Somehow I suspect that Sharon Shinn may have wanted The Alleluia Files to be about LESBIAN angels.

I don't know what's giving me that idea! It's just, you know, little things:

All Tamar's habitual wariness deserted her. All her defenses undid themselves of their own accord.

"I don't know that I could leave you behind even if I wanted to," she replied slowly. "Even if I crushed this Kiss in my arm, I think I would still hear your voice. I have become attuned to you. Jehovah woke the bond, but I think it is a bond past breaking. I am afraid, too, but not of losing you. I am afraid of what it means to have found you."

Lucinda flowed to her feet and threw her arms around her sister.

Neither was Tamar used to indiscriminate hugs from chance-met acquaintances, but she did not draw back. This felt familiar, this felt right. Even when those delicate wings came curving around her shoulders, wrapping her in a texture that was half lace and half sinew, she did not pull away. It was as if she was embraced by her own soul, insubstantial but indestructible.

She felt her bones give up their accustomed fight and her blood go dancing backward in her veins.

- The Alleluia Files

As brownbetty has previously observed, Shinn's worldbuilding would seem to indicate that she's never heard about lesbians. But then, she keeps writing stuff like this. Though this is by far the most blatant I've seen her get, Wrapt in Crystal also had quite a bit of subtext. If the two worldly nuns and their guy had been up for resolving the situation by way of polyamory, the guy would have started feeling left out after a month or so.

Come to think of it, this isn't even really the first time she's subliminated an apparent lesbian love story by making the women siblings. Though the devoted sisters in Summers at Castle Auburn don't embrace passionately, their relationship was pressed directly from the Story A mold. The straight romances feels pasted on by comparison. Is there any evidence that Shinn reads manga?