Broken Angels (Eve of Light, Book I)

Witnesses see random acts of generic magic. The government promises that's all they see.

Darryl Ridley believes desire is a disease he can cure with a kiss.

He studies the reckless, courts them patiently, and at the moment a lover would expect a bed, he gives a revelation instead: violet wings unfolding from his shoulders in waves of watery light. "I'm not your lover," he tells them. "I'm more like an angel." Then he lifts the chin, holds the eyes, and kisses his convert the way the seducers in old romances drank blood — except what Darryl drains is the appetite for love itself, for the rest of a life. He calls the work charity. His creed ends in two words: Spare None.

His partner, Robert Goldner, works a humbler miracle: he disappears. The parasites colonizing his skin and blood let him bend light until even the cameras lose him — and they are dismantling him from the inside as payment. A stranger propped against a mailbox in full sun, skin falling away like autumn leaves, wordlessly reminded him of one way the infection ends. Still he hunts missing children for the Isaac-Abraham Institution, whose chairman muses that the world will one day call the infected "angels." What's left of the world.

The newest missing-child file is Marie-Lydia McGillis's. The girl Robert and Darryl find instead is Ava Darden.

Ava was beaten and planted deep beneath her own consciousness. Wake a sleeper buried that deep, the specialists say, and her first words tell you who — or what — has come back up. The word they hope for is "Hello." Ava's first words: "Where's Marie-Lydia?" Her memory has lost everything since the day she stopped a school massacre — a massacre attempted by the red-haired girl Robert and Darryl were sent, and failed, to find.

The renewed hunt coils through an America that has renamed the impossible. Witnesses to miracles are told they saw random acts of generic magic. Terrorist artists film their atrocities, sign them like exhibitions, and are never traced. And in the dawnclubs, before breakfast, experimental poems are tested on small audiences — because in this world, the wrong words can rearrange a life.

Robert is running out of body. Darryl has turned a kiss into a life sentence. Everyone hunting Marie-Lydia offers a different rescue — and every rescuer intends to decide what a human life should become.

Broken Angels opens Eve of Light: Dark Metaphysical Fantasy — body horror, broken theology, and salvations that cost more than damnation.