EXCLUSIVE: Samael’s Choice – A White Lights Short Story

“The human race began to increase and to spread over the earth and daughters were born to them. The sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were…”

                                                                                    —Genesis 6:1-2, Oxford Study Bible 

Author’s note: Some scholars believe that this moment from Genesis explains the angels’ Fall from Heaven. When the sons of God (the angels) looked down from Heaven and desired the daughters of man (mortal women), they committed the sin of placing something before God.

This brief biblical passage has fascinated me for years. It led me to imagine a Heaven that is running out of angels because they yearn to experience mortal love. This was my inspiration for White Lights. In my previous series Fallen, Luce and Daniel invoke this yearning in their own way.

Here’s an exclusive look at a scene that takes place just before the prologue of White Lights:

The Angel of Death watched the lovers from a distance. He’d seen it all before—boy meets girl, boy meets boy, girl meets girl; every pair of them dazzling in their desire, one soul revealing itself to another, alchemizing into what their kind called love.

But Samael had never seen this before. A lover not human, but angel.

Like him. 

Until this moment, he didn’t know they had it in them. Love was a mortal occupation, its pleasures forbidden to angels. Or so he’d always thought. So how were they getting away with it?  

He stared at them. Kissing. Fondling. Gazing into one another’s eyes as if they’d found the Answer. Laughing together.

How that laughter got under Sam’s wings. 

He burned with an envy he didn’t know he was capable of. There was suddenly so much he hadn’t known he was capable of.

What happened next stunned him to his core. He watched this angel—a brother since before the dawn of time—build a fire, walk into it, set his wings ablaze. Burn them.

And walk out a mortal man.

After seeing that, how could Sam go back to his purpose? He’d invented death, nurtured it, let it bloom into the force it was today. But after these lovers? He suddenly had no taste for the films he used to make—Life Reviews, which mortals experienced as their lives flashing before their eyes as they died. Which Sam injected into their cerebral cortexes as their breath of life faded away.

He couldn’t do it anymore.

His team of angels—the ones he’d taught everything to—he looked at them now, going about the business of death. He suddenly had nothing in common with them.

He thought of nothing but the fire, of the new man who had emerged from it. He thought of nothing but unbridled possibility.

He thought of love.

He stroked the single crimson pinion in his black wings, a gift from a worthy foe from long ago. He could not say what the future held for death, but he knew what it held for him. He bided his time. He waited for the right moment…the right woman down below.

And then, after less than a grain of sand in the hourglass of eternity, the Angel of Death made his move.

He flew to an untraceable location, built a fire, and took a screaming leap inside.