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In a city of fallen angels and demons, on which side will she fall?
Bartholomew Vega built Meridian for his own purposes, and Angela Cabrera filled the city with angels to fight its demons.
Heather Rigsby, her granddaughter, has mostly avoided the inexplicable rivalry between her family and Vega until Angela’s funeral, when Vega arrives with a personal invitation from Angela in hand.
The chaos that ensues, from the wake to the funeral to the reading of the will, pulls Heather back into the fray in a whirlwind of transformation, seduction, and revelation that upends her entire understanding of Meridian, Vega, her grandmother, and herself.
Reader advisory: This book contains dubious theology, and a brief scene of domestic abuse. There is bloodplay, a gangbang (with brief ff, mm), foot fetish, non-con roleplay, whipping, and a scene of ritual sacrifice.
General Release Date: 19th May 2026
Per the invitation’s strongly worded request, Heather arrived at the funeral in a rideshare, but there were already cars up and down the street and beyond, clogging up other people’s driveways, all for the sake of paying respects to a Meridian institution—Angela Cabrera herself, late at seventy-two and taken far too soon.
Someone like Angela didn’t hold with funerals as sad, somber affairs, with black gloves, veils, sheets covering mirrors, and a preserved body on maudlin display in the middle of the parlor. Plenty of the people inside the house attended in traditional sober blacks and charcoal grays, but most of Angela’s closest family wore color. Even so, they avoided the faux pas of colors that were too cheerful, instead choosing subdued blues, purples, and greens.
Only Magda, Angela’s youngest daughter and Heather’s aunt, had adopted a livelier palette of magenta with black accents, a suit she sometimes wore in the courtroom. She was a bright spot in an ocean of dark, but everyone expected that of Magda, the neon sheep of the family and one of Heather’s many personal inspirations, including but not limited to her grandmother.
Heather would usually defer to her grandmother’s wishes more than the plum-colored floral dress she’d selected for the late afternoon wake, but she couldn’t find it in herself to fake joy.
Angela Cabrera had died seven days ago—like the beginning of a curse—without any apparent warning. A stroke had struck her during a dinner alone, and she hadn’t been found until Heather’s mother, Camille, had visited her the next morning when Angela hadn’t shown up at her professional studio or answered her phone. Two days later, after showing no signs of improvement or even presence while in her hospital bed, she’d died, as though everything else had given up at once. No one had had any inkling she’d been sick. The only indication Angela herself may have had some foreknowledge was that she’d met with her estate lawyer only three months prior, although she’d had end-of-life documents in place for years.
Seven days. Only seven days. But that week had felt like seven years, with time moving at the most infinitesimal pace for hours, then scurrying like a cockroach along the walls, narrowing actual hours into what felt like minutes.
Heather wanted to honor her grandmother—an even more important figure in her life than her mother—but all she could hold was how she’d never speak to her grandmother again. In trying to cling to every interaction, conversation, and piece of wisdom passed down to her, they kept slipping out like rice between her knuckles, which made her feel like she was already forgetting and therefore dishonoring her grandmother’s memory.
She’d taken three days off work, which was two more than they usually allowed after a death in the family, but she couldn’t show houses with a smile when grief kept ambushing her like a rabid fox. She’d cried a flood and didn’t know where all the tears had come from or where they’d all gone and why they hadn’t left her a dried husk or her apartment soaked halfway up the walls. For the last four days, though, aside from some residual lacrimal leakage, Heather had gone completely numb, and all her colors had disappeared.
The world was duller without Angela Cabrera in it.
Visually, it was comparable to her ears being stuffed with cotton. Half the time, she mourned that loss with the same intensity as she mourned her grandmother, even though the feelings themselves had been cut off from her as effectively as a hand or foot. The other half, she thought it was fitting tribute. The world didn’t deserve color after taking Angela away. Her aunt’s flamboyance was a welcome interjection, though, not quite as intense but evoking the world Heather had known before Angela had died—a reminder that it was still there, waiting, and that the desaturating fog would eventually lift. Hard to believe it ever would.
Heather had only been to four funerals for people she actually knew, one a coworker, one a friend, and both her paternal grandparents. She’d never really known Angela’s husband, who had died of a widowmaker when she’d been a little girl.
Angela’s was the hardest hit yet, surpassing the day Heather had had her first cat put down a few years ago, which had been so difficult that she hadn’t yet adopted another.
Nevertheless, nothing short of an ER visit would keep her from her grandmother’s wake. That was the least Heather could do for her, especially since she was useless to help her mother, aunt, and uncle, who were arguably going through worse, because Angela had been their mother. She felt selfish that she’d collapsed when everyone had needed her, but she didn’t get to choose what kind of grief she felt, whether low-hanging dark clouds scudding tall buildings or baleful, rain-filled cells threatening rotation.
Right now, her grief and the sky were just an endless stretch of heavy gray.
Her mother was with her brother and sister in Angela Cabrera’s foyer, an abundance of white, veined marble accented with black wrought iron. The entire front half of the house was formal and hard and cold as cemetery stone. Examples of some of her more elaborate carvings, which either had never found a home or Angela had wanted to keep for herself, towered in the twin parlors and in the fountain cradled by the curve of the grand staircase. This was where Angela had done most of her more personal business—a sort of showroom.
The back of the house, however, was dark as caves wherever natural light from the floor-to-ceiling windows didn’t reach, but comfortable as a lodge, with matte stone and warm wood making it a retreat. Aside from pieces Angela had bought from Heather, it was free of art, displaying instead family photos on any given surface—as informal as could be. Even the artwork she’d chosen from Heather’s oeuvre was less photorealistic, sketchier in charcoal, pencil, chalk, and watercolor pastel.
The house perched somewhere between large and mansion, because despite Angela’s personal preference for cozy, her success had happened quite contrary to her intention, and with it had arisen certain expectations—from Meridian, from her family, and most particularly from her husband.
The entire interior of the house was full of people, the usually cool air warm and slightly moist, as though grief created its own climate.
Heather wanted to turn around and walk right back out, offended to her core by the crowd, the ambience, the grocery-store charcuterie and canapés, the closed black casket under the marble statue of a seraph in the process of shedding her six wings—the entire sterile spectacle of the wake preceding the funeral.
Instead, she fought a welling of tears disconnected from her surface emotions as she approached her mother, who looked as though she found the circumstances just as distasteful and her eyes just as irrepressibly damp. If Camille had had half the week Heather had had, she was probably exhausted—on top of all the planning required to put everything together, even with a comprehensive end-of-life directive.
“Heather, oh sweetheart.” Camille embraced her daughter, then laughed a little as she reached into her pocket to pull out a tissue for each of them. “I’m so very tired of blowing my nose, but it just won’t stop. People keep coming in and telling me all the ways Mom touched their lives, and it just starts all over again. But how are you doing? You didn’t any answer any of my calls or texts, except to say you were coming.”
Heather half shrugged, then gestured to generally indicate where they were. There was nothing to say about why she wasn’t feeling particularly chatty. “I’m okay.”
“You know your grandma loved you so much. She was so proud of your art, and your willfulness. It always made her laugh when I’d call her in exasperation that you insisted on having your way again. Like Aunt Magda.” Camille made a face at her sister, who made a face back, no malice intended either way.
No matter how much of an odd duck Magda or Heather were, that didn’t mean either of them had ever been at risk of exile from the family. Angela would never have allowed it.
“She would be so happy you made it,” Camille continued.
“Are you okay?” Heather didn’t want to examine her own feelings on the matter, and without the colors, she could only go by the way her mother looked—the faded red in her eyes, the slight swelling on her eyelids, the carefully curated effort with makeup to cover up her weariness and grief into something more presentable for the Meridian stage.
As much as the family would have preferred to keep their mourning private, they couldn’t deny the entire city a chance to grieve its eccentric mother, who had left her mark almost everywhere in Meridian. Her elaborate angels and gargoyles could be found almost anywhere one looked—hundreds of hand-carved statues and even more limited-batch productions and reproductions, not to mention the buildings she’d been commissioned to design. She’d been a prolific sculptor and architect ’til the day she’d died, her vision and acuity as sharp as the cherub’s spear in the other parlor. Wherever Meridian had threatened to become too modern or brutalist, Angela had softened the edges—or at least made them more interesting. Without her, the city would never have become known for its particular style, now oft imitated to maintain the Meridian culture.
Angela was Camille’s mother, Heather’s grandmother, but everyone with Meridian in their blood laid claim to Angela Cabrera as their own, whether they deserved her or not.
“I’m doing all right. Some days are better than others. Your aunt and uncle are handling this better than me, because they don’t have to juggle the business and everything,” Camille answered, dabbing under her eyes with the tissue to keep from mussing her makeup.
“I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls or come over. I’ve just…”
Camille shook her head. “I understand. You have your own life. I just don’t like to think of you all alone in that apartment, stewing in your grief without anyone to lean on. If not for your dad, I don’t know if I’d be upright, much less hosting.”
“Can I help with anything?”
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