How do you know if you’re one of the damned? As a child, Don wanted to become a priest. Now a grown man mostly at ease with being gay, he’s left the Catholic Church and has chosen instead to help people through his work as a parole officer. His strong faith is shaken when his latest assignment turns out to be Michael, a young man Don hasn’t seen since he took Michael to church as a child -- and saw his parish priest cast Michael out of the church as a demon. Meeting him as an adult re-ignites the obsession Don had with the boy he couldn’t save. But can Michael be saved at all? Or is the strangely compelling demon with a taste for risky sex as damned as he believes himself to be?

Angel

But then, it depended on whose definition you went by. “Did you mean for him to die?” he asked defiantly.


Michael’s head was bowed, his face almost hidden by that coal-black curtain of hair and the cloaking shadow it cast. “No,” he whispered. He looked up, suddenly. “But perhaps it’s in my nature to kill.”


“No,” Don told him fiercely. He would not, could not, believe anyone beyond redemption. “Maybe you are a demon, but you live here as a man. I refuse to believe you don’t have free will, just like the rest of us.”


“A man?” Michael’s smile was mocking, but there was despair in his eyes. He was standing right on the very edge of the parapet, now, his back to the ten-story drop. “Is this a man, Donnie?”


Chapter 6