Gabriel opened his eyes to see —
…a sad-faced man with tired raven-black hair that touched his shoulders aiming a gun at him… The man’s almost red skin was wet with the rain… the scar beneath his left eye twitching to the tiny tremors beneath his cheek… his hand was shaking…the gun came up again… the black eye of the barrel wider and blacker than the doorway gaping behind this would-be killer…
He tried desperately to move his arms, his legs, but they refused… he watched helplessly as three more bullets hit, one steeling the sight from his eyes as it exploded in the tissue behind the socket, bathing the world in red… blood…one shattering his knee, betraying his balance on the rain-slick roof… the last one slamming into his chest… pushing him back…too far… he felt the world begin to tilt…the roof beneath his feet treacherous, like glass…
“How Do you kill an angel,” a voice inside his head mocked, taking all the burning, all the pain… absorbing it… living through it… but there was something else under it… another emotion…stronger than all the hate in the world… —
It came for him then, scrambling across the treacherous rooftop, claws hungry for his heart. There was nothing of Ashley in it. The thing scrabbling across the roof was pure beast.
“You don’t,” Gabriel said aloud, pulling himself back before the Angel of Red’s fear overwhelmed him. “Angels fall.” He fired again, the last bullet. This time he didn’t aim at the angel in Ashley’s skin, but at the ground beneath her feet. The tile fractured. It very nearly didn’t break but the Angel’s weight was too much. Ashley teetered dangerously as the roof betrayed her. Her hand clawed helplessly at the air, trying to grab something to hold on to as another tile broke. And one next to it. They tumbled like dominoes as the Angel flapped around trying to save itself. But there was no salvation to be found on a church roof in the dark heart of winter. Only death.
“We’re not the same,” Gabriel said softly, in answer to all of the taunts the Angel had planted in his head. “We’re not even similar…”
In one last desperate lunge of anger, it threw itself at Gabriel, fingernails so close to raking across his chest, stinging blood. The sound of his blood, his heart, beat loud in its ears as the Angel fell to the roof on all fours, snapping its jaws and snarling like some animal gone feral.
Gabriel didn’t so much as flinch. “Kill me then,” he whispered, thinking of Frankie, Sam, Ash. Everything he had lost. He lowered the gun to his side, waiting, praying silently for the death blow that would bring them all together…
In the bellower high above, the old bells began to peel with a multitude of voices, heavenly and angelic, desperate and demonic. With each chime another tile shattered like glass beneath the falling Angel’s weight.
It understood. Next to the hunger, the need to silence the last witness, there was real fear in Ashley’s ruined eyes. There was a crack. Something deep and terminal breaking within the roof’s timbers.
“Do you want to live?” it hissed inside Gabriel’s head as if it hadn’t heard him.
“No,” Gabriel said simply, holding the Angels’ gaze as its face blurred into those of his friends, a gallery of guilt owned by one man… Bill Stern, Jay Bogdanovich, Seth Lawson, Al Culpepper, Jackson Carlisle, a sad-faced Celine – Charlotte – Annuci, the flower girl with her stained rose, Father Joe on a mattress in a bedsit, and the last mask, the one that lingered, refusing to fade, Ashley. The future… “I’ve already lost everything worth living for…”
A splinter. Another crack. A scream of wood.
The Angel’s fingers clawed at the collapsing roof. The feral hunger that had immolated in its eyes a moment before dulled, and a deep blue-green sea swelled in its place as the timbers and tiles beneath it finally sundered and fell inwards. Ashley’s hand came up, reaching out, and then she was gone, torn away by the fall.
Gabriel closed his eyes. It was over. Where his story started, it ended, full circle. He wanted to cry but there were no tears left inside, only emptiness where so many people had been.