The Last Thing the Angel Said

There was a lot of nineteenth century Europe in the towns in the Delaware Bay region. Upheavals in Russia, the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, launched waves of scarred people to America with their vendettas, old religions and mumbo-jumbo. They brought magic, none of it good.

The Devil lived in the bricks and stones of the town of Balz, people said - but then they would.

They loved their Easter Day, their Fourth of July, their annual bike race and the grotesque balls held by their guilds; they could only celebrate if they all had eyes on one another. The kids had their own thing, a masked dance where nobody knew who was who. And though that Devil pranced among them scattering injury and misery, drunkenness and despair, the telling of alarming jeremiads, they still believed in angels, the people of that town. Those fools still believed in angels.

Bright-eyed Bronia Chambers also lived there, and was determined to escape it, along with the flawed man of her dreams, obsessive bike rider Milo Galitzki, but she had to rescue him from one of those angels first.