Fallen Angels: Book I

Prologue

Regan is a spy. In a way. She loves to collect information like nifflers do shiny things, but whether she shares what she knows is her choice, and what a cruel choice it is.

Regan does not like to tell her secrets. They belong to her, as do the collections of various weapons that hang on her bedroom walls.

Regan can not be used, though sometimes it seems that she can. If she murders, it is her murder. If she seducts, it is her seduction. If she hates or loves, it is her funeral.

Regan loves the winter, it is her happiness, like a secret she keeps close to her heart, sustaining her through summer's heat and through anger's fiery passion. She is a winter child as well. Her complexion is naturally pale, and her eyes icy blue beneath a black veil of lashes. Her hair used to be chestnut, curling slightly, until she straightened it and dyed it black. Her clothes are dark and intense, lightweight with a hint of the medieval grace counteracting the silver chains sometimes arrayed around her waist and shoulders.

Regan loves to run in the snow, the dawn following a storm, when the sky in opaque and the bite of the air still crisp on the skin. Having few friends of her own, she has folded in on herself. She walks privately through the white forest, talking softly to the trees as if they shared her thoughts and dreams. Regan throws herself down on the crunchy ground, making snow angels, a row of them, adding hair with dead twigs and sometimes a sword or a guitar, depending on her mood.

Regan is sort of angelic herself. Perhaps, though, her angel is more of the fallen sort.

As the rest of the seasons pass her by, Regan is confined to the house, reading deep, opinionated poetry, or writing anarchic speeches against government. She is the vocals in her brother's punk rock band, and one of the songwriters.

No one messes with her. Maybe it's her looks, maybe it's her attitude. When you first meet her, she is extremely shy. Then she is cynical, then sarcastic and opinionated. If you ever know her well enough, and there are only two people who do, then she is hyper and creative. When her brother left for his sixth year at Hogwarts, she replaced all his underwear in his trunk with his mom's bras.

Regan tends to keep to herself. She is quiet and introverted, with years of bottled fury and zeal in her soul. Music is an outlet for her temper. Her songs reflect a fierce anger, or a haunting depression and a terrifying, prophetic tone veiling them. Her voice, too, is ethereal, almost otherworldly--both silvery and black: water-like over the notes.

Regan is considered a freak to spectators, and unique to herself. She is terrified of bats, but keeps a spider, "Immortal", in a matchbox in her pocket. She believes strongly in heaven and hell, and in the ghost that has been trapped in the mirror in her attic. She prays to all the saints, and it seems like to black eyeliner. She likes classical and rock music, and hates rap and hip-hop. She once dropped a garage sale radio out of her brother's window just to hear it land. Regan has a bedroom of her own, but she prefers to sleep on a cot in the attic during the summer. When she was twelve, she ate fish food once a day for a week on a dare.

She always eats with the flat edge of her knife. If you make her stop, she'll eat with the back side of her spoon, then chopsticks, then a single prong of her fork.

She keeps a diary, but she writes in it backward. Instead of using a regular toothbrush like normal people, she uses a bunch of the pre-pasted sort from the dentist's office. When she passes notes, they are written in secret code, and rolled up so small that they can fit inside hollow quills so that it seems like she is kindly lending a friend a pen.

Regan is very fond of corsets and ribbons and velvet and that floaty material that everyone else calls chiffon but she calls "pimp-dress." She likes stripes and argyle, and she loves crescent moons and stars, and astronomy in general. She named each of the stars in the Big Dipper a different candy name, like "Fizzing Whizbee" and "Cockroach Cluster." Her favorite creatures are either vampires or Muggle faeries. She likes glitter on her clothes but not in her face, and she likes breaking unspoken rules, like sitting at the silent lunch table when she's not in trouble, or calling herself the best friend of a Slytherin when she's in Gryffindor.

You see, Draco Oedipus Malfoy and Regan Nayalie Luthin have known each other since they were eleven and Regan pushed him into an algae-covered pond. They have been best friends ever since. They always start their letters to each other the same way: "Hey You, it's Me" and enjoy pretending to be lovers just to confuse everyone else.

But Regan has a problem, and no one is going to get it out of her. Not Draco Malfoy, and certainly not her brother....