.
The man-angel, too, had shoved a trumpet into Gabriel’s hands and told him to breathe into it when only a seventh song was left.
But he didn’t, riding alongside Raphael, ignoring the music that streamed from Heaven onto scrambling, terrified humanity.
All the angels were on rooftops, moving from ceiling to ceiling, watching the humans that pointed at them, recorded them.
Angels have always been recorded by man, their every appearance written hastily.
When Gabriel had visited Mary, she’d told him that she would remember this, tell her cousins, her husband, and her mother, and he’d smiled.
He missed her, wherever it was that she’d gone since the beginning of this apocalypse.
Raphael’s hands, free of the proper gauntlets, were bloody.
“We should,” he stammered, then sighed softly.
“We should leave Babylon—” They were in the empire of evil, unknowing still of the Watchers climbing up its body.
“I think we should try to smear the blood of the Lamb elsewhere, on other people. We still have so much of it, and I don’t believe the demons stole any when they attacked our angels.
” He reached for one of the flasks on his armored waist, filled to the brim with crimson of the drained Lamb’s corpse.
He tilted it, flooding his palm with blood once more.
“When the final trumpet sounds, the marked will rise to Heaven, saved from what continues after.”
Gabriel swallowed. ‘But what of all those not marked by us? The blood is endless, but our time is not. Our touch is not. The lake of fire will swallow all those we didn’t reach.
’ But if he didn’t play the last trumpet, the Lamb’s blood would mean nothing, a prophecy left half-fulfilled.
Everyone would burn. What was kinder — saving some or saving no one?
Uriel would know — but he had rebelled and run away like the Lucifer he’d hated so terribly once.
Hesitating, then Raphael finally looked at his friend, then at the crowd of other angels on horseback behind them.
The dim sun beamed down at them, and the blaze of the several low-hanging stars chased away any shadows that might have hung over them.
“Gabriel. After we mark a few more, outside of Babylon, you must—”
“I know,” Gabriel interjected, his heart dull, quickening.
It was difficult to know which humans below were marked in the Lamb’s blood or in their own — which were touched by angels and which were clawed at by their fellow humans as they tried to approach the angels.
That was why they were all on high ground now — the rioting at the angels’ feet had turned into shoves and kicks, and then turned bloody.
“Are you,” Raphael suddenly asked, careful, “going to play it?” The trumpets above still rang.
Gripping the reins on his horse tightly, the messenger angel whispered, “When the great flood happened, we saved a few, just a family. Do you remember, Raphael? Noah, his wife, and his children, and now we must cull all of their descendants except for a chosen few. Will this continue forever, Raphael? Save a few, over and over.” Then, he said, lower, “The Lord said I was responsible, for believing in the Watchers, for believing in saving what couldn’t be.
He does not make us all to be saved. But it was…
your Samyaza who led those angels to Earth, who did it all for love. Your Samyaza—”
“Gabriel,” Raphael, suddenly, sharply, replied.
“What are you saying? The Watchers aren’t…
relevant to this.” As they spoke, one by one, towns and cities burned under Azazel’s direction — pieces of stars falling to the Earth, boiling the humans caught beneath.
“Don’t speak of then.” For the first time, Gabriel saw a flare of anger in Raphael’s eyes, the color of the sea.
“Once we leave,” he said, firmer, “and mark a few more humans — play the trumpet, Gabriel. You don’t want to be blamed for destruction again, do you? ”
But before Gabriel could speak a word of the trickle in his heart — a dust of fright, sadness, and an indignation that matched the healer’s — a swiveling, metallic sound interjected, then the bang of a door hitting the wall adjacent to it.
Immediately, all the angels turned to see a woman.
She looked back — hunched, eyes wide, a trickle of flaking, dried red streaming from a nostril to her top lip.
Abruptly, she set a foot before her, then another. She panted, “Help me—”
Raphael hastily took the reins of his horse and guided himself closer, saying, “Human, you shouldn’t be here.
” But he spoke in his angel language, and Gabriel didn’t open his mouth to translate.
“You’re hurt?” Fear wobbled her bottom lip, but she shuffled closer to the angel of healing and his bloodied hand.
“Here, let me mark you. Then, I will heal you if there is anything wrong.” She reached him, and he reached her. Bloodied hand fell over her head.
A scream followed, not long after. And Raphael jerked away, staggering his horse back.
Before him, bubbles of paleness bloated out of her face, then scabs of red on her arms, her neck.
Boils, rash. As a sudden coolness crushed at his chest, Raphael saw sickness.
At his own hand. Pestilence. His mouth opened, as if to scream too, but the stranger stumbled away, hands rising to her face in horror.
‘No,’ he thought, and he heard Gabriel call his name again, watched the woman begin to run, but half his mind was recalling the flood now in regret and guilt.
And the other part of him was tearing out of his body, broken by the sight. Pain. Disease. From his own hand.
Meanwhile, Dina was above the town by Babylon, wings beating slow, maintaining his place over the smoke and amid several stars, each pulsing like they were giant, grotesque hearts.
‘Dina.’ Several buildings below smoked — but which were a result of Babylon and which were a result of the Watchers?
It didn’t matter now. ‘Pestilence,’ said Apsinthos, ‘and the trumpets. Do you hear them?’ He did — six songs from above, echoing in his ears.
‘It’s almost over.’ The Watchers had long disappeared into the horizon.
‘You’ve done well. My dear Dina, you’ve done well.
’ The last of remorse, fading into the setting red sun.
‘My sweet angel. It’s almost over, and it’ll all begin again. ’ The wind tossed Dina’s braids.
‘You want to feel guilty still, but paradise’s reach grows nearer.
You can see the horizon of beauty. We’ve spent long enough dreaming of the past, dreaming of love,’ Apsinthos said, or perhaps it was Dina, perhaps it was Dina.
‘If I must kill us all to be loved by you, then watch me bloody my mouth. I’d end the world a thousand times to be loved by you.
My star. If you can be a sun, I’ll be an earth of life. Let’s begin again. You and me.’
From where Dina was, he could see a plaza overbrimming with humans, and he saw the anti-Christ just recently gone to walk some streets alone, in the vague direction of his ruined home.
And so the greater angel of beauty descended slow, toward his victim.
Pulling his wings into himself, he allowed himself to fall.
Some bulging eyes of a looming star followed Dina as air rushed past him.
The trumpets still sounded as he beat his wings a handful of times, tilted himself into a glide between homes.
‘The homes of this town. This town that welcomed me.’ Careful, he dragged a foot against the ground he flew over, then he landed in a crouch.
When Dina lifted his body up again, he stood before a young man with a hole through his head, an eternal wound over his right eye.
Dina, eyes in a happy daze, smiled widely. “Tadeo.”
The boy stared at him, face streaked in some ash like his family had been when he returned from Hell.
No hat shielded his head, his hair ruffled by a hot breeze.
Brown eyes — bloodshot. His lips were pressed fine together.
His hands were open at his sides, but they trembled so terribly that they could have been furious fists.
But he didn’t seem angry, not really. There was a hollowness to him.
As if the Beast and the Anti-Christ had been emptied out of that body and all that remained was a boy, a boy who’d tried to be good.
“You know now,” Dina whispered, and though he’d intended to grin, to once again tell the star in his head that they, together, had handed God the death, the war, the pestilence, the famine that He wanted, He needed — he saw his own face in Tadeo’s eyes for a moment, reflected.
And he heard the yells nearby of women, and the cries of some young.
Dina remembered the home he’d been allowed into, the one of Tadeo’s excited family.
He remembered being thrown out from his house when Heaven heard of what the Watchers had done.
He’d wondered, laying on the ground, clutching at the abdomen that angels had just kicked, why it all had to be like this.
Why does God demand pain? Why does God end the world?
Why doesn’t He recreate, why doesn’t He tenderly, gently, forgive? Why did any of this have to happen?
Quietly, the angel turned on his heel, and the boy watched him walk away.