The Soulmate

by Carly Bishop

  The dress didn’t matter. She couldn’t think what mattered.

  “Your life matters, Robyn.”

  “So now the cat’s out of the bag, you might as well pull all the angel tricks, even mind-reading? Or should I call it eavesdropping?”

  “Robyn, could you look just once,” he said wearily, “just this one time, for the good intentions?”

  Tears made her throat feel tight and on fire. “Yep, that’s my Kell.” The fault Keller always found with her. But that was when he was human and alive and more honest than an angel. “Haven’t you heard? Good intentions pave the way to hell.”

  He looked away, suddenly deeply angry. “You think you’re the only one who suffered? I’m the one who died in that godforsaken mine shaft, Robyn. I was the one trapped and broken, listening to your cries and knowing there was not one blessed thing I could do to break free and hold you.” He shoved himself out of the chair, too wound up, too filled with grief and anger, to sit there any longer.

  “If you think it was easy to watch you making such self-destructive decisions, and then to pick you up from that snowdrift and know that you wanted nothing so much as to die, then think again, Robyn. How do you think I felt, confronted with those scars all over your legs, and your hands bleeding and raw, and your battered face? If you—” His voice cracked. He had to start over. “If you think it was an easy decision to let you believe in your heart it was me making love to you, you’re wrong. I did what I had to do to make you step back from that decision, and I would do it all over again because saving your ungrateful little neck was what I was given to do.”

  “I’m not ungrateful—“

  “You can’t have it both ways, Robyn. Either you’re grateful to be alive because I let you believe I was Keller, or you’re not.”

  Her face felt tight and hot, swollen with tears she fought back. “I wanted it to be you so much.” He couldn’t say anything. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Robyn, dear God, of course I knew. Yes. God help me, I knew. But there was nothing else I could do. When I became an Avenging Angel, I possessed the same soul as Keller but I had no memory of being Keller. But after a while, things—memories—started coming to me. I told you how I flashed back to the cave-in as if I were Keller.”

  She nodded, waiting for him to go on.

  “Well, it wasn’t only the mine caving in. I was Keller. I was with you there. I carved our initials in the support beam.” He swallowed. “I was the one pointing out our shadows on the wall.” He stopped. “Should I go on?”

  She was numb, must have been numb not to stop him.

  His eyes bore into her. “I was the one…I lived it again. I was the one with his hands all over you. I was the one getting hard, right there in your car, right in the thick of Keller’s memories.”

  Her heart thumped beneath her ribs.

  “Think about it, Robyn.”

  The air was locked in her lungs. “Kiel…Keller. I can’t think of anything else. Was it…is it a sin? Is it so terrible?”

  He met her weepy gaze, then had to break it off. “This was no sin. This was the love and the lust of a man for his wife, only this body is Kiel, not Keller.” He looked steadily at her again. “I’m an angel, Robyn. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to deal with carnal feelings of a mortal man for his mortal wife?”

  The inescapability of it hit her hard, the tension, the need he had denied. She finally understood it must be one thing for him to make love to her when she was intent upon letting her life slip away, and quite another thing for him to have such feelings, such desire, out of a life-anddeath context.

  At last she understood what it was all about, the times he had touched her and filled her needs, denying his own. She finally grasped the nuances of all the times he had been forced to cloud her mind and memory so she would not see Keller’s need in him, or the answering instincts in herself.

  She understood that it had to be Keller they sent to her, because she would never have come back for any reason other than Keller himself calling her back.

  “Kiel, I’m so sorry. What are we going to do? How is this ever going to turn out all right?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. He had no reason to believe that it could all possibly be made right, none but faith. He sank down again into the chair. “It might all end very soon, Robyn.”

  She rose from the hearth and went to kneel at his feet. “Then, make love to me, Kiel.” She spread her hands on his thighs. “Now. Make love with me now. It can’t be wrong between us.”

  Heat spread through his physical body “Robyn—“

  “Shhh.” Her hands stroked higher. “Don’t say anything, just…kiss me.”

  Frantically he sought the dispensation he had been granted when it was her life at stake, but the awesome silence in his head granted no such surcease. Her hands were very close now to the throbbing in his groin, and he gave up the desperation. He cradled her face in his hands.

  “Robyn.” Her name was a prayer on his lips. A surrender to a calling more primal and urgent and sacred. He leaned forward. His lips approached hers. His body hummed. The space between their lips was alight, charged, alive. Sparkling.

  “Kiel.”

  He thrust his hands into her hair and pulled her closer, closer, until the heat of their flesh melded, until the flesh of their lips touched.

  It was a kiss, he believed, more glorious, more sacrosanct, more pure, than any kiss anywhere, in all time, had ever been. He turned his head in the smallest possible degree, back and forth, so that their lips brushed ever so lightly, the stroke like his own angel wings against the vast firmament of the heavens.

  But her body was mortal and was on fire and she wanted more than the chaste and pure, more than heaven. She reached for his hands and dragged them to her breasts. She tore at her bodice and ruined the dress, but the beautiful midnight blue gown had long since ceased to matter. His hands cupped her fullness and stroked. His thumbs drew across her beaded nipples.

  Her cry of stabbing pleasure filled him. Her eyelids fluttered closed but he saw beyond them into the eyes of her soul, and he saw heaven there.

  And he saw in her eyes the faces of his unborn children.

  Agony ripped through him and he began, literally, physically, to disassemble. He wanted her children to be his so powerfully that he had caused a rift between heaven and earth.

  He felt his physical body dispersing, fragmenting like a holographic image slowly exploding into points of light until he was no more than a specter. He focused every bit of his will and power into their kiss, but too quickly the instant of his disappearance came and she knew.

  She opened her eyes. But for the barest specter of light in the shape of the hands of Kiel Alighieri at her breast, he was gone. Sparkles of light, the last of his physical energy, went out.

  To Robyn, it was as if the stars had gone out that night, and if that was true, the sun must also have died.

  She sank to the floor. Changed in ways she could not have described with all the power of her pen, she knew she was still Robyn Delaney Trueblood, skeptical to her bones, believing in what she could see and hear and touch.

  Heaven had taken Keller away from her again. She had no way of knowing whether or not he would be back. Hell, she remembered the saying went, hath no fury like a woman scorned.

  She shed her dress and panties and nylons and dragged a blanket and pillow from her bedroom to sleep in front of the fire so she wouldn’t have to wake in some wretched sweat when the darkness finally got to her.

  Left to her own puny mortal devices or not, she would continue seeking justice where Kiel had left off. Maybe then they would let her have Kiel back. Or Keller. Then she would believe in more than what she could see and hear and touch.

  But she doubted, as she doubted most things, that such a thing would ever come true in her lifetime.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the morning, she rose stiff and sore from sleeping curled like a rag doll in
the chair. She knew instantly that Kiel was not there, that he had not returned in the night. Resigned, she showered and washed her hair, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, put on her shoes and went looking for Detective Crandall.

  She would not think about anything but the task before her. Confronting Crandall.

  He had called in sick, she learned, but, driving up and down the streets of Aspen, she spotted his four-wheel-drive vehicle parked, very nearly hidden from view, alongside a garage in a fenced enclosure. The sign on the fence forbidding unofficial entry clued her in. Unless she was very much mistaken, this was a police storage facility.

  She drove around the block and parked her car on the street perpendicular so that it faced the garage and would be less identifiable. Studying the layout and surrounding properties, she guessed that the updated garage had once been a carriage house for the much larger Victorian mansion adjoining the fence.

  She had two options, and neither was all that much to her liking. She was a writer, not a sleuth or a detective, but if she was going to take Crandall by surprise and get from him what she needed to know, she had to get onto that property. So she could either dart into the yard to the side of the Victorian house, climb the tree, maneuver herself out onto a limb stretching out over the police yard and hurl herself down…or she could grow her own set of wings.

  Quick, hot tears stung her eyes. She dashed them away and started to get out and cross the street when another police vehicle, this one marked, cruised by. The female officer didn’t notice Crandall’s vehicle until her car had passed the gate. She backed up and pulled into the drive at the gate. Looking annoyed, she got out of her vehicle and sorted through a ring of keys for the one to the padlock.

  Robyn decided this was as good an opportunity as she was ever going to get. There were no windows on the street side of the old carriage house, and once the policewoman had entered the building to see what was going on, Robyn could slip through the gate and hide alongside the garage on the opposite side of the outbuilding from the door.

  The policewoman snapped open the padlock and left it hanging on the latch as she shoved the gate open far enough to walk through.

  Her heart pounding, Robyn got out of her car and forced herself to wait until the officer opened the door and went inside.

  Tamping down her fear of getting caught, Robyn stood and walked across the street as if nothing in the world mattered, but once she was inside, she ran for cover. Making her way along evergreen shrubs to the north side of the carriage house, she went to the back, then across the back to the southwest corner.

  She waited what seemed forever, straining to listen, hearing nothing, but in what was really less than two minutes she heard the door open again. Peeking around the corner, she watched the female officer walking back to her car, apparently satisfied that whether Crandall had called in sick or not, he had reason to be in a locked storage facility.

  A small, cranky terrier in the yard of the adjacent Victorian house caught sight of Robyn and started barking and snarling. The policewoman looked back. Robyn held her breath and flattened herself up against the back of the building until she heard the gate clanging shut and the police car drive off. The dog’s owner called her snapping, angry pet into the house.

  Robyn took a few deep breaths to calm her frayed nerves. Was this worth it? But she was in now. Locked in, to be accurate, so she might as well do what she had started out to do.

  She plucked up her very righteous anger and walked calmly around the corner, slipping inside the dark, dank entrance to the outbuilding. She could hear Crandall’s grunts as he shifted boxes about, somewhere to her right. She moved along the south wall.

  She’d been inside police property rooms before. This one, although evidently housing older items and not current evidence, was set up similarly, with removable metal shelving in rows like library stacks. Looking through them toward the lighted end of the old carriage house, she spotted a figure in a larger area with a table.

  She went silently down the side aisle until she came to the place where Crandall stood at a table pulling archival computer tapes from a carton.

  She leaned against the end of the metal storage racks. “What are you looking for, Detective Crandall?” she asked softly.

  Startled, he dropped a canister of digital tape. He jerked his head around in her direction. “How in the hell did you get in here?”

  “Through the door.”

  “Well you can just take yourself right back out the door, Miz Delaney,” he mocked. “This is a restricted area on police property.”

  “I assumed it was. And since you’re just like any other private citizen when not on duty, why are you here when you called in sick?”

  He scowled at her, but he clearly wasn’t at all that concerned. “I’m a cop, I have matters to research. This is where that gets done. You, on the other hand, are not a cop, but a broad sticking her nose in business she’d be better off leaving alone. Now, I’ll do you a favor and look the other way while you get your butt out of here.”

  “I don’t want your favors, Detective Crandall, but if asked, I’ll be sure to tell your supervisors you were willing to be very accommodating about a civilian trespassing on police property.”

  Sighing heavily, he picked up the canister he’d dropped and flung it back into the carton. “What do you want?”

  “I want to know where you were, Detective Crandall, when Spyder Nielsen was murdered.”

  “Oh, for chrissake, spare me your candy-assed theories! Candelaria whacked Nielsen. Period, end of discussion. Where I was has about as much to do with that as nothin’.”

  “Except Trudi Candelaria did not kill Spyder, and I think you know it. I think my husband knew it.”

  “You know what? What you think or what your husband thought or what Howdy Doody mighta thunk doesn’t interest me in the least.”

  Her anger pitched higher. Struck by Crandall’s resemblance to Keller’s caricatures of him, she made herself stay collected. “How many people knew your daughter, Betsy, was pregnant with Spyder Nielsen’s baby?”

  “That he’d screwed her and then dumped her, you mean? That his freaking doxy threw money at my little girl? Is that what you mean?” Crandall’s face registered such anguish for a split second that she felt a stab of sympathy for him. The anguish dissolved to a sneer. “Well, lady, you’re undoubtedly somebody’s little girl, too, but you’ve just bought and paid for a one-way ticket to hell. You get my meaning?”

  Her chest tightened. Her ticket had better be to heaven after all of this, or hell would see the fury of a woman done truly wrong. “Did you kill him, Detective? Did you go there and pick up that bronze and murder Spyder Nielsen?”

  He swore vilely. “No. Somebody beat me to it.”

  “Somebody? Not Trudi Candelaria?”

  “You just don’t know when to give up, do you.” He slammed the four sides of the top of the crate together and hurled the box back onto the metal shelf only four or five feet away from her. He closed the distance in three steps of his squared body and grabbed her by the wrist, twisting her arm behind her back.

  Pain shot clear to her shoulder. She struggled, knowing she had no chance against Crandall’s bulk and power, but in the instant she pulled loose, Crandall went flying backward. He crashed into the table and fell on his butt to the floor.

  Robyn stared at her arm, where there was no more pain, and then at Crandall, whose rank confusion screwed up his face, and she knew.

  It wasn’t any native strength of her own that had broken free and thrown Crandall to the floor, but the power of an angel. Of Kiel.

  “Are you there?” she asked. “Are you really here somewhere?”

  Finish him off, Robyn. You’re doing just fine. Relief shouted itself, coursed through her, but her elation was short-lived.

  “You bet I’m here, you stupid interfering cow!” Crandall hissed, and before she knew what was happening to her had begun to swing a wooden chair at her back.

&nbs
p; She screamed and braced for the pounding blow but it never came. She found herself standing behind Crandall. The power of his swing as the chair swept through the spot where she had been, crashing and breaking against the metal storage racks, reverberated in Crandall’s body instead.

  Knowing Crandall was stunned, she couldn’t help the laughter bubbling out of her.

  He turned, still holding the jagged back of the chair, more enraged than ever, roaring vile epithets at her. But now she understood he could not hurt her, that Kiel would move her or block Crandall.

  “Tell me the truth, Detective Crandall. I want to know it all.”

  “In hell,” he bellowed at her, advancing on her, not getting it yet that nothing he could do could touch her.

  “No, now,” she said. “Right here, right now. Did you kill Spyder Nielsen?”

  He swung at her again and again with the jagged, splintered back of the chair. Each time, she was transported in the blink of an eye to a safe space behind Crandall.

  He began to pant, to breathe heavily with the exertion, to fall victim to the confusion. His eyes glazed over in his fury. “He deserved to die,” Crandall snarled. “He deserved to die a thousand deaths, and that sanctimonious bitch had the nerve to throw money at my Betsy!”

  His pain tore at Robyn, but she had to know the truth. “Did you kill him, Detective?”

  Enraged even more at what Spyder Nielsen had done to his daughter, he swung at Robyn and missed three more times, like a blind wild man lashing out at a target he couldn’t see. In his rage, he hurled the table, and when that didn’t work, he pulled down the long row of metal shelving.

  There should have been no escape for her, but when the resounding metal clash died away, Crandall standing defeated at one end, Robyn stood unharmed at the other.

  “Who the hell are you?” he screamed. “How the hell can you still be standing there?”