Prologue: Mortal Ruin

      When the normally innocuous radio station she always listened to while she was working suddenly started pumping out Mortal Ruin’s first big hit, ‘Dead as My Love’, Chloe Lyon was in the kitchen area of her small flat, carefully brushing a thick coating of richly scented dark criollo couverture chocolate into moulds, to make the last batch of hollow angels before Christmas.

      That seemed pretty appropriate, because a hollow angel was what Raffy Sinclair had proved himself to be, but it meant that it was a couple of minutes before she had a hand free to reach across and snap down the off button. By then they’d moved on to Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’, so it was becoming obvious that the guest on Desert Island Discs (she’d missed the start) had much happier memories of 1992 than Chloe did. In fact, she’d take a bet on the next song being Whitney Houston and ‘I Will Always Love You’, and that really would finish her off.

      But the music carried on playing in her head even after the radio was silenced and it was already too late to suppress the memories. The dark, viciously searing tide of anger and pain at Raffy’s betrayal was rushing in as sharply as if it had all happened yesterday and she was once again that love-struck nineteen-year-old, thinking she’d found a kind of magic more potent than any of her grandfather’s chants, charms and incantations.

      She’d loved that Clapton song, though Raffy’d teased her that it was mawkish. But then, as well as being keen on Nirvana, he’d had a worrying penchant for Megadeath and older bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, all of which influenced the lyrics he wrote for his own band, Mortal Ruin. This obsession with the dark side was part of the reason why she’d never mentioned her grandfather to him – he might have been too interested had he known about her connection with Gregory Warlock.

      But actually, there had simply not been enough time to explore their family and backgrounds, since they’d met and fallen in love at the start of her first university term and those few weeks spent intently engrossed in each other encompassed the whole span of their relationship.

      It wasn’t surprising that she’d loved him at first sight – he was tall and handsome, with long black curling hair, a pale, translucent skin and eyes the greeny-blue of the Caribbean Sea in a holiday brochure – but he’d seemed as transfixed as she was…And anyway, the Tarot cards, when she consulted them, had told her that change was coming and she would meet her soul mate, so she’d naturally assumed he was the one.

      Big mistake.

      She hadn’t believed it was the end, even after that final argument on the last night of term, when he’d told her he and the other three Mortal Ruin band members had decided to gamble their futures on a recording contract and he’d asked her to go with him, rather than head home for the holidays as she’d intended. She hadn’t explained why she absolutely had to go home either, though she might have done if she hadn’t been so angry – or if he had been capable of talking about anything other than Mortal Ruin by that point.

      If only she’d known she wouldn’t be going back for the next term…If only they hadn’t had that final, bitter argument, so she never even gave him her home address…There was a whole series of ifs, but they probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the end, because he turned out to be so not the man she’d thought he was.

      A hollow angel: dark and handsome on the outside, an emotional void within. A Lucifer echoing with false promises.

      Of course, she hadn’t known that then. Looking after Jake, her baby half-brother,