They’d never make it in time by foot; the long driveway down the ridge took them in the opposite direction from the station. Keys—could he find the keys for Gregory’s car? If he did, he could materialize his fingers and—But what if they wasted all their time looking for keys that Gregory had with him?
“Other way, Philip.” Tristan turned Philip around. It was a dangerous shortcut, but their only chance: the steep and rocky side of the ridge, which dropped to the station below.
After a couple of steps, the cool night air revived Philip. Through the boy’s eyes and ears, Tristan became aware of the night’s silvery shadows and rustling sounds. He too was feeling stronger. At Tristan’s urging, Philip broke into a run across the grass. They raced past the tennis court, then forty yards more toward the boundary of the property, the edge where the land suddenly dropped off.
They were moving faster than a child could have, their powers combined. Tristan didn’t know how long his renewed strength would hold out, and he wasn’t certain that he could get them safely down the steep side of the ridge. It seemed to have taken forever just to get this far.
He felt a moment of resistance as he and Philip climbed the stone wall marking the end of the property.
“I’m not supposed to,” Philip said.
“It’s okay, you’re with me.”
Far below them he could see the train station. To get to it they’d have to climb down a hillside where the only toeholds were the roots of a few dwarfed trees and some narrow ledges of stone, with sheer drops beneath them. Occasionally patches of brush broke through the rocky surface, but mostly it was rutted earth with a cascade of tumbled rocks that would roll at the lightest touch of a foot.
“I’m not scared,” Philip said.
“I’m glad that one of us isn’t.”
They picked their way slowly and carefully down the ridge. The moon had come up late and its shadows were long and confusing. Tristan had to continually check himself, reminding himself that the legs he was using were shorter, the arms unable to reach as far.
They were halfway down when he misjudged. Their jump was too short, and they leaned out too far from a narrow strip of rock. From their ledge, it was a straight drop down twenty-five feet, with nothing but stones to snag them at the bottom before another drop. They teetered. Tristan drew into himself, cloaking his thoughts and instincts, letting Philip take over. It was Philip’s natural sense of balance that saved them.
As they descended, Tristan tried not to think about Ivy, though the image of her head hanging over her shoulder like a limp doll’s kept passing through his mind. And all the while he was aware of time ticking away.
“What is it?” Philip asked, sensing Tristan’s concern.
“Keep going. Tell you later.”
Tristan couldn’t let Philip know how much danger Ivy was in. He cloaked certain thoughts, hiding from Philip’s consciousness both Gregory’s identity and his intentions. He wasn’t sure how Philip would handle the information, whether he’d panic over Ivy or even try to defend Gregory.
They were at the bottom now, racing through the tall grass and weeds, getting tripped up by rocks. Philip’s ankle twisted, but he kept going. Ahead of them was a high wire fence. Through it they saw the station.
The station had two tracks side by side, north-bound and southbound, each with its own platform. The platforms were connected by a high bridge over the tracks. On the southbound side, which was farthest from Philip and Tristan, there was a wooden station house and a parking lot. Tristan knew that the late-night train ran south-bound.
Just as they reached the fence Tristan heard the bells of a town church, tolling once, twice. Two o’clock.
“The fence is awfully high, Tristan.”
“At least it’s not electric.”
“Can we rest?”
Before Tristan could answer, a train whistle sounded in the distance.
“Philip, we have to beat the train!”
“Why?”
“We have to. Climb!”
Philip did, digging his toes into the holes of the wire mesh, stretching and grasping with his fingers, pulling himself up. They were at the top of the fence, twenty feet high. Then Philip jumped. They slammed into the ground and rolled.
“Philip!”
“I thought you had wings. You’re supposed to have wings.”
“Well, you don’t!” Tristan reminded him.
The whistle blew again, closer this time. They ran for the first platform. When they climbed up on it, they could see across the station.
Ivy.
“Something’s wrong with her,” Philip said.
She was standing on the southbound platform, leaning back against a pillar that was at the edge of the platform. Her head was hanging to one side.
“She could fall! Tristan, a train’s coming and—” Philip began to shout. “Ivy! Ivy!”
She didn’t hear him.
“The steps,” Tristan told him.
They raced for them, then across the bridge and down the other side.
They could hear the train rumbling, getting closer. Philip kept calling to her, but Ivy stared across the track, mesmerized. Tristan followed her gaze—then he and Philip froze.
“Tristan? Tristan, where are you?” Philip asked in a panicky voice.
“Here. Right here. I’m still inside you.”
But even to Tristan it looked as if he were out there, on the other side of the track. Tristan stared at the image of himself that stood in the shadows of the northbound platform. The strange figure was dressed in a school jacket, like the one Tristan wore in his photograph, and had an old baseball cap pulled on backward. Tristan stared, as entranced by the figure as Ivy and Philip.
“That’s not me,” he told Philip. “Don’t be fooled. It’s someone else dressed like me.” Gregory, he said to himself.
“Who is it? Why’s he dressed like you?”
They saw a pale hand move out of the shadows into the clear moonlight. The figure beckoned to Ivy, encouraging her, drawing her across the track.
The train was rushing toward them now, its headlight whitening the track beneath them, its whistle blasting in a final warning.
Ivy paid no attention to it. She was drawn to the hand like a moth to a flickering fire. It kept reaching out to her. She suddenly reached out her own hand and took a step forward.
“Ivy!” Tristan shouted—Philip shouted. “Ivy! Ivy, don’t!”
KISSED BY AN ANGEL
SOULMATES
P3-1
With her chin held high and her cloud of curly blond hair tossed back from her face, Ivy shut the school counselor’s door and walked down the hall. Several guys from the swim team turned to stare as she moved toward her locker. Ivy forced herself to return their glances and to look confident. The pants and top she wore for the first day of the school year had been selected by Suzanne, her oldest friend and fashion expert. Too bad Suzanne didn’t pick out a matching bag to go over my head, Ivy thought. She walked past the senior class bulletin board. People whispered. People pointed her out with small nods. She should have expected it.
Anyone whom Tristan Carruthers had fallen for would be pointed out. Anyone who had been with Tristan the night he was killed would be whispered about. So naturally, anyone who had tried to kill herself because she couldn’t get over Tristan’s death would be pointed to and whispered about and watched very, very carefully. And that was what everyone said about Ivy: brokenhearted, she had taken some pills, then tried to throw herself in front of a train.
She could remember only the brokenhearted part, the long summer after the car accident, the nightmares with the deer crashing through the windshield. Three weeks ago she’d had another of her nightmares and had woken up screaming. All she could recall from that night was being comforted by her stepbrother, Gregory, then falling asleep, looking at Tristan’s photo. That photo, her favorite picture of Tristan, in which he was wearing his old school jacket and a baseball cap backward o
n his head, haunted her now. It had haunted her even before she’d heard her little brother’s strange account of that night.
Philip’s story of an angel saving her hadn’t convinced her family or the police that this wasn’t a suicide attempt And how could she deny taking a drug that had shown up in the hospital’s blood tests? How could she argue against the train engineer’s statement to the police that he wouldn’t have been able to stop in time?
“Chick, chick, chick.” A soft quivering voice interrupted Ivy’s thoughts. “Who wants to play chick, chick, chick?”
He was calling to her from the shadowy space beneath the stairs. Ivy knew it was Gregory’s best friend, Eric Ghent She kept on walking.
“Chick, chick, chick …”
When she didn’t react he emerged from the dark stairwell, looking like a skeleton startled out of his tomb. His wispy blond hair lay in strings across his high forehead, and his eyes looked like pale blue marbles set in bony sockets. Ivy had not seen Eric for the last three weeks; she suspected that Gregory had kept his jeering friend away from her.
Now Eric moved quickly enough to block her path. “Why didn’t you do it?” he asked. “Lose your nerve? Why didn’t you go ahead and kill yourself?”
“Disappointed?” Ivy asked back.
“Chick, chick, chick,” he said softly, tauntingly.
“Leave me alone, Eric.” Ivy walked faster.
“Uh-uh. Not now.” He grabbed her wrist, his thin fingers wrapping tightly around her arm. “You can’t blow me off now, Ivy. You and I have too much in common.”
“We have nothing in common,” she replied, pulling away from him.
“Gregory,” he said, tapping one of his fingers. “Drugs.” He ticked off a second item. “And we’re both champions of the game of chicken.” He grabbed a third finger and wiggled it. “We’re buddies now.”
Ivy kept walking, though she wanted to run. Eric bobbed along with her.
“Tell your good buddy,” he said, “what made you want to do it? What were you thinking when you saw that train rushing down the track at you? Were you stoked? What kind of trip was it?”
Ivy felt repulsed by his questions. It seemed impossible to think she would have deliberately jumped in front of the train. She had lost Tristan, but there were still people in her life she cared deeply about—Philip, her mother, Suzanne and Beth, and Gregory, who had protected her and comforted her after Tristan’s death. Gregory had been through a lot himself, his mother having committed suicide the month before Tristan died. Ivy had seen the pain and anger caused by that death, and it seemed totally crazy to her that she would try the same thing.
But everyone said she had. Gregory said so.
“How many times do I have to tell you? I can’t remember what happened that night, Eric. I can’t.”
“But you will,” he said with a quiet laugh. “Sooner or later, you will.”
Then he stepped away from her and turned back, like a dog that had reached the end of its territory. Ivy continued toward her and her friends’ lockers, ignoring more curious stares. She hoped that Suzanne and Beth were finished with their senior orientation meetings.
Ivy didn’t need to look at the locker numbers to find Suzanne Goldstein’s new nesting place. Suzanne wasn’t there, but the locker was being fumigated with an open bottle of her favorite perfume, which guided Ivy—and all guys interested in leaving Suzanne a note—directly to the spot. Suzanne had found three new guys to date recently, but Beth and Ivy knew it was just a ploy to make Gregory jealous.
Beth Van Dyke’s locker, which was close to Ivy’s this year, already had a piece of paper sticking out of it, but it probably wasn’t a note from an admiring hunk. More likely, she had shut the door on a scrap of a steamy romance, one of the many that filled her notebooks.
Ivy went ahead to her own locker to drop off her new books. Kneeling down, she dialed the combination and pulled open the door. She gasped. Taped inside her door was a photograph of Tristan, the same picture that had haunted her for the past three weeks. For a moment she couldn’t breathe. How had it gotten there?
Frantically she recalled everything she had done that morning: roll call in homeroom, then a general assembly, then the school store, and finally a meeting with the counselor. She ran over the list twice, but she couldn’t remember taping the photo to the door. Was she really losing her mind?
Ivy closed her eyes and leaned against the door. I’m crazy, she thought. I’m really crazy.
“Am I nuts, Gregory?” she had asked three weeks earlier as she stood in her bedroom on her first day home from the hospital. She held Tristan’s photograph in her trembling hands. Gregory gently took the picture away from her, giving it to Philip, her nine-year-old savior.
“You’re going to get better, Ivy. That much I’m sure of,” Gregory said, drawing her down on the bed next to him, putting his arm around her.
“Meaning I’m crazy now.”
Gregory didn’t answer right away. She had noticed the change in him when he came to see her at the hospital. His dark hair was combed perfectly, as always, and his handsome face was like a mask, just as it had been when she first met him, his light gray eyes hiding his deepest thoughts.
“It’s a hard thing to understand, Ivy,” he said carefully. “It’s hard to know exactly what you were thinking at the time.” He glanced over at Philip, who was setting the framed photo on the bureau. “And Philip’s story sure doesn’t help much.”
Her brother responded with a stubborn glare.
“Maybe now that no one else is around, you can tell us what really happened, Philip,” Gregory said.
Philip glanced up at the two empty shelves where Ivy’s collection of angels had once stood. He had the statues now. Ivy had given them to him on the condition that he would never again talk about angels.
“I already told you.”
“Try again,” Gregory said, his voice low and tense.
“Please, Philip.” Ivy reached out for his hand. “It’ll help me.”
He let her hold his hand loosely. She knew he was tired of being interrogated, first by the police, then by the doctors at the hospital, then by their mother and Gregory’s father, Andrew.
“I was sleeping,” Philip told her. “After you had your nightmare, Gregory said he’d stay with you. I was asleep again. But then I heard somebody calling me. I didn’t know who it was at first. He told me to wake up. He said you needed help.”
Philip stopped, as if that were the end of the story.
“And?”
He glanced up at the empty shelves, then pulled away from her.
“Go on,” Ivy prompted.
“You’re just going to yell at me.”
“No, I won’t,” she said. “And neither will Gregory.” She gave Gregory a warning look. “Just tell us what you remember.”
“You heard a voice in your head,” Gregory said, “and it was telling you that Ivy needed help. The voice sounded something like Tristan’s.”
“It was Tristan,” Philip insisted. “It was angel Tristan!”
“Okay, okay,” Gregory said.
“Did this voice tell you why I was in trouble?” Ivy asked. “Did the voice tell you where I was?”
He shook his head. “Tristan said to put on my shoes, go down the stairs, and go out the back door. Then we ran across the yard to the stone wall. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go over it, but Tristan said it was okay because he was with me.”
Ivy could feel Gregory’s body tense next to hers, but she nodded encouragingly to Philip.
“It was scary, Ivy, climbing down the ridge. It was hard to hold on. The rocks were real slippery.”
“It’s impossible,” Gregory said, sounding frustrated and perplexed. “A kid couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have done it.”
“I had Tristan with me,” Philip reminded him.
“I don’t know how you got to the station, Philip,” Gregory said heatedly, “but I’m tired of this Tristan story. I don’
t want to hear it again.”
“I do,” Ivy said quietly, and heard Gregory draw in his breath. “Go on,” she said.
“When we got to the bottom, we still had to get over another fence. I asked what was going on, but Tristan wouldn’t tell me. He just said we had to help you. So I started climbing, then I kind of messed up. I thought because Tristan was an angel we could fly”—Gregory got up and started pacing around the bedroom—“but we couldn’t, and we fell off the top of this high fence.”
Ivy glanced down at her brother’s wrapped ankle. His knees were cut and bruised.
“Then we heard the train whistle. And we had to keep going. When we got closer we saw you on the platform. We shouted to you, Ivy, but you didn’t hear us. We ran up the steps and over the bridge. That’s when we saw the other Tristan. The one in the cap and jacket, just like in your picture,” he said, pointing to it.
Ivy shivered.
“So,” Gregory said, “angel Tristan is in two places now—with you, and on the other side of the tracks as well. He’s playing a trick on Ivy, calling her over to him. It wasn’t a very nice trick.”
“Tristan was with me,” Philip said.
“Then who was across the tracks?” Gregory asked.
“A bad angel,” Philip replied with complete certainty. “Someone who wanted Ivy to die.”
Gregory blinked.
Ivy sank back against her headboard. As bizarre as Philip’s story sounded, it seemed more real to her than the idea that she had taken drugs and thrown herself in front of a train. And the fact remained that somehow her brother had gotten there and he had pulled her back at the last moment. The engineer had seen the blur in front of his train and radioed in that he could not stop in time.
“I thought you saw Tristan,” Philip said.
“What?” Ivy asked.
“You turned around. I thought you saw his light.” Philip gazed at her hopefully.
Ivy shook her head. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anything from the train station.”
Kissed by an Angel/The Power of Love/Soulmates Page 29