Serenity was drawn to him. Wrath could tell. She was much too self-controlled to simply admit this to herself, though, and that was fine. If there was one thing Wrath had these days, it was time.

He worked throughout the class, painting a picture of a rainbow. Oh, Serenity had placed fruit bowls on each table and wanted them to create something silly, but he wasn’t interested. No, he’d paint a rainbow, and it would be the most beautiful thing he’d ever created.

As Wrath swiped his paintbrush over the sheet of paper, he realized he felt different. Freer. He felt freer. He wasn’t quite sure why he felt that way or even why it mattered. It was simply a new, different feeling. After centuries of only feeling anger and hatred, being able to feel anything else felt like…well, it felt like a blessing.

Maybe that’s why everyone liked angels.

Wrath? He’d never been a fan. Angels and demons didn’t interact nearly as much as people liked to imagine they did, but he always found the white warriors to be a bit pretentious, if not downright arrogant. A fallen, though…well, that was different. Especially if this was a lost fallen.

Those were rare.

Usually, when an angel cut off its wings, there was a good reason. He was in love with a human or she had grown tired of being bossed around for all eternity. What most angels didn’t realize, though, is that there were people whose entire lives revolved around hunting down fallen angels and using their bodies for magic.

Dark magic: not that there was any other kind, really. Magic was magic, and Wrath felt a strange sense of foreboding when he thought about Serenity. Those scars were unmistakable. The thick, black lines that marked her as a fallen must have appeared when she was still bleeding. The blade used to cut off an angel’s wings hurt more than anyone could possibly imagine, but it was the scars that really cemented her fate.

They marked her.

He had seen them for the first time long ago. The fallen he’d been with in the 13th century during one of his many outings to Earth had shown him. She’d shown him the way the black spirals covered her arms and extended to her shoulders and back. They completely covered where her wings had been, making it impossible for a human to ever tell there had once been wings there.

But the scars had done more than simply concealing her former life as an angel.

They had shown the world what she was.

Serenity must have realized that there was danger lurking on Earth. Why else would she be so careful to cover her scars? Wrath never would have noticed them if her shirt hadn’t slipped just so the week prior. Then again, if that was all it took to make her scars visible, perhaps someone else has noticed.

He wanted to warn her to be careful, wanted to ask her to protect herself, to watch out. Stealing the life of a fallen angel wouldn’t grant immortality, wouldn’t do anything. Fallen angels were human. They were thoroughly, completely human. There was nothing special in their body or their blood that would grant their killer any immunities, yet it didn’t seem to matter.

Wrath knew exactly how many people were willing to do just that and it was what he’d dedicated his life to doing after Harmony died.

Harmony.

She had been so perfect, so sweet, so innocent. She was a kind woman with big dreams and her head in the clouds. She had never even seen the magic users coming. Then again, neither had Wrath. They’d both been caught by surprise, but while he had powers in the realm of demons, he did not have those same strengths on Earth.

He had been unable to save Harmony.

He had been unable to keep her from death.

He had been unable to do the one thing he had so desperately wanted to do: protect her from a dark and deadly future.

It had been over in a matter of minutes. She had died, and then they had taken vials of her blood.

It won’t do anything, he had screamed at them, begged them to save her, begged them to use their magic to bring her back to life, but the witches hadn’t cared. They had simply looked at him, and then disregarded him as an idle threat, and they had left him to wait with her body until someone discovered what had happened.

Wrath had never been the same.

He had changed that day, watching Harmony die. He had changed, and the entire world of demons knew it. Demons were known for having bad attitudes, but after Harmony’s death, Wrath’s had been especially terrible. He was never calm again, never at ease. He was always restless, always looking for ways to get up to Earth and protect the fallen angels he could find.

He had made his way through different places, teaching classes, instructing people, writing books and stories and tales. He had made it his life’s goal to expose the fact that killing a fallen angel could not, would not, grant you immortal life. It wouldn’t grant you anything except the label of MURDERER.

It would do nothing.

That was the thing about humans, though: they just didn’t care. They didn’t care what he said or what he did. They didn’t care about the stories, the explanations. All they cared about was the fact that there were supernatural beings on the planet, and they wanted a taste.

Every fallen angel died.

There was a reason cutting your wings off was such a huge problem. There was a reason it was so frowned upon in the angelic community, and it had nothing to do with becoming human. It had everything to do with the fact that you would be hunted, caught, tortured. You would be hurt.

Angels weren’t hard to find once they were on Earth. They all congregated to the same areas, mostly. They all hung out around churches and places of worship. They all tended to wear the same bright, flowy clothes they’d worn in the angelic realm. They were easy to find, and there were demons who looked after them.

Like Wrath had.

The demons didn’t have the same powers on Earth as they did in other realms, but it didn’t matter. Typically, they had brute force. They had strength. More importantly, they had the knowledge that the newly fallen angels did not. They knew about the magic users, and they could warn the angels.

Why the angels themselves didn’t warn their brethren about dangers on Earth, Wrath would never understand. The entire wing-cutting process was time consuming and painful. According to the angels he’d spoken with, it was the most terrible pain they’d ever felt in their lives, and it hurt longer than they could have imagined.

But that was it.

Their wings were cut, and then they were human. They would be deposited on Earth to live out their remaining days. The angels just never understood that with their angelic scars, those days would be numbered.

Wrath and his friends would try to warn the angels to cover their scars, to move around, to dress in different ways. Don’t act like an angel, they would say, but the fallens never listened.

So why was Serenity so different?

How did she get to be lost?

All angels were tracked on Earth, either by demons or other angels, but every so often, one of them disappeared. It wasn’t easy to do. It required completely hiding their scars from watchful eyes, and blending in with the humans. They also had to stay away from holy places because those were essentially hangouts for the supernatural.

There was only one lost fallen in the last eight hundred years that he knew of. It was one from just a few years ago, one of the angels’ most beloved.

She had been adored, but she had left.

He tried to remember the story, tried to wrack his brain to think of the details. He couldn’t remember her name, but that was unimportant. Angelic names were unpronounceable, anyway.

Then it hit him.

She had done it all for love.