I sat watching tensely, still hardly able to believe that just six weeks ago, my life had been relatively normal – or at least as normal as possible, when you’re psychic and like to fix cars. And then I’d done a reading for Beth Hartley, a girl in my high school back in Pawntucket, New York. I’d seen her joining the Church, becoming sick and listless. I’d tried to stop her, but hadn’t been able to – and in the meantime, an angel named Paschar had foreseen that I was the one who’d destroy them all.

I sighed as I watched the angels flying across the screen. God, I wished he’d been right. I thought of my mother, sitting lost in her dreams, her mind forever destroyed by what Raziel – I hated calling the angel my father; he didn’t deserve the word – had done to her. She wasn’t the only one. Millions of people had been hurt just as badly by the angels. Millions more were probably being hurt by them right that second, while all the callers on TV exulted about angelic love.

Angelic love. The words left a bitter taste when you knew the angels were really here to feed off human energy, as if our world was their own private fish farm. And thanks to something called angel burn, they were seen as creatures of beauty and kindness, even as their victims’ life energy crumpled under their touch. The result might be a mental illness like my mother had, or MS, or cancer, or almost any other debilitating disease you could name. Because when an angel fed from you, there were only two certainties: one, you’d be damaged for ever in some terrible, irrevocable way...and two, you’d worship the angels until the day you died.

I glanced at Alex sitting beside me, taking in the firm lines of his face; the dark eyelashes that framed his eyes; the mouth that begged to have my finger on it, tracing its outline. By the time Alex was barely sixteen, his entire family had been destroyed by angels. Now dozens more of his friends had been killed by them too.

The black AK tattoo on his left bicep didn’t stand for “Alex Kylar” – it stood for Angel Killer.

Alex was the only AK left. The only person in the world who knew how to fight them. The thought of anything happening to him was like razors slicing my heart – and our plan to recruit and train new AKs wouldn’t exactly keep us out of the line of fire. Part of me really did want us to go live in a cave – or up on a Tibetan mountaintop, or out in the middle of a swamp somewhere – anyplace that was remote and safe, so we could just be together without worrying, for ever.