“I have to dispose of them. Maybe you should leave. I don’t have time to take you home though. I have to do this before the cops get here.” He was surprised the police hadn’t already shown up, given the lights and the noise they had been making. But the cemetery butted up to housing projects, the residents of which probably had no interest in getting involved in any potential crime and hadn’t bothered to call the police.

Gabriel turned and opened the gate to Anne’s tomb without waiting for Sara’s answer. He didn’t want to scare her, but he didn’t want to get caught with dead bodies either. It was highly doubtful he’d be acquitted this time around. Stepping inside, he removed the front of Anne’s tomb and opened the drawer.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sara asked, coming up behind him.

“I have to hide them, and this is actually a perfect place.” Reaching into the darkness, Gabriel extracted the bag that held Anne’s ashes and set it carefully on the path outside the gate.

Sara just stood there as he went over and lifted both Marguerite and Raphael up and carried them to the tomb. Gabriel felt terrible that she was watching, and he said, “Sara, close your eyes, babe. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

But she just shook her head. “No, I have to see. And did you know—though I’m sure you know—that when the Watchers fell, God sent the four archangels to retrieve them? Raphael bound one of them hand and foot. Gabriel destroyed some of the fallen ones by inciting them to civil war. And Michael put others in a dark cave for seventy generations. A dark cave . . . like this tomb.”

Gabriel shoved Raphael into the dark opening, sweat rolling down the back of his T-shirt even as he felt a chill at Sara’s words. “I’m not an archangel. I’m a fallen one.”

“But you’re righting a wrong . . . destroying fallen ones who were well and truly evil. And I don’t think it’s any sort of coincidence that you and Raphael were named after two of the archangels. And that my last name is the name of the third.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence either,” he conceded, crossing Raphael’s legs at the ankles. It would have been a hell of a lot easier getting him in the tomb in a casket, but he had to make do, and as quickly as possible. Gabriel got the body fully into the hole and did the same with Marguerite.