October skies

Preston realised poor Emily’s eyes must have been open in this glade; she’d seen this apparition, and in that moment was eternally doomed. Her mind emptied by the horror of it, leaving behind the breathing carcass they had been tending this last week.

My God, poor girl.

A violent and messy death right now would be preferable to that. An eternity of torment to a moment of agony — seeing his insides steaming on the snow beside him as his consciousness ebbed away. This death, certainly no more than seconds away, was going to be a hard death, but infinitely preferable to the fate his daughter had suffered.

Poor, poor Emily.

‘End my life,’ he whispered. ‘It’s worth nothing.’

He sensed it moving around him, from the front, to his right, then behind… circling, studying him silently. He felt the vibration of its steps through the ground, the monstrous weight shifting from one foot to the other, and the energy radiating from it.

Heat trickled down his thighs and Preston realised that his shame was complete. ‘Lord, I’m ready to die.’

A gust of wind swept through the branches above with a hiss, the leaves and fir-needles rustling in tacit agreement. He heard the angel shift heavily in front of him, felt the warm blast of breath on his face and smelled the sulphurous, fetid odour of death.

‘S-spare them, p-please!’ his own breath hissed past trembling lips.

It was silent, except for the deep, rumbling, panting breath. Then he heard the angel, deep inside his head, in a dark corner, a quiet, whispered voice.

Prove yourself. Kill the outsiders. Kill them all.

CHAPTER 65

Friday

Heathrow Airport

‘I’m boarding now, I think.’

Julian cocked his head and listened to the repeated announcement for a moment. Amidst the garbled words he thought he detected his flight number and the phrase ‘now boarding’. There was movement from around the departure lounge and, almost instantly, the beginnings of a queue formed in front of the boarding gate.

‘Yeah, this is my flight. You’ll meet me at Reno?’

Rose sounded tired. ‘Yup,’ she mumbled.

‘Okay then, I’ll see you later on today,’ he replied. Then as an afterthought, ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about.’ It was a probing, throwaway comment. Of course there was much to talk about, and not all of it would be about work.

‘Sure,’ she replied in a non-committal way, ‘be good to have you back,’ she said.

They said goodbye in the same professionally familiar way that they always had before… before the other night.

Of course, friendly and laissez-faire as always. He got up, grabbed his bag and ambled towards the growing, ill-defined, meandering queue in front of the gate, pondering that last comment of hers.

Good to have you back.

He found himself replaying that in his head and trying to analyse the tone and timbre of her voice for the slightest clue on how exactly she meant that; how she felt about him. He shook his head at the ridiculousness of it all. Saturday night in that diner, they’d been mildly juiced on the beer, well and truly on a high over the discovery of Lambert’s journal, and yes, they’d flirted a little — that’s all. End of story.

This is getting stupid.

They knew each other well, better perhaps than most married couples. They’d worked out of each other’s back pockets these last few years, on too many occasions wearily propping each other up with black coffee and trench-banter as they pushed a thirty-six-hour shift to rush together a last-minute edit. There had been the unavoidable intimacy of shooting footage from a variety of uncomfortable places, arms, legs and cables tangled round each other for lack of wriggle room. They had shared the exhilaration of seeing their work aired on BBC2, and the disappointment of sliding into the obscurity of various digital channels. They had got pissed together God knows how many times, swapped CDs and regularly derided each other’s taste in music, slept together in the back of a touring Transit van with a sweaty teenage grunge band, and cowered together at the back of an equally sweaty BNP rally.

Not once had they ever flirted with the idea of something more.. until the other night, that is. Since then he’d been troubled with the notion that he felt a lot more for her than he’d realised. The idea scared him. He enjoyed the security of the tight, solitary bubble in which he had lived most of his life, no one ever getting too close, no one ever hurting him.

Now here was Rose. The thought of folding her in his arms, stooping down to kiss her, feeling the tickle of her hair on his face, the trembling warmth of her body pressed against his… terrified him.

This is ridiculous.

‘We need to talk,’ he muttered to himself. A bull-necked man with a shaved head and a Rooney football shirt, standing to his left, shot him a bemused expression.

‘Uh, sorry,’ Julian smiled awkwardly, ‘just talking to myself. I.. uh… do that sometimes.’

The man shook his head and pressed forward into the shuffling queue with his boarding pass ready.