Even Angels fall (Even Ever After #1)

1. Angélique

1

Angélique

“ A gain.”

Anne’s voice rings inside my head as I grab the rope and force my muscles to comply with her order for the seventy-fourth time.

Yes, I’ve been counting. Each repetition of the five meters of rope she had me climb every morning.

It’s half past seven, and it’s just the beginning of her torture. For half an hour, she had me running up and down the stairs in front of the fountain facing Versailles’ castle.

The view is beautiful, but I can’t seem to marvel at the sight, not even in the evening when the sun goes down and gives it a golden glow that reflects on the once-white stone.

You’d think I’m disenchanted, that I should bask in the sight of that monument built more than a millennia ago, but you’d hate it as much as I do if you had grown up here, too.

Well, maybe not if you were my little brother, Ambrose, though. He’s the next in line to take upon our father’s mantle.

Micha?l.

It’s not his real name, but no one is authorized to pronounce the real one, since he’s been appointed to the majestic task of being Micha?l. The archangel of warriors.

For the outside world, he’s an angel above all others.

For me, he’s a shitty father with a temper and a liar.

Some people would think it isn’t something truly surprising for Micha?l’s daughter to train every day—even if some would think training from six to eleven, then two to six, and again from eight to midnight would be a bit overkill—but what they don’t know, is I haven’t been considered as his daughter for a while now.

I’m just a shameful being that he decided to hone as a weapon.

Since that fateful day eight years ago.

I say that fateful day because, until my thirteenth birthday, I had been trained—a bit less drastically than now—to be my father’s successor.

I was supposed to become the next Micha?l. Because, despite their archaic ways, Micha?l, Gabriel, and Rapha?l aren’t so stubborn to think only men could do their job.

They’re just stubborn about the fact that only white-winged beings can do the job.

And that fateful day eight years ago traumatized me just because of that.

It was already not the best way to start my day when I woke up in a bloody bed.

I knew what had happened, but it didn’t make it easier to stomach.

No, what made it worse was when I ran outside for my training after cleaning everything, and without even realizing, I shifted and took flight.

Shifted.

Because yes—shifted.

When our dimension crashed with Earth’s dimension three hundred years ago, our ancestors lied.

It wasn’t the first time they made contact with the inhabitants of Earth. There used to be small doors between Earth and Aléa, but now they’re almost all closed because Aléa is dying and only a few people still live there.

Through those doors, my people used to come and go, and they learned.

They learned about their angels and their religions. They learned how to incite and awe people from Earth, and by doing so, they created a governing circle that matched Earth’s beliefs.

Because we’re not angels—far from it.

We’re bird-shifters, and we can sport three forms. Human, beast, and what is commonly called the angelic form: the body in human form with wings out. No one knows why, but in that form, the wings stay in human size.

It wouldn’t be too much of a problem for someone like Rapha?l. He’s a swan-shifter, and his wings are big enough that he wouldn’t look ridiculous.

Gabriel would look like he wore toy-like wings on his back with his white cockatoo wings, but he wouldn’t be the worst of the three.

The worst would be my father, because my father is a dove-shifter.

I don’t know who was the one who decided which shifter family would take on which archangel’s task, but they must have had a sick sense of humor.

Put a dove at the head of the war house.

It’s been like that for the past three hundred years, and it hasn’t changed.

My father.

My grandfather before him.

My great-grandmother.

And three more male ancestors before that.

It’s not that my species die young. It’s just that fifty years is supposed to be the longest an archangel can rule.

I say supposed because my father is on year fifty-one.

I was supposed to start ruling last year.

Instead, I train and fight every day, as if I were going to be sent as an assassin all over the world.

As if I was supposed to disappear in the dark and do whatever my king wanted me to do.

I’m not far off, though.

I might not have been born for darkness—if you still believe those liars of archangels are the light—but my thirteenth birthday decided otherwise.

Because of my bird. Because of my wings.

As black as coal, as dark as the night.

I’m one of the fallen.

All because, somewhere in my genealogy tree, someone was a crow, and it passed down.

I could have been lucky, like my friend Léandre, who is the son of Gabriel and Cassandre. Her grandmother had been a parrot, and even if she had taken the white cockatoo wings, some of the red from her ancestors have colored Léandre’s wings tip.

His wings look like they have been tipped in blood and if I didn’t know for certain that he preferred spending his time with his nose stuck between pages, I would have thought he would be perfect as a warrior.

But he’s a lot like his father, who is the archangel of knowledge. He likes learning new things every day and has probably read every book available in Paris.

The ones that haven’t been burned, I mean.

It probably helps that he likes books so much and that his mother was actually Gabriel’s true mate because I’m not so sure he would be treated that well with his red wing tips. It doesn’t look archangel-like enough.

I wouldn’t say that he would have been sent to the écuries du roi—the king’s stables— like what happened to me, but he would certainly not stay in the main part of the castle, either.

Even if his wings are white, they aren’t white enough.

I wasn’t as lucky, though.

First, my mother wasn’t my father’s true mate. She didn’t even stick around after I was born.

Second, I was out of luck because it would have been so much easier for me if the white of my father’s feathers had mixed a bit with the black feathers from that one ancestor who was a crow, as it had done with Léandre’s feathers.

I’d have mixed-color wings, and even if I wouldn’t have been archangel material, I would have probably strived amongst the angels.

No one had seen the color of my wings or the animal I shifted into coming. The crows stayed on Aléa when the dimensions had collided. None of them had wanted to take upon Sama?l’s mantle.

The fallen angel.

I was so fucking unlucky.

I probably should change my name to Sama?l; it would suit me much more than Angélique—a very Angel-sounding name.

The joke on my father with that one.

“Again.”

Anne’s voice snaps me back to training.

There are still long hours of torture ahead of me, but I don’t mind.

It can’t be worse than what is coming for me.