Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (12 page)

“I’m doing fine.”

“Little Lotus now, she whipped up a paste of some sort for your road rash and gave it to me. I put it on your desk. She said it will heal that up right fast.”

I hadn’t even noticed until now how much my leg was aching.
The hike hadn’t done it any good, but I wouldn’t have taken a step of it back for anything. The fairy rings, the
angels
. . . there was so much I wanted to ask, and I wasn’t sure if it was okay to ask it.

Once the dishes were done and Grandpa Jack settled into his recliner to watch television in the living room, I started up the stairs.
A shout followed me. “Oh, I forgot! Nash called just before you got home.”

“Thanks, I’ll call him back later,” I said, so overcome with irritation that I forgot to duck at the top of the stairs and met disco consequences.

“And Diego, too!” Grandpa Jack hollered.

Wonderful.
I didn’t want to talk to either of them. It had always been Downy and Taylor that boys went for in Bellangame. I was the girl they noticed after getting shot down. That hadn’t done any wonders for my self-esteem. But here I had the opposite problem, boys ditching their hometown girls for the dazzle of Los Angeles. Opening the green container on my desk, I lathered my leg in cream. It had a strange smell, yet the pain ebbed and died almost at once.

Did Adriel like me?
That was all I really cared about. He had broken an angelic law to catch me, yet . . . it could have been pity. Pity and nothing more. My heart sank. I was just his lapse. He couldn’t like me that way, not the third choice girl from Bellangame High. And he wasn’t just any guy either, but an impossibly old, beautiful, and mysterious guy.

I
had a lucid dream that night of the strike to earth that never happened. My head cracked on a branch of a tree in the plummet, so I was not aware when my body slammed onto a boulder. Death didn’t come immediately upon impact. For seconds my heart continued to beat, and the pulse of it vibrated to me watching this happen. I stared into my own staring eyes and moved back so the blood seeping from my wounds did not touch my bare feet.

This was as it should have been.
My heart beat once more and quieted forever. The silence spread like a stain around the broken body, moving out farther and farther to mute the sounds of the forest. It was this silence the searchers noticed. I didn’t know the Coopers save Lotus and Zakia, but I saw echoes of their features in relatives searching with flashlights. They looked up when the silence muted their voices and the rustles of their feet over the ground. Then they moved as one to the center of the quiet and found my ruined body. Zakia reached it first. He required no flashlight with his night vision, and the lights from the others darted about as they rushed to me.

It was too late. I was dead.

I watched as my eyes were closed, searchers wiping at their eyes and a stretcher soon coming. Once upon it, the body was covered with a sheet. Then I as the invisible watcher was lifted up, up, up into the trees and above to the road, to float behind the ambulance driving on the curves of Sutter. The sirens weren’t on, nor did the driver go quickly. There was no medical treatment that could help me now.

This was right.
What a sorry end! I had lived seventeen years just to die in Spooner. The body was wheeled into an elevator at the hospital and ferried down to the morgue. A doctor came forward to lift the sheet, and when it fell, I was at my funeral. Looking pale and sick with grief, my parents and grandfather cried in the front row of the chapel. The place was packed, every seat taken and many more people standing in the back. Spooner faces and Bellangame faces mingled, tissues being touched to eyes and shoulders shaking. I watched from above, hating to see everyone in such pain. I shouted at them that I was fine, but they didn’t hear me.

This was the tapestry, the coffin slipping from sunlight into the earth, the clumps of dirt settling on the wood.
My family went to a waiting car, my friends dispersed, and the cemetery workers finished filling in the grave. Still I floated above, watching them leave and wishing they could hear me call out not to be left alone. Grass grew over the dirt of my grave, flowers came and went, the trees in the cemetery lost their leaves and grew them back according to the season. In time, the flowers stopped coming to my grave. I understood that my parents must have died. It was to them I mattered most, and once they were gone, I essentially ceased to exist. This was what had been planned for me originally.

I was no one important.
I wasn’t one of the people who needed a guardian angel, since my life was too small. There was something so devastatingly right about this scene, the lonely grave beneath me. People visited other graves and children played about, occasionally one or two stopping to notice that this was the grave of someone young. They wondered what had happened and returned to their lives. My only life was here in the cemetery, and I watched them go in envy, their world lost to me forever.

When I w
oke up, I got out of bed. It was too much like lying in the coffin. Pulling the feather from the holder, I brought it back into bed with me and fixed my pillows so I was sitting up. No longer did the feather glint with gold, no longer was it so meltingly soft. The barbs were growing stiff, and I knew this would one day look like any other ordinary feather. That was sad.

Sleeping that way, I
woke with a sore neck. After using the cream again on my leg, I swiped some on my neck as well. Whatever Lotus had put in this cream was effective. The pain faded to gentle tweaks and those evanesced altogether. I turned my neck slowly to stretch it and heard a crack of something settling back into place. Then I walked out the door to head to school.

I still had the sun.
The Jessa in that dream, in the woven tapestry was cold in the ground. But the real one in this new tapestry felt the warmth on her cheeks. And this might be the wrong thread, the wrong weaving, but it felt right, too.

I got to school without remembering a single turn
or light. Pulling into an open spot, I lifted my backpack off the passenger seat and thought of how hard it was to go from the glory of the fairy rings to the humdrum of Spooner High School. I had the radio set to an instrumental station, and I listened to the rest of the piece that was playing before I got out. It was there within the flute in this song, the faintest remnant of what I’d experienced, and it was gone in a flash.

When I stepped up to the curb,
Nash materialized out of nowhere to peer at me through his bangs. “Hey, how are you doing? Why didn’t you call me back last night?”

“I fell asleep early,” I lied.

He grinned and followed me to my locker. “But where were you? Your grandfather said you weren’t home.”

“I just went for a drive
.”

“You should take someone along who knows the area!
There are all sorts of sweet spots around Spooner like the miniature golf place behind Dovey’s Athletics-” He jabbered on as I walked to first period, wishing for him to go away. I wondered if Savannah or London liked him especially, and if there was a way to subtly push them together. That would take more matchmaking finesse than I had. I hadn’t even dated in Bellangame. Boys looked right through me to the shinier girls.

“See you after class!” Nash shouted when the minute bell rang.
I sat down at my desk in irritation. Mr. Rogers spent the first part of class talking about the importance of eating breakfast, and how he’d had bacon and scrambled eggs.

Bacon.

Pork.

Swine flu
, I thought, and wiped down my hands with anti-bacterial cream. I didn’t think that was how it transmitted between people, but the mental association was one I couldn’t shake. Ugh. I should have bought the bigger container of hand cream, considering how many times in the day I was going to have to use it. My parents would come back to Bellangame with suntans and I was going to come back a pale ghost in full OCD meltdown.

When the bell rang, I shot out the door to beat Nash’s arrival and was safely ensconced in second by the time he appeared at the window.
I stared intently at my textbook until he went away.

The second hand went around the clock with excruciating slowness
through the period. Not wanting to spend the day dodging Nash, I decided to cut. If anyone caught me on the way out, I’d play up my leg. Why not? It looked worse than it felt, and I might as well milk the accident for what it was worth. And what I really wanted was some time to be alone, to think about the dream and reality. I didn’t have energy for school now.

I had just
gotten to the door of my mail truck when a silver racecar pulled in to a spot near mine. A smile broke out unbidden upon my lips to see Adriel, who looked up in surprise when I bent to the window and tapped. He rolled it down and called, “Not in the mood for school?”

“So not in the mood,” I said.
He dressed so nicely for high school.

“Me neither.
Hop in, if you want.”

If I
wanted
? I wouldn’t even have accepted a third ticket to my parents’ cruise around the world over this. Letting myself in, I clicked the seatbelt as he pulled back out and drove to the outlet of the parking lot. This never would have worked at Bellangame, proctors stationed around the school to make sure no one made a break for freedom, but Spooner High didn’t monitor its students as closely unless it concerned the restrooms.

“Where to?” Adriel asked.

“Anywhere,” I said. He slowed at the outlet and I looked over the grass to see that this had not gone unnoticed. Easton and Savannah were there cutting to another building, and that meant Nash was going to know by lunchtime at the latest. It might give him a hint that I wasn’t interested. I could only hope.

“Cadmon came back last night,” Adriel said once we were on the road.

“I’m glad,” I said. “But you can see that, can’t you? You see my soul.”

“With angel
ic sight, I can see almost anyone. It isn’t mind-reading though, I promise.”

Gesturing to a bicyclist riding hard down th
e tree-lined road, I said, “What do you see in him?”

Adriel
reduced his speed and craned his neck to get a better look at the man. “Heavy shielding. I don’t know what it concerns unless I know him, talk to him some at least, but the amount . . . I would tell you to stay away, if you asked. Every human on this planet has some degree of shielding; it’s a matter of degree.” He edged out to the center of the lane to give the bicyclist more room, since there was little shoulder on the road. “So it was vengeance. I can’t believe he told you. But that makes it easier for us.”

“How so?”

“To understand. An angel’s primary obligation is to guard. It’s a sacred task. Drina was passive, allowing the death of her entrusted soul, but vengeance means that Cadmon brought about the death himself. To actively seek a charge’s death . . . to wield the blade . . .” Adriel checked in the rearview mirror, his expression one of incredulity. “It’s anathema to everything we are.”

The
car slid to a stop at a red light. I asked, “Do you know how hard it is to look at him and not see a child?”

“
That was just his form for his last soul, and the one he will have to spend eternity within as I will spend eternity in this one. This morning he got up and hid everyone’s keys. He does that sometimes. I think it’s his way of saying he wants us all to stay home. But Taurin put these on our rings-” Adriel poked at a black fob dangling from his key ring, “-and they send out a signal to our computers. They aren’t very good at long-range, but so far he’s just hidden them around the house.”

“Thwarted,” I said.
“Where were they?”

“Tucked in a dark corner under the kitchen sink.
We would never have found them without these. Breakfast?” He turned into a drive to a charming diner called Sweet Touches, with flowers bursting from every corner. It wasn’t a place I expected to see in Spooner.

The inside of the restaurant was just as cute, with little vases of flowers at every table and a tiny gift shop.
The hostess came over to the podium and greeted Adriel in a familiar way. She was in her early twenties and very pretty. Looking me up and down, she said to him flirtatiously, “Is this a cousin of yours?”

It was plain s
he knew I wasn’t his cousin, and I sensed she just wanted to establish that she saw him all the time while I was new to the scene. Her shirt was low-cut, and when she leaned forward on the podium, it dipped even lower. Adriel spoke in a polite voice. “She’s a friend of mine from school.”

“Well, follow me,” she said exclusively to him.
Her hips swayed back and forth as we went through the tables. She was making sure that Adriel noticed her short skirt with the purple fringe swishing over her thighs.

Once we were seated in a corner booth
and she had gone back to the front to greet more people coming in, I couldn’t help but ask, “What do you see in her soul?”

“Fe
ar,” Adriel said. “Every time we come here. That’s how she responds to young women, Kishi included. Even Drina. Like they’re competition for the guys’ attention, and she’s fearful that they will win.”