Earth Angel (22 page)

When they reached earth’s solar system, Elle slowed their descent, and Abby saw her home planet, small and fragile and precious. Beneath its violent surface of cyclones and earthquakes and volcanic upheaval and the equal violence of life-forms competing for survival, she saw pure light emerging. The vegetation, the rocks, the rivers, the oceans, the atmosphere—even the concrete and steel cities—were alive with an energy and a light that was uniquely earth, but mixed with a spark of angelic light, a spark that was bubbling laughter and bliss, undimmed by human darkness. Earth would survive on its own, but it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t have that angelic presence. And that was a loss she didn’t want to live to see.

* * *

Elle skimmed the surface of the ocean, weaving among ice floes as she and a few friends trailed a pod of humpback whales who rose and fell like dark shadows in the Antarctic twilight.

“I was hoping that putting Abigail on the bridge would zap some sense into her,” Elle told the others, “but no such luck.”

“It was a good idea,” Artemisia reassured her.

Tatiana, who rarely voiced an opinion, spoke up. “We need to recall her. Now.”

“We should check the bridge first,” Sapphire said. “We should count the nodes. With Sidonie and Hortense dead, we’re two angels short now. Even if we recall Abby, if the bridge didn’t adapt, we’ll never be able to position one angel at each node. There’ll be two empty nodes.”

 And if they didn’t have the right number of nodes, they were stuck. What a sickening thought.

“Of course the bridge adapted,” said Artemisia.

“We don’t know that,” Sapphire said.

“It wouldn’t hurt to check,” Elle said. “I don’t trust that alien technology.”

“We could never have built this bridge without it,” Artemisia said.

Elle sighed. “I know. I just wish we understood how it worked.” The bridge was a perpetual nuisance. It had never been completely stable. They knew how to use it and how to fix it, but even eons ago, when it was originally built, they’d never understood its inner workings. That was what came of using leftover parts left behind by a vanished alien race.

She called out to all the other angels through their mental link. Thousands of them responded and they all went out and canvassed the bridge to count the nodes. The number of nodes matched the number of angels, including Abigail Vogel as well as all the other incarnated angels who had already made it back to the Realm. At least that part of the bridge was functioning as expected. As long as the number of nodes matched the number of angels, they could fix it.

* * *

After what she’d seen, Abby doubted everyday earthbound existence was ever going to feel the same. Her body felt heavy, like gravity was pulling on her too hard, and the spa’s lounge made her claustrophobic. It felt strange to be at work. She wanted to escape the spa and get back out there, into the sky, into the colors and the wind and the speed. She wanted the excitement of it. She wanted the sheer sense of awe. She just…wanted.

She told Gwynne she was taking a break, then hiked through the parking lot and into the woods to Angel Rock in search of Elle.

She didn’t have to wait long. Elle materialized as a ball of light high in the clouds and tumbled from the sky, slowing only at the last split second before she crashed into the rock. She morphed into winged shape, unhurt.

“Are you ready to help?” Elle sounded impatient.

“I was thinking—” Abby began.

“The bridge didn’t kill you on contact. What further proof do you need?”

“You said the bridge intersects this dimension, and obviously I was able to travel on it even though I’m human. So why can’t I fix it now? You know, without killing myself?”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way.”

“Will you at least try it my way?” Gwynne would probably be mad that she was considering helping at all, but this way had to be safe. She’d been on the bridge. This would be no different. And she had to try. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t at least try.

“All the other incarnated angels have already reverted to angel form,” Elle informed her.

Abby shifted uncomfortably. So she was the only one left. That explained the pressure. “I think this is a good compromise.”

“You can’t help in human form. You won’t resonate with us.”

“You don’t know that for sure. All you know is what worked before.”

Elle spun slowly around the boulder. “This is not a good idea. There’s no telling how the bridge will react. Or how your body might react. It could be dangerous for you, for all of us.”

“Would it really hurt anyone else?” She didn’t want to harm them. They were her friends. And if Elle and Sapphire were right, they were more than her friends—they were once her family, her community, her world.

“I don’t know. Perhaps not.” Elle paused. “To be honest, it’s highly unlikely.”

“I’m willing to risk it if you are,” Abby said.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea.”

“But you want me to die. And the bridge is already damaged. What’s the harm in trying?”

Elle spun around herself, throwing off a flurry of sparks, then stopped. “Fine. If this is how you choose to kill yourself, fine. Just try not to make the bridge any worse while you’re at it, okay?”

Abby was besieged by second thoughts. She’d assumed Elle would be happy if the bridge killed her, considering her death seemed to be Elle’s main goal. But she wasn’t. Was there something Elle wasn’t telling her?

“You really think this will kill me?”

Elle seemed to deflate. “Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll link up, your body won’t have the right angelic frequency, nothing will happen. It’ll all be a big waste of time.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“I don’t know for sure,” Elle agreed.

She should call Gwynne, tell her what she’d decided to do. But she couldn’t, because she was mesmerized by the warm breeze that blew around her, ruffling her hair, and by a song that hovered at the edge of her awareness, a song of incredible longing. The breeze whisked her off the ground and into the sky, and she was caught in a dizzying, familiar whirlwind.

Gwynne. She didn’t get a chance to tell her, to say goodbye, just in case this didn’t work.

But it would work. She wasn’t going to die, and if she had told her what she was up to, Gwynne would have tried to stop her. And if she didn’t make it back—which she wasn’t going to think about because that wasn’t going to happen—Gwynne would figure out what she’d done. Heck, Gwynne could ask the angels. They’d tell her.

And her grandparents, they would miss her. They’d never understand the truth, though. She hoped Gwynne would make up some explanation for her disappearance that would make sense to them. Not that they needed one. They’d assume she’d followed in her mother’s irresponsible footsteps, just like they always warned her not to. Just one more irresponsible choice in a long history of skipping class and driving too fast and being friends with troubled classmates and donating the boring, fugly, age-appropriate dresses her grandmother spent good money on to the church’s homeless without permission. Not to mention dropping out of college and failing to get a real job with health benefits.

They wouldn’t understand that this time, she really was trying to do the responsible thing.

Chapter Sixteen

They stood in the void in complete darkness. It was silent, so profoundly silent and empty that Abby couldn’t feel where her body’s edges were. She had no edges—her awareness seemed to stretch out toward infinity.

After a time—once she remembered she had feet, had a body—she realized her feet were on a surface. She was standing on the bridge.

Out of the darkness, angels appeared like points of light, lining up along the bridge span as far as she could see in either direction, lighting up the void. They took each other’s hands, linking up, and as energy currents began to flow from one angel to the next, the angels became brighter, shining like pure, transparent crystals, each a slightly different shade along the spectrum—yellow sapphire, citrine quartz, topaz, amber, copper, gold—each one a dazzling, brilliant complement to the whole.

“Each angel stands at a node,” Elle explained in a hushed voice. “The number of nodes evolves over time, always one per angel, always attuned to our exact number. When all of us are linked, our combined energy forms a wave that returns the bridge to its normal state.”

Elle and Sapphire had volunteered to take the most dangerous positions, standing on either side of Abby. She was the weak link in the chain, and no one knew what would happen with a weak link. They’d never had one before.

Sapphire took her hand, and then Elle. And then…nothing.

“I told you this wasn’t going to work.” Elle started to pull her hand away.

But before she broke contact, for a fraction of an instant, the link flickered through Abby, connecting her to all the other angels. In that instant, she felt their emotions flow through her and knew they loved her with a love beyond all reason. They missed her. They wanted her to be with them. They were her family, the family she never felt her grandparents, although they loved her too, quite gave, because there was always that undercurrent of disapproval, that unspoken reminder that she was unstable and her mother was irresponsible and her father was scum.

In that instant, her heart filled with love for all these countless trillions of light-filled beings whose capacity for love outstripped anything human. The immense power of it was overwhelming. Her heart felt like it couldn’t expand to hold it all. Time stretched out and that fraction of an instant lasted an eternity.

She clutched Elle’s hand and reached for the link with all her heart, desperate not to let it go. It called to her, pulled at her, made it hard to think. She wanted to join the angels right now, for real. She could do it. She could cut the lifeline that kept her away from them. This was where she belonged, inside this supernova where love was pure and fearless and unconditional.

She gripped Sapphire’s and Elle’s hands, but they released her, and the fragile link flickered away.

Her nerves screamed in shock and her heart seized up in agony at being cut off from her glimpse of who she was meant to be, at losing that beautiful connection, at being deprived of that light. She doubled over and fell into Sapphire’s arms.

* * *

Gwynne padded to her kitchen in her pajamas to wash some breakfast lettuce and carrots for the vegetarians in the house. The kitten rubbed against her ankles to remind her the carnivores needed to eat too, nearly tripping her in her enthusiasm. Gwynne filled the kitten’s bowl and took the veggies to the living room where the guinea pig and rabbit cages sat on tall tables out of the kitten’s reach, far from any feline launching pad. She stopped.

Crap. She crept closer to the guinea pig’s cage.

“Pigness!” she gasped, cooing and covering her mouth.

Apple, who had not looked pregnant when she took her in, but had recently developed quite the suspicious don’t-look-at-me, I-swallowed-a-couple-of-golf-balls bulge, was cuddled in a corner of her previously solitary cage with three furry, bright-eyed babies.

* * *

No one knew what she’d done. No one knew how close Abby had come to doing something they wouldn’t understand. Something they’d condemn. As she tuned her harp, she glanced up every once in a while past Gwynne’s unstaffed desk to scan the handful of clients waiting in the lounge, but no one was paying any attention to her. She was sure someone would sense her brush with angelkind just by looking at her, and yet, no one said anything. Because no one could tell.

Gwynne rushed in, late for work, and didn’t say a word. Because even Gwynne couldn’t tell. Of course, Gwynne was probably trying her best to ignore her.

Gwynne tossed her bag on the floor under her desk and switched on her two digital picture frames and fiddled with them before returning them to their usual position, back-to-back, one facing her and the other facing out for the guests to see, with a small card positioned in front inviting people to Ask About Adopting a Rabbit. As usual, a slideshow played of her menagerie.

Abby came over to check them out, acting casual. “More rabbit shots? No,” she corrected herself, realizing she’d seen these before. “These are your old ones.”

“Keep watching. The new ones are coming,” Gwynne said. “They’re fun. My guinea pig had babies.”

Abby leaned over the desk and cocked her head upside down to see the photos that faced Gwynne. A family photo was next—a gawky Gwynne in her early teens, curled on a sofa with two white rabbits in her lap next to her sister and her mother. Then came the picture of her garden, with the sun shining on purple asters and a rabbit at the edge of the shot. Then came another rabbit.

“When are the guinea pig pig-tures coming up? These are all rabbits.”

“That’s my sister,” Gwynne bristled.

Oo…kay. Abby refrained from pointing out that her sister had a rabbit on her shoulder. She thought Gwynne knew about this
Where’s Waldo?
rabbit thing.

Maybe not.

The new photos were next. Gwynne paused the slideshow to point out her newest additions. “Here’s Apple, the mom, and the babies—Nittany, Fuji and Apple Jack.”

She expected them to look like naked rats, but instead they were tiny little bundles of fur, all redheads like their mother, each with its own unique pattern of white patches. Their huge brown baby eyes stared right into the camera. “They are so cute.”

Abby shifted so her hair, hanging upside down, didn’t block Gwynne’s view. As she did, her hair swept against Gwynne’s extended forearm. They both froze.

Gwynne wanted to be
friends
, and maybe for being friends, leaning over the desk was too flirtatious, but it was hard to keep her distance when it felt so comfortable not to. Gwynne had been pretty clear, though, that she didn’t want her to touch her.

Abby straightened and pretended nothing had happened. “Hoping someone here will want to adopt them?”

“They’re not ready to leave their mother yet. But when they are…I don’t know. I’m thinking I might keep them myself.”