"See?" Fletcher announced triumphantly. "He's even admitting the whole hobo thing! Come on, Skulduggery, there's no such thing as angels. I mean, you're sorcerers, you're hundreds of years old, you know that. Just look at the Faceless Ones."

His confidence faltered slightly when no one seemed to be agreeing with him. "Wouldn't you guys know?" he tried again, a slight modicum of fear creeping into his voice. Skulduggery could imagine hundreds of different reasons Fletcher might have for wanting this all to be a joke. "Wouldn't somebody have noticed something by now? Wouldn't someone have told me by now?"

"Fletcher," Valkyrie snapped suddenly, "no one tells you anything even when you ask. Shut up."

Tanith had taken a couple of hesitant steps forward, but she seemed to be trying to look everywhere except at Gabriel, which Skulduggery found interesting. Eventually, her gaze fell on Skulduggery himself. "Are you..." she began, stopped, swallowed, and tried again. "Is he... are you sure?"

Skulduggery nodded cheerfully. "Oh, yes. Wings, halo, the whole nine yards. How else do you explain my being here?"

"But..." Tanith's voice weakly trailed off. She was still talking directly to Skulduggery, and probably wasn't even aware that she was doing it. "Does that mean that..."

She didn't seem able to finish the question, but Skulduggery knew the general direction she was going in. It had been his first query too, even if he hadn't voiced it for a while. It was the natural progression of thought, one step up above an Archangel. "Yes and no," he answered her. "In Gabe's universe, they apparently visit theme parks. But I doubt that's the case here."

Ghastly's face had been carefully blank up until this point, but now he glanced back at Skulduggery with a sort of confused shock. "Theme parks?" He shook his head. "Gabe?"

Skulduggery's reply was delayed by a split second. "He introduced himself that way."

"Exactly how long have you two known each other?"

How was Skulduggery supposed to answer that? He'd met Gabe after only two or three days trapped in Landel's reality, and a good deal of time had passed since then, even before they all managed to escape. At some point, they'd become friends; at some point after that, Gabe had confirmed Skulduggery's suspicions that he wasn't as normal as he tried to make himself seem. Time passed differently in other realities. There was no real answer. "A while," Skulduggery finally decided, opting for simple. "The circumstances where we met were very different."

Ghastly gave a slow nod. The differences in time, Skulduggery knew, wouldn't be what was giving him trouble. "Then... this is Gabriel."

"Yes."

"The Archangel," Ghastly clarified. "Messenger of God. That Gabriel." He didn't seem to want an affirmation this time, instead looking Gabe up and down with a reserved expression. "I pictured him very differently."

"So did I," Skulduggery agreed. "You should see him when he isn't hurt."

A smile finally broke out over his friend's face, and Skulduggery had no clue what it was about. Ghastly's entire worldview had just been shaken to its very core, and he was smiling. Smiling. That was probably a sign of either a badly damaged psyche or - the more likely case in this instance - amusement at his own private joke. Skulduggery would have to ask him about it later.

Ghastly was the first of the four to approach Gabriel, and he politely held his hand out. "I don't know what the protocol here generally is..."

"You don't need to avert your eyes, apparently," Skulduggery informed him.

Ghastly ignored the detective, continuing on as if nothing had happened. "... but I want to thank you for what you did. Especially if it's left you as drained as you look."