She Speaks to Angels: YA Angel Thriller (AngelFire Chronicles Bk #1)

by Blackwelder, Ami

  “Hey Jen, hand me that book The Dark and the Light.” I sat crossed-legged on my twin-sized bed while Jennifer plodded over to me with book in hand. Papers from Tommy’s folder covered the carpet from my bed to the dresser. The notepad sat on top of the book Angelology as Tommy’s Kindle rested next to my NOOK on the nightstand. We wanted to cover all bases.

  “The book is boring.” With a flick of her shoulder, Jennifer added, “I don’t think we’ll find anything in there. Why would a football player care about this stuff anyway?”

  “I don’t know, but this page looks interesting.” My eyes widened and called for Molly’s and Jennifer’s undivided attention. Molly peeked over my left shoulder as she slid on top of the sheets with me. Jennifer watched as she leaned on the right arm of the bed.

  “What?” Jennifer asked.

  “Here.” I pointed to the luminescent image of an angel basking under the reflective moonlight by a lake.

  “So?” Jennifer shrugged.

  “So, look closer.” I emphasized the shape, tracing it with my pinky. “Don’t you remember?” Stretching for the notepad on top of Angelology at the foot of my bed, I opened the notepad to a corresponding page.

  “The same picture from Tommy’s notepad.” Molly cleared up the confusion on Jennifer’s face.

  “So? He probably liked that picture or something. He was obsessed with that particular angel form, big deal.”

  Deep jaded black wings decorated the angel-boy. A youthful glow assured that he was no older than eighteen. Coal black hair fell over his ethereal oval face in sharp edges, framing stone-black pupils. He appeared so serene, so regal. And something about him was so...familiar.

  “Maybe he was gay....and into the angel look?” Molly raised her brows while Jennifer winced and defended him.

  “No, he wasn’t. He flirted with girls all the time.”

  “Flirted, but did he date any?” Molly’s cheeks tightened so that they each had a hollow carved into their centers.

  “No way.” Jennifer squinted and rubbed her nose. She almost sniffled again.

  “Guys, would you stop!” I waved my hands in front of each of their faces before this escalated into something unrecoverable. “He wasn’t gay!”

  “How do you know?” Molly implored. “I mean we never really know anyone, do we?”

  “I know because...because I caught him making out under the bleachers with Noe Young.”

  “Noe! The quarterback’s girlfriend?” Jennifer could not have been louder.

  “Yes, that Noe.”

  “Did he see you?” Molly drew close to me, so close I could feel her breath on my neck.

  Staring at the sky blue bed sheets I answered, “Yeah.”

  “What did you do?” Jennifer threw her red locks behind her ears as her leg squeezed in next to me.

  “I hightailed my ass out of there...but not before Tommy stopped me at the gym door and insisted I tell no one. So I never did.”

  “What a good friend.” Molly rolled her chocolate eyes.

  “Hardly. He never spoke to me before that day or since,” I responded.

  “I guess now he never will,” Jennifer added.

  “Guess not.”

  “Well, maybe he still can.” Molly pulled up the Kindle. “Talk to you I mean. After all, we have all his last notes.”

  “Yes, we do,” I agreed. I marked the place in the book with my finger. “So...if he wasn’t gay, then he was obsessed with angels for another reason,” I corrected them.

  “Like...” Molly searched the recesses of her mind, “a school assignment.” She eye-balled me with a smirk. She took hits at me anytime she could. I couldn’t blame her; this investigation was an easy target for jokes.

  “He draws this particular angel over and over again in his notepad. That must mean something.” I mulled over the pages. “Why not this angel? Or that one?” I point to various pictures in the book.

  “Maybe he liked his fashion sense?” Jennifer gave up finding any real reason and swung back on my bed.

  Shaking my head I felt determined to find an answer, “Remember a month ago he started flaking out and not showing up at games.”

  “Yeah,” the two said in unison.

  “Well, something must have happened to him then...something that really shook him up,” I added.

  “Let’s double check that theory.” Molly flicked on the Kindle and scanned up and down with her finger pressed on the screen. “All his angel books show a check-out date from the local library of about a month ago. They are now all overdue.” She swung the Kindle around to show us just as the screen faded to gray.

  “Perhaps we will find more info on this device.” Molly suggested.

  Molly and I stared at the Kindle in a way that must have scared Jennifer, because her mouth fell agape at our crazed expression. But we couldn’t help how we looked, because what we saw in the reflection of the Kindle scared us too. We could make out the reflection of the bedroom on the edges of the Kindle screen and a bit of the house roof on the bottom of the screen. Then splat dead-and-center we, or maybe just I, saw the outline of what appeared distinctly to be some kind of winged creature.

  We flung ourselves around, our eyes fixed on my bedroom window. Chills rushed down my arms and spine.

  “Did you see that, Mol?” I nudged her shoulder. “Did only I see that?” I felt paralyzed in fear.

  Almost in a stutter Molly responded. “No...no I saw it too. Something large. Something with wings. Eerie.” She closed her eyes as the goose bumps passed over her cream colored skin. The two of us jumped up from the bed and headed to the window. As we pressed our faces against the cold glass, I cracked the frame open an inch. A gust of cool air whisked in and over us. Our eyes searched the ground two stories below and in the trees. Nothing.

  “I didn’t see anything.” Jennifer looked at us with incredulous expression as she padded toward the window for her own examination. “Sure you two didn’t smoke something before I got here?” She didn’t really want us to answer.

  “I saw something. I know it. I felt it.” I rubbed my palms over my bare arms and pulled my robe from the hook on the wall. Flinging on my cotton warmth I felt a tinge better, but a bit violated like...like someone watched me. Maybe I was just being paranoid?

  “Why didn’t I see it, then?” Jennifer voiced her doubts, twisting her face.. “I mean...of us three I would not be the one to miss something obvious. After all my father is a lawyer.”

  “Maybe because you were too busy looking at us to notice anything in the window?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I know what I saw.” Brows arched.

  “What does that mean anyway, because your father is a lawyer? What does that have to do with anything?” Molly sounded hard.

  “Well, I’ve been trained to notice details. So, the obvious should come fairly easy.” Jennifer defended with freckles blending into the color of her reddening hot face.

  “Obviously not. “Molly rolled her eyes and then darted them to the window.

  “Ok.” Jennifer ignored the words-of-war and sat on the bed again, unconvinced.

  Tightening the lock on my window, I shut the burgundy curtain.

  “Maybe we have all been staring at all this angel paraphernalia for far too long,” Jennifer suggested, as if that must be the only reason why Molly and I something. But that just made Molly angry. Her face turned tomato red just like Jennifer’s hair. Molly hated not being taken seriously. She had a hard enough time being accepted in high school because of her parent’s gypsy ways. I had never seen Molly so agitated and I had seen her heated quite a few times.

  “So you are just going to give up? That’s it?” Molly flung her arms in the air and turned from Jennifer. “We get close to figuring something out and then you are too spooked to hang in there? I thought you were supposed to be the level headed girl in this town, Jen!”

  “Chill out, Mol.” I tilted my head in her direction as she stood between the window and the bed. Then I plopped on
the bed beside Jennifer. After all, Jennifer just wanted to shut up all this angel talk to get things back to normal. I couldn’t blame her. “Mol didn’t mean it.”

  “Then how do you mean it? I want to know what happened too. I have more of a reason to know than any of you.” We all knew she referred to her crush. “More personal reasons than just some...some journalism assignment. But not if it is going to get us all out of hand.”

  “Alright,” Molly took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for snapping, but can we please just get back to our assignment?” Molly said with a mixture of surprise and defense.

  “OK.” Jennifer caved; she saw the desire to solve this in my eyes too.

  “So, we know he checked out these angel books a month ago...” Molly brought us back on track.

  I interjected, “And he started acting odd about a month ago.”

  “What do you mean by odd? Clarify.” Oh, God! Jen’s lawyer streak burst through.

  “Skipping class regularly...without his football buddies.” I stated.

  Molly fixed the buttons on her pajamas as she added, “Spacing out in class. I have him third period...Had him third period.”

  “And his nose was buried in his Kindle the past few weeks, even at lunch and in the hallway,” I remarked.

  Molly’s angry face softened as she saw Jennifer taking her more seriously. Joining us on the bed, Jennifer suggested, “It’s like everything changed for him a month ago.”

  “Yeah, everything.” I dropped my gaze to the Angelology book. “Like his whole world turned on its axis.” Circling thoughts competed for space in my mind as my gaze jumped from the window to the books, from the Kindle to the notepad. Could it be? I shook my head.

  “Maybe Clark found out,” Jennifer suggested and Molly wrinkled her forehead. “About Noe and Tommy. You’ve heard rumors about his temper too.”

  “You really think Clark could push his nearly-best-friend off the roof of the school?” Molly considered the accusation for a minute and then it seemed she believed it could be so. She had seen worse on the streets of NY.

  “How would they get up there anyway?” I interjected on deaf ears. They had lost themselves in scenarios of Clark and Tommy.

  “Clark invites Tommy to the roof for some kind of football prank and then...” Molly felt a strange ease in this grotesque conversation. “Splat.” She smacked her hands together.

  “Do you have to be so melodramatic?” Jennifer’s dart-like gaze struck Molly. “Clark probably just lightly pushed him, maybe an accident or something?”

  “Or his temper got the better of him,” Molly argued. She’d make a good lawyer, too. A different kind of lawyer than the one Jennifer would make. She wasn’t refined or professional-appearing, but something in her raw discussion of things made it impossible to take my eyes off her when she spoke.

  I just sat there, silent.

  Jennifer and Molly looked me up and down, waiting for a response. Something, anything...to say they were crazy or right.

  “What?” Molly read me well. “You’re thinking something, what?”

  “Nothing. It's stupid.”

  “No, really, tell us. It can’t be any more stupid than...” she couldn’t think of anything, “than...well never mind. Just tell us.”

  Inching closer to them, I spoke almost in a whisper, as if I said a bad word for the first time or had to keep a secret from Mom. “Maybe he saw something, something that made him scared.”

  “You mean like an angel.” Molly said what we all knew I was thinking.

  “I don’t know...maybe?”

  Jennifer looked like she could burst out laughing at any time, but tried to hold it in.

  “Could be,” Molly interjected, “I’ve seen a lot on the streets...I mean, with my gypsy parents and all that. Plenty of devils. Plenty of the unexplained. Why not angels?”

  Jennifer would be hard to convince with her lawyer persona to uphold. “Sometimes shadows can make you think you see things.” She explainedlike a scientist rationalizing the supernatural.

  “Sometimes we can never be sure what we see. I agree to that.” Molly tucked herself under the covers and nestled her head on one of my pillows.

  “How are we all going to fit in here?” I questioned with humorous tone.

  Jennifer squeezed beside me, tossing the books to the floor and throwing the covers over her body. When Molly returned the Kindle to the nightstand, I curled up the notepad and stuffed it under my pillow.

  “We made room all through middle school.” Molly pressed her head in our direction. “We can make room now.”

  I smiled, knowing full and well that Molly didn’t actually share a bed with us in 6th grade, and since our freshman year of high school she usually slept on a blow-up mattress on the floor. But maybe she believed we saw something in the window more than she let on.

  “It’s gotta be Clark,” Molly professed before closing her eyes. “We should find out what happened between them one month ago.”

  In the morning I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and yawned. I wanted to sleep in, and since we had no school the rest of the week, I felt I had every right to, but the curiosity over everything we had discovered the prior night nagged me.

  Slipping over Jennifer who still slept tucked under my covers, I plopped onto the floor. In a panic I realized I didn’t see any of the angel books where Jennifer had dropped them. My mind awoke immediately as if I had had a pot of coffee. I scoured the bedroom floor like a soldier using a toothbrush for cleaning. Empty. Adrenaline allowed me to leap over the carpet to the nightstand. The Kindle, gone!

  “Everything is missing!” I shouted, and Molly’s head jerked up from the pillow, her bob bouncing about and her eyes in-and-out of focus.

  “What?”

  “The books, the Kindle, the papers! They are all gone!” I threw my arms up in the air like my Italian mother in argument. Then, I slipped my fingers under my pillow to find that at least the notepad still remained.

  Propping herself up, Jennifer looked beside the bed and saw that there really was nothing there. “What happened to everything?” She jumped to her feet.

  Then a breeze blew through the window which now stood slightly ajar. A creak echoed through my ears as the wood window frame swung back to the wall and the curtain above billowed.

  All eyes turned to the window and remained frozen there.

  Family Ties

  Molly and Jennifer had a quick breakfast before heading out. Mom wanted to spend some quality time with me and I wanted to pick my brother’s brain. I think my friends had had enough of my room anyway.

  “Before I start feeling claustrophobic, I’m going to the mall. Meet you later?” Jennifer waved goodbye and jumped into her sedan. I stood with Molly for a few minutes more in the driveway.

  “Don’t do anything stupid...at least not without us.” The glint in her eyes told me that, despite her complaints, she loved trouble.

  “I won’t. Promise.” With a warm hug Molly departed. I loosened my coat as I entered the house.

  “Your friends gone?” Mom asked from the kitchen, where she was baking.

  “Yeah, Mom.” I shouted in return.

  “Sit with me then.” I followed the sound of her voice as she moved from the kitchen to the living room. I looked at her as she stood there. Both her head and her body were rather rounded, but her brunette hair was pulled into a tight bun on the top of her head, adding a couple of inches to her height. Her sky-blue eyes met mine, eyes that reminded me of myself.

  I plopped down in the rocking chair adjacent to the sofa where Mom sat and rested my hands on the wooden chair arms, curling my toes under, pushing myself back and forth.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I asked. Mom had that look, the one that said this would be a long conversation.

  When her lean fingers extended to mine, I knew this would be a serious talk. “I just wanted to make sure you were OK. You know, since Tommy’s suicide. If there is anything you want to talk to me a
bout, any feelings about this, I am here for you.”

  I took a breath and my focus went from Mom to the curtained window and back to Mom.

  “I...I feel scared about it I guess. Confused.” Shrugging, I tried to examine my own feelings, emotions that I hadn’t quite figured out since Dameon asked me. “I...no one was expecting this. His death was such a surprise. I guess I’m more shocked than anything. I mean, a football player!”

  “Samuel told me all about it. He was one of the first on the scene after the principal called.”

  I curled one leg underneath the other and bit my lip. Samuel. I wanted to make sure to talk to him before he left. Who knew when I’d see him again. I glanced at the clock on the wall; still early enough, 8:05AM. He wouldn’t leave until 9:00AM.

  Mom rubbed her fingers over my knuckles, then my wrist. “If anything like that ever happened to you...I would just...I don’t know how I would ever get through it.”

  “You won’t have to, Mom. I’m fine.” I sensed the churning mix of worry and guilt inside her. She carried those heavy emotions everywhere, always questioning what she had done that horrible day my father died. Wondering if she had only done this or that differently if he would still be alive. She didn’t want to have to regret another death in the family.

  “You would tell me if you felt depressed...or...”

  “Mom, don’t worry.” I stood and leaned in for a hug. “I’m fine. I’m not Tommy. I’m not Daddy.” I arched my brows and used my most serious expression. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Better not.” Mom ended our hug with a tickle to my ribs and a kiss to my cheek before she finally let me go.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Samuel, already in uniform, skip down the stairs to the living room and head into the kitchen. As I heard the sound of eggs being scraped out of the pan and onto a plate at the small dining table, I let go of Mom, too, but the warmth of her hug lingered with me.

  “I want to talk to Samuel,” I whispered. Rushing away from Mom, I felt her eyes on me the whole way to the kitchen table.

  “Hey, Sam.” I joined him.

  “Hey, sis, what’s up?” Samuel’s big brown puppy-dog eyes looked out from under hairy brows.