Ugly Angels

By Brien Feathers

To have a heart is to love, isn't it?

The faerie war has devastated the world, and what little remains of humanity lives underground as vampires.

Kara is a half-blood. Her mother was human, but her father was not. She works as a hostess in one of the many pleasure dens of Nocturne, a vampire nest in a catacomb. Earning her blood one night at a time, Kara lives as peacefully as she can in a dying world.

For decades her life has been the same... until she meets a stranger who may be able to grant her fondest wish—to be human. But nothing comes free in this brutal world, and when the faeries come knocking on the door she must choose between saving the life of a stranger or protecting her own secret.

Lucien is a powerful telepath and a pureblood vampire, meaning he was born as one. He's never seen the sun. On a mission from his queen, he travels to the city of the undead, Nocturne, territory of a different vampire clan.

When betrayal turns a negotiation deadly, he finds an unlikely guardian in a den hostess. But can their fledgling bond survive when he learns that she's the enemy?

Delve into the dark world of Ugly Angels, where newfound love is tested, and old loyalties are torn.

This adult dark fantasy tale comes with a content warning for strong language, graphic violence, and intimate situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brien Feathers
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9789919900168

Brien Feathers

Dark fantasy author, poet, screenwriter, and cat enthusiast living in the land of Mongols.

Book preview

Ugly Angels

Brien Feathers

Brien Feathers

Copyright © 2023 by Brien Feathers

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover designed by JV ARTS.

Contents

Content Warning

One

1.Nocturne

2.Airplane

3.Priest

4.Nothing

5.Bye

6.Stay

7.Hate

8.Promise

9.Coward

10.Premonition

Two

11.Demon

12.Mother

13.Memory

14.Keep

15.Slayer

16.Father

17.Dream

18.Eclipse

19.Crucify

Three

20.Protocol

21.Blackhunt

22.Whiteswoon

23.Hell

24.Forever

25.Happiness

From the Author

Also by Brien Feathers

Content Warning

This book contains strong language, graphic violence, and intimate situations.

Reader discretion is advised.

One

Nocturne

They said the children of the night came from the faerie but that wasn’t true. They had always been here, hidden. Unlike the lycans and their faerie masters, vampires were creations of the Maker. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, at the brink of the Third Great War, when time used to exist, humanity had opened a portal to a dying world that the Maker in all his wisdom had locked away. On that day, the old calendar stopped and the era of the Bloodline War began. Since then, cruelty became the mark of all creatures, of this world or otherwise.

Vitali had called all the hostesses of his dens to the walk and Kara stood among them, keeping her head low. It was daylight out there, and being closest to the edge she could see it. The hostesses lined the walls of the tunnel on each side while Vitali dragged an iron crate with Celeste crying inside. She’d stolen from Vitali. He was going to walk her in the sun and make a show of it—he always did.

This is what happens when you fuck with scavengers, Star whispered, and pinched Kara’s side. He meant well. She let him be.

Celeste had been their roommate, and Reef, her scavenger boyfriend, would come over often talking about the Longdark and how they could make it to Lyon during the three-day solar eclipse. In the end though, scavengers being scavengers, he’d convinced Celeste to steal krystallis from Vitali, and blood-fiends being blood-fiends, they’d smoked it all. They’d never see the Longdark because Reef was already dead. Vitali tore his head off.

Silver through the heart, beheading, and sunlight were the three ways a vampire died—sunlight being the most brutal.

Kara! Celeste screamed, her hand outstretched through the bars as Vitali tossed the crate outside.

A long chain rattled after it, the lead wrapped around Vitali’s wrist. Kara covered her ears and a phantom music started in her head so she wouldn’t hear the awful cry. No one was allowed to look away, and she had to watch as Vitali pulled the crate back in. Celeste was burning and they threw a bucket of water on her, which steamed, then Vitali threw her out again.

He did this three more times, until there were only charred bones and a pile of wet ash in the crate. The redhead with freckles on her chest as if she sunbathed at the beach, the girl who’d been a kindergarten teacher before the war and had taught Kara to read human letters was gone. Celeste hadn’t been her human name, but when she had a real name she’d lived in an apartment on the third floor, had two cats—Athos and D'Artagnan—and she’d been in love with her neighbor in 3B. She used to reminisce about these things when she was high.

Steal from me, and I’ll walk you in the sun, Vitali said, to which all the hostesses nodded. It hadn’t been the first show and it wouldn’t be the last.

Vitali was seven feet tall, wore a genuine leather jacket with spikes on the shoulders, and a thick gold chain with a snarling bear pendant around his neck. He had a greasy ponytail and chest hair spilled out through the unbuttoned collar of his silk shirt with flower patterns. Not visible at that moment, but he had belly hair—Kara had seen him without his clothes on, as had all the hostesses of his dens.

Before they began the five mile descent back to Nocturne, Kara flicked a look up at the pristine blue sky beyond and thought she saw the most peculiar thing ever—an airplane hanging from the cotton puffs of clouds. She blinked and shook her head, but the shape in the sky remained.

Come on, bitch. Star grabbed her elbow. Let’s get going unless you mean to walk out in the sun.

Do you see that? Kara pointed at the airplane.

Careful! He yanked her back. You’re going to blister your arm.

The shape in the sky had disappeared when she looked again. A trick of the mind, Kara assumed. She looped her arm around Star’s and let him lead her down into the dark tunnel. Star, with long straight hair that he dyed blue and an immaculate manicure that matched his locks, and Eshe with puffy curls and flawless bronze skin, were Kara’s two other roommates. Eshe came to Kara’s other side and took her arm as well.

Star and Eshe were fullbloods, vampires who used to be human but were turned, as opposed to purebloods like Vitali and his goons who had two vampire parents and were born that way. Both purebloods and fullbloods had nocturnal sight, but not Kara—she was a halfblood. In vampire terms, a halfblood was someone whose mother was turned while carrying an unborn child. Conceived human but born a vampire—halfblood. They were rare and their sight was crap in the dark. No one could see in the pitch black, but a vampire’s eyes captured light better and saw sharper in the dim.

The walk to Nocturne was armed to the teeth and rigged to death with iron bars and checkpoints every fifty yards. The antennae of the landmines buried under gravel and debris glowed only in the blacklight Vitali carried. The hostesses followed him precisely so as not to trigger them. Iron was lethal to the faerie and the descent to the pit of Nocturne was a throat of a leviathan with jagged iron teeth. Although it’d been over a century since the faerie crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the Bloods—Vitali’s clan—didn’t play with security.

During the five mile walk in high heels, the hostesses gossiped about Celeste, saying how she had it coming. Perhaps they were only saying it because Vitali could hear them, but Kara bit her lower lip till it bled so she wouldn’t speak out of order. She couldn’t love and didn’t feel sympathy, but rage was a familiar emotion inherited from her father. She tried her best to keep it suppressed but sometimes it had a way of surfacing. Kara felt for the iron bangles on her wrists that Star called ‘fugly’—fucken ugly—and it doused her anger like a splash of cold water.

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Nocturne was a two-hundred-mile-long catacomb of dark corridors, dust, and bones. Time was lost in the city of the undead, one continuous night lasting an eternity. Kara thought she’d been here for three decades, but it could easily be four, or even ten. She didn’t know what year it was, no one did, and they thought it was autumn when the tunnels flooded and the power breakers went out. Fall was a wet season and the water seeped in through the limestone walls when it rained above.

The catacomb was made of rooms as much as it was of winding tunnels, and in the one Kara kept her things in she lay on Celeste’s mat spread upon a mound of earth along the wall. The graffiti was left behind by the humans, and one next to Celeste’s bed was of a clown holding a scythe. In the corner where Star and Eshe were erecting a house of cards on a stone slab was a depiction of a man in a bowler hat. One eye painted black, he was holding a knife. Underneath him, it said, ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

Humans and vampires used to have many languages and many letters but only one remained now, the one Celeste had taught Kara to read in. But certain words such as ‘day’ had lost their meaning because that measured twenty-four hours, and no one knew how long an hour was. ‘Day’ in Nocturne meant it was light above but didn’t signify a length of time.

Star and Eshe built a house out of cards, stacking it higher and higher till it collapsed, and they would start over again. More than once, they’d used the entire deck of cards—a perfect house.

Krystallis, the lifeblood of Nocturne that kept law and order, was crystallized synthetic blood diced with diamorphine and methamphetamine—fancy words with a lot of letters, terms Celeste used to know. It should have been just crystallized blood, but for decades Vitali had been dirtying the supply with long words. Ideas like this got Celeste walked in the sun. It was best not to repeat them, even in one’s mind. Because ideas had a way of taking hold, spreading like the plague, and infecting others till everyone died of it. Kara shook her head.

Everyone had a tick, a thing they repeatedly did when they smoked krystallis and didn’t sleep. Celeste used to construct music in her head and her fingers would twitch playing an imaginary piano—that was her tick. Star and Eshe stacked cards, that was their tick. Taking out the things from her fugly satchel and staring at them was Kara’s tick. So she got up to do that. It hadn’t been a purposeful thing but a compulsion that comforted her.

One by one, Kara took out the things from her fugly satchel, lined them in a row on the dirt, and looked at them in the candlelight. She arranged them in the order she favored them.

One, a glass heart with a photo of a couple inside it: a man with a white shirt and black suspenders hugging a woman in a white dress and a crown of woven flowers. They were looking at each other while the sun set behind them.

Two, a heart locket with a keyhole but she didn’t have the key.

Three, a heart-shaped red box tapered at the edges. It had a dirty stuffed bear inside, crouched as if it was hiding.

Four, another locket, and although shaped like a heart, it wasn’t red. It was clear and had dried flowers trapped inside.

Five, a wooden keychain, a square with a heart cut out from it. ‘She stole my heart’ it said about the missing piece.

Six, a porcelain heart that said, ‘Be Happy’.

Seven, a pink knitted heart, a tiny pillow that fitted on her palm.

She also had a handful of sticks that glowed when snapped in the middle, flares, candlesticks, a copper lighter that made a knocking sound when she flicked it open, a glass pipe that cost fifty dinne, a plastic bag of krystallis with a sad, single shard left in it, a shoe with a broken heel that she meant to get fixed, and the heel of said shoe.

Kara dropped her last shard into the glass pipe and flicked her lighter open, but the wheel turned without a spark. The flint was gone. That would be five dinne at the tattoo parlor. Besides shoddy inkwork, they also sold pipes, lighters, flints, and fuel.

Seeing as how her lighter didn’t work, Kara held her pipe over a candle flame and rolled the thick glass bowl side to side, letting the shard heat and melt into a red liquid. As soon as Kara took a hit, Star came over.

Give it, bitch. He held out his hand.

An unspoken rule of Nocturne, no one shared their pipes or bags, but Star had a habit of asking Kara because she had a habit of handing it to him.

Is that all? He looked at the empty pipe after he cleaned off the last of it. Eshe, do you have any left?

Eshe checked her garter, then shook her head.

For the Maker’s sake, Star hissed. Get ready then, bitches, off to work. He said ‘bitch’ in a way someone might say ‘darling’ and both Kara and Eshe got up to comply. Not to him, but to the fact that they needed to earn dinne.

Krystallis cost a thousand dinne per 3.5 gram baggie. The blood may be synthetic and dirtied with long words, but without blood, vampires turned pale.

Starved vampires drank each other, and the cannibalism poisoned their minds, turning them feral—pales. They didn’t wear clothes or respond to names. They didn’t collect trinkets or need candlelight. Pales inhabited the fringes of the catacombs and were always silvered on sight. Vitali may be cruel but he kept order and his tight rein was the reason Nocturne had survived when so many other nests had failed.

Lyon, the nest Celeste wanted to run off to, was already pale—had been before Kara came to Nocturne. She hadn’t said so to her friend because it was over three hundred miles away and not a distance a vampire could cross in a single night, which was why Celeste and Reef had been waiting for the Longdark. But Kara would have no reasonable explanation for her knowledge. She sighed because she’d let her friend have hope of escape. She sighed because withholding the truth was akin to lying, wasn’t it?

I don’t have friends anyway, she told herself. Diamorphine was what mattered. It kept the nightmares at bay. So she got ready with the girls, washing in a bucket of rainwater because she was a hostess after all, and in Nocturne, the dens were open all ‘day’.

Airplane

Lucien had been digging into the armrest, testing his nails against the lacquer of the polished wooden surface. He’d never been away from home and anxiety was a strange thing, like a boiling pot left unattended. Andre and Dedreh, the two others in the cabin with him, were Francis’s men and he didn’t know if they could be trusted.

You all right, Lucien? Andre asked and when Lucien lifted his gaze the fullblood was staring at him.

It’s fine. Lucien leaned back into his chair and crossed his legs. I’m just not used to flying. Tell me about Vitali.

Andre shrugged. Apollo’s oldest son, the Blood leader. That’s all I know.

He has a younger brother, Sedric, added Dedreh, blowing red mist, exhaling krystallis. Andre and Dedreh were seated together and across the aisle from Lucien. The brothers run Nocturne, home to ten thousand the last we checked. It’s probably more now. They accept strays.

This, Lucien already knew, and it wasn’t helpful. Sending only two fullbloods with Lucien in negotiation with the Bloods, Silverfox’s sentiment had been that Francis was trying to get him silvered. He had been livid.

"Should there be trouble, you will foresee it, yeah?" Andre asked. He had green eyes that grew brighter when narrowed, and blond hair the tone of his skin. Cut so close to the scalp, he looked bald.

Only a few seconds, Andre, answered Lucien.

Few seconds lead is a lifetime of advantage in a fight, Andre said. He looked honest, and ‘looked’ was the operative word.

Dedreh had earth-toned skin, bright red braids, and none of them had prior dealings with Bloods. From what Lucien understood, the Bloods were physically larger, possessed marble skin like armor, tough to penetrate even with silver, and superior strength in their enraged state.

It dinged in the cabin and a seatbelt sign came on along with Sean’s voice through the speakers. This is your captain speaking. I hope your flight was enjoyable although we have no flight attendants. We’re beginning our descent over Sector Five ruins, so buckle your seatbelts, and should we catch fae fire and explode, well, then we’ll all be cooked. Should we all die, I hope to see you in heaven. If not, I’ll put in a good word with the Maker.

Lucien closed his eyes and clutched the armrest he’d been scratching as the plane vibrated from the steep drop. Resurgence pilots had a habit of diving rather than gently descending. They’d been trained that way because the faerie needed to breathe and below twenty-five thousand feet was where they flew. Landing or taking off was when the planes were most vulnerable and Resurgence pilots hauled ass through it.

This wasn’t a fighter jet but a passenger plane, and every bolt in the frame rattled and the cabin light flickered as the plane plummeted. Lucien felt as if he would levitate had the seatbelt not been dragging him down with the plane. He wanted to vomit but there was a certain assurance in seeing the fullbloods react the same way. They both clutched their seats and Andre, who was religious, signed the