Gabriel did not have to wait especially long. Her body began to stir within a few minutes. ‘That much is like humans at least, regardless of whether they’re an angel or a demon.’ He reflected and put his thumb on the hammer of the weapon. He cocked the curved silver hammer back. It clicked, and the eyes of the figure on the couch popped open. One arm flew up to the top of the couch, the other went out toward him with the palm up, her legs kicked out as she started to flail. Bits of yellow ichor from her wound spattered around to fall with a thick wet splat on the floor, couch, and more annoyingly, on Gabriel’s easychair. He frowned a little when he saw the stain on his chair. ‘Great, that’ll never come out.’ He thought, but spoke to her.

“Don’t move.” Gabriel barked the order, his finger on the trigger and eyes focused down the barrel. “I can shoot the wings off a fly at a hundred yards, I’m aiming straight at your head, and this is no ordinary gun. Now slow down, lower your arms, and then stay still.”

The gray eyes were like storm clouds, and darted around, seeking help or at least, seeking some understanding.

She found none, only silence. Seraphim complied, lowering her arms and remained lying on the couch.

“Good, that’s good. Just stay there and tell me, angel or demon?” Gabriel asked.

“Angel.” She answered, focusing her eyes on her new captor.

“Prove it.” Gabriel demanded.

“How?” She asked and pursed her lips shut.

“Sing.” Gabriel answered.

“Demons can sing.” She pointed out.

“But those move a different set of instincts.” Gabriel pointed out, and Seraphim blushed a little at the implications, but she nodded. While lying on the couch, she parted her lips and sang a few lines, her soaring voice washed over him like warmth from a fire on a cold winter’s night, and then like all beautiful songs, it ended far too soon.

“Satisfied?” She asked, blinking several times in the span of silence after her song.

The weapon didn’t waver.

“You’re not lying.” Gabriel grunted, “Now why don’t you tell me how you found me and what you’re doing here. Usually I do the hunting and the finding, nothing and nobody comes looking for me anymore. And there’s no way I’m going to believe you got here by coincidence.”

Seraphim held her breath in her chest for a moment, her heart quavered, and she took the plunge. “Michael said he was sorry he was such a shit to you, and that he was calling in a debt.”

Gabriel lowered the hammer back down, then moved his weapon away from her head. “How do you know my brother?” He whispered the words, his eyes opened so wide that the whites were like looming twin moons in his head.

Seraphim relaxed a little when the implement of pain was no longer pointed at her. “He saved me… h-he died for me.” She said and relayed the story to him from start to finish, down to the last moment she remembered. Tumbling down through the mists and falling unconscious.

“So… my brother is dead…” Gabriel said as he felt his knees give way and he crashed to the floor, the gun slipped from hand and clattered away. “That sounds like the kind of end he’d go for, too…” Gabriel did not look up, his eyes were focused on the floor as his eyes welled up while the impact of the loss hit him. Though secure against angel song in most respects, it did still soften his heart some, and his iron control slipped to let out liquid sorrow.

“Bastards, I always knew they’d be the death of him, I always knew it, and he never listened… you can’t find atonement with anyone like them…” Gabriel muttered the words to himself, but to Seraphim they were nonsense.

When the weapon clattered away, her eyes went straight for it, but with the pain in her leg still as great as it was? ‘I doubt I’ll reach it before him, no, I know I won’t.’

He finally addressed her, “So my brother sent you to me for help.” Gabriel directed it to her as a statement, to which Seraphim could only nod.

“Which means they’ll come looking for you.” Gabriel snapped and raised his head, he got up to his knees, his eyes still wide, “Of course they will, they sent jets after you, they won’t just let you disappear. Angels are pretty rare, and… what’s your name?”

“I-I don’t know. They called me Seraphim, but-” She began to slowly sit up, as he didn’t object to that much, she went up the rest of the way and added, “I truly don’t know.”

“Seraphim, huh?” Gabriel muttered, he blinked back and suppressed all his mourning and sense of loss, focusing like a sniper on the objective in front of him.

“Your brother thought, I guess he was s-saying you’d help me.” Seraphim ventured, wincing as the wound in her leg stung her when she moved it a little too much.

“He would say something like that.” Gabriel groused.

“Please.” She whispered.

“Help me.” She pled.

Her eyes focused in on his own, ‘Did I make a mistake, will he turn me in? What happens now…?’ The totality of uncertainty held between them, until the chain that rested on her thigh, slipped off and clattered to the floor at her feet, dangling from the collar around her throat.

“God damn it!” Gabriel huffed and forced himself to his feet, he pushed his hand off his knee and straightened up. “I’ve got no choice here…”

Seraphim exhaled the breath she’d held back.

“But you’ll need a name, I can’t just call you ‘Seraphim’, that's a little too obvious. How about I just call you ‘Sarah’ for short?” Gabriel suggested, and to that, Seraphim could only nod.

He went and picked up the pistol, and when she inched herself back, he stopped, “You said you were a prisoner for a long time, centuries from the sound of it, so how do you know what this is?” Gabriel asked.

“The Cardinal of the Order of Saint Theresa… he would use it, the pain balls that came from that-” Seraphim began to explain, and Gabriel cleared his throat.

“Bullets.” He interjected, “So he had you shot… probably with cursed rounds, that sounds like something the Theresans would do.” Gabriel said and without thinking, he spat in disgust toward the nearby fireplace. Last night’s dying ember hissed in protest, and he carried his pistol back to its resting place.

“Theresans?” Seraphim asked, cocking her head slightly.

“What we call the people who held you captive, they believe suffering brings people closer to God, and it makes them very comfortable being the source of suffering when it’s for what they call the greater good. They make most of the cursed bullets, chains, and other stuff used to bind or hurt spirit beings.” Gabriel explained, while Seraphim just looked at him with an empty, lost expression.

He rolled his eyes, approached her, and then turned around and crouched down, “Just hop on my back, I’ll treat your wound and explain…” He promised, while internally, he sighed, ‘I thought I was out of this business… five straight years of peace, and now this happens… what shit luck.’

He caught her suspicious expression in the glass window of his door, she was looking down at him with tightly closed lips and about to push herself up to a standing position on her own.

Gabriel could already hear the protest she was about to make.

“Don’t argue, you shouldn’t be on that, angel or not, if you got hit with a cursed round from a jet… the iron bird or sky chariot or whatever you want to call it, you shouldn’t be on that until we’ve cleaned it out and let it heal.”

She still didn’t move to comply. “I’ll carry out Michael’s last request, don’t worry, if I wanted to do something sketchy to you, I could have done that while you were unconscious.” He protested.

Seraphim’s mouth dropped open, then slowly closed. She then leaned forward to accept his offer.

He remained still while he felt her hands trace over his back and loop around his neck, then he reached his arms back and grabbed her behind the knees and stood with a single quick grunt.

She held her wrists and let him carry her further into the house, and as he carried her, she looked around. His walls were barren and the decor was all but absent, several rooms with open doors were completely empty and unused at all. If they had a purpose, it seemed that it was to just store dust, as a thick gray carpet of the stuff blanketed those rooms.

“Out here in the mountains, folks sometimes get lost, dumbass hikers and people thinking they’re off on some grand adventure… and they forget that the natural world is a really dangerous place. I find them sometimes, then bring them back here.” Gabriel explained and turned in through another door, there she saw a long, single bed on wheels. Beside it a metal pole from which there hung a clear bag. “A full first aid station complete with saline solution and some basic medical equipment, and lucky for you… out of sheer habit, I keep some of this stuff.” He said and putting his back to the bed, he lowered her to sit on it.

He then went to a small cabinet and she watched his back as the noise of clinking glass hit her ears while he sorted through things just out of view.

“Here we go.” He said, and pulled out a bottle large enough that his fingers couldn’t close all the way around it.

“What is it…?” Seraphim asked.

“Water, for most people, is just ordinary water. But for you, it’s something more. It’s a mix of the water of Lourdes and from Joseph’s well. We need to cleanse the curse, and for that, there’s nothing better than this.” Gabriel said and brought the bottle to his mouth, he bit down on the cork, pulled it free with a pop, and spat it aside.

Seraphim frowned a little, “You keep saying words but… I don’t understand them, or… or what they mean, anyway.”

Gabriel sighed and began to pull white strips of gauze from the same cabinet.

“You mentioned stone water?” He asked rhetorically and began to press the gauze against the bottle opening, soaking the gauze strip in places.

“Yessss…?” She drew out her answer as a question.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Gabriel quoted the passage, and her face, already naturally pale, lost several shades of color.

“Right. Tears or blood from the priests who have abused children, or more powerfully, from the children themselves, or those who loved them. The worse their pain or despair, the more powerful the curse. That’s what the ‘stone water’ is named after. That’s what hurt you, that’s what’s in your body now.” Gabriel explained, his face a dark red with anger as Seraphim stared down at her leg with disgust.

“Now hold still, once we get this out, you’ll heal quickly, right?” He asked, and Seraphim swallowed a lump in her throat.

“Yes, when he… used the bullets, the Cardinal always had them removed and I healed quickly. A few minutes at most.” Seraphim answered and watched Gabriel’s hands. He held her calf and began to wrap the white cloth around her wound, she winced once and sucked in her breath.

“This will probably take a few hours.” Gabriel said without looking up at her, “Even for this stuff, it’ll take time to work, if you’d been human, you’d have lost your whole leg to that round even without a curse.”

“Do the… Theresans, are they the ones who do… do those things?” Seraphim asked, and Gabriel shrugged.

“I don’t know, they’re accused of it by some people, but their upper ranks always claim ignorance whenever anyone is caught. But they shuffle around people who are accused of it and make sure they can offend as long as possible before the law catches up to them, so who knows? My brother, he didn’t believe they knew, he just… he had his own reasons for being there, but I wouldn’t put anything past those people.” Gabriel said and tucked the metal clip at the end of the gauze wrap into the gap, then clapped his hands.

“There, good as new. Or not, but it will be.” He added, “Just stay off of it for a little while and…” He rubbed the back of his head and thought it over, “If you’re going to be out here, you should probably catch up to the rest of the world, can you read or write any modern language? Obviously you can speak but-” He snapped his jaw shut when he saw that she was looking down at her bandaged leg.

“The pain is a lot less.” She interrupted.

“Yes, but you shouldn’t walk on it yet, wait until it’s done, I can get you some crutches if you’d rather lie down on the couch again.” Gabriel offered, and she shook her head.

“No… no, I’ll wait but, can I… can I have the name of the man who helps me?” Seraphim asked and though she didn’t raise her head, she did cast her eyes up to him again.

“Just call me Gabriel.” He said.

“Gab-riel.” She mouthed his name in silence, then repeated it slowly out loud.

“Thank you, Gabriel.” She said to him and put her hand over the wound.

He cleared his throat and coughed into his hand for a few seconds, “Don’t worry about it. Just wait here for a moment and I’ll bring something to occupy you,” and without waiting for a response from her, he spun on his heel and strode out with quick, long steps, leaving her alone in the room.