Growing up I had a pretty normal childhood, I suppose, despite being the only child on earth with wings.

My parents, the human Linda and the angel Amenadiel, did their best to support my uniqueness while at the same time keeping me grounded. The latter sometimes quite literally. This was for example the case when my 4-year-old self, high on a sugar rush after an afternoon of indulging in ice-cream and sweets with my favourite demon and babysitter, Mazikeen, began flying around the house like a mad person, trashing furniture and terrorizing the house cat.

"Tie him down," yelled my mother while jumping up and down trying to grab my feet at the same time as I crashed a second chandelier, by accident I would like to add.

My father on the other hand just looked at me with stars twinkling in his eyes, so proud that he nearly burst.

"Just let him fly, Linda," he said with a stupid smile on his face. "He is an angel. Let him fly."

My mother, however, always the practical one of the two, did not yield.

"Tie. Him. Down. We can't afford redecorating the house one more time this year."

And dad did as she wished and soon enough I was drifting over the dinner table, my right ankle tied with a rope to my usual chair, my hair lightly stroking the ceiling.

"New house rule," mother declared. "No sweets before dinner." She gave Mazikeen a dark look over her glass of wine. Then, glancing upward towards me, she added: "And we will sit down during dinner, Charlie, no matter if we are human, demon, angel or something in between. Do you understand?"

I obeyed reluctantly and was immediately forgiven by everyone involved, well except for the house cat who until this day hisses at me whenever I enter a room.

With time I learned to better control my wings and my flying abilities. I also learned when and to whom it was appropriate to show my wings and when it was not.

"To show your wings to somebody, specially a human, is a very personal thing," my father explained to me once when we were out soaring through the sky high above the city of Los Angeles. "It is something one should only do after long and careful consideration."

"Like you did with mum?" I asked.

My dad shrugged, his lips formed a secret smile.

"Linda was different from ordinary human. I did not have to hide from her, not for long anyway" he said. "She already knew about heaven and hell, being friends with Luci and all..."

He stopped himself, a worried frown suddenly appearing on his forehead as if he thought he had said too much.

"Who is Luci?" I asked curiously but my father did not answer. Instead he abruptly turned around mid air, his large, white wings flapping widley.

"It will be time for dinner soon," he said hoarsely. "We mustn't let your mother wait."

As we began our journey back home I noticed something glittering in my father's eyes. Tears. They disappeared so quickly that I later thought that maybe I had imagined them. Still, several years would pass before my father ever mentioned Luci again.

As a child I was never alone. Besides my parents and Mazikeen there were Dan the cop and his daughter Trixie who often visited us for game nights or taco tuesdays and Ella, the forensic scientist, who taught me everything I needed to know about God, ghosts and old cars. And then of course there was Chloe, sad, beautiful Chloe with eyes haunted by an unspoken loss. She was always very nice to me and as Trixie's mother and a good friend to my parents she was a natural guest in over house. Yet I always had the horrible feeling that I somehow was part of the reason to why she was so sad, an event of some sort that my parents would not speak of and which I myself could not remember. The mystery only grew more intense when I sometimes late at night, when they all thought that I was sound asleep, could hear the grown-ups in hushed voices discuss my god father and uncle, a man who I had never meet. Who was he and what had happened to him?

It was not until after my 12th birthday that I started to get some of the answers to my many, many questions.