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  Angelfall

  The Eternal Flame Series

  L. Penelope

  Contents

  Stay Connected

  About the Book

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Thank you!

  Excerpt: ANGELBORN

  About the Author

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  About the Book

  Their love could break the world.

  Lyrix, the first new angel to emerge in a millennium, brings hope for her endangered race. But the weight of duty is heavy. As the newest and strongest, she is expected to become a Seraph, one of the stoic angel kings and queens. She dreads the prospect of losing all her emotions in the transformation, but avoiding her destiny may lead to extinction for her kind.

  Wren is half-human and a second-class citizen among angels. A chance meeting with Lyrix leaves them both yearning for a life lived on their own terms. A relationship between an angel and an angelborn is unprecedented, and powerful forces oppose their union. On a journey to the human world, tragedy strikes, and Wren and Lyrix realize their love may destroy both worlds.

  Prologue

  SAN FRANCISCO, April 18, 1906

  I hold my straining belly as I race down the dark, creaking stairs. Traces of the dream linger, fueling my haste. The force of a contraction brings me to my knees on the landing. I bite down on the fleshy base of my thumb to stifle a cry of pain. I don’t want to awaken anyone in the boarding house.

  Tears pierce my eyes but do not fall. Finally, the contraction passes. I inhale a stuttering breath, gathering my strength to take the last flight down. My legs wobble, weak from months of bed rest. I’m not sure I can make it, but I must find Wren.

  Streetlights flicker feebly against the predawn sky. A horse and wagon rumble over pavement somewhere nearby, but the street before me is empty. Half a block away, traffic rolls down Montgomery Street, as the day begins early for laborers. My steps are slow, my body hunched over, arms shielding my belly, willing the baby to wait. Just a little longer.

  The street is so quiet—the silence makes the hairs on my arms stand up. My dream started quietly too, before it became a nightmare.

  I make it to Montgomery Street, each step an agony. As I turn the corner, another contraction hits, but that’s not what takes my breath away. Wren stands there, halfway down the block—my Wren, his hands raised high above his head. A shorter man hovers an arm’s length away, the switchblade in his hand glinting in the flickering streetlamp.

  It was this flicker I saw in my dream. A glancing of light off the steel along with a sense of dread that made me awaken in a sweat and rush from our room at the boarding house.

  Wren shouldn’t be here. He should be on his way to work, even now hitching up the cart for the morning deliveries. Instead he reaches into his pocket for his billfold and hands it over to the thief.

  He catches sight of me then, just a quick, worried glance before his focus turns back the man with the knife. The thief’s lurching and swaying suggests he’s just left one of the opium dens which pepper the neighborhood. He has what he wanted, the meager dollars in Wren’s billfold, and I suffer through another contraction, barely able to stay on my feet.

  Wren remains still as the thief pockets the money and backs away. I release the breath I’d been holding. My hands press against my belly, willing our baby to wait just a little longer. The midwife must be called. I have not been human long enough to be confident about the birthing process.

  Wren’s gaze is on me. He can feel my distress through our bond, even now that his powers have faded. He turns to me at the same time a brilliant light arcs across the sky. The deep violet luster hovers overhead, so bright I have to squint against it. Wren can't see it, but the thief does.

  “No!” I scream as the light expands, taking on the shape of a man. Wren stops suddenly—I can practically see his mind racing, trying to figure out what is wrong. Violet is the color of the Angels of War. I do not recognize this angel, but all of the disparate images of my nightmare fall into place. The glimmering light, the fear, the certainty. Some part of me knew that the rulers of Euphoria would stop at nothing to get me to bend to their will. As the angel hovers, whispering horrible thoughts into the ear of the thief, I fall to my knees with a cry. Wren is fully human now and no match for this angel, and I cannot use my powers without harming the baby.

  The child is impatient under the weight of my distress. My water breaks. A fountain of warm liquid pours from me, flowing down my legs in a stream. Wren lunges for me.

  The thief raises his arm high, before plunging his knife into Wren’s back. I fall to my side—the pain turns to numbness, and the rest of the world fades away. All I can see is Wren’s face, contorted by agony. Another step brings him closer to me, but the knife sinks in again and again.

  Wren falls to the ground. The man stands over him, eyes blazing with fury. The Warrior angel’s job is done. He darts away as quickly as he came, disappearing back into the night sky. As soon as he leaves, Wren’s murderer drops the knife, staring at his hands as if he’s never seen them before.

  Wren drags himself across the pavement to reach me. I stretch out my arm, seeking to touch him just one more time, but fall short.

  Wings flap in the distance. Different angels coming for Wren. To take him away from me.

  As they approach, I scream again and try with all my might to pull myself over to him, but can’t move. This body that I love so dearly is failing me.

  Unlike the Warrior, the two Guardian angels arrive in their corporeal forms. They land in a cloud of black feathers. Black masks hide their faces. They point their cruel obsidian swords towards Wren. My cries for mercy fall on deaf ears. Ebony fire swirls around their blades. The angelfire builds as I wear out my throat, uselessly begging for them to spare him. When they release the fire, a wall of pain slams into me, silencing my cries and dissolving the tether of my control.

  The fire takes Wren, leaving not so much as a charred mark on the sidewalk. The baby quiets inside me, somehow knowing that his father is gone.

  A deep and primal pain breaks loose within me, in the form of a sound no human voice could produce. The force of my despair radiates outward, detonating a charge that quickly spirals out of control.

  The ground shakes violently. Windows rattle, then shatter, raining down shards of glass. I’m vaguely aware of the angels taking flight again, weaving through the crumbling and falling cement and brick. Dogs bark in the distance. Screams fill my ears as people awaken to the shuddering earth.

  My body splinters and fragments. My angel form takes me and not the other way around. All the control I fought so hard for is lost as anger and grief overwhelm me. The full weight of my angelic powers fuels the destruction.r />
  It goes on and on, until the city I love is as broken and ruined as my heart.

  Chapter One

  CITY OF EUPHORIA, 31 Cycles Earlier

  There are times when I feel like a match hovering far too close to a cannon's fuse. Pretending to be like the others makes me want to erase that little sliver of distance and set off an explosion. But that is the essence of the problem—I need to try so hard to fit in, and the trying makes me angry.

  If I wasn’t so emotional and “unpredictable,” maybe I would be moving up the stream instead of languishing here near the end, where I’ve been since I started working at the Guild of Records.

  Mannix actually used the word “unpredictable” to describe me. When I’ve never missed a shift, and I catalog more quickly and accurately than any of the angels in my sector. How much more predictable can you get?

  I return to my station after my meeting with the archangel and stare at the stream of aether running before me. Openings upstream are few and far between. Angels rarely leave, and the downstream positions are usually reserved for the slowest angels… and the angelborn. I thought I had a real chance, but Mannix delivered the news that the promotion had gone to a full angel instead.

  He advised me to be patient. “In time you will have the opportunity to grow.” He must truly believe this, for angels cannot lie, but for them, time is measured in centuries, not days. My lifespan is just as long, but being angelborn makes me impatient.

  Next to me, my coworker Tyrex plucks out a pearl of data from the stream of energy. He holds it gingerly between his glowing fingertips, then flicks it into the air. It sails to one of the nearly infinite number of bins filling the floor around us. The pearl is cataloged, and Tyrex moves on to the next one.

  “Did you honestly believe that the guild would promote a halfling when there was an opening in the upper stream?” he asks me. “There are far too many hardworking angels here to waste good positions on an angelborn.”

  Tyrex says this with the same nonchalance with which he says everything. It would never even occur to him that something like that would hurt my feelings. After all, angels don’t feel emotions the way humans do. Being half-human, I feel way too much.

  In order to appear “predictable,” I check my glow, making sure it’s bright and even so no one will be able to work out what I’m feeling. Then I look up to find my dam, Beetrix, staring in my direction. She is far upstream, though not as far as she deserves to be, and glows a few shades darker than normal—she must have noticed that something is off with me. She’s the only one who would; I suppose a mother always knows her son better than anyone else.

  A twinge of guilt spikes in me. Beetrix has sacrificed so much for me—I owe it to her not to sulk. I straighten up and turn my attention back to the stream. A pearl collides with my hand and I pluck it out, absorbing the knowledge it holds.

  ‘On Monday last, inquests were held at Jackson Street Tavern, Toxteth Park, into the deaths of two men found near Tall House. A jagged incision appearing in the throat of the first deceased indicates foul play.’

  I choose a category for the information and fling the pearl into the corresponding bin, where it will sit until someone in one of the other guilds requires it. Beetrix is still staring at me—I give her an encouraging nod, hoping she will understand the gesture. She knows how badly I wanted to move up the stream. Down here we get the most mundane information after all the interesting knowledge has already been filtered out. Birth reports, death reports, tidbits about how a human has passed a certain hour of his or her day. It all goes into the archive, and it’s all incredibly boring.

  Beetrix’s glow pulses subtly—only someone watching for it would notice. I rise to go to her and see what’s wrong. Next to me, Tyrex glances up. A tense wave of anger rises within me as I await another disparaging comment from him. But he remains quiet as I move away.

  I glide to Beetrix’s side, my interest piqued as the pulse of her glow grows almost giddy. I hover next to her station and watch the stream of aether rush by lightning quick. Lodged at the side is a tiny twinkle of green light, a pearl that Beetrix has set aside and not yet cataloged.

  She motions for me to handle it. No one around is paying attention, so I pluck the bit of data from the stream. Once I make contact, the knowledge becomes a part of me instantly. I nearly drop the thing in my shock.

  I whip around, searching the reactions of the other Recordkeepers, but the hall is quiet, everyone oblivious to the momentous news I just learned.

  “When?” I ask.

  “Now!” Her voice is an urgent whisper. She’s trying to keep her glow under control, resulting in little sparks erupting around her. Beetrix is the only angel I’ve ever seen do this. She lived among humans for longer than most; I’ve always suspected this is the reason why.

  “Do you not want to see it?” she asks.

  My own glow brightens in response.

  “I have to take this straight to Mannix. After that, everyone will know. Hurry.”

  I thank her and rush off, not caring that I’m leaving my shift early. Very soon, no one will notice my absence, for they will be abandoning their posts too.

  I fly through the open ceiling and head for the center of Euphoria to witness the birth of an angel.

  In the same way that everything in the human world is comprised of matter, everything in Euphoria is made of light, from the towers and spires of the buildings, to the softly radiating pathways, to our very bodies. Objects may differ in color or illumination level, but everything is bright.

  At the very center of this vast city where darkness cannot abide is our most sacred place—the Eternal Flame. It is the source of all the power of Euphoria. The Flame keeps the world of the angels running and is the reason for our existence. All of our work nurturing human souls through their various lifetimes is for this: once a human has lived several times and their soul is deemed ready, an Angel of Death leads it here, to the Eternal Flame, where it joins all of the other souls and adds to the aether—the energy powering our world. But there is another reason for the Flame.

  When I was young and still learning all the rules of my new and fascinating home, I asked Beetrix why I was different from the other angels.

  “Because you are angelborn,” she said. “Your father was human and you were born from my body when I took on that form.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to know what it was like to create life. I wanted to know what it was like to love.”

  “Can angels not love?”

  “Our angel forms were not made to hold emotion. Only in human form can we accomplish that.”

  “And angels in Euphoria can’t have babies?”

  “No,” she said, her glow dimming.

  “Well, where do angels come from?”

  “They come from the Flame, but an emergence is very rare. Once every few hundred human years, sometimes longer, a new angel will emerge. It is what we work and hope for. It is what Euphoria is here for.”

  I hadn’t really understood, but over the cycles it became more and more clear. The angels had come to this realm and begun interfering with the affairs of humans a very long time ago, after their home was destroyed. They cultivate the Flame using mature human souls as fuel, but only the Seraphim know exactly how it is done. There has not been a new angel during my lifetime—the last Nascent emerged nearly one thousand human years ago.

  I fly across the city and land at the base of the Flame, its white fire glowing brighter than anything else in Euphoria. The normally calm blaze has grown agitated, sparking multicolored flares up toward the sky like human fireworks.

  Around me, others gather to watch; the news has spread as quickly as Beetrix predicted. By getting here first I’m assured a front-row view of the emergence.

  The growing crowd presses forward. As the throng thickens, with more and more swooping down and landing around the perimeter of the Flame, I stand my ground to keep my prime position. Nearly every angel
in Euphoria must be here now, waiting eagerly for the Nascent. But we are silent, watching the Eternal Flame until the multicolored sparks coalesce into a whirling ball of rainbow light. From it emerges a figure who shoots like a cannonball into the air and then begins a free fall.

  Chapter Two

  The new angel is as uncoordinated as a newborn foal taking its first steps. Limbs flail and jerk. The variegated lights of its form strobe as it falls like dead weight, unable to fly or control its body at all. No other angel moves to offer any aid. The Nascent cannot be injured by a fall, but I imagine that crashing onto the ground in front of most of Euphoria cannot be what they want their first act to be.

  When it seems clear that it is not able to right itself, I shoot up into the air and catch the body in my arms. Instinctively, the angel solidifies, accepting my aid. Its glow calms, becoming a gentle glimmer of rainbow light. A wave of surprise and displeasure ripples through the crowd. Lights dim around me in disapproval of my gall and the unnecessary touching, but no one speaks.

  I land before the Flame and set the angel on its feet. The swirling kaleidoscope of an arm clings to me. “It’s all right,” I whisper. “You’re strong enough to stand on your own.”

  Uncertainty flickers across the Nascent; this angel is already far more emotional than normal. The changing moods and temperament are far more angelborn than full angel.

  “What is your name?” I ask.

  The colors brighten. “I am Lyrix.” Through the point of contact where we touch, I can feel her decision to be female. Gender isn’t truly relevant for angels, but in order to interact with humans, they tend to choose one and stick to it. Being half-human, I had no choice in mine.

  “And you?” she asks.

  “Wren.”

  Her glow brightens; on a human it would be a smile. “Thank you, Wren,” she says. I want to ask her more. How does it feel to be new? What was going through her mind as she flailed in the air? Was she afraid? But I don’t get to ask her these things or say anything at all, for the crowd parts, and two of the four Seraphim hover before us. Their massive forms burn a deep, unchanging red. All gathered dim in deference to the king and queen.