A Little Teaser - Tears of Heaven

Here’s a little taste of my upcoming release, “Tears of Heaven” due this fall:

The fight was not going well.  Del should have brought Marrin.  Ahadiel had told her to bring Marrin, but that had only made certain that she wouldn’t.

Del gasped as the rogue landed a solid punch into her stomach and ribs, the air whooshed from her lungs.  He followed with a stab of his clawed-fingers into her right arm.  Cold-filled pain suffused her shoulder and caused it to spasm.  She spun away, awkwardly.  Her right arm felt like it had been shattered, pulverized into a pudding, useless as gelatin.  The cold-forged iron spike she’d been holding, dropped from useless fingers and clattered to the floor.  The rogue looked at her with brutal menace in his eyes and flame licking around the lids.

It would have been a good trick.

If only it had been a trick.

The flames were all too real.

Fortunately, Del didn’t suffer from the same fears that mortals had to contend with.  A rogue divinity hissing heresy and spouting fire, literal fire, around his eyes would have left a mortal quivering in terror until the Last Judgment.

She’d seen it happen.

“Leave now, little half-breed,” the rogue said, and his voice had a sibilance that seemed to surround her, whispering in both of her ears intimately, “and I will not kill you.  Stay, and I will make your pain a torture.  I will see you last for days upon days, and I promise you abuses you could not dream.”

Del said nothing.

People think they want to meet an angel, but they really don’t.  The awful truth is that meeting an angel is the scariest, most life altering moment of any mortal’s short existence.  Angels have always had their voices raised in songs of praise and their wings dipped in rivers of blood.  When the Throne needs a mortal slain or an army felled, an angel is sent.  When a city or nation needs to be leveled and the ground sown with salt for a thousand years, an angel is the destroyer.

Flood, fire, famine, disease, pestilence and death are conjured through an angel.

Angels should be a human’s worst nightmare embodied.