Page 2 of Even Angels fall
Because we’re not angels—far from it.
We’re bird-shifters, and we can sport three forms. Human, beast, and what is commonly called the angelic form: the body in human form with wings out. No one knows why, but in that form, the wings stay in human size.
It wouldn’t be too much of a problem for someone like Raphaël. He’s a swan-shifter, and his wings are big enough that he wouldn’t look ridiculous.
Gabriel would look like he wore toy-like wings on his back with his white cockatoo wings, but he wouldn’t be the worst of the three.
The worst would be my father, because my father is a dove-shifter.
I don’t know who was the one who decided which shifter family would take on which archangel’s task, but they must have had a sick sense of humor.
Put a dove at the head of the war house.
It’s been like that for the past three hundred years, and it hasn’t changed.
My father.
My grandfather before him.
My great-grandmother.
And three more male ancestors before that.
It’s not that my species die young. It’s just that fifty years is supposed to be the longest an archangel can rule.
I say supposed because my father is on year fifty-one.
I was supposed to start ruling last year.
Instead, I train and fight every day, as if I were going to be sent as an assassin all over the world.
As if I was supposed to disappear in the dark and do whatever my king wanted me to do.
I’m not far off, though.
I might not have been born for darkness—if you still believe those liars of archangels are the light—but my thirteenth birthday decided otherwise.
Because of my bird. Because of my wings.
As black as coal, as dark as the night.
I’m one of the fallen.
All because, somewhere in my genealogy tree, someone was a crow, and it passed down.
I could have been lucky, like my friend Léandre, who is the son of Gabriel and Cassandre. Her grandmother had been a parrot, and even if she had taken the white cockatoo wings, some of the red from her ancestors have colored Léandre’s wings tip.
His wings look like they have been tipped in blood and if I didn’t know for certain that he preferred spending his time with his nose stuck between pages, I would have thought he would be perfect as a warrior.
But he’s a lot like his father, who is the archangel of knowledge. He likes learning new things every day and has probably read every book available in Paris.
The ones that haven’t been burned, I mean.
It probably helps that he likes books so much and that his mother was actually Gabriel’s true mate because I’m not so surehe would be treated that well with his red wing tips. It doesn’t look archangel-like enough.
I wouldn’t say that he would have been sent to theécuries du roi—the king’s stables—like what happened to me, but he would certainly not stay in the main part of the castle, either.
Even if his wings are white, they aren’t white enough.
