Fallen Angel 1: Ashes of Eden

By J.L. Myers

☆ Series Special - Books 1-4 free or discounted for a Limited Time ☆

Think you know the story behind Lucifer’s fall from grace? Think again...

Before Earth there was Heaven, a place of immortality and subservience where angels existed to watch the world transform. Until one angel changed everything. Stripped of his essence, flesh replaced light, and the weight of Lucifer’s new wings bore down on him like a burden...until he saw her.

By his side since the dawn of time, Gabriel was Lucifer’s closest companion in brilliant light. But seeing her in the flesh changed him. Lucifer can’t look away. And not because she’s perfection personified. Beyond Gabriel’s cascading hair, porcelain skin, and blushed lips, her silvery eyes are the windows to her very soul and her eternal hope—even for an unworthy angel like him.

And Lucifer is unworthy.

His thoughts of her alone are a sin. The words he whispers and the fleeting touches he can’t refrain from during their stolen moments together are forbidden. But their secret won’t stay buried for long. Another angel knows the truth, and he’s ready to stab Lucifer in the back to fulfill his own selfish needs...

Can true love prevail despite the threats that stand in their way, or will Lucifer’s forbidden desires set him on a dark path he can’t escape from?

New Adult/Paranormal Romance/Angel/Demon
Warning - This book contains some language and sexual situations.

Fallen Angel Series Order

1. Ashes of Eden
2. Dawn of Reckoning (New and Lengthened version Now Available Nov 2018)
3. Breaking Lucifer (Releasing Jan 2019)
4. Cold-Blooded Fate (Releasing March 2019)
5. Falling Stars (Releasing May 2019)

"A love affair to rival Romeo and Juliet, there is good and evil, love and lust, beauty unrivaled and jealousy most ugly."
- Kay Mack (Top Amazon Reviewer) ★★★★★

If you love angel series from the likes of J.R. Ward, Anna Santos, I. T. Lucas, and Lauren Kate, then this story of a love that not even Heaven and Hell can tear apart is just for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.L. Myers
• Release date: Jul 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463116876

J.L. Myers

Jessica L Myers vivid imagination and quiet demeanor as a child led her to the imaginary worlds of books. Even at a young age, her love for the supernatural was prevalent, with her first loved books being R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series. Following that she took an interest in other non-fantasy fiction, including Virginia C. Andrews series Flowers in the Attic. In her teen years, Jessica spent many school hours writing poetry and dark short stories and took up sketching some of the terrifying things that came from the graphic night terrors she’d grown up with. As an adult and after meeting the love of her life, Jessica got married and started a small construction business with her husband. With the birth of her son, Jessica suffered PPD and found escape in her books and their fantasy landscapes. It was at this time that her need to write flourished. In 2009 the decision was made and the first words to her New Adult Paranormal Romance novel What Lies Inside were written. When Jessica isn’t immersed in writing about extraordinary characters with dangerous abilities and deadly obstacles to overcome, she likes to spend time with her two kids and husband, curl up with a good book, or watch anything and everything supernatural.

Book preview

Chapter One

Gabriel writhed against the tree, flames entering her robe from the ground up. She cried out, the burn attacking her toes and climbing her legs, melting and burrowing through her skin. This was the end—her end—here in this grassy field. Here under a darkening sky before the eager eyes of all the human men who had captured her. Here— alone.

With agony consuming her on the outside, Gabriel retreated into her mind, away from the smell of her cooking flesh and the sound of her bloodcurdling screams. No longer able to feel the wet tears that forged tracks down her face, she conjured the memory of her last encounter with Lucifer.

He had come to watch her. To observe her down on Earth.

But of course she had known the moment he landed nearby. As always, she had felt him.

At first her heart had taken off in her chest, soaring like a bird’s rapid wings on the breeze. But her heart did not make the rules.

I want you to leave, Lucifer. Leave me be.

And he had, despite the tears she could not hold at bay. Despite how clearly his heart was breaking as he staggered away and took flight up into the twilight sky. Clinging to the image of his shell-shocked face, she remembered the sheen to his wide silver-blue eyes, the bunching of his tan brow, the way his lips trembled over clenched teeth as if he were fighting the temptation to refuse her demand. Her hand cupping his jaw had been their last touch, a touch that could never compare to the slide of his rough hands over her bared body or the hungry pressure of his mouth against hers. But that would never happen again.

As you wish. Lucifer had surrendered to her refusal. He had granted her wish. And now…

She would die alone.

Gabriel’s screams shattered her memories as the blaze engulfing her robe-clothed body licked even higher. Legs bared and bloody, flames now lashed her stomach and arms. Renewed panic made it feel like her insides were smoldering too. This couldn’t be her end. It couldn’t be their end.

Yanking her arms up to evade the burn, the lowest rope snapped around her hips, ripping skin away in its wake. Gabriel hissed at the sting, swallowing her screams. Raw hands snatching and tugging at the higher ropes, they refused to budge, her strength failing her.

Darkness fell, teasing her senses with the promise of cold that could never combat the inferno of flames that climbed ever higher and renewed her tortured cries. Wings trapped to the tree behind her catching alight rapidly, even escape from her bindings would not spare her. Those men stood by, spears in hand and murder painted in their eager gazes.

Strands of her windblown hair sizzled up to her scalp with flaming embers, and Gabriel’s eyes pinned shut. The burn attacking her arms had a hold of her ribs, eating away inside her, breaking her. Her heart felt hot, too hot. Soon her screams would turn to fire—with her final shriek.

Unable to speak, parting words formed in her mind. A telepathic message, a goodbye…that would never reach its source. Never blame yourself, Lucifer. This was not your doing. It was mine. I was wrong. I need you. I have always needed you.

A sudden commotion sounded, a booming ruckus as the ground shook. But the cause mattered not. Nothing mattered anymore. Her end was imminent.

And then everything changed.

Gabriel’s bindings suddenly released and she fell like the dead. A blanketing weight covered her, blocking the cooling breeze and dousing the consuming fires that coated her sticky body and wings. Skin stuck and peeled away, the sound joining her rattling sobs. And then she sucked in a choked breath—and smelled him.

Unable to believe her senses, Gabriel cracked her melted eyelids open.

Staring down at her was the one face she had never expected to see again. Tan, rugged, and filled with a fear of losing her that resonated in his eyes with silver tears. Lucifer. You came— she rasped, realizing this was real. Realizing Lucifer had returned to this field on Earth and was surrounded by murderous men. Tongue feeling like it was on fire, she gasped out, No. Oh, no. Please. Leave before they get—

There were screams, men barking orders out of sight that refused to break through the sound of rushing blood in Gabriel’s ears. The look of relief across Lucifer’s face morphed with animalistic fury. No being will ever hurt you again. I vow it.

And then he was gone.

Chilled air swept in at his absence, fighting the burn that clawed at her bloody body and causing a fresh wave of agony to dance across her melted skin. Grunts and shouts rose up, and then wet thumps—bodies hitting mud. Dread hooked into her insides as if worms had suddenly risen up to devour her charred remains. Murder of men was a heinous sin. A sin so much worse than her forbidden interactions with Lucifer. She needed to stop him. She needed to—

With a gasp of pain, Gabriel rolled to her side, seeing movement through the long brown grass as men fell injured but still alive. Her eyes scoured through the mass of men screaming commands to kill. Finally locating Lucifer, she saw a dagger in his hands as he caught the throat of the man who had led this village of men and ordered her death. The man’s face turned red then purple as he was lifted from the ground. Spit sprayed from his lips, but no sound escaped. The grip on his jugular was too tight. A death grip.

You attacked the wrong angel, you disgusting excuse for a human. Lucifer’s smile was a promise as he pointed the dagger at the man’s wide eyes.

Gabriel struggled to her hands and knees, the grass ripping more of her raw skin away. About to fall in a heap, she grunted through the agony.

And now you die.

Gabriel pushed upright, choked words flying from her bloody mouth. Lucifer, no!

Dagger freezing mid-air, Lucifer’s head cranked sideways. His eyes widened and flung the man aside to run at her. Gabriel, look—

Something punched into Gabriel’s back, stealing a gasp from her as it tunneled through her heart and exploded out through her chest. Her head fell forward, and a bloody spearhead gleamed up at her.

The end of Gabriel and Lucifer’s story was upon them…but this is far from where this devastating love story began.

Chapter Two

Lucifer felt the change the moment God’s almighty power surged. Circled around the concaved pool that glimpsed into infinity, he witnessed the phenomenon as their levitating creator glowed brighter than the sun. Every one of his nerve endings tingled with warmth, forcing the light he was made up of to burn brighter and brighter. Yet he was not afraid. He believed in his maker with his grandiose plans, and he was far from alone. The eleven other archangels glowed brighter too, the luminosity that made up their essence burning with intensity in reaction to God’s will.

Then the warmth and serenity they had come to trust in the Realm of Light shifted.

Lucifer choked back a cry as agony ripped through his soul. The shock of sound heightened a sudden panic in him. The other angels gasped and screamed too, vocalizing their pain as the trustful offering of their light took a brutal turn. It was the first vocalization that had ever been made since their maker forged them from his own radiance. The beginning of language that was passed from lips rather than telepathically—because with this torturous pain, something epic was happening. Luminous strands tangled through the air around the concaved looking glass, the brilliant white being drawn from the twelve angels and into their God. With each passing moment, the ground vibrated and the pool rippled. Sounds of shifting and forming crashed and rattled behind them. The angels’ glorious light dimmed too, growing fainter and fainter.

Lucifer was the first to feel the change, the weakening of the power God had infused them all with. Yet he did not question it or give in to alarm as his essence was floored. He trusted the one who had brought him and his heavenly brothers and sisters into existence. He trusted God’s plan. His vision for a future unlike anything that had ever existed.

Still now and forevermore immortal, Lucifer watched in awe as the angels’ spherical forms dimmed. Glowing curves and lines evolved, becoming more an more clear as something in him expanded, forcing breath to fill what had never needed air before. Folded and hunched around the edge of the water that glimpsed below, he saw cuts of flesh form and stretch over the others, all the while feeling the cutting phenomenon morphing his essence into something more…tangible.

A quiet cry to his side sent a strike of fear through Lucifer. He reached out fast with a hand that appeared in bone and then flesh—the names came to him as if God were telepathically implanting the knowledge of their new forms—to grasp onto a much smaller and more delicate hand. The instant touch of her dulled the striking agony that felt more like Lucifer was being torn apart piece by piece rather than being created into more than what he or any of them had ever been. The sigh she expelled at his touch eased his consuming worry for her. He had never felt anyone before, never had flesh and bone to reach out and touch her with. The one angel who had been beside him in light since the dawn of existence. Gabriel.

The name he had never spoken out loud—and now he wanted to say it again, over and over. Instead, the reflection in the shimmering water stole his focus as his stinging flesh continued to take shape. Sight blurred, their two evolving forms rippled. Lucifer looked toward her, squinted eyes traveling up over the radiance still obscuring her developing form. His sudden need to behold her compelled his actions—but before he could see her face, he was brought to the glowing ground. Lancing pain shot up from behind him, high on his raw back and his mouth gaped to scream. Other screams joined the chorus, different in tone to the deep timbre of his voice.

The hand he still held squeezed tighter, trembling as Gabriel clung to him. Lucifer…

Her soft voice gasping his name for the first time sent a wave of chills through him. He squeezed back, struggling to form words, desperate to let her know she was not alone in this, that she would never be alone as long as he was alive. What had once been telepathic words in his mind solidified into clumsy speech. I am…here.

With a last surge of power, light was stripped from every one of the twelve angels, leaving a gentle glow that haloed each of their—bodies. Lucifer gaped at the reflection in the water, seeing the distorted reality of what he and all his heavenly brothers and sisters had been transformed into. He didn’t look up as the sounds of shuffling and groaning reached his ears. The siphoned light centering them all in a levitating sphere above the rippling water was not enough to hold his gaze. Gabriel’s hand slid free of his, and he felt an instant loss as her warm touch faded. Worry overtook his senses, yet he could not move to sit like he could hear the others were doing. A burdening weight pressed down over him, covering him in a velvety blanket of warmth. Yet it was not what continued to keep him floor bound. Vision blinking crystal clear, it was what encompassed his sight that kept him down.

He could do naught but stare.

Draped in magnificent white wings, Gabriel gasped short, yet slowing breaths beside him. The arch of her feathered attachments covered her shoulders. The tips stretched so long that they sheltered her entirely from view. And then she shifted. Back levering up, her concealing wings moved with her. Little glimpses of her long limbs and equally pale body peeked out from the iridescent feathers. Her skin was the softest thing Lucifer could ever imagine seeing. Even softer than his own feathers that brushed over his new and sensitive flesh that prickled and tingled with each breath. Studying all he could glimpse, his eyes traveled from her legs that were folded beneath her to her petite bottom, slight hips, to the silvery hair that cascaded down over her shoulders to pool between her legs. Letting his gaze travel higher, he counted each rib bone beneath her—

Lucifer sucked in a breath as he saw the small swells that ballooned out further up her chest. With the rest of her skin so pale, the blushing circles with their own pointed peaks captivated him. Her shimmering hair curled gently around her breasts that swelled from her chest as if to draw and keep his stare.

Gabriel’s vast wings cocooned her body then, cutting off Lucifer’s view and causing him to finally shift to sit upright. "L…look." The gentle lilt of her voice caused a flurry inside him as her delicate hand reached out from beneath her wings, pointing to the area above the looking glass.

The heat all around them spiked, that centering brilliance so bright it was almost blinding. Lucifer wondered if all the heat solely came from the visible and powerful source. He breathed in as if inhaling her angelic words into himself. Something forever changing was on the precipice of happening, and he was here as a witness as much as a source of power to be called upon. God had put his light into all of them in the beginning, and now that power was needed for something else. Something new.

Yet he could not bring himself to look away from her.

He had to see more. He had to behold every detail of the angel he’d been spiritually—soulfully—connected to for more than a millennia.

A sudden explosion of light shook the realm. Gabriel shielded her eyes from the sight, watching lower as God sent his and their combined power down into the darkness of the great beyond. There was a sound of collisions and a resounding BOOM that shook the luminous ground beneath them.

This was the moment they were meant to witness, the creation of Below, a new realm of physical and living things.

Lucifer couldn’t do it.

He could not bear witness to all the beauty that was being forged below, because what he was fixated on at this very moment was the most beautiful thing he could ever have imagined. Even obscured in clarity by the intensity of the brightness all around them, he studied every detail, seeing in his mind what was beneath the blurry edges that were like looking through water. Her chin was round yet pointed, leading back to a jaw that disappeared below her long silvery hair. He gaped as he studied her lips that were both full and rosy, so living in color that they made him think of her swelling chest hidden below. But the one thing that stole his gaze and kept it there was none of that. Above her little nose, he found her eyes. The first eyes he had ever seen. Rimmed in black lashes, the pools of her eyes glittered with blue and silver, and as he stared, he saw something welling in them that he did not understand. Something that intrigued and fascinated him. Her eyes were misty as she peered down at the changing sight below. And then she blinked.

A silver drop plunged down, rolling a sparkling track down her pale cheek.

Lucifer touched her jaw, the drop that was wet and warm trailing down his finger and tingling as if absorbing into his flesh. Gabriel gasped and looked right at him with her beautiful eyes that resembled the pools of water that were forming below. Scouring his features, she studied every part of his face. As the wonder in her own eyes brightened, Lucifer dared to glimpse his reflection in the rippling water they were crouched by. Unlike Gabriel, his flesh was golden as was his hair that reached his broad shoulders. His eyes were the same silver-blue color as hers, but his body was much larger and defined by bulges and ripples compared to her soft curved lines.

Lucifer.

His name from her lips was like a soft caress that cascaded over his entire body. With each fleeting moment that took but a second and eons at the same time, the blurry lines around Gabriel came into focus. Even his imagination could not have prepared him for this. The crystal clear sight of her, and even more than that, the raw emotion that sparkled from her wet eyes.

Lucifer saw with total clarity the one being that would come to be the center of his universe—and the bane of his existence. My Gabriel.

Chapter Three

As time continued on, changing from infinite to measure, Lucifer remained by Gabriel’s side— where he belonged —watching over the rotating world below from the edge of the looking glass. Now draped in flowing silk and woven cloth to conceal the differences God had given them, it was not her naked flesh that consumed his thoughts to distraction. Even now, he remembered the first sunrise, an awe-inspiring sight that had parted Gabriel’s beautiful, blushed lips with an expression of wonder that he would never forget.

Stealing fleeting glances at him from behind the veil of her long, silky hair, Gabriel marveled at how such a simple thing as light, or the lack of it, could change something so profoundly.

The world below had evolved from mountains that spurted burning red to cool into hard rock and stone, dividing water that flooded the valleys and reflected pure blue from above in the vast expanses it covered. Sprouts of green flourished soon after. Trees grew tall enough to touch the sky, and the ground offered bountiful blooms.

Lucifer was captivated too, though not even mostly because of the view. The words Gabriel spoke, the way her expressions changed, the slight rosy hue that attacked her pale cheeks when he caught her looking his way—the faraway world was nothing compared to the evolving being right beside him…or the thrill he felt at beholding her animation.

Lucifer brushed his golden hair behind his ears as he glanced at her with a steadying breath. His hands that were clenched on the lap of his white robe uncurled, yearning to touch her ethereal face and feel the warmth of her pink cheeks.

But then he noticed something across the motionless pool that acted like a mirror as well as a view to Below. Watching them with a furrowed brow from under his sand-colored hair, Remiel’s shifting eyes were at odds with his casual kneeling position.

In confusion, and although he loathed the thought of distancing himself from Gabriel, Lucifer rolled onto his knees. Rem—?

Gabriel’s soft, warm hand pinned him down and turned his body to stone. She released her grasp almost instantly, holding her hand to her stomach while curling her fingers in tight—as if she too had felt the spark between them. Do you see, Lucifer? The waters flow from high up… With wonder dancing in her eyes, she uncurled her