For full notes and other chapters, please see the
Masterpost.
Notes: This is the third part of the Missing an Angel series. It is recommended that you read the first two before reading this one.
Chapter Rating: PG-13
Chapter word count: 3,674
Chapter Summary: Jane is not an extension of Gabriel. There will come a time when Gabriel has to explain himself to his daughter.
CHAPTER 26:
The Truth Comes Out
Dressed all in black, Gabriel strolled through the streets of London, swinging one of his brushes and calling out “Soot-o! Sweep-o!” in the time-honored tradition of chimney sweeps. Two soot-darkened children trailed along after him. One, the younger boy, grinned brightly at everyone and everything. He was Thorn, changed into a human body but lacking a human mind to accompany him. He could follow and stay, but it was best when he didn’t try to speak. The older child, Jane, walked with a slouch, her felt cap tugged low over her face but not hiding her pout. She was dressed in a rough cotton shirt and trousers like Thorn, hiding her femininity behind a layer of soot.
“Good day to you, Madam,” Gabriel said, doffing his top hat to a passing lady and stooping into a low bow. “Need a sweep? Your home will be fresh and light again once I pay you a visit.”
“Hmm…” The lady paused, looking Gabriel and his two charges over. “It has been a while… tell me, how much do you charge for your services?”
“Ordinarily, I ask four pence a flue, Madam, and for that you get the finest work in all of London. No one better than my little lads.” The angel clapped his hands on the shoulders of Jane and Thorn, beaming at the lady. “But for you, Madam, a fine gentlewoman like yourself, I dare say I can drop that down to just tuppence. Tuppence a flue, Madam, and all your chimneys will be as fresh and clear as the day they were built; you can have my word on that!”
“Tuppence?” the lady repeated, failing to hide her pleased expression at the cheap price Gabriel offered. “For tuppence, I may just take you on. Let me speak with my husband.”
“Of course, Madam, of course.” Gabriel bowed and tipped his hat again, and Jane pinched Thorn’s side until he gave a little bow with her, tugging the brim of his hat. “You can find me here most days, excepting the Sabbath. I’ll remember your face and hold my end of this arrangement.”
“Thank you, sir. I do appreciate it.” The lady offered the trio a little smile and a nod before setting off again.
“I hate this,” Jane muttered as the lady walked away, her pout returning in full force. She added crossed arms and a scuff to her step as she followed after Gabriel again. “This is stupid.”
Gabriel sighed, guiding them over to a narrow alleyway, where he set his brushes down and tweaked their bristles in a half-hearted attempt to look like he was adjusting them. “I thought you liked seeing all the nice houses.”
“I don’t like being dirty.” Jane tugged at her shirt and scowled at Gabriel. “Or plain. These clothes are horrid.”
“Do they scratch?” Gabriel raised an eyebrow at his daughter. At thirteen years old, she was starting to seriously develop Opinions. Based on the signs he’d been reading in her body language and expressions, this outburst had been a long time brewing. Gabriel would have to tread carefully to keep from offending her.
“No.” The answer was sullen, accompanied by squinting eyes and lips pooched out into a distasteful moue.
“Do they keep you warm?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s wrong with them?”
“They’re ugly!” Jane flung out her arm, pointing across the street to a handful of young woman dressed in bright silks and voluminous skirts. “I want to dress like that! Why do we have to be chimney sweeps? You’re a god. You change reality with the snap of your fingers. You made Thorn into a human! Snap your fingers and make yourself a king or something, and then I can be a princess and everyone will bow to us.”
“Bowing is overrated,” Gabriel sighed. “Trust me. I’ve been there.”
“Well maybe I’d like to find that out for myself.” Jane folded her arms again, still scowling. “Papa, why do we have to be nobodies all the time? Everywhere we go, you decide we should be some low-level workers, like gardeners, or cooks or sweeps. Why can’t we ever be someone important? Even just a merchant would be nicer than this!”
“Jane…” Gabriel sighed, glancing around. Thorn was sniffing down the alley, clearly uninterested in the conversation, just like the rest of the people on the street. “Look around us, Jane. You’re shouting and making a scene.”
“So?” Jane flopped back against the brick wall of the alley, twisting away from Gabriel to very pointedly show him that she was not happy with him right now, and if he so much as tried to put a wing around her, there would be Hell to pay.
Gabriel had gotten very good at reading his daughter’s body language in the eight years they’d been traveling together.
“No one’s noticed,” Jane continued, scanning up and down the street herself. “No one has even looked over at us. No one’s coming over here to see what’s going on.”
“Exactly.” Gabriel cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted. “Hey!” A couple passersby glanced over, but their interest quickly dissipated when they saw there was no spectacle to watch. He looked over his shoulder at Jane. “We’re invisible.”
“I don’t like being invisible,” Jane muttered.
“I do,” Gabriel countered. “Because when you’re invisible, people forget you’re there. When we go into those nice homes, Jane, we’re forgotten as soon as we enter. No one minds their tongue around us. No one covers their dirty work. When we’re nobody, nobody bothers to hide from us. We can learn all their secrets if we just pay attention.”
“And then you kill them for them.”
“I don’t kill them,” Gabriel corrected, holding up a finger sternly. “I punish. I guide. I correct.”
“And they end up dead.”
“Only if they don’t learn,” Gabriel admitted. “Or if they don’t pay attention. Or if they’re just stupid.”
“Humans are stupid.” Jane hunched her shoulders as far as she could, slouching into the curve of her chest.
“That they are,” the angel agreed quietly. “But they try. They try so hard to be better. Most of them, at least. And because they try, we have to help.”
“I still don’t understand why.” Jane shot Gabriel a dark look from under the brim of her hat. “You keep saying it’s our job to guide and teach them, but why? None of the other gods do that. Aunt Kali doesn’t. Baron Samedi doesn’t. Even Athena doesn’t, and she’s supposed to be a goddess of wisdom sharing her knowledge with humans. But she doesn’t do what you do. Humans serve the gods. They worship them. They don’t get served by them. We are better than humans!”
“Don’t!” Gabriel whirled around as soon as those last words left Jane’s mouth, turning on his daughter with his wings flared wide. His arm landed across her shoulders, driving her back against the wall, and Jane flinched, gasping in shock.
“Papa!”
At the end of the alley, Thorn stopped and looked back at them, shoulders back, head cocked to the side. If he could prick his ears up higher, he would, checking back on them for danger.
The tension left Gabriel as quickly as it had filled him, and he was left looming over his frightened daughter, his fingers itching for a sword he hadn’t drawn in years. Gabriel stepped back, turning away from Jane and pressing his hands over his face. He needed to… he needed to just breathe, to take a moment to compose himself before he could find it in himself to comfort her. He folded his wings in again, tucking them back into his vessel.
“Papa?” Jane’s tremulous touch brushed against his shoulder blades, right where his wings had vanished. “I don’t… I’m sorry?”
“Oh angel,” Gabriel murmured, turning to sweep Jane into his arms. She didn’t fight him, letting him hold her and tentatively hugging him back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. You just scared me, that’s all.”
“How?” Jane asked, snuggling close against Gabriel’s chest like she had when she was small. Her ear was pressed over his heart, and he imagined the sound was as reassuring to her as her own was to him. They were alive. They were together. They were not alone. “How did I scare you?”
“We are not better than humans, Jane.” Gabriel touched his fingers to Jane’s cheek, then smoothed them over her face, tracing the curve of her chin and brushing away the soot. The grime was only superficial. He never actually sent her up the chimneys. That’s what magic was for. “Thinking we are is the first step towards corruption. We are not better. We are simply-I am simply older. You don’t even have that. Seniority does not equal superiority.”
“But we’re gods. You’re a god. I’m a demi-god. How is that not…” Jane trailed off as Gabriel shook his head again.
Thirteen years. Thirteen years, he’d kept quiet about his true identity to Jane, to his own daughter. He’d kept quiet about her true identity. At first, he simply hadn’t wanted the little chatterbox to blab something to Kali, but now it had just become habit. Jane deserved better than that.
“We’re not gods, Jane. I’m not a god, and you’re not a demi-god.”
“But you’re Loki.” Jane untangled herself from Gabriel’s arms to take a step back and look at him, though she kept hold of his hands. “No tricks. You’re Loki.”
“No tricks,” Gabriel agreed, squeezing Jane’s small hands. “I’m not Loki. I’m just wearing his body.”
Fear flashed across Jane’s face again, tightening the muscles in her cheeks, dilating her eyes. She licked her lips, taking another step back, the distance tugging at their clasped hands. “You’re possessing my papa?”
“I’ve been possessing Loki for over a thousand years, Jane. I am your papa. But I’m also…” Gabriel hesitated, watching his daughter, before he pulled out his wings again, spreading them wide for her to see. He even released his veil just enough for her to see, solidifying the individual feathers still edged in gold. “I’m also an angel.”
Jane’s eyes were attracted to the feathers, huge and white in her dark face. “Those are wings,” she breathed. “Real actual wings. I just always thought you were a particularly glowy god, and sometimes I’d pretend you were an angel, but you never… those are wings!”
Gabriel smiled a little, curling one forward to brush it over Jane’s face. She jumped at the touch, pulling her hands back from Gabriel’s before looking apologetically back at him. “You’re really an angel! An angel of Heaven?”
“Not anymore.” Gabriel drew his wing back, folding all of them behind him but keeping them visible. “I didn’t like what was happening in Heaven, so I ran away.”
“You’re hiding.” Jane had always been exceptionally sharp, even as a little girl. She read voraciously, especially the myths and legends of pantheons from all versions of human civilizations. Gabriel tried to keep accounts of angels and their offspring away from her, but like any good child, Jane could sniff out what was forbidden and found ways to access it. She spoke seventeen languages fluently and could read even more-unlike Gabriel, Jane didn’t have an innate knowledge of all the world’s languages, but she did have an ear for grammar and a knack for picking up vocabulary. Every day, it was harder and harder to keep knowledge away from her. “That’s why we keep moving. That’s why you don’t want to stand out.”
“That’s why we keep moving,” Gabriel agreed. “We don’t stand out because we can’t guide the humans if we’re controlling them. That’s not how a good teacher, how a good big brother does things.”
“You’re a big brother. To all of humans?” Gabriel nodded, letting Jane work through things in her own time. “Because you’re an angel. All angels are big brothers to all humans?” Another nod of confirmation. “Then… if you’re an angel,” Jane pointed at Gabriel, “then that would make me…” She pointed slowly to herself, staring off into some middle distance, “half-angel? Is my other father actually human, or did you lie about that too?”
“He was human, yes,” Gabriel had told Jane about Fergus when she was old enough to ask, but in no great detail. He was a human her papa had fallen in love with, and he had been a Scottish tailor, and Thorn had been his puppy, just like he was now Jane’s. Jane knew Gabriel was her mother, but she hadn’t known about the full history Gabriel had shared with her father. As a child, she hadn’t cared very much for the father that wasn’t present, and she had never asked again as she grew older.
“So I’m half-angel, half-human.” Jane’s hand dropped and clenched into a fist at her side. She was taking long, deep breaths through her nose, her eyes hardening against a surge of emotion Gabriel could see playing across her soul. “There’s a name for that.” Moonlight and silver flashed out of her eyes as she turned toward Gabriel. “Nephilim.”
“I see you’ve been reading.” Gabriel tried to bury his unease as the Nephilim watched him. Her eyes hadn’t changed like that since the day of her birth. She had never looked more inhuman in all her life. There was an angelic stillness to her posture as she scrutinized him. At thirteen, the Nephilim was no longer helpless and dependent upon him. Gabriel was confident he could take her in a fight, but he prayed he would never have to be tested.
“Monster.” The silver bled out of Jane’s eyes, returning them to their normal dark grey. “Abomination.”
“And who called you that?” Gabriel demanded, his own fear of the creature shoved aside in favor of concern for his daughter with the shaking voice and a tear starting to cut a path through the soot on her face.
“It’s in all the books,” Jane answered, turning away from him, her arms wrapped around her waist. “All the books you tried to hide from me. The Nephilim were monsters, and they were going to destroy the world, but the Archangel Gabriel slaughtered them all and saved humanity.”
“It was a bit less noble than that,” Gabriel mumbled, dropping his gaze to the cobblestones. “Jane, I wasn’t going to… those Nephilim were different.”
“You knew the other Nephilim?” Jane glanced back at Gabriel over her shoulder. “Did you know the Archangel Gabriel?”
Gabriel bit his lip, lifting his eyes to his daughter. “Jane, I…” For the first time since it happened, Gabriel was overwhelmed by the shame of having lifted the sword that ended the Nephilim threat. “I am Gabriel.”
Jane spun around sharply, still hugging herself. “You? You’re Gabriel? You’re that angel?”
“Yes.” There was no refuting the truth. Jane would find out his angelic name sooner or later, and it was inextricably linked with the massacre of the Nephilim. Better she heard it from him than from someone else. From Raphael. He wouldn’t try to comfort Jane if he found her. He would simply lift his sword and end her life, just like Gabriel had to all his own nieces and nephews. All the original Nephilim.
“You killed them?” It was a whisper, followed by a damp sucked in breath as Gabriel nodded his confirmation of that truth as well. “Were they… were they monsters?”
“They were.” Gabriel stepped forward quickly, reaching out for his daughter. “Jane, you have to understand, those Nephilim weren’t like you, they were-”
“Why?” Jane cut Gabriel off as she took a step back, out of his reach, looking up with those dark, sad eyes. “Why?”
There were so many whys Jane could be asking, and she wasn’t giving any clues to which one. “Jane, I don’t…”
“Why did you have me!?” Jane’s upper body lunged toward Gabriel, but she kept her feet firmly planted and her arms tightly wrapped around herself. “If they were all monsters that you had to kill, why did you make me? Why did you make a monster? Why would you?”
“You are not a monster!” Gabriel surged forward, wrapping Jane in his arms and wings before she could pull away. She struggled, but only for a moment before she was collapsing against his chest with a sob, finally releasing her own stomach to clutch at Gabriel instead. “Jane, my angel, my sweet, you are not a monster.” He smoothed his hands over her hair and down her back, petting her in long strokes that always calmed her when she was young. “When the other Nephilim lived,” he began, “my brother, Lucifer, walked the Earth. Surely you know who he is.”
“The devil is your brother?” Jane whispered thickly against Gabriel’s chest.
“All angels are brothers,” Gabriel explained. “From the lowest Cherub to the highest Archangel. We are all brothers, and Lucifer was once an Archangel, the most beautiful and brilliant of us all. But he,” Gabriel closed his eyes, swallowing around a lump in his own throat as he remembered his brother, all he had been and all he had lost, “he thought we-angels-were better than humans. He thought we were above them. And he acted on it. He raised himself up above humanity. He encouraged destruction among them, and he took all of the Nephilim he could find and raised them in Hell. They were twisted in the… in the fires there, and they grew up full of hatred: hatred for angels, for humanity, for anything God loved. Those Nephilim were monsters, Jane, but being a Nephilim does not make you a monster.”
“But there’s never been a good Nephilim!”
Gabriel pulled back to cup Jane’s face in his hands, making her look up at him. “There’s also never been a Nephilim raised with love. Because I do love you, Jane. I’ve known you were Nephilim since the moment I decided to create you, and there is nothing, nothing, that God Himself could do to make me regret that decision. And trust me-I’ve met Him. I know what He is capable of, and it isn’t enough.”
“What if he could bring my father back?” Jane squirmed a hand up between them to wipe at her face, smearing the soot. Gabriel sighed and snapped his fingers, cleaning her face off completely and his own. The soot was only a costume. He didn’t need it distracting him now. “If God said you could have him back, but you’d have to give up me? Would you?”
“Never,” Gabriel answered immediately. “Jane, I loved your father more than I’ve ever loved another. Perhaps even more than God,” he pressed a finger over Jane’s lips, “but don’t tell Him I said that.” God already knew. God had known for millions of years, ever since Gabriel refused to kill Cariel. God had known the depths of Gabriel’s love longer than Gabriel had known. “And even with all of that, if having him back means I lose you…” He shook his head, pulling Jane against him again. “Never, Jane. Never.”
It was true, too. Gabriel had often wondered himself how far he’d go for Jane. Before she was born, he had second-guessed and doubted himself, but once he got to know the little girl, he had fallen hopelessly, obviously, completely in love with her. In a perfect world, he’d bring Cariel back to his side and keep Jane, but he couldn’t pick him over her. He’d had billions of years with Cariel at his side, and over thirty with Fergus. He’d only had Jane for barely more than ten, and he wanted so many more.
“But I’m still an abomination,” Jane mumbled into his lapels
“You are not an abomination,” Gabriel sighed, kissing Jane’s hat because he couldn’t reach her hair. “Not to me.”
“To someone.” Her fingers clenched against his back. “Papa?” Jane pulled her face out of his coat, staring into his chest. “To someone?”
Gabriel closed his eyes but nodded. He couldn’t lie to her. Not about this. “In the eyes of the Heavenly Host,” he began, “all Nephilim are… mistakes.”
“Are they going to try to kill me like you killed all of the other Nephilim?” A flash of silver flitted across her eyes, there and gone too quickly for a human to register.
Jane was too young to be asking such solemn questions and far too young to ask with such a chilling sobriety in her voice, a flat, dead acknowledgment of her own fate. Gabriel dropped to one knee to look her square in the eye, his hands squeezing her shoulders firmly. “You are innocent, Jane. As long as you remain innocent, innocent and good, the Host has no reason to kill you. You just… you keep being a good girl, Jane. Don’t ever turn on humanity. Don’t put on airs, don’t assume they are worse than you because they are weaker. You behave, and you be good, and they won’t… they won’t have any right to kill you.”
Not that that would stop the Host from descending on Jane if they realized she existed. Raphael tended to mete out punishments before listening to verdicts, thinking death was far more merciful than anything life could offer, even to the innocent. It would give Gabriel a leg to stand on if they were ever caught, though, and Michael would value innocence over circumstances of birth.
At least, the Michael Gabriel had known would. He wasn’t sure how much his oldest brother had changed in his absence, how must he had twisted like Raphael.
“And even if they try, I will always protect you.” Gabriel cupped the sides of Jane’s head between his hands, pushing his fingers into her loose curls and staring into her eyes, willing her to believe him. “There isn’t an angel alive I wouldn’t stand in the way of to keep you safe. You are my child, and I love you. Always.”
Next...