Docia Departed: The Wayward and the Wicked, #1

By Angela Kulig

What if everything you died for was a lie?

Seventeen-year-old Docia Gutierrez willingly trades what's left of her life for that of another: a boy who told her lies, and a love that doesn't exist.

Now she is paying for sins she can't even grasp, while being brutalized by a broken heart and a bargain she's only beginning to understand—left to rot in a harsh otherworld of nightmares and ruin. In her darkest moments, Docia wishes for an end that is already upon her—and it's in one of those moments, he finds her.

Fallen Angel, Fox, knows all about paying for crimes you didn't commit—they say—he's the Patron Saint of them. It's a title he wishes he could shake, just like his gray wings and half-moon eyes. It marks him for what he is and what he isn't, just like every other cold truth.

Fox isn't dark or light, nor is he hopeless—not yet—but after an eternity of chasing atonement, he is jaded, and now he's Docia's only chance out of the otherworld. The road in and out of hell is paved with good intentions, but at the end of that road, Docia must choose who or what she wants more than life itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Green Envy Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393073475

Book preview

Chapter One

The scene wasn't always the same, but it ended that way, every time. Shaking words and fingers, unsteady feet, a knife-like goodbye—and then I was falling. The sky was black and white. All of one thing, then half the other. It was starless, eternal, like a stark and cold dawn until it bled to gray. Pinched, it swirled into something like the shape of wings.

Minutes, hours, days: time was a trick the rulers of my body and mind wielded against me, as was the darkness. I'd crave both those things when my tormentors finally started to break me.

At first, I was left alone. So alone, madness clung to me like a second set of skin. I could see nothing. I knew I was in a box that was as wide as I was long, but shallow. Coffin deep. It was made solidly of bricks that smeared my fingertips and hair with deep fine ash. One side of my prison was open with bars in the shape of gleaming silver stars. Every edge was as sharp as a knife from ceiling to floor.

And on the other side of those bars? I couldn't see, and I couldn't guess. Things came by the place I was kept. They slithered and slid and dragged. They were all manner of beasts, I was sure, but not even my imagination could make them out. Maybe they were fanged or clawed, but my worst fear was that they weren't monsters at all, but people, like me. Like I used to be.

Learn not to fear the night, a voice said.

It came from deep within the inky blackness, like a bucket of ice-cold water. I was shocked to find myself suddenly so clear-headed, but there was still no hope of making out the shape of the man who’d spoken to me—and it was a man. He had a smooth voice, precise, and I clung to it.

There had been many words since I'd come to this place. Promises and pleading in more languages than I could count. Taunting and hissing by whatever it was that prowled the halls outside my metal cage. Screams, shouts, and swears, but there hadn't been any words like this. There had been no words for me at all, not even the horrible ones.

Hello? I dared.

My voice shook the same as it did the night it ended, however long ago that had been. I didn't need water to wet my lips. I was dead, and so was everyone else here. Everyone but the dark angels who lorded over us, but in my limited experience, they weren't exactly alive, either.

But that encounter felt like forever ago. Whether that was lifetimes or moments, I'd never be sure.

Strange, another voice said from above me—the one forcing me to remember what I always begged to forget.

I'd been led from my cell dozens of times, maybe hundreds. Always by the same woman—rarely catching sight of others. She was the only person I ever saw, and she never told me her name. In my head, where I mostly lived then, I called her Red. There was light where I'd been taken, and there usually was. Light to mark every awful detail, and help to keep it inside you, festering. Things that happened in the dark tended to morph until they were little more than morbid imagination. Humans held on to the things they could see. Whether they wanted to or not.

Do you think he'll be the one to save you, child? I tried never to think of that time in her presence. Though I doubted it would do me any good.

Sprawled out on a stone table, grit dug into my back like shards of ice. Only I was used to the cold. I wasn't tied or chained—no, Red's weapon of choice was usually words. Words and the awful truth. I flinched away, for once hating the little freedom I could get.

She always called me a child, with her lips the color of dried blood. Even if her face appeared no older than mine, her eyes made from the shadows themselves, always seemed to give her away. Eyes so dark, they ran into the pupils and swallowed them up. There were curtains on the wall behind her the same color of those eyes, and miles and miles of the dark smudgy bricks.

I didn't want to admit it, but she already knew—Red knew everything about me. Even things I didn't understand myself, and things I wished I could forget.

The woman smiled at that and flicked her long bronze hair over her feathered wings. Her wings were massive, even tucked behind her as she worked on me, and blacker than the night she was the master of.

I had no hope—that was the first thing this place snuffed out of you. Yet some cowardly part of me had wished that man could save me from this fate, because deep down, I feared there would never be one.

Docia, dear—The woman knotted my hair into her pale fingers—if I have taught you anything, it should be that you have terrible judgment. Do be careful what you wish for.

With a handful of my matted inky strands, the woman made me look at her, made me fall floundering into her dreadful gaze again, and the last thing she said to me was, With any luck, you'll get it, and then you'll be even worse off. Not that I care.

Her wicked mouth sounded delighted at the prospect, but I was already gone.

The drop-in was never the same as the tumble out. Dropping was like being wrapped in a fog thick enough to drown and drag. Thick enough to block out everything, but the knife-lined things she wanted you to see. Laughter from another world struck like lightning, the echo was its thunder, and then I was alone on the street again.

Thirty-second street was not where I wanted to be any time, but no one wanted to be there after dark that was quickly approaching. Rain threatened but held off in all but the smell and humid air. Brandon was late.

Brandon was always late. I'd expected it and dreaded it all the same. I thought I knew torture then, in those shoes, the color of stardust. Men eyed me with interest, and I was unused to it. Brandon was the reason I'd come out of the shell I hadn't realized I'd been in, and he was the only one I was looking to sell myself to. No, not for coin or care, but crooked smiles and wide eyes.

I was a fool. The woman was right, and I should be wary of my own judgment. It was the thing that had failed me most, even as I was so used to failure.

Brandon had become my reason for everything, and I his, in a short amount of time, or so I thought. I'd pegged Brandon for a poet, but he was a fraud, and if Blood-lips was to be believed, I wasn't the first to fall for him. On the table under shadows and ruin, or in the fog of this far away street, I was forced again to recall every sharp detail.

There was a man, who wasn’t a man at all. He wore a coat too large for his frame, a layer that must have been to hide the wings, though I couldn't have guessed that then.

Then there was a deal that I knew nothing of. A deal I was about to pay in full.

It is like sharpening a knife, she once told me, as she reminded me again of how dull she thought I was to fall for such an obvious trap. Women like her would never understand. I doubted she'd felt powerless in her entire existence.

As the idea rippled across my thoughts, I felt her hold on me lessen. It was as though the talons she had in my memory lost their hold for just an instant.

I'd been so preoccupied with that reaction, that when Brandon appeared, I almost hadn't expected him. A shock, when I'd relived this event more times than I could recall. I tried to keep track when she'd first begun to force me into the memories, but it was hard to hang on to the threads of those moments then—it still was.

Was it the woman who spoke to me now? Laughed and made me see everything again, things I wish I could rip from my empty chest? Or were they symptoms of the thing or memory. The nightmares, the dreams of ruin and rage came whenever I dared shut my eyes, for even in death, it seemed I slept. It was a different form of torment. Perhaps death and sleep weren't really so different; maybe it was just a different venue... or maybe that, too, was the same. Perhaps the only real battleground was my mind.

That, of course, was a war I'd lost some time ago, long before I landed myself here in the place of someone else.

When I woke up alone in my cage, I wasn’t surprised. That was how the ordeal usually ended and, how it had begun. But there was something different, something other.

Monsters roamed the halls, and though they didn’t linger by my door, for whatever grace I must have, I could usually tell they were there. Though screams still struck from the far corners of this godforsaken place, the noise of those beasts, whatever they might be, was absent.

They had an almost unheard hum to them. A live wire in the usual darkness. It was worse when there were many, and low when there were few, but that feeling was gone—replaced by something else.

I pulled myself up, staining the back of my ratty dress. My legs holding my weight against their will, I pushed to the bars, but I didn’t touch. No, that was a lesson I'd learned early on. The dead could sleep, and the dead could scar. Thick purple-red flesh lined the palm of both of my hands. They'd been that way since what I could only guess was my second day here. They looked horrific—and they were—but they felt like little more than wax welts as I pressed my fingers together and then my palms.

As close as I dared, I strained my eyes into that familiar darkness, and something was there, just outside what my eyes could make out, but the shadows were lighter.

I almost laughed at the hope that seeing something gray in the endless black of my new hell had given me.

Well, you are right, a voice said, moving closer.

Not a voice, the voice. I'd rolled the sound of it around in my head so many times, I probably knew it better than my own.

I hadn't heard his steps, I'd think later, but I'd been a bit preoccupied with his face. His was otherworldly, his face was the likeness by which the greats had carved their marble men, but that wasn't what I saw at first. It was his eyes. So much like the black of Red's own—and yet nothing like them at all. The