The Fallen

“You’ll never guess who I caught singing in the streets the other day,” Kyle said, and for a moment Cody had no clue what he was talking about, but then Elise asked,

“Who?”

“Abbadon.”

Cody sucked in a breath sharply. “What? But I thought The Fallen didn’t have Voices.”

“Not natural ones,” Kyle said. “But the government hates it when ordinary people have an edge over them. So they tried to find voices of their own.”

“Who else has a choirboy, that you know of?” Marsh tossed a pair of dice up in the air, caught them with practiced ease.

“Olivier, or so the rumor goes.”

Cody could only stare as Kyle hoisted himself up onto the railing and perched for a moment, looking so much like one of those morons who tried to suicide off the footbridge between Nebraska and Iowa. Then Kyle stepped off the railing - and into the air. Marsh swore under his breath, and Cody saw Elise’s grip on her guitar go white-knuckled, but Kyle hovered for a moment, then began to descend slowly, gently, as if on an invisible elevator. In a movie he’d have been accompanied by a pillar of light filled with swirling dust motes.

“Malpas and Samael, too. Maybe even Zagan,” Kyle said. He paused, beckoned, and Cody’s entire world was filled with the beating of mighty wings.

Then Gabriel appeared on the ground beside Kyle. Amidst the shadows and the rubble, Gabriel looked too bright, too vivid to be real.

“Can the listeners catch on to them, too?” Elise asked.

Kyle nodded. “I suspect Olivier let himself be caught. Imagine what the government will do, once it has what it thinks is an actual Angel in its grasp?”

“We already fought this war,” Cody said. “The Fallen have their answer - and one third of us. What’s going on?”

“Don’t you get it?” Marsh asked, his voice tight. He was staring at his dice where they lay on his open palm. Snake eyes. “This is a whole new war.”

(338 words)