A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock #1)
Laurell K. Hamilton
About the Book
Meet Detective Zaniel Havelock. A man who can talk to angels.
As an Angel Speaker, Zaniel once used his special gift to serve both the celestial beings and his fellow humans. But a terrible betrayal forced him to abandon that life. Now he’s a cop working in the City of Angels.
But where angels walk among us, so do demons. And there’s no question that there’s evil at work when Zaniel is called to the murder scene of a college student. But is this just evil that one human being can do to another, or something more? When demonic possession is a possibility, even angelic protection can only go so far.
The race is on to stop the killer before he finds his next victim. But Zaniel is facing his own very personal demons, and the past he never truly left behind . . .
This one’s for everyone who made the world a better place
this last year when everything seemed lost.
Thanks to all of you who did anything large or small to save,
to help, to be there for someone else.
You are all my heroes.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, DUINO ELEGIES
CHAPTER ONE
There were angel feathers in the dead woman’s bed. They looked like huge white swan feathers, impossibly large, but then they were supposed to propel something the size of a tall man skyward. I didn’t have to see the angel to know that he’d be tall; they were all tall, some close to eight feet, but average was between six feet and seven feet. I was six feet, three inches, a big guy by most standards, but angels always made me feel small, even when they were close to my own height. It wasn’t about physical inches when you were in the presence of angels.
I stared down at the feathers scattered across the tangled bedclothes like soft ivory, lacy cream curling with their edges moving as the window air conditioner blew directly across from the bed. The bed was shoved up against one wall, with most of the small off-campus apartment taken up by the desk and enough floor space for the yoga mat that was leaning in the other corner.
The forensics team had finished in the bedroom, though I could hear them in the bathroom that this apartment shared with the one next door. I clenched my hands in the plastic gloves, booties over my shoes so I wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. My detective shield was around my neck on its lanyard. My FN 509 nine-millimeter was in a side holster under my jacket. I had its little brother, the 503, at home. Some of the other cops had given me a hard time about not carrying a Glock, until I invited them down to the shooting range to try an FN. Then they asked price. There were other cops around, lots of them; there always were at a murder scene, because that’s how it was called in first. A murder scene with angel evidence on-site, and they bumped the call up to us. The Metaphysical Coordination Unit was our official title, but the other cops and most of the media called us the Heaven and Hell Unit, because we didn’t just solve crime on one side of the spiritual divide, we worked both sides of the street—someone had to keep the peace between beings that could tear the world apart if they ever went to war again.
If the angel feathers hadn’t been here it would have been listed as a rape homicide and been given to Sex Crimes. I stared down at the feathers; they’d started to gleam as the light faded outside the small window. I wasn’t certain if they glowed with holy fire or I was seeing the light inside my head where I saw spirits and visions. The largest feather was so white it looked ghostly in the dying light. The others were less pure in color, more off-white, and they had flecks and edges of faint color to some of them. Not all angels had snow-white wings, but that was the color that most people expected, so that was the color the angels had chosen for the largest feather that they left behind. They had wanted to make certain the human police officers first on the scene would call in the Metaphysical Coordination Unit and send for me, because I was the angel expert.
I stared at the largest feather as if I was trying to read it, but it just lay there whiter than the sheets it was lying on. It was as long as the bed, carefully placed on the edge, a huge primary flight feather. There was no way for anyone to have gotten out of the bed without disturbing that feather, yet it lay ruler straight. The other feathers weren’t anything that would cripple a wing, but this one would if angels flew like birds. The feathers were all on top of the sheets, not under them, not on the floor, not scattered like they’d be if the rapist had been an angel as the feathers seemed to imply. I knew angels didn’t lose feathers when they had sex, not even if it was rough, because for most of them the wings weren’t that solid. For those whose wings were solid, no human being was strong enough to tear them apart, not barehanded. Either the angels did it themselves, or something powerful enough to injure them did it, which meant it wasn’t the victim. I’d have bet any amount of money that they’d been placed on the bed after the crime had been committed, but why? Why did the angels care enough about this one undergrad college student to incriminate themselves? God might know when every sparrow fell, but the angels didn’t show up to catch the bird before it hit the ground. Of course, they hadn’t saved the woman. She’d been found nude, beaten to death, and with enough dried bodily fluid on her body that rape was almost a certainty. Until forensics confirmed it, it wouldn’t be rape, but it was a sexually motivated crime; we were only waiting on the medical examiner to give us a list of exactly what had happened to Megan Borowski. Thinking her name made it almost impossible not to picture her body, the beating her face had taken, her body left on the floor of the room like the murderer had just gotten up and walked out after he was done with her. There were no signs of remorse, no attempt to cover what he’d done to her face, or her nudity. It made it more likely to be a stranger, or someone who didn’t feel regretful about what he’d done. We were all assuming the attacker was male, because of the bodily fluids on the body and the strength needed for the beating.