Christopher Alderidge broke her.

Before him, she'd been so sweet, a gossamer, delicate, virgin blossom who drifted on the wind like a wind nymph twirling amongst the clouds. Because she always put a rusty old bathtub out front to fill with the heavens' blessed teardrops, saying that she was filling it for the siren fey folk who lived in the underground sewers so they, too, could rid themselves of the grime that sunny, tourist-infested Port Sirena seemed to have been borne with in its very earth, and because she would sell scented candles door to door because she declared the ghostly folk liked the citrusy smells, the townspeople began to think early on of Evangeline as the dreamy-eyed, ghost-loving girl whose skeleton shone with the purity that others so lacked. She became the very facsimile of the sun that so many sought to reach but came just short.

People likened her to an angel.

Perhaps it was because of this that the townsfolk ignored all the flaws that plagued her as a girl.

One summer, she'd begun to fly. Like a sylph of the air, dancing in the evanescent, shapeshifting wind that embraced her small body like she was one of their own, macabre in the way her skinny limbs were gruesomely contorted as her twisted arms performed the disjointed dance of flight. At first, the townsfolk, the locals, they'd laughed. They knew, no matter how much they loved this sunshine maiden in the skin of a lowly mortal, that she thirsted for the unseen, make-believe monsters that she proclaimed lived just below this tourist town, devouring the sewage systems, that she would sometimes stop in the middle of the road slack jawed and stare, saying, "Do you see him?" Surely this was just another one of her naive jokes. Look at her, she wants to fly with the angels!

But when her small arm twisted backwards and a hellish shower of blood splattered over the awed tourists crowding the beachside tourist shops and boardwalks, the screams began to ring out.

When she fell back to earth, as though she'd been rejected by the heavens and found only sinful and flawed enough to ever be a mortal walking the wretched grounds of blood, her mother wept like her very happiness had been ripped out from her skeleton and flung to the stars, clutching her daughter's weak body to her chest. Feathers that had not been there before were picked out of her sweaty, tangled hair. Fishermen counted the freckles on her face to ensure that it wasn't an unlucky number. And her body, how it trembled as she slumbered!

"I'm sorry, Mama," the terrified girl had sobbed later. "He made me do it."

"Who?" Juliette had asked desperately. "Evangeline, who?"

Another time, two days after she'd returned from seeing her father, she'd been found picking apart tourist pigeons with sticks and her bruised, bare hands, the pale slender bones in her angel hands stained to the core with silken blood so crimson and sweet-smelling, her mother swore for days afterwards that it had been the nectar of hell.

Her eyes, oh, how hollow and euphoric they'd been as she partook in the beautiful, grandiloquent art of reaping the delicate, flowery threads of a life for the earth's whispered ghost song, as she hungrily tore bone after organ after flesh out of the bloody, maimed mess that embraced what was left of the pigeons' screaming, agonised souls flying to the heavenly reaches of the blessed stars. As a sharp stick was shoved into a speckled grey bird's stomach with little-girl certainty, splattering the small, flourishing backyard's rich dirt with crimson stains and guts, Port Sirena's sunny fever had begun its slumber. The rays painted the gruesome play she was performing for the vibrant stuffed animals lined up in front of her in the sins of the stars. Had the weeping moon danced only a little bit more for her, the bruises on her thin, trembling arms would've been visible, and had the neighbours next door not been arguing quite so loudly with their windows open, the names she whispered like a prayer from her cherubic roseate lips might have been heard as she squeezed each and every flightless, contorted corpse so hard that the last throes of agony were dragged from their star-limned bodies, and the most unseen remains of the crimson sin she'd spilled stained the dirt once more.

"It's what the sirens would've done, Mama," she'd sobbed. The murders had seemed to her like a normal instinct to have, a whim to follow. No different from suddenly wanting to paint. But she was broken and jaded, and there was something wrong with her, and the angel that used to claw at her chest because it shone so bright seemed to have dimmed terribly, enough that her beloved mother no longer looked at her like she held the very universe within her hands.

It made her feel terrible.

After that, Juliette had angrily forbidden her from going anywhere near the blithesome, oblivious pigeons who plagued the tourist boardwalks or the bright arcade streets. She would always be with at least one of her siblings, even if Reece and Prescott became cruel after being torn away from their girlfriends.

Juliette didn't care. Desperation had begun infesting the despair-ridden core of her many skins, as the three jobs she worked began to yield less and less money for her and her three children, and keeping watches over her small, prophecy-seeing dream-eyed angel became smaller and smaller. Were the stars so unseeing that they would allow her to birth three children as a teen, all from different men, and then curse one of them with wretched insight into the fantasy dream worlds of the imagination as well? Had she the choice, or the money, she would've sent her angel to somewhere where they could tear those false, ghost-ridden eyes out from her daughter's mind and could carve out the peculiar parts of her that did not fit, that had no place in this world or reality and should've been cast off into the abyss of the underworld long ago. There would be no more drawing glow-in-the-dark fish on the trees so the lost sirens would feel less homesick. There would be no more setting out raw beef bits for the vampires who her daughter claimed would pass their cramped yellow house during the night. But the only place cheap enough would've been the local asylum. And though she was anxious and chaotic, Juliette would've let the very heavens burn and fall to the earth before she would've let her only daughter be tormented like that.

But they say the third time is the charm.

A few years passed without incident: still, nine-year-old Evangeline was the angel of the town, revered by the locals and smiled at by the tourists, and still, her delusions of monsters and glorious creatures roaming Port Sirena continued. Reece would mock her endlessly about it. But all of the family had finally let the restraints go, thinking they were safe, thinking that at last, the angel had found her head and had found the claws to tear off the fake wings she'd taped to her shoulders.

Huddled up in the cold, grimy basement. Those palely ethereal angelic eyes were unforgiving and unseeing as she peeled skin after skin from tear-kissed, dreamy-eyed periwinkle faces, her small crimson hands the hands of the devil as she majestically painted the stars and the sky with the blood of those left to her mercy. Animal cries and shrill, agonised screams of terror and gasping, breathless sobs. Hands imploring for mercy, mercy, though they'd never given any, as the pain and star-crossed sins that poured forth from their traitorous souls were woven into threads with which she could make them into puppets. But Evangeline had never been one to torture. Some small mercy that was as the skin of their faces was torn off.

How long had the police stayed around the yellow house, asking each family member over and over the same questions, intruding when Juliette finally had her rare breaks from work? She was a wreck. Evangeline was being held at a police station in a faraway desert - because such was Port Sirena: part coastal beaches, part lush forest, and on the outskirts, dry, dry desert - and at night, in her dreams, she fancied she could hear the sobs of her daughter calling for her. Now was when she needed to help her angel. Not later, after she'd been through police and psychiatrists and mental asylums and paparazzi. Her daughter would only heal, her wounds would only stitch themselves back together, at Juliette's touch. She'd already been fired two times after the incident and was now only hanging on by a thin, delicate thread to her last grueling job, and as vicious family after family bent on avenging the dead sued them for what Evangeline had done under the trance of her monsters and ghosts, Juliette found now she could only put potatoes and cold oatmeal on the table. Soon she would lose her precious boys, too.

Petitioners began gathering outside of the house, chanting for mental asylum reforming. She could no longer emerge from this wretched place, that had become the terrible ground where her lithe, heavenless body slowly withered and rotted away, without being beaten and clubbed by the vengeful crowds, and still, still, the fervent, insane jabbering to every hiring tourist shop she could find online until a protester broke their electricity yielded nothing. She gave Reece, pretty, smooth-tongued Reece, all of the beloved, precious trinkets she'd hoarded up over the years, bijoux and curios from countless men who'd revered her, to sell to the souvenir shops, because he did not attract the same violence and hate that had sunken into her shrivelled, broken bones that yearned for the one object kept away from her, locked in a heavenless, hollow-eyed prison of ghosts and delirious fantasies. Soon even that money ceased to come, when even fearless Reece could not deny being the murderer's brother. And Prescott, who had once been luscious and beautiful as a black cat roaming the realms of the underworld, became so thin and haggard that his whole pale, skinny arm could fit under the door. And yet, when terror began haunting Juliette's restless dreams and the packs of frozen hot dogs stocked in their basement became a rarity, it seemed all the hope was lost, slipped from between her greedy, desperate fingers.

And then families began promising to call off their arguments and complaints. Promising...if only her daughter would be sent to that cold, heavenless prison with her wings clipped, infested with hollow-eyed, slack jawed ghosts in the skin of weak children spun into puppets, where maimed limbs from insane expeditions led to children being left to rot inside of a wagon that the nurses would occasionally push when they felt like it, where lunatics traded their pills in attempts to murder themselves in hazes and reveries. It was a clouded oblivion of depression. The place where little Evangeline would be crushed.

Yet by now Juliette was far too wrecked and ruined to listen anymore. She herself rotted within her bedroom, the devastation of herself like the collapsing of the sun, crying into the phone to complete strangers while her sons frantically shook her awake from her delirium.

And then finally, after their mother threw herself down the stairs, Reece screamed out of the window that they would let them send Evangeline there.

When that broken beauty who used to be the sun returned after six long years, it was to find a heavenless, unholy town filled with self-righteous, wrathful people who loathed her for what she'd shed with innocence. Those who had so loved her no longer revered the hallowed ground she walked on and the twinkling, luminous splendour that she seemed to shed like loose skin everywhere she tread, no longer looked at the smooth curve of her lithe, angellike neck and roseate, ethereal limbs more fragile than delicate, flowery gossamer with anything other than the lust she'd encountered at every turn in the asylum. As a peculiar oddity, the newest delicate doll to gawk at, people followed everywhere she went as she restlessly sought to escape the terrible place that had become her former home. It was cursed now, breathing the wrath that was now her oldest brother. When a tourist screamed from being pooped on by a pigeon, she startled and burst into tears as teens laughed at her and took videos. When she smiled at one of the fish taco stand owners, he spat in her face.

But her worst mistake was not yet to come.

That came the day she met Christopher Alderidge.