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Sera, my broken sister, dove headfirst into the chaos. She discovered the city’s secret pulse, the hidden gatherings where a warlock might read your fortune for a bottle of gin or an exiled fae might sell you a trinket or two. And she discovered she could “take” sips of life from the vibrant careless people around her. It wasn’t a meal. Not yet. It was a taste—a siphon of their shimmering auras—that gave her a euphoric rush, a fleeting warmth.

She thought she had it under control. She was wrong.

“It’s just a taste, Cassie! It doesn’t even hurt them,” she’d insist, her eyes too bright.

“You’re playing with a fire you can’t control, Sera,” I’d argue, my voice sharp with a fear she must’ve mistook for judgment. “This hunger… It’s not a pet. It’s a beast.”

She’d laugh, a brittle sound. “You don’t understand. You are content to sit in the dark and rot. I want to feel something.”

And from the rain-slicked rooftops above, an angel always watched us both. Remiel. Our unwanted guardian and Heaven’s silent bloodhound. He wasn’t just observing our fall; he was watching a fuse burn down on a ticking bomb. He had orders from Malakar and Michael to act as a guard, but I suspected he was there much more often than he was required to be.

The night it all exploded started, as it so often did, with a fight.

I’d found a small drained bird in her room, and the discovery had led to a screaming match that had ended with her storming out. She went looking for that feeling—that rush—and found a subterranean club. She probably took a sip from a mortal but realized the essence was bland. Then maybe she saw a warlock. Their auras were always potent, intoxicating. And I think that was the taste that broke her composure.

She tore through the city’s shadowed corners like a plague wind. It wasn’t a hunt. It was a massacre. Eight people died that night. Five mortals. A warlock. A lone shifter. An exiled fae.

After the eighth body, I think her own body gave out. The chaotic influx of so many conflicting essences was a poison her system couldn’t process, like a mortal who mixed too many types of alcohol. In a filth-strewn alley behind a theater, she collapsed into a magical coma-like stupor.

Drawn by the psychic scream of so many souls being ripped apart in quick succession, I found the alley. And in the center of that carnage, I found my unconscious sister curled up like a child, her face serene and her aura flickering violently.

My only instinct was to get her away, to hide her. To erase this nightmare.

That was when Remiel, a silent specter of celestial law, dropped from the rooftops. His eyes blazed with righteous fury. He was prepared to execute the monster, once and for all, yet the scene that met him was not a predator gloating over her kills but me, on my knees, desperately trying to shield my comatose sister’s body with my own. He saw my face, a mask of absolute terror and love, and I told him I would die before I let him touch her.

I think he broke at that moment. I will never know why he chose to fall with us that night because he didn’t speak. He just looked from Sera’s still form to my pleading, terrified eyes and gave a grim nod.

His celestial duty turned to ash at our feet.

Without a word, Remiel scooped Sera’s limp form up from the grimy cobblestones. He looked at me, a question in his eyes, and I just nodded toward the direction of our flat. He vanished into a blur of movement faster than sight, a whisper of displaced air, and reappeared moments later, alone.

He had completed the first part of his sin.

Now came the evidence.

We moved through the predawn streets like ghosts—me following the fading screaming echoes of Sera’s rampage and him a silent shadow at my side.

When I stopped at the first body, the face a placid mask and his soul plucked clean, I pointed. Remiel placed a hand on the man’s shoulder and vanished. The air crackled, empty. A heartbeat later, he was back at my side, his face a little colder and his jaw set a little tighter.

We didn’t speak. We just moved on to the next and the next. It became a grim, silent rhythm. I was the bloodhound now, sniffing out the trail of my sister’s sins, and he was the pallbearer, the angel of death tasked with erasing the consequences. With each body he collected, I could feel the light within him dim, the weight growing heavier.

We found the eighth and final victim near the Canal Saint-Martin. In the heavy silence that followed, surrounded by the ghosts of what we’d done, Remiel finally spoke, his voice low and strained.

“It’s done,” he said, not looking at me. “Go back to the flat. Be with your sister. I’ll handle the rest.”

I think it was an offer of protection—a guardian’s last desperate attempt to shield me. A century ago, I might have seen it as his duty. A week before, I would have seen it as arrogant. But in that moment, seeing the profound self-loathing in his eyes, I saw it for what it was: unwanted mercy.

And I refused to grant it to him.

“No,” I said, my voice quiet but firm.

This act of burning bodies, of using celestial power to erase sin, was a desecration of his very being. To let him do it alone would be to let him suffer that violation in solitude. I couldn’t grant him that solitary torment. I had to witness it. I had to share it.

If he was going to fall this far for my sister, the least I could do was fall with him again.

Surprise flickered in his exhausted eyes. He tried to protest, but I cut him off.

“You don’t have to bear this alone,” I said. “You didn’t even have to help. This torment is mine more than yours.”