Broken Angels

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 courts the reckless, 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." What the kiss 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, in a world that may one day call the infected "angels." What's left of the world.

The latest hunt leads through a corner of an America that has renamed the impossible. 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. And every power that joins the hunt offers a different rescue, each intending 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.