by Carly Bishop
“Robyn, you said?” Kiel asked.
“Yes. Robyn Delaney Trueblood,” Clarence supplied. “And I…“
Kiel straightened.
Clarence went on and on about quitting, giving up, throwing in the towel, crying uncle, whatever it took to get out from under his Guardian responsibilities to Robyn Delaney Trueblood. But Kiel had tuned the Guardian Angel out.
Robyn…
The name echoed through his being, stirring vaguely recollected mortal sensations. He lifted his head and turned his awareness inside himself as if trying to recall a favorite melody—but the images he sought were veiled and unfocused, somehow inaccessible.
He tried to shake off the frustration of knowing… and not knowing. The Avenging Angels often worked under such limitations. His fellow Avengers Sam and Dash—-even that cute little button of an angel, Ariel—had just been on assignments to restore order and justice. The DBAA dockets were full, and it was often the case that the Avenging Angels assigned didn’t know who the guilty party was. The Avengers couldn’t just swoop in, name the culprits and strike them down. Instead, they had to work through mortals.
But this not knowing felt strangely personal to Kiel, as if in his mortal existence he had known Robyn Delaney Trueblood….
Chapter Two
“You have,” Angelo muttered darkly, answering Kiel’s unspoken thought.
“Have what?” Kiel asked.
“Known Robyn Delaney.”
“In the biblical sense?” Clarence squeaked, gaping at Kiel. “You mean Ezekiel is Keller Trueblood?”
“Was Keller Trueblood,” Angelo corrected him, projecting an image, like a hologram, of Keller and his wife, Robyn, into thin air for both Clarence and Kiel to see.
“Oh, my gracious sake’s alive!” Clarence uttered, but Kiel could only stare dumbfounded at the extraordinary lifelike projection. He didn’t recognize himself—the mortal he was supposed to have been. Kiel’s earthly manifestations bore no physical resemblance to Keller Trueblood’s image, but the woman, Robyn, fired Kiel’s heart. A strange and foreign sensation poured through him.
Kiel’s human manifestations didn’t ever get too cold or overly hot. He didn’t shiver, sweat, sneeze or even leave footprints. He was an unrepentant flirt, that was true, but if he’d ever had sexual congress with a mortal, with Robyn, he didn’t remember it. In fact he had no recollections of a life here on earth before his assignment to the DBAA.
But the still, silent apparition of Robyn Delaney, caught up in this special dimension, mesmerized him, touched him deeply. Her hair was black as cooled, gleaming lava, her complexion fair and fine as the inside of a conch, and her rich brown eyes seemed to penetrate to the molten core of him.
His very soul lightened and soared at the sight of her insubstantial image. What was he supposed to do with such wonder and joy over an earthbound woman?
He tried to bring his attention back to a more objective focus, to the problem at hand. It had never before occurred to him to question where his soul had most recently been. Recalling his fellow Avenging Angel Dash’s last assignment, Kiel had to wonder why he had no memory of a mortal life—or if it was true that Keller Trueblood had been murdered.
“Didn’t Dash and the mortal Liz Carradine just avenge Agatha Orben’s murder?” he asked.
Angelo nodded, making the projection of Keller Trueblood and Robyn Delaney vanish. “Yes, but—“
“And didn’t Aggie arrive in heaven knowing she’d been murdered? Didn’t she go straight to St. Michael demanding justice?”
Angelo frowned. “Again, yes—“
“Then why is it that I arrived not even knowing my mortal name?”
“These decisions,” Angelo intoned, annoyed by these vestiges of Kiel’s prosecutorial cross-examination skills, “are made upstairs, so to speak.”
“Or else I fell through the cracks,” Kiel muttered.
“Well, this is all very interesting,” Clarence whined, stamping his foot at his inability to get a word in edgewise, “but could we please get back to what you’re going to do about Robyn?”
“We’ll take it from here,” Angelo stated, waving the Guardian away. “Be gone!”
To Kiel’s amazement, the quirky, bean-counting little Guardian Clarence stubbornly held his ground so as not to leave Robyn Delaney Trueblood stranded without heavenly supervision.
“I want your word on that,” Clarence demanded.
“My word!” Angelo burst forth with a commanding demonstration of his fearsome angelic power. Sparks flew. A brilliant light more powerful than a million candles flashed. “My word?”
Clarence gulped. “I’ll take that as a promise,” he croaked, popping out before he could be commanded again to leave.
Angelo shook his head. Guardians, Kiel knew, performed a vital function in the scheme of things, but they could be a real pain.
“About your mortal existence, Kiel.” Angelo didn’t wax philosophic very often. Justice required decisiveness and action; in this instance, he parted with his usual peremptory ways. “It’s often the case that the Heavenly Hosts wish to spare newcomers the anguish of knowing they had an early and unanticipated end to their human lives. It’s true that Agatha Orben was murdered, but she had lived a long and prosperous life. You, on the other hand, were in your prime.”
Kiel nodded thoughtfully. Even now the image of Robyn Delaney threatened his angelic equilibrium, made him wonder what it was to be human and in love. In heaven, it went without question that to be human was to be frail and needful. Vulnerable to grand and dark passions alike.
“The fact is,” Angelo went on, “I’ve never assigned a case quite like this one. Your death…make that Keller’s death, was a grave injustice, but there was an even earlier injustice, too. Keller Trueblood was prosecuting the murder of Spyder Nielsen when he died.” Angelo briefly outlined the facts of the case. “By dint of some cosmic slip-up after Keller’s death, that murder has gone unsolved and unpunished, as well.”
“Some cosmic slip-up?” Kiel demanded incredulously. “How do these things happen?”
Angelo shrugged. “It’s rare, but mistakes happen. Why, I can’t say.”
“Can’t say,” Kiel asked, uncertain as to whether or not Angelo, in his supervisory capacity, could be trusted to reveal the whole truth, “or won’t?”
“Can’t,” Angelo promised. “Kiel, you must understand what’s at stake. In all likelihood, loath as I am to admit it, Clarence is right. Robyn Delaney will be in grave danger if she goes after the truth of Keller Trueblood’s death alone—and then we’ll really have a tangled mess of injustices.”
“So, I take the assignment,” Kiel said, acting as if he was certain, to make up for the fact that he wasn’t so certain at all. “I don’t remember the first thing about being Keller Trueblood, so there shouldn’t be a problem.”
Angelo looked up at Kiel from beneath his shaggy white eyebrows. “Surely you can divine the possible complications…. You are the angel of Robyn Delaney’s husband. We’re not talking any old marriage, Kiel. It may have appeared ordinary, but Robyn and Keller were soulmates. Their marriage was made in heaven. Two people in love for all time. Robyn is inconsolable, and is destined to remain that way for so long as she lives.”
Untouched in his angelic trappings by such human emotions, Kiel had no way of gauging the power of Robyn Delaney’s feelings or the nature of her loss. “Am I supposed to reveal to her that I am…that I was Keller?”
The shelf of Angelo’s white brows lowered. “That decision must be yours. I should think it might deepen her despair to lose you again when this case is resolved.”
Kiel could see how dangerous it might be to Robyn’s peace of mind if she knew, if despite all his precautions, she somehow came to know that Kiel was the angelic incarnation of the soulmate she had known as Keller Trueblood. To lose a soulmate twice in one lifetime… Kiel shook his head. He could not in any conscience put her through that.
“Why bring me in on th
is case?” Kiel asked after a while. “There have to be forty other halos around here who could avenge Trueblood’s death.”
Angelo scowled. “We can’t afford to lose whatever insight Keller Trueblood possessed concerning the murder of Spyder Nielsen.” He eyed Kiel carefully. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, you are already experiencing certain echoes of Keller’s earthly experience as Robyn’s husband. Yes?”
Kiel gulped, so to speak. He began to see the stickier implications.
Angelo nodded. “There is a pinprick, now, in the vast reservoir of Keller’s memory. Hopefully, that will serve you well in avenging your own death, as well as preventing Robyn’s.”
“Let me get this straight,” Kiel said. “If I take this assignment, I’m going to have greater and greater access to Trueblood’s memory?”
Angelo shrugged. “We simply don’t know. A case of an angel avenging his own mortal death has never arisen before.”
Kiel didn’t know panic, except as an interesting phenomenon in humans, but he thought what he was experiencing right now might qualify. Already wary of his reactions to a mere image of Robyn Delaney, he didn’t want anything to do with Keller Trueblood’s remembrances. “Why don’t you just restore his memory to some other sap?”
Angelo glowered at Kiel’s choice of labels. “That is impossible.”
“Why?” Kiel demanded. “Humans get themselves age-regressed and claim other people’s memories and lives all the time.”
“Crackpots,” Angelo muttered darkly. “We’re not restoring Keller Trueblood’s memory to you. It can’t be done. But your soul is your soul, and your consciousness of earthly experience may expand to benefit your cause.”
He paused and glanced skyward, shaking his head. “Look. This is all celestial psycho-babble to me. I just pass out assignments, and these orders come from on high. You may refuse this assignment, Kiel, but it’s been hinted that one of Robyn Delaney’s descendants will be crucial to the fate of mankind in the next millenium. That won’t be possible if Robyn provokes her own murder.”
Kiel stood and paced to the window overlooking the gardens in back. The last of the roses clung sweetly to the vine. Autumn leaves had begun to fall. Angels didn’t need oxygen, per se, so it wasn’t possible that his lungs were failing him. Still, he felt this sensation to the core of his angel being.
A curious, dangerous sparkling hummed through every cell of his human form. Kiel shut his eyes and let his memory reconstruct for him Angelo’s three-dimensional image of Robyn Delaney Trueblood. The extraordinary bond he felt with her overpowered his considerable angelic detachment…and then he understood the strange emotion human beings called despair.
He would fight to save her life; and though he was her soulmate, because his natural life had been cut short and he was an angel, Robyn Delaney’s children would not be his.
He drew a deep breath and allowed the peace of his heavenly existence to ease the painful mortal emotion, restoring his equilibrium.
The dice of God, after all, were always loaded.
ONE MOMENT THE TRAFFIC was at a standstill, and the next, flowing freely. Robyn had never seen anything like it. In fact, fifteen miles further up I-70, she began to wonder if there had been any delay at all. Maybe she was just so anxious to get on with confronting Stuart Willetts and Trudi Candelaria that she had imagined the whole thing—but no.
She hadn’t imagined anything.
The sun went down behind the mountains early, casting a glow around the aspen groves. In Silverthorne she pulled off the interstate to fill her gas tank. Dark clouds had begun to roll over the mountains, obliterating the sunlight. The gas station cashier said she’d heard they’d closed Independence Pass and it was snowing even now on Vail Pass—both entries to Aspen.
What else could go wrong? Robyn thought, changing in the rest room into a clean pair of oatmeal-colored linen slacks and a turquoise silk blouse. But a late September snowfall in the mountains wasn’t all that uncommon.
Reassuring herself that a few inches of snow would not make the roads impassable, she tossed her ruined clothing into the back seat of the car, then darted across the way into a French bakery near the warehouse outlet stores. She bought a small crusty baguette and a large coffee, then resumed her drive.
By the turnoff south of Minturn, high in the heart of the Rockies, Robyn knew the sudden storm was more than she had counted on. She hadn’t packed for this. She stayed on I-70 westbound, and in Glenwood Springs she almost turned off and took a room at the famous Hotel Colorado. The natural hot springs in the area would have gone a long way toward easing the ache in her leg from taking on the creepy little mugger and then driving so far.
What would it matter if she didn’t get to Aspen tonight? Willetts and Candelaria would not be any more guilty or less innocent.
Robyn simply couldn’t endure the delay. She hadn’t made her reputation by coddling herself. She wouldn’t start now. She knew from long experience that if she waited, her advantage might crumble. Frau Kautz would return. Robyn might lose the element of surprise, or catch one and not the other at home—Spyder’s home. For her purposes, she needed to catch Candelaria and Willetts together and off guard and without the interferencerunning Frau Kautz.
South from Glenwood on what the locals called Killer 82, Robyn wended her way up the Roaring Fork River valley to Aspen. Winding, steep, breathtakingly gorgeous in her headlights even against the pitch black of night, the road twisted and climbed through the mountains until the pink glow of Aspen in the distance began to shine through the snow.
She couldn’t see the lights of private airplanes twinkling above Sardy Field, but the landing approach sent them so close to the highway that she could hear the whine of jet engines in descent, landing in rapid succession before the storm made it impossible.
Short of Main Street, she turned back on the McClain Flats Road, back toward some of the most expensive properties anywhere on earth. She might have taken the county road itself outside of the town of Snowmass, but there was no marker for the road Spyder lived on.
Robyn backtracked slowly. She knew that many of these ritzy communities were gated, with at least a security guard and a boom to lower and raise, but not the one she sought. Spyder Nielsen was extravagant to the extreme in many ways, but not in this.
No one who didn’t belong on his estate or serve there even knew where Spyder’s property lay—not, at least, until he’d been murdered. She turned onto a road she would not have seen in the dark and snow without knowing exactly how far she’d come back.
No snowplows had been through, but so far, it hadn’t mattered. She hadn’t hydroplaned or been unable to brake. She would make it just fine.
In keeping with the rugged, natural environs, there were no street lamps. Her headlights reflected back at her off the blowing snow, and she passed through steep patches that in another few months would be impassable without four-wheel drive.
Spyder Nielsen’s estate lay yet another four miles ahead. One mile up the narrow, winding road the snow began to drift. Robyn’s tires began to slip on icy gravel beneath the snow. She pressed on the gas pedal and plowed through a small drift, but on the other side of the barrier, her speed sent her into a sickening spin and her coupe careered backward, slamming the rear of the car into the mountainside.
“Damn it!” she cried, jolted hard, banging her fist in frustration off the steering wheel. A part of her knew she should take a cosmic hint and give up confronting Willetts and Candelaria tonight, but she refused to be stopped.
Nothing would have stopped Keller. Nothing had ever stopped Keller—not until that mine shaft collapsed—and nothing could stop her short of her goal now, either. The engine had died, but she was able to switch on the ignition again. She tried rocking the car back and forth to gain momentum and escape the drifts, but every maneuver she tried to pull her coupe back onto the road only buried her tires deeper.
The car refused to budge. She knew she would never be able to see in the
dark how she could work her way free and back onto the road.
She pared down the contents of her shoulder bag to a small voice recorder, her identification and a toothbrush, then pulled a disposable rain slicker over her head, the only garment she had that might come close to protecting her from the elements, got out of the car and began hiking up the deserted and treacherous mountain road.
The thick, wet snow soaked through her canvas espadrilles. The rain slicker, her only protection, barely held up. Her limbs began to feel leaden and her fingers frozen, then fiery and finally numb from the cold. The wind sliced through her linen slacks and plastered the slicker to her shoulders. One shiver after another shuddered through her body, and Robyn began to cry.
Her tears made the going even tougher. She couldn’t see where she was going, much less gauge her steps. The rugged mountain road was meant for four-wheeling, not hiking. The terrain created drifts and the ice-encrusted gravel gave way beneath her feet.
Getting out of her car was the worst decision she had made in a string of impulsive, irrational choices. She wasn’t getting better, she was getting worse. She wasn’t getting over Keller, she had merely uncovered whole new vistas to obsess in. She loved him more than life. She didn’t want to go on without him. She didn’t want to be brave anymore, or strong.
It was just too hard pretending to be fine when her heart ached so much that she just wanted to lie down and die.
When her leg collapsed beneath her and she fell, she struggled back to her knees, anyway. Something inside her would not say die. Some primitive part of her brain refused to give up and let her heart have its way.
She swiped at her tears, but her hands were cold and wet from falling in the snow. She would follow the road back to her car and wait in the warmth from the heater for help to arrive. How long could it be before someone drove by?
Days.
She shoved the thought away and pulled the strap of her purse back onto her shoulder. She tried to stand, but this time her ankle, stiffened by the numbing cold snow, twisted and threw her into a patch of scrub oak. She fought off more tears, willing herself to crawl back to her car if that’s all she could do.