A Terrible Fall of Angels

  Copyright © 2021 Laurell K. Hamilton

  The right of Laurell K. Hamilton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in the USA in 2021 by

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  First published in Great Britain as an Ebook in 2021 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Excerpt from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translation by David Young.

  1

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4722 8535 5

  Cover images © Nik Keevil/Arcangel (man with a gun)

  Cover design by Tim Green/Faceout Studio

  Author photograph © Stefan Hester

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Praise for the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novels

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Angel Vocabulary

  Bibliography

  Discover more by Laurell K. Hamilton . . .

  About the Author

  Laurell K. Hamilton is the bestselling author of the acclaimed Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novels which have sold millions of copies worldwide and created the market for sexy paranormal fiction. She has published nearly fifty books and novels, including the bestselling Meredith Gentry series, as well as short stories and novellas, and written in the Star Trek universe and in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. A Terrible Fall of Angels is the first book in the new Detective Zaniel Havelock series, set in a world where angels and demons walk among us.

  Laurell is a resident of St. Louis and supports many charities and links to local groups dedicated to helping animals in need and protecting the natural world. She invites you to visit her website at www.laurellkhamilton.com.

  @LKHamilton

  Titles by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novels

  Guilty Pleasures

  The Laughing Corpse

  Circus of the Damned

  The Lunatic Cafe

  Bloody Bones

  The Killing Dance

  Burnt Offerings

  Blue Moon

  Obsidian Butterfly

  Narcissus in Chains

  Cerulean Sins

  Incubus Dreams

  Micah

  Danse Macabre

  The Harlequin

  Blood Noir

  Skin Trade

  Flirt

  Bullet

  Hit List

  Kiss the Dead

  Affliction

  Jason

  Dead Ice

  Crimson Death

  Serpentine

  Sucker Punch

  Rafael

  Merry Gentry Novels

  A Kiss of Shadows

  A Caress of Twilight

  Seduced by Moonlight

  A Stroke of Midnight

  Mistral’s Kiss

  A Lick of Frost

  Swallowing Darkness

  Divine Misdemeanors

  A Shiver of Light

  Specials

  Beauty

  Dancing

  Wounded

  Anthologies

  Strange Candy

  Fantastic Hope

  Zaniel Havelock Novels

  A Terrible Fall of Angels

  Praise for Laurell K. Hamilton:

  ‘Wow! [This book] has it all – a terrific new character, devious twists, plenty of action and one hell of an ending’

  ‘Hamilton remains one of the most inventive and exciting writers in the paranormal field’

  Charlaine Harris

  ‘A hardcore guilty pleasure’

  The Times

  ‘I’ve never read a writer with a more fertile imagination’

  Diana Gabaldon

  ‘A sex-positive, kick-ass female protagonist’

  Starburst

  ‘Anita Blake is one of the most fascinating fictional heroines since Scarlett O’Hara’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘What The Da Vinci Code did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel’

  USA Today

  ‘Wildly popular’

  Entertainment Weekly

  ‘Hamilton’s complex, enthralling world is utterly absorbing’

  Booklist

  ‘Always very, very sexy and exciting’

  Dreamwatch

  ‘Mesmerizing reading indeed’

  Locus

  ‘Supernatural bad guys beware, night-prowling Anita Blake is savvy, sassy and tough’

  P. N. Elrod

  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.

  I had to try to think of Megan Borowski as just the victim, a body savaged by attacker or attackers unknown, because it could have been two men. That might explain why she hadn’t screamed for help. Had one threatened her in some way during the rape—I won’t kill you if you just do what I want—and then they’d killed her anyway? Evil, it was evil, even if it was just men who did it, but was it Evil with a capital E? Was that why the angels had been ordered to leave their feathers at the crime scene, so we’d know it wasn’t just a human-on-human crime?

  I had one of the few quiet moments I’d ever had at a scene like this, where some trick of duty or assignment had sent everyone somewhere else, so I had a moment to stare down at the dead woman’s bed all by my lonesome. I didn’t believe it was an accident that I was alone. The crime might not have been planned, but when every other person working a suspicious death leaves the prime crime scene to just me, well, I was waiting for whatever the Big Guy wanted me to see, or hear, or experience. Maybe there’d be a clue that only I would find, or needed to find. God worked in mysterious ways, and so did all His messengers, that much I knew. I heard one of the crime scene techs curse, as if something wasn’t going to plan in the hallway. Celestial beings were involved; nothing would go according to human planning, I knew that much. In all the years I’d worked angel detail I’d never seen a single feather left behind unless the angel was fighting for their own safety.

  If there’d only been one smaller feather, I might have thought the victim had an angelic lover, maybe. Angels were funny things and could affect people in ways that neither the human lover nor the angel could see coming. Because we were the wild cards, we humans, once angels got a taste for us, they could screw up both their eternity and our lives—screw it up all to Hell. Of course, one small feather might have been overlooked in the initial investigation. Realistic evidence of an angelic lover wouldn’t have been spotted right away. It wouldn’t have made anyone call us yet. I wouldn’t be standing here if the angels hadn’t gone all-out to grab my attention.

  The silence got that weighted quality to it, and I knew that even if one of the techs came back into this room in the next few minutes, they might not see a damn thing except me. If they were one of the gifted and could see the unseen, they were about to be in for a Heaven of a show.

  The angel manifested just in front of me, between the foot of the bed and the window. The h
air on my arms stood to attention, but the skin on my neck stayed calm, so I knew it was an angel, but not one of the angels that had left the feathers. They wouldn’t be able to manifest like this anymore. Once the spiritual got solid enough to leave DNA behind, they couldn’t just conjure themselves out of thin air. The figure hovering before me wasn’t even solid enough to stand on the carpet, because “it” was made mostly of light.

  The angel glowed before me, all white and gold-yellow light; even its eyes were full of yellow fire, but there was no heat. Angels don’t give off heat, no matter how fiery they look; if you ever see a glowing angel and feel heat come off it, it’s not an angel, exactly. One of the first things you need to understand if you work angel detail is that fallen angels are still angels, and demons, well, that’s another problem altogether, but the rule is, if it gives off heat, run; if you can’t run, pray.

  The angel’s wings were barely hinted at; “he,” or “she,” was mostly just light with a humanoid figure in the middle of it, and a shimmering hint of wings, and flowing robes, but mostly just that full-bodied halo, the aurora.

  The voice sounded male, but honestly angels this shining are sexless, they just are. “We are pleased that we do not have to manifest fully for you, Detective Zaniel Havelock.”

  It wasn’t the opening I’d expected; if angels seek you out personally then it’s with an extremely specific message like in the Bible: You are pregnant with the Son of God, or Flee now, enemies are coming. The personal conversational style was how they spoke to Angel Speakers, Angelus Dictum, which means “the angel said” to make it clear that the person sharing the message from the angel is not an angel but only their mouthpiece. Angels did not speak like this to people on the outside, but once I’d been inside and I fell back into the same rhythm, an old habit come back to haunt me. “You can lose the humanoid stuff altogether if you want. I do appreciate you trying not to drive me insane by manifesting in your pure energy form, but it’s okay, I don’t need the baby steps.”

  “Very well,” it said, and the human pretense went away. I was left staring at light, or flame, or something in between the two. It filled nearly all of that half of the room, but it gave off neither heat nor formed shadows. Again, if something says it’s an angel, and glows at you, but it causes shadows around it, it’s not the good kind of angel, or maybe it’s not an angel at all.