Earth Angel

by Siri Caldwell

  But maybe to Elle, whose entire explanation of how the bridge worked was, No one understands it, it’s alien technology, it really was semantics.

  “It doesn’t matter how much energy you can harness,” Elle said, “because earth energy is not what we need. We need angel energy.”

  “That can’t be true,” Gwynne said, taking heart from the shift in Elle’s explanation. Because if the amount of energy wasn’t the issue, but instead it was the type…“Energy is energy, right?”

  “Not in this case,” Elle said.

  “No, listen. Maybe I can’t help on my own, but Abby’s got both a human energy system and an angelic energy system. Her field already knows how to integrate them. She’ll be able to link to me while she’s linked to you, and I’ll read the flow and I’ll push her into alignment with you. I’ll shift her into phase.”

  Abby leaned into her. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Gwynne tightened her grip. “I’m not losing you. Do you hear me? I am not losing you.” She might not have been able to save her mother or her sister, but she could save Abby. And the angels. She’d save them all.

  “Your killing yourself on that bridge is not going to help,” Abby said. “Elle, don’t let her do this.”

  Elle shrugged. “If Gwynne wants to die, she can be my guest.”

  “What?” Abby shrieked.

  “Actually,” Elle said, “there’s a slight chance it might work.”

  Gwynne perked up. “What does that slight chance depend on?”

  “It depends on whether your energy field can handle the energy that flows through the bridge.”

  “I can handle it. It will work.” It was going to have to.

  “A minute ago you said it wouldn’t work,” Abby reminded Elle accusingly.

  “The others have their doubts,” Elle said. “I do too. But you never know.”

  “You never know?” Abby’s voice rose with barely contained hysteria.

  “Whatever gets our bridge fixed.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Gwynne said with more conviction than she felt.

  “Possibly.” Elle drifted toward the ceiling. “Your channels are clear enough, and your vibrational frequency is higher than most people’s.”

  “No.” Abby gripped Gwynne’s arm.

  “If not, I have a backup plan,” Elle said breezily.

  Yes, they all knew about Elle’s charming little backup plan. Gwynne gritted her teeth. “We’re going with my plan.”

  “She’s not going to kill me,” Abby said.

  “That’s optimistic of you,” Gwynne said.

  “Unless she thinks killing you off is going to make me suicidal.”

  Gwynne’s stomach churned. What a thought, that they might be playing into some twisted angelic plan. “Would it?”

  Abby bit her lip. “Of course not.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Elle breathed. Her voice cracked a little, as if she was hurt that they were both angry at her. “I wouldn’t do anything to break your heart.”

  “Thanks,” Abby said gently, sounding like she didn’t want to hurt Elle, either.

  “Which doesn’t mean Gwynne won’t die,” Elle reminded her.

  Not helping. Gwynne almost said it aloud, but caught herself in time. She rubbed Abby’s side and glared at Elle. She needed Abby to not think about what she risked. Thinking would lead to dwelling, and dwelling on the danger to Gwynne’s life would lead to her doing something rash like running off to save the world without her.

  “You signed up for suffering when you volunteered to live as a human,” Elle added.

  Still not helping.

  “And I’d have eternity to get over it?” Abby suggested.

  “Don’t think like that,” Gwynne said.

  Abby leaned her head against Gwynne’s shoulder. “You’re going to do this even if I say no, aren’t you? You’ll find a way to do it without me.”

  “Yeah.” Gwynne buried her fingers in Abby’s hair and held her close. She’d do anything for her.

  “Then let’s do it together.”

  * * *

  “We can’t let her do it. It’s too dangerous,” Artemisia said. She stretched her wings and banked right, circling Elle as they flew over the glittering lakes and hidden caves that dotted the landscape of the Angelic Realm.

  They hit a cross breeze and Elle took an exhilarating breath of crisp, unpolluted air. She tacked into the wind, Artemisia at her side. “I know she’s special to you, Artemisia, but she volunteered. Of her own free will.”

  She’d known Artemisia was going to be upset. They all were. Gwynne had a lot of friends among the angels. A lot of fans. When you spent most of eternity being invisible, it was fun to hang out with someone who could see you.

  “You must have manipulated her.”

  “I didn’t.” Elle flew harder into the wind. “I tried to talk her out of it.”

  Artemisia sighed. Dropped back. Flapped her wings to catch up. “I believe you,” she said. “Gwynne has a mind of her own. There’s no talking to her.”

  Elle couldn’t agree more. “I told Abigail not to date her because I knew Gwynne was going to end up being a problem. I knew she was going to interfere.” Of course, if Elle hadn’t made the bad decision to talk to her in a last-ditch effort to convince Abigail, they wouldn’t be in this awkward situation. It really was not Gwynne’s fault.

  “Maybe I can stop her,” Artemisia said.

  “No,” Elle said quickly. “We’re going to have to use her. We need to fix the bridge before it kills anyone else.”

  “She doesn’t understand what she’s getting into. The bridge will kill her!”

  Elle fell in beside her. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  Artemisia crumpled. “My brave girl. I should be proud that she wants to help.”

  “It’ll be dangerous for her, but it might work.”

  “And if it doesn’t, she’s dead.” Artemisia shuddered and the wind swept her away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Gwynne stowed her suitcase in the trunk of their rental car at the Albuquerque airport and reached for Abby’s carry-on.

  “Did Elle tell you how far it is?” Abby asked.

  “Would have been nice.” All she knew was they were supposed to drive north to Santa Fe and then on toward Taos until someone bright and shiny showed up to navigate.

  She’d assumed they would access the bridge from Piper Beach as Abby had, but Elle said Angel Rock was just a jumping-off spot, something that was safe to tether in populated areas because it didn’t harm humans who accidentally came in contact with it. They couldn’t use it in this case. For Gwynne to be involved, they had to travel to one of the four places on earth where the bridge was anchored so that Gwynne, who could not safely touch the bridge, could stand on the ground yet be within arm’s length of it. That meant they were headed for New Mexico, which was far, far easier to reach than the Sahara or the singing sand dunes of China or the virtually impossible to get to anchor in Antarctica.

  Leaning into the backseat, Abby strapped a seat belt around her harp, a small squat one that fit in the airplane’s overhead luggage compartment. She’d insisted on bringing it, saying she’d feel naked without it.

  “I’ll drive,” Abby said, her head inside the car and her backside wiggling flirtatiously.

  “I don’t think so.” There was no way Abby had already forgotten her name was not on the rental agreement, or why it wasn’t there. She liked the wiggle, though.

  Abby emerged from the back and shut the door. “I only speed when it’s safe. And I never go as fast as I really want to.”

  Gwynne was sure that was true, but what happened when a strung-out kid like her sister ran into the street without looking, or a woman broke a high heel and stood hopping on one leg in the middle of the road, or a deer leaped across the highway? Were angels going to pluck those pedestrians and randy deer out of the path of an oncoming car, just because Abby was driving? No, they were not.

&
nbsp; “I’m driving,” Gwynne said.

  “I’ve never been in an accident,” Abby protested. “I have excellent reflexes.”

  “Nice try, but no.”

  Abby gave up and climbed into the front passenger seat while Gwynne figured out the controls and started the car. She adjusted the rearview mirror and caught Elle’s reflection. Ugh. Back to work. Wiggle appreciation time was over.

  “I thought you were going to meet us later,” Gwynne told Elle.

  “Careful with the harp,” Abby warned over her shoulder.

  More angels popped in and crammed into the back and Elle scooted closer to the door to make room for them. One enthusiastic angel arrived out of nowhere and landed in Elle’s lap shouting “Road trip!”

  Gwynne exchanged a look with Abby. “I guess this means we’re all riding together.”

  Abby leaned back in her seat. “You must be psychic.”

  Over the next few miles, more and more angels arrived until hundreds of them swarmed alongside the car—as well as behind the car, in front of the car, and presumably above the car.

  “Could you please not crowd in front of the windshield?” Gwynne asked. She glanced at the speedometer and noted she was going ninety miles an hour. North of Santa Fe, they’d lost what little traffic there was, and with few landmarks and the vastness of the desert, it was easy to ignore how fast she was driving. Abby certainly wasn’t going to ask her to slow down. “It’s hard to see where I’m going with all that light shining in my eyes.”

  The swarms of happy angels continued to turn somersaults and narrowly avoid midair collisions, but the ones who had stationed themselves in front of the car did move off to the sides, which helped considerably with her vision problem.

  Gwynne kept her foot on the pedal and did not slow down. She didn’t want to be a hypocrite about the speeding thing, but the sooner they got where they were going, the sooner they could get this over with, and the sooner that damn angel would stop threatening her girlfriend.

  “Never drive faster than your angel can fly,” Elle said piously from the backseat.

  Gwynne glanced again at the speedometer and then at the angel’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “I never kid.”

  “Are we going to have to listen to cheesy bumper sticker quotations the whole way there?” As if pissing her off with the whole bridge thing wasn’t bad enough, now Elle had to carpool.

  “It’s not cheesy. I like it,” Elle said.

  “Oh, for the love of God.”

  Elle began to sing, and one by one the others joined in. The Sanctus again.

  Abby clicked off the radio and rested her head against the seatback. “It’s so beautiful.”

  Gwynne started to make a negative comment about the angels’ song choice but swallowed it when she saw Abby was completely enthralled, a blissful smile on her face. Besides, Abby was right. It was beautiful, in its own crazy, angelic way.

  Abby added her voice to the others, following their ascent up the scale and hitting every note with her unexpectedly beautiful, sweet tone—didn’t she say she couldn’t sing?—until she breached the end of her range and her voice cracked. She filled her lungs with air, rejoined the flurry of voices as they chased an even higher note, and missed again. Instead of backing down, she cheerfully launched herself way beyond her range and hit a God-awful screech of an off-key note. She threw her head back and laughed with joy.

  “You have a nice voice,” Gwynne said. It was true, too, up until that last part.

  She took one hand off the steering wheel and took Abby’s hand in hers, pulling it into her lap and to heck with all the uninvited chaperones, who continued down the scale and back up again with an unceasing chorus of holy, holy, holy. Normally holding hands might have been enough to make them disappear, but not today. Either they were taking their road guide duties seriously or they were too caught up in timing their musical entrances just right to notice.

  “This is why I don’t hire myself out as a singer,” Abby said. “My range sucks, and I have way too much fun. At least when I have fun on my harp I don’t damage anyone’s hearing.”

  Gwynne rubbed her thumb over the palm of Abby’s hand. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “You don’t have to lie.”

  Abby twisted in her seat like she wanted to check on her harp, and as she did, Gwynne loosened her grip on her, worried that Abby was moving because she was uncomfortable with the public hand-holding. Abby freed herself and even though Gwynne was expecting it, it still made her slump. But then Abby positioned her body so she blocked Gwynne’s hand from returning to the steering wheel and proceeded to press against her thigh, her fingers digging into the fabric of her jeans in a private caress that would be barely perceptible to anyone watching, like oh, say, from the backseat. Which meant all of Abby’s shifting in her seat wasn’t because she was uncomfortable.

  Gwynne’s mood perked up. She reached up to smooth Abby’s hair. Abby made a happy sound and then pretended to be jostled by the moving car and fell practically in her lap. And still the angels did not skedaddle. Abby moved her hand higher, sending licks of heat up her inner thigh.

  Gwynne’s heart hammered. “If you keep that up, we’re going to get in an accident,” she murmured.

  Abby fingered the seam of her jeans and followed it upward. Gwynne stopped breathing. Her thighs tightened and her back pressed against the seat as her blood pulsed against the crotch of that seam, throbbing with anticipation, impatient for her fingers to reach her, squirming with worry that if Abby did ever get there—and she was damn close—she’d rise off the seat.

  “I used to be able to hit that high note,” Abby said matter-of-factly. “So I just go for it, because, you know, maybe one day I’ll surprise myself.”

  Gwynne slammed her hand back onto the steering wheel to maintain control of the car.

  “I love you,” Abby murmured, brushing her lips close to her ear as she returned to her seat.

  She loved her. Abby loved her.

  Gwynne swallowed. She had to tell her this at ninety miles an hour?

  Abby crossed her arms and settled in her seat as if nothing had happened. “Why are all you angels here, anyway? Couldn’t you just give us directions to this mystery mountain and meet us there?”

  Elle spoke up from the back, her broken-glass voice carrying over the singing. “We want to make sure you arrive safely.”

  “And doing a bang-up job of it too,” Gwynne said, wishing she could be alone with Abby. Elle wasn’t the major source of distraction here—she had Abby to thank for that—but Elle wasn’t helping. Maybe once they fixed the bridge they’d get a break from all the angelic visitation. That would be nice. Privacy. Alone with Abby Vogel. Alone with her in a very private room. With a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob. What was that saying, Angels are all around us? This sign would say Angels are NOT all around us. PLEASE.

  The brake lights on the cars ahead of them lit up simultaneously and she eased her foot off the accelerator.

  “Now you slow down?” Elle sounded annoyed.

  “Speed trap,” Abby said before Gwynne could figure out why everyone was slowing, but several seconds later, she saw Abby was right.

  “I did warn you,” Elle said.

  “This was why you wanted me not to drive faster than my angel can fly?” Gwynne held the car steady at five miles below the speed limit. “Could you have been a little less cryptic?”

  If she couldn’t be clear about something as innocuous as a speed trap, what else hadn’t she told them?

  * * *

  Odina Fierro rang up two extra-large bottles of spring water, various snacks, and a bunch of postcards of one of the supposedly extinct volcanoes up the road to the north.

  “You’re buying postcards?” one of the two young ladies asked the other, as if there was something wrong with the merchandise.

  Odina didn’t see what the customer was so worked up about. Sure, p
ersonally, she thought the pictures of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at sunset, when the mountains turned bloodred, were prettier. But these were nice too. The aerial views of the lone mound rising from the plains always sold well. Nothing wrong with any of her postcards.

  The other girl fanned out the postcards to show her friend. “Elle says this is where we’re going.”

  “When did she tell you that?”

  “While you were outside digging through the trunk for your purse.”

  Odina hadn’t noticed the girl talking to anyone. Had to be texting. “You girls planning to visit the mountain?”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Risk-takers, I see.” They didn’t seem like the type. Usually it was skinny testosterone junkies who hiked up that mountain, daring each other to do something stupid, trying to feel alive. Her neighbor’s kid went up there last year and came back with an armload of thunderwood and carved it into souvenirs he wanted her to sell in her shop. No thank you, she told him. No sir-ee. Wood injured by the lightning spirit was bad luck. The kid said the tourists didn’t know any better. They’d think it was traditional. But she told him no.

  “Lots of other mountains around here you could hike,” Odina told the girls. “Just as beautiful.”

  “What’s wrong with this one?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “What do you mean?” one of them asked.

  Odina counted out their change and handed it to them. “We call it the Bermuda Triangle of New Mexico. Every year someone disappears up there. Or gets struck by lightning.”

  The two girls exchanged meaningful glances.

  “No one ever proves it’s lightning that kills ’em, of course. If it was just disappearances, I’d put my money on a mountain lion having them for lunch. A mountain lion could explain the fatal heart attacks too, if you ask me. But the dead bodies, no. Never heard of a mountain lion killing folks and not eating ’em.”

  “We’ll watch out for mountain lions,” said the one buying the postcards, tucking her change into her purse. She didn’t look like she was taking her seriously—just humoring an old woman.