His head lowered in the mirror, and I shivered as his warm lips brushed my neck. Then he glanced up, listening, as a new voice came from the TV: a woman caller with a Southern twang to her voice. “She must be sick, that’s all. But just because she’s mentally ill doesn’t mean she’s not dangerous. Why, you can tell from that photo – there’s just a deranged look in her eyes...”

Actually, my eyes looked more worried than anything else, just then. Alex and I went back into the bedroom, where the two news commentators on the screen were nodding gravely, agreeing that, yes, I must be deranged to have attempted an “act of terrorism” against the Church of Angels – which was what the media was calling my attempt to seal the gate between the angels’ world and our own.

I sank onto the bed. The Church claimed I’d been trying to set off a bomb in the cathedral; that I hated the angels so much I’d planned to blow the whole place up, regardless of the thousands of worshippers there to witness the arrival of the Second Wave. Me, a deranged bomber. It would have been funny if Alex and I weren’t in so much danger.

An image of the cathedral in Denver from the previous day appeared: its broad white dome and massive columns; its parking lot, choked with cars and people. And its high silver doors, standing open as countless angels streamed out. I’d seen the footage several times now; I still couldn’t take my eyes off it. I watched in morbid fascination as the angels’ wings flashed gold in the sunset, pouring out from the cathedral in an endless river of light and grace. In their ethereal form, angels weren’t normally visible except to the humans they were feeding from, but they’d made an exception as the Second Wave invaded our world. They’d wanted to hear people’s cheers, Nate had told us. The cattle, cheering their slaughterers.

The Second Wave and me were the big news of the day. Everyone on the planet seemed to be debating what this meant: whether the angel footage had been faked or not, what it meant for our world if it hadn’t been. The news programme showed the same clips over and over, with the headline Angelic Arrival scrolling past at the bottom of the screen. Then, when they got tired of that, the commentators took more phone calls, from all across the country: people who’d seen the angels arriving; people who wished they’d seen the angels arriving; people who thought they’d seen me; people who wished they could see me so they could give me what I “deserved”.