'You sure you want to do this, Case?'

Addi's brow was a mess of worry lines as he looked at me, his gaze flitting down to where my hand rested on my distended stomach. I'd been rubbing it without even realising it. Rubbing it because I could feel Lily moving around inside. Rubbing it because it calmed me. Addi knew that and I knew what he was thinking now. He thought I didn't want to do this. He thought I'd changed my mind.

I looked into his eyes and smiled.

'Yes, Addison. Perfectly bloody sure, thank you.'

I chewed on my lower lip as I studied his face, suddenly uncertain whether he was trying to dissuade me because he didn't want to be a part of this. I couldn't blame him. He might have enjoyed being a gangster once, but things had stepped up a level since his days of dealing drugs on Davey's patch.

'You know, if you don't want to be here, Ads, no one's going to stop you from leaving, or think any less of you for not sticking around.'

'Speak for yourself,' sniffed Berith, coming to stop beside us and leaning against the balcony, looking out across the view afforded from being ten storeys up. 'I'll think less of him. I thought you had more balls than this, Addi.'

Addi sucked in a breath through his teeth, his eyes darkening. 'You know something, I think I preferred you when you were Oscar and he was a right royal bastard. I reckon that pretty face you have now has gone to your head, man. I didn't see no other human on that freaky inter-dimensional battlefield surrounded by all your fucked-up friends. I got through that, remember? I got away from that ugly-as-fuck Cherubim thing, I survived having my soul half-sucked out of my chest and I'm still standing today.' He shook his head and sneered in disgust. 'Telling me I ain't got no balls. Man, I should chuck your arse over the side here and let you fall. Bet you won't be looking so pretty when your face is spread out across the pavement.'

Berith shrugged, pushing one unruly lock of dark hair behind his ear. 'I've survived worse falls, my friend.'

Addi was right. Berith - who was now Berith again, no longer needing to disguise his true form under the mask of a human face - was remarkably good-looking. He turned heads wherever we went, his dark skin and long, wild curls earning him admiring glances from women and men alike. It seemed strange to me, that someone who had hid in Oscar's repugnant body for so long, was actually quite the head-turner. Tall and muscular, he looked every inch the man I had seen in Ethan's memories, accompanying Lucifer and Lilith and young Ethan on their travels in the Tibetan mountains.

I grinned and rubbed my stomach again, not because I needed calming, but because it had become a thing to do whenever I sat listening to Addi and Berith banter back and forth. It felt good being around them and this weird friendship they'd developed. Of course, neither of them would admit it was anything close to a friendship.

You're my friend, he's just a fucking bad smell that won't go away, Addi had said.

It's not a friendship, it's an understanding, Berith had said, demons do not need friends.

Of course, they were both full of shit, because under all the macho denial, I knew they liked each other really and even though my heart ached with emptiness without Ethan, it felt right that Lily and I were with them now. We needed them. They needed us.

'I think I preferred it when I was Oscar too,' Berith said, his eyes glinting mischievously. 'You had more respect for me then.'

'Only because I didn't want a bullet in my head.'

'Oh, I could still do that,' the demon replied, pressing his fingertip against Addi's forehead. 'I could push it in there with my fingers. Bury it right into your skull. It'll hurt far more than a gunshot would though.'

Addi scowled, and pulled away, but I could see there was a hint of nerves hidden behind his Hackney-boy bravado. 'How were you ever an Angel?'

Berith gave him a withering look. 'Addison, I would have thought you'd have learned by now that Angels were never what they would have had you believe?'

Addi snorted, rubbing his hand over his chest as if he could still feel the pain of getting part of his soul consumed by Juliette. 'And don't I know it,' he said. He followed Berith's gaze across the city that seemed to look so beautiful from up here, and sighed. 'Case, baby-girl, you sure about this?'

'He has a point,' Berith said, turning to face me, his expression suddenly serious. 'You can walk away, Casey. You cannot change the past. Even the destruction of the Angels could not undo centuries of their meddling. What you do now, will not alter the path your life has taken.'

'I know that,' I said. 'And the weird thing is, I wouldn't change it, even if I could and I know how fucked up that sounds, because I should want to change it. I should want to go back and erase it all, every horrible thing, every nightmare. But everything that ever happened to me made me who I am today. It made me stronger. It gave me courage that I never knew I had.'

As if listening, Lily kicked inside, and I looked down as my stomach undulated with the force of her little kicks, something which still freaked me out a bit to see.

'And if it had never happened, I wouldn't have met Ethan. So, no, I wouldn't change a thing.'

I looked at the door closest to where we stood, casting my eyes over the peeling paintwork and the dead plant in the flowerpot on the doorstep. Thrust deep into the mud, there was a long metal prong with a model toucan at the top, its brightly-coloured beak comically bigger than its whole body.

I smiled.

The macaw. The cockatoo. The rainbow-billed toucan. The scarlet ibis.

'This isn't about changing my past,' I said. 'I can't do anything about that. But I can change somebody else's future. Maybe even their present for all I know.'

I glanced sharply at Berith. 'Do you think he'd disagree? Try to persuade me to walk away?'

Berith placed a hand on my shoulder. 'No. Ethan would be right here by your side.' He looked around, smiling. 'Who knows, maybe he already is.'

Taking a deep breath, I turned and rapped on the door with my knuckles and waited. Voices echoed from within, muffled, but one becoming clearer the closer it moved towards the door. A shadow shifted behind the frosted glass.

I always thought I'd recoil if I ever saw her again. I had done a few years ago, spotting her shuffling along the high street, four cans of cheap lager in the thin, plastic off-licence carrier bag gripped tightly in her hand. I'd seen her and shrank back around a corner, trembling as I'd clutched at the wall, silently begging it to open up and swallow me whole, mould me into the brick and cement and hold me there so I didn't have to face her ever again.

It was her who recoiled this time.

'Hello, mum,' I said, cheerfully.

Maggie Brogan, my nemesis, my own personal demon, my mother, shrank back, curling inwards as if she'd been punched, as she looked in turn at the three people she'd found on her doorstep.

'Who the fuck is it, Mags? Tell them to piss off,' a slurred voice called out.

I'd have recognised that voice anywhere.

You could have pushed my head underwater to drown it out and I would still have recognised that voice. He'd whispered to me so much over the years. When I was awake. When I was asleep. It was as if that voice lived inside my head and yet I knew he was real. He was the ghost that had never gone away. My mum's dealer.

The worst of them all.

I cocked my head to one side, smirking. I couldn't believe my luck when Berith told me he'd tracked him down, and the discovery had seemed even more significant when Berith had told where he was now living. In a way, it had sealed Maggie's fate, just as it had his.

'Oh, sounds like you've got an old friend of ours here,' I commented, getting a little thrill when Maggie's eyes widened with shock and fear as she looked down at my arms and saw my veins shining a bright, electric blue under my skin.

'Mind if we come in?' I said. 'I think we have a lot of catching up to do, don't you, Maggie?'

As I closed the front door behind me - letting Berith and Addi enter the apartment first, Maggie backing up as they advanced - I felt the air move by my side. It was just a brief, warm breeze that enveloped my hand, but I clenched my fist as if I could feel his fingers interlocking with mine. Inside, Lily kicked again and again, dancing as if the sudden warmth had reached her tiny body.

'That's right, sweetheart,' I murmured. 'Don't you worry about a thing.'

I turned around to face the room at the end of the corridor, where the screaming had already begun, and reached for the leather satchel strapped across my body. It wasn't quite like Lucifer's, but it was as close as I could find, old and battered, with cracks in the leather that I liked to run my fingers over, just as Ethan had done.

I patted my hand over it, feeling the Gospel hidden inside that I'd retrieved from the battlefield, next to where Blake's ashes must have been, mixed together with the cold, white dust of the Angelic dimension. Protected by Endorian magic, the Gospel of Helel had survived the end of the Angels, just as we had.

'Daddy will find his way back to us soon,' I whispered, smiling as I looked down.

I placed my other hand over my stomach, feeling the euphoric bliss of our daughter's movements within.

'I read it in a book.'