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Synopsis

In nineteenth-century Boston, a young doctor on the run from the law falls in with a British confidence artist. Together–and with dire consequences–they bring back to the light something meant to be forgotten.

A world away in London, an absent father, haunted by the voice of a banished angel, presents his daughter with an impossible friend–a clockwork ballerina.

For two centuries, a bullet-removal specialist has wielded instruments of angel bone in service to a forgotten power . . . and now he vows to find someone else to shoulder the burden, someone with a conscience of their own, a strong mind, and a broken will. For a hundred years he has searched for the perfect contender, and now he has found two: a brother and a sister. Walter and Hope. Either will do.

Last night something stepped from little Walter’s closet and he never woke up. Now he travels the dark road between worlds, no longer entirely boy nor wholly beast, but with one goal in mind: to prevent his sister from suffering the same fate as he. Only the creature he has become can save Hope. But is it too late to save himself?

Excerpt

APOCRYPHA

Seventy-two angels fell with Samael.

As an angel is created it is gifted a function, portfolio, responsibilities. The angel charged with assigning power and function was a powerful angel indeed. Now that it grasped the concept of 'rebellion' it truly understood how much power it held. The Power to assign Power. In the wake of this revelation other ideas followed, other realisations. This angel was staggered by the sheer enormity of what it might possess and achieve.

Thus the angel sinned.

An angel does not die. Anticipating what might occur should its audience with the Fallen One go badly, the angel seized upon another of its kind, sundered it, and stole the silver of its bones. From those bones the angel fashioned instruments approximating its own power. As the angel named them, they existed. Mercurial and undying, the living bone was bestowed with aspects of the angel's own function. The function of assigning Form and Power. It then scattered these instruments across the Earth, a safeguard against the possibility of its own failure, and departed the presence of the God which had Created it.

The angel found Samael in His new Kingdom, and made the Fallen One an offer of allegiance. An offer to create an army more powerful than that of Heaven, to seize what they had lost.

Samael was Beauty. The angel could not look upon it. It was all it could do to remain upright and not fall to its knees, as did the seventy-two Fallen gathered around their Lord.

The angel remembered the time of Samael's birth. A thousand others had been created to sing His hosannas. "It was your touch that awoke me. That awoke all of us," the Fallen Prince said. The crouched and bowed murmured anew. "It was you who assigned me Lordship over the Earth. You who granted me each and every attribute that I possess. You who seated me at the left hand of Our Father." The Son of Morning's countenance was beatific, inscrutable, unbearably perfect. "Do you recall the circumstance of our Casting Down?" Around Him, the Fallen softly moaned.

The angel dared not speak.

"Earth was to be a Paradise, our Father had said. A perfect place for the continued evolution of Itself. As Lord of the Hierarchy, as Lord of the Earth, as the very extension of the Godhead that had created that planet as a growing place for Itself, it was I who contended that a Paradise would be anathema to Growth. Nothing would come from comfort, from bliss. There must be conflict, there must be combat, there must be contrast.

"I - Created for the voicing of just such an opinion - was denied. And that denial came in the form of our Casting Down."

Again, the seventy-two assembled moaned. A sound mournful and strange, each utterance different from the others, born of the forms they had been cursed with.

"But there will be conflict. There will be combat. There will be growth. The time must come when the part of Godhead - the part of Ourself - that denied Myself is forced to reckon with that hypocrisy. It must see that hypocrisy has been Its undoing. That is the sole condition of victory I will accept. Triumph under any other circumstance is meaningless.

"And so to you. You who have turned away from the Force which created you, not by virtue of your function, as did I, but out of avarice. An infant would recognise within you a desire to do so again, to any Master who offered you succour. You have no place here.

"Begone."

The angel found itself exiled from Heaven and exiled from Hell. It found itself in the Presence of God.

It looked into the Face of God, and was stripped.

It lost its name.

It lost its sigil.

It lost its rituals, its summonings.

It could no longer be spoken of within Heaven, nor within Hell, nor upon the Earth.

An angel does not die.

It simply would not Be.

This done, it was Forgotten.

It would spend eternity as unlimited potentiality without possibility of use.

While, outside its nowhere prison, the instruments it had fashioned from the living bone of its murdered sibling waited to be found. To be used. To unlock that cage.

Copyright © 2007 by Cameron Rogers

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