She’s fallen from heaven, but has she fallen from grace?
When she hits the stairs of the Archimedes Public Library of Meridian, battered and naked, she doesn’t know who she is, how she ended up there, or why her shoulders hurt so much.
Police detectives and demon hunters Noah Dunn and Andrea Black immediately recognize her as an angel. The only problem is that, with her wings ripped from her and her memory hazy at best, there’s no way to determine whether she’s an angel turned human or entirely fallen from grace.
For now, Jane Doe is just trying to get used to being human. Until she figures out what she’s doing in a spiritual battleground like Meridian, she agrees to lend her empathic powers to the detectives’ aid.
They especially need her now, as the summer heats up and the street kids they protect start to go feral…or missing.
Reader advisory: This book contains scenes involving multiple partners, MF, MFF, FF. There are instances of mostly unintentional supernatural coercion and unintentional infidelity, as well as mentions of children in peril and distress, and child violence.
General Release Date: 17th June 2025
On an unseasonably cool evening in September—a Tuesday—a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere, scorched the dimming sky with a blue glow for fifteen seconds, then burned out over Meridian, Texas, before it could hit the ground.
This, in itself, was not unusual.
Objects from space enter Earth’s atmosphere all the time without anyone seeing them, especially during the day. However, this celestial event occurred when the sky was dark enough and the meteor itself large enough to last long enough to notice. A number of security cameras also caught the event.
In this case, only a handful of people actually noticed it, and because it didn’t last long enough to capture on their phones, most of them promptly forgot. No one posted asking about whether someone else had seen that flash in the sky or some UFO. No one reported it to news outlets. No meteorologist thought it was important enough to mention during the evening news. The event lasted fifteen seconds, in a brilliant bright sapphire, and died without fanfare.
* * * *
The head librarian of Archimedes Public Library—three stories of books, a rare book collection, several rows of DVDs that echoed Blockbusters of old, and a children’s section that doubled as a play-date space, a mix of the magical and modern that made her proud to be a book bearer—switched off the last light in her office. She folded her jacket and scarf over her arm in case the false fall weather was too chilly for her from the building to her car.
After locking the grand wooden double doors behind her, Beth gripped the railing to descend the two dozen stairs down to the street. On wet days, the stairs were a bit more difficult and she would use the zigzagging accessibility ramp to ease her way down, but tonight she was feeling particularly lively, and she was looking forward to a date with an older gentleman at one of her favorite restaurants.
He’d texted her to let her know that he’d already arrived at the restaurant and was ordering some wine for when she arrived. This was their third date, and although she hadn’t been looking forward to returning to the dating world, she was quite enjoying being courted. Her apartment still smelled good from the roses he’d bought for her last time. And, since this was their third date, she might just let him try to kiss her.
Young people usually thought the third date was the sex date, but she and Gerard weren’t going that fast—although she certainly wasn’t planning to wait six months like with her first boyfriend, back before texting and golden-age dating apps. There was something exhausting and exhilarating about trying again, though, in the new world, with its new ways.
Beth had lived in Meridian all her life. A few years ago, she’d transferred from the old public library to the Archimedes, which the notoriously solitary Mr. Vega had built for the city. She’d watched Meridian turn from a nothing waystation on the way to Fort Worth to a bustling city to rival Dallas. She hadn’t known whether she’d like it as buildings stole the horizon and it began its inevitable sprawl into suburbs, but she was still here, her family was here, and it wasn’t terrible at all.
Her shoe hit an uneven place on a concrete stair. Beth clung to the brass railing to keep from falling.
The Archimedes was such a new build, even by Meridian’s standards, that there was no reason why the concrete should already have been so uneven from the annual freeze and melt—which seemed to destroy streets and sidewalks solely for the devil to laugh at the inevitable skinned knees, black eyes, and tire blowouts.
Streetlights hadn’t quite caught up to the earlier evening darkness, and Beth’s eyes weren’t so good at night anymore. She found her flashlight app and switched it on to see what that dark blob in the slightly darker blob on the stairs could possibly be. No one had run in to tell her that something terrible had happened during open hours. And she might have bad night eyes and needed to wear special glasses to drive, but she would have noticed if there had been an earthquake, even a minor one.
The flashlight switched on—blinding at first, but her eyes eventually adjusted.
Beth stumbled back a few steps with a gasp. A shriek strangled in her throat behind the hand she brought to her freshly lipsticked mouth.
“Oh my God, you poor dear. Oh my.”
She fumbled to get to the actual phone part of her phone to call the emergency services.
“Hello? Hello? Yes, I’m at the Archimedes Public Library. My name is Beth Holding. I’m the head librarian. There’s an unconscious woman on the front steps. The concrete is all broken around her, and it looks like she’s knocked out and bleeding. No, she’s not dead. I may not be a doctor, young man, but I can see her breathing. No, I haven’t touched her. I don’t want to hurt her any more than she already is. Oh, she looks like she’s been beaten pretty badly, or maybe it was a fall? I can’t imagine how or why. Just get paramedics down here quickly. Oh, dear. Can I cover her with my jacket? She’s not wearing a stitch. Okay, I can hear sirens.”
Beth crept carefully down the steps and unfolded her jacket to shake it out like a blanket and cover the poor girl’s nakedness. She was bleeding from multiple places on her bare body, but not terribly. Just by eye under the flashlight, Beth couldn’t tell if she had any broken bones.
“Just hold on, sweetheart,” Beth whispered to the girl. “Just hold on. See? Help is on the way. I’ll pray for your healing.”
Red and blue lights flashed against the looming hulk of the library above. Beth ran down to meet the paramedics, who pulled out a gurney but rushed with a spine board up to where the woman lay halfway up the stairs.
When Beth turned back to watch them, shining her light where they were working, she thought it was such a curious thing. Where the concrete damage spread from a central point under the girl, the cracks looked just like wings.
Aurelia T. Evans is an up-and-coming erotica author with a penchant for horror and the supernatural.
She’s the twisted mind behind the werewolf/shifter Sanctuary trilogy, demonic circus series Arcanium, and vampire serial Bloodbound. She’s also had short stories featured in various erotic anthologies.
Aurelia presently lives in Dallas, Texas (although she doesn’t ride horses or wear hats). She loves cats and enjoys baking as much as she dislikes cooking. She’s a walker, not a runner, and she writes outside as often as possible.
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