CHAPTER 12: JOURNEY
Lurking in the shadows was a pale face, his blazing eyes on fire. His glare was aimed toward a woman who seemed to be glowing a pearly white: her eyes, her hair, her skin. Everything about her was sparkling and shining.
The two were communicating, their mouths moving, but I heard no sound. A man stepped from the shadows to show a strong build and black hair. He wore the Nebulous Sun around his neck, which rested on his chest. His jaw was tight, his features strikingly handsome, but his clothes were from another time period—an ancient time. He was not like the Shadow who seized me in my office. His features were human.
They were arguing, and they transmitted the intensity of their power and skill. Light flashed between them, and magical shields flew up as they both deflected the energy. Another woman, luminous and authoritative, joined the other. Now it was two against one. More light flashed between the group, yet I was unable to see the outcome.
My focus was fading.
“Abelie?” My head snapped to the left to see who was calling my name.
It was Andrew, terror in his eyes. “Run,” he shouted. His face was lined and grief-stricken.
The women turned to face me, their white eyes macabre. I stepped back and fell to the ground, tripping over something. My hands slipped on a wet substance, and when I glanced down, I saw golden blood leaking from the body I had fallen over. It was like a molten river. My heart pounded in my chest so violently I thought it would jump out my throat. The women swept sinuously toward me, their stance threateningly close. Andrew flew through the air like a bullet, his eyes thundering his rage. The women turned on him and struck him down.
“No!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Tears descended my face, leaving gold stains on my white dress. Andrew’s hand reached toward mine, but I couldn’t grasp it. I was too far away. A force pulled me backward, away from the dying angel.
“Gabriella,” a soft, frantic voice sounded in my ear. “Gabriella? Please come back to me. You’re all right. We’re safe.”
I was in the dark, my eyes closed tightly, tears finding their way out from under my lids. Warm arms were around me, a steady hand sweeping my hair from my moist face. He spoke light and fast, a liquid language spilling from his tongue. I took a breath as if I’d been holding air in my lungs for an hour and blinked my eyes open.
Andrew’s face was only inches from mine, a tortured expression displayed there. His hand swept along my chin and up to my ear. “I was worried,” he whispered. “You were sending sparking jolts through my body. I’d felt them from you before, but this was intense. I could feel what you were feeling.”
He hugged me to his chest before lessening his grip so I could see him again. “You screamed, and it was as if lightning blew from your fingertips.”
The bus was quiet, and I craned my neck to look around. Everyone was conveniently looking away from us.
“The bus isn’t functioning anymore.” His eyes darted up toward the front before swinging back to my face. “It seems your gift has disabled it.”
I sat up quickly, and my head spun. “Ugh.” I made a noise and put my hand to my forehead as if it would stop the spinning. It felt like I had drunk half a bottle of alcohol. “Where are we?” I looked out the window, the darkness spreading out like a creeping shadow.
“Nowhere,” he answered. “The man said another bus is on its way to take us to Boise City.”
I stood and quickly lost my balance. Andrew steadied me. My breath whooshed from my mouth, and I fell back toward my seat.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” I mumbled. In the dream, it was as if I had been someone else. I tried to remember the name I had heard, but I couldn’t grasp it. “My dream was so real, and I thought you were—” I cut myself off.
“Thought I was . . . ?”
“It’s nothing. Just a nightmare.” I looked down at my hands twisting in my lap.
His hand seized mine to stop the movement. Voltage shot between us as if he were taking some of my tension away.
“I may not know this new world, but humans have not changed since I was last alive. It’s something,” he said with certainty. “You can trust me, but I understand if you don’t.”
“That’s not it at all.” I looked into his golden eyes. “I do trust you, more than I’ve trusted anyone in my life.” I could hear the conviction and awe in my own voice. “You saved my life. I thought I was going to die, and you jumped from a plane with me in your arms.” Hero worship? You bet.
Somehow, in the plane, he had woken at the last second and flown in like the angel he was and saved me. What made me more deserving than the others who didn’t make it? I didn’t see the difference, but the angels did. I had to make sure he knew that because of his bravery, I trusted him. “I owe you my life,” I murmured as I stared down at my feet.
He was silent. I wanted him to say something. Anything.
His finger lifted my chin to his angelic face. “No, I owe you my life.” His smoldering eyes backed up his proclamation.
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, you did,” he stated, exasperated. “Don’t you understand? I was dead until you released me. You saved me from my tomb.”
“How’s that possible? Tell me. What happened on the plane?” I needed answers. Karen and the Elders hadn’t known how to wake the angels, and yet here was Andrew telling me that it was I who had woken them.
He exhaled in exasperation. “You don’t see how amazing you truly are.”
“All I did was nearly plummet to my death,” I said wryly.
He held my chin again so I had to look directly into his eyes. His grip was firm. “Your cry to save Karen’s life, to save your friends, overwhelmed any thought to save yourself. Whatever spell was on us broke immediately, shook us from our prisons, and brought us to you. We all knew instantly that we were meant to protect you, save you, make you safe again.” He grabbed both of my hands and brought them close to him. “I was so afraid, so utterly scared that we’d be too late. We were falling out of the sky, and all I could think about was getting to you. It was as if my existence would have been worthless if I didn’t stop you from . . .” he trailed off. He seemed unable to say the word “dying.”
“So it was me who woke you?” I whispered under my breath. “I still don’t understand how.”
His lips quirked into a knowing smile. “Your death was coming to light. You’re the Illuminator. The one who will stop the darkness, the one who will save us. It was foretold long ago that the Halo of the Sun would protect the luminous one: you,” he pointed out. “And my coming back? Well, I was meant to protect you. No spell could bind us from our sacred duty to you.
“But that isn’t all that brought us back. It was your selflessness that did it. You had to prove you were worth saving.” His smile grew, and he kissed the tops of my hands. His lips lingered there for a few seconds longer than I would have expected, and he looked up to gauge my reaction. I shivered, and he let go.
I shook my head, first to shake off the feeling that his kiss had given me, and second to make sense of everything he had said. Sometimes he seemed to have trouble telling me things in a way I could understand. “If you say so,” was the only coherent thing I could come up with.
“You’re worth saving,” he said as he leaned his head back against the seat. “Ehno informs me that the next bus is near.”
“That’s a relief.”
He lightly laughed. “Which statement?”
“Both, I guess.”
Lights flooded through the windows of the bus, and for a second my heart flickered uselessly in my chest. Was it the FBI finally coming to capture us? Would we be taken away and placed in the same prison that Ehno and Lucia were in? Andrew saw my stricken look and said, “It’s the other bus.”
My heartbeat slowed.
“Are you worried? Your heart was fluttering like humming bird wings.”
He could hear that? Heat filled my cheeks.
> “You’re new to this world,” I said. “Those people, the FBI, they’re a powerful force to be reckoned with. They have military weapons, spies, and undercover agents. This isn’t like a few hundred years ago. Technology has advanced to the point where one small weapon designed by a few could level a city of millions.” I realized I might have gone a little out there with my explanation, but it was all true. Things were different. This wasn’t the world the angels had known before.
Again, he was silent. For a moment I thought I saw fear flash in his eyes, but when I looked at him more closely there was nothing but compassion and loyalty. His bold features were stark in the illuminated bus. The lights made his jaw look chiseled, as if from stone, and his eyes were molten gold. Honestly, he looked like a force to be reckoned with, but when his words came out, they were nothing more than a nervous whisper.
“Millions?”
I nodded. “Now we can talk to someone on the other side of the planet and see their face as if they were two feet away from us. People can fly to any country in the world in planes, and most of us have our own cars. They’re like this bus, but smaller. We have cell phones, so we can talk to anyone we want, anytime, no matter where we are.” I watched him engulf the knowledge. “They’re great, you know, when you’re at the grocery store and you forget if your sister wants the baked chips or the Cheetos.” I smiled, knowing he had no idea what I was talking about.
“We were on a plane when I saved you,” he stated, as if working out a math problem. “But it was falling from the sky, and that’s when I awoke.”
I nodded.
“And you can really see someone on the other side of the world and talk to them?”
“Yes.” I’d always wondered what it’d be like to meet someone who was completely oblivious to technology. Here was my first glimpse. “And we’ve discovered things too. We discovered the world is round, or a geoid to be more accurate.”
“I can fly,” he said simply.
Like I wasn’t aware of that fact. “I know.”
“Well, I could tell that the Earth was not, in fact, flat. Some people were idiots back in the day,” he reminisced, grinning.
“Excuse me,” the bus driver said over the light chatter of the nine people on the bus. “The other bus has arrived. Thank you for being patient.”
We watched as the others stood to exit. Andrew got to his feet and held out his hand. I grasped his palm and that same current raced between us. He raised an eyebrow at me as I lifted myself up.
“What?” I whispered.
He tried to hold back a smile. “Nothing.”
“Uh huh,” I said, looking at his striking features. It was hard not to be aware of his attractiveness. “It’s something.”
“That’s what I said.”
We sat in companionable silence during the rest of our journey to Boise City, which was not far from where the bus broke down—thanks to my new gift of electricity. We got off the bus, and Andrew stared at the city, which was lit up like a birthday cake.
“We need to find a place to stay,” I whispered.
“Surely there’s an inn around here?” he asked.
“That’s easy enough,” I said, walking toward the bus station. “There should be all kinds of travel magazines and information in here.”
He lifted one brow. “I’ll follow.” His eyes raced around the area in one quick swoop, as if scoping out the place for Shadows lurking in the darkened woods behind the station.
Inside, I found a table full of brochures and magazines, free for the taking. I picked one and sifted through information about the city, restaurants, activities, events, and eventually hotels.
“This one looks decent,” I pointed at the picture. “And look, there’s a coupon for ten percent off.”
Andrew didn’t say anything, and I looked up to see him touching one of the pictures on the cover of a magazine. His eyes were far away, as if he was thinking of another time.
“Andrew?”
He didn’t look up. “This painting looks so real,” he said in awe. “And the paper . . .”
I tried not to laugh. “That’s not a painting; that’s a photo.”
He looked over at me, questions in his eyes.
“You know: a visual representation,” I said slowly and then trailed off. “It comes from a camera. They’re devices that can capture a moment in time and be printed onto paper.”
“There are a lot of devices in this world,” he stated.
“I agree,” I said and showed him the magazine I held. “Tell me, does this look like an okay place to stay the night?”
He seized the magazine right from under my fingers. “It’s beautiful. Won’t it be expensive? I don’t have any coins.”
I smiled. “I do. It’s only sixty dollars for one night, and look”—I stabbed the coupon—“it says if we bring this in, we get ten percent off.” My eyes scrolled down to the fine print. I should have known, always read the fine print. It said: “Rooms with one king-sized bed.”
I thought Andrew would offer something like “I’ll sleep on the floor,” or “We’ll put pillows between us,” but he didn’t.
His eyes grew wide. “Sixty dollars? That’s preposterous.”
“No,” I whispered. “That’s normal. And we have plenty for the room. I took a few thousand out of my savings before we left Burns.”
“Thousands?” His eyes grew wider. “I’ve always had money; it’s just part of being alive forever. But human women—” he cut off. “To have that much money, you’d have to be rich.”
“No, I’m in the medium income level in America,” I said in the best matter-of-fact tone I could give him.
“And that would be?”
“I believe the average yearly income for a household in the U.S. is roughly fifty thousand.”
His mouth dropped, but he quickly moved on to another subject. “The U.S.?”
“The United States of America.” I rubbed my neck, tired. “I can’t wait to get you to a library.”
“Take me tonight,” he suggested. “I read swiftly.”
“Okay, if I can find one open this late. It’s almost ten in the evening. If there’s a campus nearby . . .” My eyes roamed the many flyers, magazines, and brochures around the table before I saw one with a university in the background.
“Ah hah,” I exclaimed and snatched it up. “Boise State University. Why didn’t I think about this before? I knew the university was here. “We’ll call a cab and go see if their libraries are still open. When I was in college, the libraries on campus stayed open all day and night.” I would know from the many hours I’d studied instead of partying.
“A cab?”
“Andrew, just go with the flow,” I said.
Clearly confused, he asked, “The flow?”
I scrubbed a hand down my face and made a noise of frustration. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be rude, I’m just exhausted.”
He smiled his wonderful smile, completely unaffected. “Gabriella, the only way you could hurt me is by not existing anymore.”
And there goes the blush again. “I’ll call the cab company.”
“Of course. Go with the flow,” he said in his Italian accent. He seemed so innocent for someone so old. I laughed and seized his hand in mine, letting the electricity flow between us, pun intended. The feeling was amazing.
Shadow of the Sun Page 14