Fall
From Grace
Exile
of Angels Book 1
by
Ron C. Nieto
Genre:
Urban Fantasy
Hell
was meant to be a timeless prison. It’s not.
Henry
Black, former Archangel of Secret Knowledge, wants some peace of mind
after untold millennia locked up in Hell, but the guilt of inhabiting
a body that is not his own and of having left behind his brothers and
sisters still damned to solitary confinement eats him up inside.
Old
sins are hard to cleanse.
He
thinks he can atone by doing the right thing—play the older brother
to his host body’s kin while upturning every secret buried in
Creation until he finds a way to free every single angel who fell—but
with every fact uncovered, he finds himself one step further from the
release he craves and one step closer to more chains that
bind.
Maybe
the only way to be at peace with himself is to face a new war head
on…
The car jerked to a stop, and in turn, it jerked me out of my thoughts. I opened my eyes. Phillip had thrown the Alfa into park in front of my apartment, and he’d already jumped out. I scrambled after him, but of course he popped the trunk first. Of course, he saw what I’d done.
The trip to Boston’s library hadn’t been a complete waste. I had borrowed a few titles. Phillip had helped me carry them to his trunk, and then he had jumped in the driver’s seat. And I had stalled a moment, enough to reach in and distribute the books in even stacks, weight and size taken into account in an impromptu Lego game to build a solid base. It had kept them from slipping and flying around, even with Phillip’s driving, and now it caused Phillip to stare at me, smirk back in place.
Blast it.
“Don’t comment,” I said, combing my hair back. It felt like I’d spent the whole morning telling him that.
“Wouldn’t dream to, brother,” he said easily enough. And he reached in and pulled out a few books, more than half of them, not adding another word but thinking plenty of them. It frustrated me. Not because I didn’t like him—Phillip was nothing if not likable. The looks, the style, the attitude… my little brother always behaved like the world was his for the taking, and the world liked to prove him right. No, the problem wasn’t my brother. Rather, it was the fact that he wasn’t my brother.
I grabbed the remaining couple of books and slammed the trunk shut. The car was an ancient Alfa Romeo model. Old, not vintage. The bright red paint was chipped, and the back bumper was dented. The back windows got stuck easily, and you had to jostle the manual lever up and to the front if you wanted it to work. Still, it was his car, bought with his own money, and he loved the decrepit machine. I knew that, just as I knew how much force I needed to use in order to get the satisfying bounce of the suspension system just from closing the trunk, and just like I knew Phillip would flinch at the rattling noise.
I knew all that because Phillip was Henry’s brother, and that’s the sort of thing brothers could tell about each other. However, I wasn’t Henry. I was just wearing his body. The knowledge sat in the pit of my stomach, a roiling knot that had tied itself over and over and sometimes threatened to nauseate me.
Only sometimes, though. Only when I was reminded that Henry had had a life before me.
“Let’s just go up,” I said. The words rasped over a dry throat on their way out.
Just one day out of Hell. One day worth of a lie. The weight of it sat heavier by the second across my shoulders while we climbed to my apartment. Henry’s home.
Rise
To Freedom
Exile
of Angels Book 2
I
am a demon possessing the body of the late Malik Sadik. Truth.
Yes,
the former Archangel of Truth now inhabits the body of coffeehouse
barista Malik Sadik. But Malik wasn’t a willing participant to this
possession, not like Henry Black. The human Henry Black willingly
gave over his body to the Archangel of Secret Knowledge. Malik, on
the other hand, was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I
still feel human. Truth.
Yes,
Malik still feels human. But he’s not human and a war is brewing.
When Hell threatens to unravel and its black hunger eats and corrupts
those Malik has learned to care about, he must make a choice between
what he knew as an angel and what he has begun to feel as a man.
So,
what happens when Truth isn’t right?
Malik glanced between Ed and John, both wearing their uniforms as shields and their guns for safety. Malik himself didn’t have a gun, didn’t have a bulletproof vest or anything. If there was any shooting in his future, he only had his jacket to protect him—and since the damn thing didn’t do a great job of protecting him from Detroit’s bitter cold, he supposed it wouldn’t be any better against a bullet. Or a knife. Or a club. Or—
Stop it. It’s not like we’re expecting that sort of trouble anyway. If this was a normal call, we wouldn’t be here.
Truth.
Yeah, but that truth doesn’t take into account that Black can make mistakes, right? That fucking know-it-all could have sent us to break a drug dealer’s ring by error. Wouldn’t that be fun. “Oops, sorry, carry on. We were just responding to a bit of demonic energy in the area, didn’t realize it was just a coke OD.”
Malik shook his head to rid it of the what-ifs and walked up to the house, close on the cops’ heels. John and Ed exchanged a quick glance, and then John kicked the door, hard enough to tear one of the hinges in a cloud of splinters. The door hit the wall with a crash and both John and Ed spilled into the house, fanning out to cover the foyer and the doors leading into the house. Malik hesitated only a second before following suit. He chose to move toward John’s cover—he always did—and once the three of them were inside, they slipped into the first room.
The raid didn’t look at all like the stuff Malik was used to seeing on TV. John had assured him that it didn’t look at all like a raid planned by the regulations, either. This was, as both cops often complained, undermanned, rushed, and bordering on illegal… but it was the best they could do, given the circumstances.
“Can you feel it?” John asked, his voice barely above a murmur.
No. Lie. Yes. Truth. “Yeah,” Malik answered. “I feel it.” If only I knew what it is that I feel, or how I feel it, or what it feels like…
“Where?”
Upstairs. Lie. Left. Lie? Right. Eh, no, not quite.
Malik gestured in a general direction, mostly up ahead. He shrugged when John gave him a look. “What? It’s faint, I can’t pinpoint it.”
“If it’s faint, does that mean it’s weak?” Ed whispered from the rear.
Malik shrugged again. “Weak is relative,” he said. His stomach was beginning to cramp already, nausea from focusing on his sense of truth rising on the back of his throat.
A noise came from deep inside the house and Ed swallowed his answer, whatever it might have been. It was a scratch. Like someone dragging their feet, maybe. It came and went, soft and quick like it hadn’t even happened, but all three of them had heard it.
All pretense of humor left the group. Malik saw John’s shoulders tensing, his body crouching lower. Ed would be doing the same behind them.
“Are you ready?” John mouthed, no longer daring to even whisper.
Ron C. Nieto is a fantasy and romance author who has been writing in her secluded fortress for the longest time. Recently, she had a talk with her cat and decided that she should share her creations, because it was selfish to hoard them all for herself.
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