Angelfall

One of the people nearby reveals herself as Penryn’s mother and aggressively hugs her and strokes her hair. The men approaching back off, clearly scared of Penryn’s mother. She tells the twin to go away and then hits Penryn hard on the head for running off, startling the twin. Penryn’s mother tries to convince Penryn that the twin is a devil, but Penryn tells her to be quiet or she’ll leave her behind, which makes her mother quiet down.

The twin gets her inside the hotel garage but warns her that it is a suicide mission, and he can’t help her further. He warns her to leave within an hour. Penryn and her mother descend into the garage, walking in almost complete darkness and silence. They eventually sneak down to a basement where they find people quietly talking. They sneak inside and find a warehouse full of glass columns, each holding a human-sized angel that looks like a twisted scorpion.

The scorpion angels look alien and human at once, and they disturb Penryn deeply. She convinces her mother to stay put while she goes deeper into the warehouse, eventually realizing that the scorpions are feeding on human beings in their tanks and that the bottoms of the tanks are filled with debris from previous victims. Penryn realizes in horror that the current victims in the tanks are alive, if barely.

As a human and an angel approach, Penryn hides. The angel berates the human for a late shipment of “drawers”—clearly meaning morgue containers—then leaves. Penryn goes to find a ladder to help the victims in the tanks, but spots something colorful and strange to her right—a wall with stacks of children’s bodies.

All the children are naked, of varying ages, and have autopsy marks and stitch marks across their bodies, alongside other horrific modifications. In horror, Penryn calls out for Paige, and to her surprise, Paige wakes up and crawls out of the pile of bodies. She is stitched and bruised and barely resembles herself. Penryn falls to her knees and hugs her sister’s cold, mutilated body.

An angel finds them and tells her to put the “specimen” back, which Penryn refuses, telling him instead that they are leaving. When he mocks her, she attacks him, trying to kill him with the sword, but he slams her wrist into the table, then pins her down and starts strangling her. Penryn begins to pass out.

Something attacks the angel from behind, and Penryn hears someone throwing up. She looks up and sees Paige ripping into the angel with razor-sharp, metal teeth, gagging with every bite. Penryn calls out to her, and Paige returns to innocence, walking miraculously toward Penryn. She holds out her arms and calls Penryn “Ryn-Ryn,” a name she hasn’t used since she was a baby. Penryn wonders if she would use humans as bait to soothe Paige if it were all she could eat.

Penryn ignores Paige for the moment and stabs the angel through the heart with Raffe’s sword. As she finishes killing him, an angel exclaims, and she turns to see Laylah and several other angels staring at her. Before anyone can act, the building rumbles, and the angels flee.

Penryn takes the sword and attacks the tank with a living woman inside, freeing both her and the scorpion. Penryn considers leaving Paige, assuming that the creature inhabiting her sister’s body is no longer her sister, but she realizes that Paige may have responded to her name and that she can’t abandon her. Their mother finds them and hugs Paige through sobs, then glares accusingly at Penryn. Penryn’s mother announces with authority that they must leave, but the authority vanishes when she insists that they are being chased, making Penryn realize that she’s still experiencing schizophrenia symptoms and Penryn must remain in charge.

As they leave, Penryn hears crashing and realizes that Raffe is in danger. Seconds later, a giant angel and Raffe slam through the doors. The angel, Beliel, is the same angel who cut off Raffe’s wings, but now he has Raffe’s angel wings stitched onto his back and Raffe has demonic bat wings stitched on his in turn. Beliel explains to Raffe that he had to swap their wings for politics—so Beliel will gain more power in Hell and Raffe will lose power in Heaven.

Penryn tries to bring Raffe his sword, but it drops out of his hand, rejecting him for his demonic wings. Beliel mocks him for his new nature, and then mocks him for having a human “pet,” which both he and Penryn deny. Beliel accuses him of betraying his own morals by taking up with a human woman, and they start to fight again, while Penryn wields the sword herself and attacks Beliel with it, realizing the sword is using her as a conduit rather than the other way around. As she goes to slice off Beliel’s wings, a scorpion angel grabs her ankle and drags her to the floor.

Penryn dodges one blow of the angel’s stinger but is hit in the neck by a second. She begins to burn in pain and the scorpion goes to feed on her, but Raffe grabs the creature and hurls it away. He kneels beside her, stunned. She is too paralyzed to speak, but he gathers her into his arms and hugs her, reassuring her she will be all right, his face full of grief and pain.

As Beliel goes to attack Raffe again, the politician angel, Uriel, enters and forces Beliel to stand down. He insists that if he kills Raffe, Raffe’s men will make him a martyr, and a martyr is harder to fight than a monster. As Uriel speaks, Penryn goes limp with paralysis, and Raffe screams, thinking she is dead. Uriel is delighted by Raffe’s grief, mocking him for loving a human. Uriel tells Beliel to kill Raphael when he is known as a fallen angel, and they leave.

In a fit of rage, Raffe destroys the laboratory, then puts the sword in the scabbard on Penryn and carries her and the sword out of the lab.

As Raffe carries her, he grows weaker. He berates her, not knowing she can hear him, for letting loyalty get her killed. Upstairs, the hotel is a warzone, with humans gunning down angels left and right. Raffe follows the fleeing humans into a burning kitchen, where they flee from a gas explosion. He reaches Obi and the others, who react in horror to his appearance but stand down; Penryn hears a woman screaming and realizes it is her mother. Raffe, realizing he can’t stay, puts Penryn down and runs his fingers across her lips, then leaves.

People ask panicked questions, and Penryn’s mother runs to her. Penryn, unable to answer, contemplates how much Raffe risked bringing her back to her family. One of the twins appears and identifies her, and Obi tells everyone to abandon her, as there’s no room for the dead. Before they can leave, however, Paige limps out of the shadows and picks Penryn up, carrying her at a normal pace to the truck. Paige grins horrifically at Penryn, who is unable to look away.

As they drive away, the aerie explodes and collapses, and the angels scatter. The human survivors cheer. Penryn thinks about how they’ve declared war against heaven, but with a victory under their belt, it may be a war they can win. She decides she is “proud to be a Daughter of Man” (279).

Penryn’s pain fades. She spots Raffe flying above them in the sky, watching over the humans to keep them safe, but he leaves when the humans begin to shoot at him.

After another hour, Penryn fully comes to, although she can’t move fully yet and nobody has noticed that she is alive. She delights in being alive in a world where Raffe is flying and Paige is alive.