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Many of you have come to love Fallen, the haunted Sidhe. She appears in THE BEAR WITH 2 SHADOWS, asking Hibbs to bring her Blake back to her.

Before Victor Standish, there was Blake Adamson. And here is the end of the tale for Fallen and her Blake, told through his eyes.

{Blake has been stabbed in the back by the hate of Fallen given living form. Solomon, the Angelus of man's body and panther face, is racing the chariot of Death to Valhalla in a mad attempt to save Blake's life.}


Her faerie eyes seemed to be on the brink of breaking down completely.

She took my right hand in hers gently. "Oh, hold on, Blake."

I shook my head. "C-Can’t."

"Don’t say that," she sobbed, bending down and placing her head on my chest.

She jerked up, her eyes wild with the desperation of finding some way of holding on to me. "Together. T-The Father told you we’d - we’d always be together. You can’t die. You can’t die."

I tried to hold up my left hand. No good. Like Fallen’s Hate had told me, I was all washed up.

I lifted it with my mind fingers, and even then, it took all I had to do it. I placed my trembling hand over her heart and tried for a smile. I don’t think I made it.

"H-Here. Always together. Here."

She looked up in agony as if there’d be an answer in the heavens. "Not good enough," she wailed. "Not good enough."

Black tears streaming down her face, she held my hand tight as if willing her life force into me. "Don’t leave me, Blake. Don’t leave me."

As black as her tears became the world around her, so that all I could make out was her face in a ever-thickening mist. My eyes must have been glazing over because I heard her crying low. She squeezed my hand even harder.

"If - If you st-stay, I-I’ll tell you a secret."

I forced my eyes open wide to clear them. It worked. A little.

This time I did manage a small smile. With my mind fingers, I wiggled my ears.

"I-I’m all ears."

She cocked her head as if she couldn’t bear the pain inside her. "Oh, y-you and y-your dumb jo-jokes."

She reached out and gently brushed that stubborn lock of hair from my eyes. "You know all those times you flew at night?"

"Yes," I whispered.

"W-Well, I ... I crept into your room then."

"What?"

She turned her head to the left as if the memory was killing her.

"I ... I used to go to your chest of drawers and touch your - your combs and brush, running my fingers along them. I’d imagine you fighting to get that mop y-you call hair to stay down."

She smiled a smile of agony, her lips trembling. "I’d - I’d laugh and sit on your bed and s-smell your pillow, that always smelled of pine trees."

I tried for a swallow and didn’t make it. Tears started to blind me. She knew what my hair smelled like. Fallen looked as she were about to shatter inside.

"Th-Then, I’d pick up whatever book you were reading at the time, and ... and I’d open it, looking at the parts you - you underlined -"

She mewed soft and long as if she were about to break down. And I think she might have except that Solomon choked down a sob himself.

She looked up. He turned his head away and slapped the black reins with a sharp snap.

The chariot took off faster in a lurch that sent a jagged bolt of agony through me. Fallen picked me up to cushion me. And meaning to help me, she sent another spear of pain through me.

But in a way that was a good thing, for it cleared my vision and hearing. She stroked my right cheek softly.

"Those - those parts you underlined. I read them out loud, pretending you were rea-reading them to me."

She sniffed back the tears. "Your books. To my eyes, they burned with so many different colors. So many. I - I could tell what books made you sad, or laugh, or angry."

Suddenly, she wrapped me in a fierce embrace. "But the book that burned the brightest was the one that had ‘Annabel Lee’ in it."

She sniffed wetter this time. "I knew all about that poem, B-Blake, all this time. All this time."

She clutched me tighter, holding her cheek against mine and rocking and rocking. "Y-You want to know what the color of love is?"

"Wh-What?"

"The color of love is you," she sobbed.

"Is you!"

She turned to Solomon, who was blinking back tears himself, and wailed, "You’re the Angel of The Most High. Tell me. Why does evil always win? Why? WHY?"

She raised her head and howled gut-deep like a shot animal. I couldn’t take it. And neither could Solomon.

He turned his head away, choking down another sob. I lifted my hand with my mind fingers and stroked her cheek.

She shook her head that shivered in spasms. "I always thought I would be Annabel Lee. Not you. Not you!"

I forced my traitor throat to work, and it rebelled, making my words hoarse, almost impossible to understand even for me. "A-As long as you live, I live - in you."

Her lower lip trembled so I thought she’d break down, but she managed to get out, "You big, d-dumb b-boy scout. I don’t want to go on living if you die. Don’t you know that?"

I tried to speak, but the world grew hazy and dark again. My head nodded to my chest. She shook me hard.

"Blake!"

I fluttered my eyes open and saw her reach frantic inside her mind. "I - I know your secret."

"What - what secret could ... a boy scout like me have?"

She smiled as if that secret was a knife in her heart. "That ‘full on the lips’ kiss you wrote about in your diary."

"You read my diary!," I moaned.

She shook her mane, a bitterness twisting her face. "Such a silly thing. A simple thing. And ... And I teased you so with it."

I had tried to stay with her, but it was no good. Her face. I could barely make it out anymore. Only her tortured eyes, and them only in a thick haze. My head nodded, then my chin settled on my chest, and I heard her from far, far off.

"A-And now, wh-when it is too late, when y-you will not even feel it, I shall give you our f-first, our last, ... my only kiss."

I prayed silently, 'Oh, Father, grant me strength just one more time.’

I smiled with all the love I had burning in me for her.

"Another thing you said a long time ago, Fallen, was - was that sometimes the best words were actions."

And with that, I wrapped my left arm around her and pulled her to me. I leaned in to her face. She sobbed, then her trembling lips parted.

Her lids went all heavy. And she kissed me, fierce, hungry, wild, just like she was deep inside. She crushed me to her. Her tongue touched mine.

I - I had never been kissed like that before. I didn’t know what to do.

I touched back as hard as I could. It must have been the right thing to do ‘cause she ran her tongue along mine, and I did the same to hers.

That had to have been the right thing to do, too, as she leaned her whole body into me, her lips crushing mine. I squeezed back.

She felt so soft, yet hard at the same time, in my arms. Her lips were soft, too, even as they pressed hard against mine.

And for one small magic moment, we were one.

Not in body, but in the heart, the spirit, the very soul. We were one. And she was mine. Mine.

Fallen was mine.

Our first kiss was all I had hoped it would be. No. A hundred times better. It was wonderful.

Wonder-

It was as if a plug had been pulled deep, deep within me, and all I was got sucked down a black hungry whirlpool that was darker than just sleep or fainting. Down, down, down, I went, being tugged down into a cold, black, starless sea that billowed all about me.

I went limp in Fallen’s arms. She screamed then, as if the very heart of her had been cut out. Strange. It had sounded as if she were three miles away. How odd.

Then, before I was pulled under completely, I heard someone else. Solomon.

But he was even fainter, so far off, so very far off. His voice seemed all but choked out with tears.

"S-Sorry, Sidhe, but - but even good souls die."

I was a child, and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee.
***