Prologue
Christmas. The birth of our Lord and Saviour. The time for Christmas trees capped with angels, and nativity scenes with adorable little baby Jesus', and Shepherds and Kings.
What a load, seriously. Baby Jesus was the ugliest freaking baby I've ever seen. And I've seen a LOT of babies in my time, I was around way before Noah floated on the ark, which honestly wasn't that impressive. He only got two of every animal he knew of, and he could only travel so far. And I mean, the Mediterranean isn't exactly an ideal place for elephants, lions, kangaroos and millions of other species he wasn't aware of. But the flood was real. And HUGE, I mean thousands of people flock to the site without realizing, but the Greek Isles used to be all mainland you know...
And the whole thing with angels with their big, fluffy, white wings floating out of their dresses. Angels can be boys too, I mean I would know...
And the wings don't look like that either. The thing I can liken them to the most is eagles' wings. People were created in God's image, and eagle's wings were created in ours. A nice little tribute don't you think?
I can't claim complete angel ancestry though, quite the opposite. Half angel-half human. My mother lived a very long time ago. My father Carlisle on the other hand, lives with me in our house. With my, I guess, you could call a couple of them half-siblings, considering Carlisle fathered them too. Others are "adopted", whose human parent tried to murder them, after the whole bursting out with wings thing. People were a lot more suspicious back then.
You get a pretty good deal being a half angel though. You still get the ability to live forever, and we're almost entirely injury proof. Plus we can make ourselves appear any age we want.
The only irritating thing happens to be the most common thing people think of when they hear angel. Wings. Full angels like Carlisle can just tuck them between their shoulder blades, and they flatten completely.
For us, our wings are UNDERNEATH THE SKIN, so if we're in trouble and we need to fly, we need to break the wings through.
Which just so happens to hurt like a bitch.
So, if you're like my adopted siblings, and you accidentally do it when you're little -you can't really help it, it's sort of like an advanced flight or fight reaction- not only do you have excruciating pain until you can work out to land, -which is normally a crash landing, because you panic and stop flapping the wings- you also have a parent trying to kill you on the same day.
Fun times for a six year old.
And after the parent discovers, oh crap, I can't even hurt the devil spawn, they almost always abandon them somewhere.
We find them, bring them in, and teach them the ways and rules that come with keeping our secrets, and stopping themselves from accidentally - you know, killing everybody everytime you get in a rage.
Bad things happen when the calm temperament of an angel is disturbed.