Every good story needs a great hero. Fangs & Halos has a tarnished hero in Sulivan Kilcoan. Formerly an Enforcer angel named Eistered.
Of course, I have someone I imagine as Sullivan as I write. He’s Ryan Reynolds. That voice, the smile, and the …look are pure Sullivan.
Oh, Ryan Reynolds with an Irish accent. Imagine that one.
Oh yeah!
The name Sullivan came from his love of Ireland and someone whose story was tragic.
The original Sullivan was a potato farmer in Ireland who watched his children immigrate to America and the others die in the potato famine 1845-1849.
Sullivan’s younger children died one at a time, each buried in the churchyard. Then his wife died, leaving him alone except for his friend Eistered.
The two men stood over her grave and Sullivan talked about her and the total destruction of his family. After he told Eistered that he knew that he was really an angel, he said even God hated the Irish and he slit his own throat, bleeding out before Eistered could summon help.
Eistered buried Sullivan next to his wife and promised he would never be forgotten, then he took the name in honor of the man he was unable to save.
It took a while for the rest of Heaven to catch onto the name change, some of the angels were very reluctant to call him by the chosen name. It took the Archangel Mikhail using the name for the hold-outs to follow.
Sullivan works often with two other Enforcer angels, Essexiel and Sethiel. After a night of tuning angels, being a witness to markings, or taking vampires to Hell, the boys would skip the Ambrosia that was the sustenance for Heaven and go to Britain to hit the pubs.
As Sullivan had formed a love of the Irish, he took everyone for drinks at pubs in Ireland. His favorite is the oldest pub in Ireland: The Brazen Head Pub. Drinking Guinness, sampling the food, playing darts, and trading insults, mainly about football (soccer).
Sethiel took a Scottish identity and made The White Hart Pub–Edinburgh Scotland his favorite hang-out.
Essex took the Welsh Skirrid Inn, near Abergavenny Wales as his home tavern.
Each of the pubs were haunted and the ghosts could recognize that the three were angels.
In Lilly’s Angel, Sullivan goes to tune the two untuned vampires whose aural signature were detected as the angels came down to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He encountered some local boys robbing graves. They manage to blind him and take his wings.
He wakes up in Lilly’s crypt with her and Baron, the Vampire Cat. He discovers he’s been turned into a vampire. The rest is literary history in Lilly’s angel. There are even more parts of Sullivan’s story in the next three books and coming in Book 5.
If a former angel-turned-vampire can dream of a “normal” life, he wants nothing more than to settle down with Lilly Marchantel, his maker and love, and run a pub in Ireland somewhere.
References:
The Irish Potato Famine
The Brazen Head,
Lower, Dublin
The Brazen Head is officially Ireland’s oldest pub, dating back to 1198.
The Brazen Head Pub Website
The White Hart Pub–Edinburgh Scotland
No website.
Claimed to be Edinburgh’s oldest pub, with parts of the building and cellar dating back to 1516, the remainder of the pub is said to descend from 1740
The Skirrid Inn, near Abergavenny Wales
Skirrid Mountain Area
Skirrid Inn and Pub Article in Higgy Pop
The Skirrid Inn is said to be the oldest pub in Wales, over 900 years old.