by Carly Bishop
“Whatever possessed you?” Candless demanded, his pulse thumping at every visible vein in his neck and head.
“Opportunity. The ultimate gamble. There are more photo ops out there than you can imagine, Dad. For instance, Conrad here, cutting the deal to bring illegals over the border. Then there was Kelsey, threatening an old woman with her family being deported while the old girl did Kels’s nails. Next came you, on the yacht with Gina Sellers. And last, but certainly not least, the INS agents talking to good old Gina. It didn’t take but a few of those photos to effectively demonstrate to a couple of Conrad’s illegal laborers that their ass was grass if Gina Sellers lived.”
Isobel clutched Angelo’s hand. Across from her, Patrice sat clutching her stomach, so sickened with dismay at what she was hearing that she sat silently crying.
They had had it figured correctly without knowing which of the three Candless heirs had hatched the plan. Of course it would be timid, guilt-stricken Harrison, willing to do anything at all to return the shock of the unnatural and cruel favors his father had done him in his lifetime.
But it was Bruce who sat stunned, his jaw slackened. “You simpleminded idiot,” he uttered, his face contorted with his displeasure. “How could you be such a fool?”
Then Isobel knew what the lab technologist had not. This was what her dream had meant to convey, to liken the treachery of Angelo’s own brother, his murderer and hers, to the perfidy of the Candless heirs, one of whom had betrayed the others. The only one who had nothing to lose by the addition of another heir. The one most horrified that Gina’s murder had been arranged by one of them. The only one who could have paid fifty thousand dollars to buy a falsified paternity testing.
“Why, Bruce?” she asked softly. “Why did you do it?” But suddenly, she knew. Angelo tightened his fingers around hers. “Did you think that one final insult would finally convince your mother to leave him?”
“Dear God, no,” Patrice moaned, looking at her eldest, at her pride and joy, the one with all the talent and wit and charisma. The only one who respected her. Her head shook. “No.”
Candless turned on Isobel. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Angelo stepped forward, every cell of his being radiating danger in reprisal for the implied threat to Isobel. “Maybe you’d like to rephrase, and address your question to your son.”
Candless took an involuntary step backward, visibly gulping. He turned slowly, a quarter turn so that he could see his son. “What is she talking about, Bruce? What final insult?” His voice trembled with rage.
Bruce swore. “Kels is right, you know. You are a creep. You are a bully. You don’t deserve to have a family.” He turned to Patrice. “Mother—”
“No,” she interrupted fiercely. “Don’t say it. Don’t you say it.” She looked around at each of her children in turn, then demanded, “How could you do this? How could you? Conrad? Harry? Kelsey?”
Candless interrupted. “I’ m talking to you now, Bruce.”
“The question, Mother, is not how could they, but how could they not?” Bruce retorted, ignoring his father. “They’re weaklings. They’re fools. They are what he made them,” Bruce shouted, pointing at his father. “Morally vacant! What kind of example did you set, staying with him? How many times did I beg you to leave him? Didn’t I go out and earn my own fortune so you wouldn’t have to stay? And here you sit, shaking like a damn leaf, still too afraid to be alone, to leave the man who destroyed us all, one after another.”
Candless reared up and would have flown in his murderous rage at his son, but Angelo constrained him, forcing Candless back into his chair.
Patrice’s head shook as if she were palsied, and a flat keening noise came from her throat. “Bruce, what have you done?”
“I set it up, Mother.” He looked with loathing to Isobel. “Gina was pregnant. She knew the father, but he had abandoned her. She needed help. I saw an opportunity to give you the excuse you needed to finally leave this bastard, and what does he do? He takes Gina’s baby into the bosom of his family, and you just sit there doing your martyr act”
“How?” Candless asked dully. “How did you do it?”
“I bribed a lab tech, and she falsified the report. It was that simple. You see? Gina just wanted support for the baby, but she wouldn’t have come to live here for any amount of money. What happened, Harry? How did you bait her into that death trap?”
“Oh, that was the real INS. Stand-up men, you know. They wanted a stoolie in Camp Candless. Conrad was in deep shit. I saw an opportunity, too, bro, to keep Connie and Sinjin out of trouble, and get rid of the old man’s bastard brat all in one masterstroke.”
Bruce stared at his brother in disgust. “How did you get her there?”
Harry laughed. “I couldn’t have known Gina would have done anything not to come live among this happy little family, but it worked out quite well. She took the bait to that barrio death trap because she thought she could get what the INS wanted without having to live here, acting as their stoolie.”
Bruce shook his head at Harry and the rest, his jaw cocked, his ire up. “Look at them, Mother. They would rather conspire to murder an innocent human being than to go out and take care of themselves.”
Patrice broke. An unholy cry came out of her mouth. She stood, pulled her pearl-handled gun out from beneath her sweater, gripped it with both hands and pointed it at her husband of more than thirty years. “You!” she screeched. “You did this!”
She fired the gun, then fired again and again, wildly, all aimed at her husband. Isobel clutched the baby to her breast, turning toward Angelo, feeling the vibrations of the terrifying shots and Seth’s screams to the center of her being.
Candless stood frozen behind his desk. In the first split second, Angelo deflected the trajectory of the bullet, then again and again, enraging Patrice who would fire until her husband lay dead.
And all that time, pain and grief and self-recrimination roaring in his head, those seconds stretched into an eternity, and Angelo saw how it was coming to pass that the fragmented images of Isobel’s death were true.
The distraction, the desperation seized him, and when Patrice pulled the trigger one last time, he failed to deflect the bullet, which ricocheted off a brass sculpture on Ian Candless’s desk, and headed straight for the head of Gina Sellers’s baby.
Isobel saw the bullet coming at Seth, despite her protective posture. In her mind the fractured seconds passed as hours in which she knew that this was one bullet over which Angelo de Medici, Avenging Angel of the Lord, had no power whatsoever.
This was the moment of highest truth, the consequence of her choice to become human again to save the baby from his mother’s fate.
This was the moment in which she was the most human, and the most terrified. She might choose, of her own free will, to turn and take the bullet herself to spare the baby for whom she had already given up everything else. She could choose between this life and any possibility of her union with Angelo, or she could choose her own death, because that was what it would take to protect Seth’s life.
But there was only one choice, and they both knew it. As much as Angelo was an Avenging Angel in his soul, so was she a Guardian in hers. All the passion and commitment and love between them, centuries of it, were expressed in her cry to Angelo.
And then she turned and the bullet tore into her mortal body and entered her heart, and Isobel Avedon died.
Again.
THE INS AND HALF A DOZEN other city, state and federal agencies descended on the estate within a matter of an hour. Every member of the family was taken into custody for one crime or another. Conspiracy. Fraud. Bribery. Accessory. Murder, attempted and real.
Crippled in his grief and rage, Angelo cradled Seth to his shoulder with his right arm and Isobel’s body in his left. None but one dared approach him in that eerie, silent aftermath, torn asunder only by Seth’s heartrending cries. And that one was the Avenging Angel Pascal.
U
nseen and unheard, he urged his dearest compatriot to let a woman from the Child Protective Services, brought in by helicopter, take charge of Seth.
Angelo’s entire body shuddered. His human heart felt near to exploding. He had business to conduct, an appearance to make, reparations to demand in heaven, or he would never have let the baby go. But a bevy of guardians, Isobel’s own kind, came to watch over the woman, and so Angelo surrendered the babe to her arms.
He lifted his beloved Isobel and carried her outside. The wind whipped high, the sea churned. His grief alone was cause enough to blacken the skies. His anger wrought fearsome bolts of lightning, but the only rain fell on the cheeks of Angelo de Medici.
He prepared himself to leave her lying in a protected cove on the beach. Her face was that of an angel, alabaster in death, more precious to him than the life of any other—now or ever. It was due to his ego, his unbending swaggering arrogant attitude, that Isobel lay dead again, and he could not tolerate the pain. He backed away from her body, leaving no prints in the wet sand, until the anguish forced him into his ethereal angelic form. He transcended the earth and soared to the heavens, his mighty wings spread hard and wide. And when he came before the heavenly council, he saw Pascal again, along with all the saints and martyrs, the powerful assembled to hear his demands.
He let them see him, in all his fierce glory—the Avenging Angel they knew so well—and then he collapsed his wings and stood before them with none of his power or radiant trappings. Instead, he demanded as a man that the life of Isobel Avedon be restored to her, along with the baby she had sacrificed herself to save.
“No one,” he called out, “no one among us has answered a higher call than the Guardian Isobel Avedon. Haven’t we stopped ages of tyranny? Haven’t we defeated the forces of evil, time and again, throughout all the millennia? Will we not fight this battle as long as it takes? But, I say to you, the saving of one innocent life is as much as all of this. What is done to the least of God’s children is done to the greatest. And this day, Isobel died to save the life of an innocent babe.”
He was reminded on high that these were Isobel’s own consequences, the inevitable outcome of the free will she had chosen to exercise.
He argued on, creating a barrage of emotions, the equivalents of lumps in human throats and tears in human eyes, to every angel in the assembly. But, in the end, all his eloquence, his threat to resign the Avenging Angels, his defiance, his pleading, changed nothing.
He saw with terrible clarity the inevitability. He had promised her he would let nothing happen to Seth. He just hadn’t known it would mean that she must die in the baby’s stead.
He saw that it was true that there were none so tortured in heaven and earth as the Avenging Angels. Like him, in one degree or another, they had all suffered agonizing loss, and it was this that gave them their might and their mastery, their taste for reprisal. But for all his power to wreak the vengeance of the Lord, Angelo could not save Isobel’s life.
What she had willingly sacrificed out of love, he could not take back in the name or interests of justice.
Pascal saw the knowledge sink like a knife into the heart of the Avenging Angel Angelo de Medici, and his own soul quaked with sorrow. “Go back to her, mon ami. Go back to her now.” And when he had gone, when he held Isobel’s slight body on the beach in the gathering twilight of that fateful day, Pascal saw to it that the others understood this mighty transformation. Angelo had served mankind in all his fierce quest for justice for half a millennium, and yet when the time came, he gave up his pretensions and his attitudes and his arrogance, and he knew that it was love and not might that must—in the end—save the world.
Only, Pascal argued, there was nowhere in the annals of heaven or earth a love as powerful as Angelo’s for his Isobel. He had learned the most important value of all, had he not?
As Pascal had suggested, Angelo returned to the beach where he had left Isobel’s body.
His heart splintered as the last rays of sunlight appeared over the vast Pacific. He took Isobel’s lifeless form into his aching, empty human arms and cradled her body to his own, and sank to his knees.
He learned that there were places in the human heart too deep, too impenetrable for tears to reach or heal, and so he had none. Simply a profound prayer that Isobel be spared this merciless death, which only his arrogant avenging attitude had made necessary at all, remained.
Seconds passed as hours, but it was not until Angelo conceded his powers, conceded his faults, conceded even Isobel’s life, that her eyes fluttered open and her wound healed over as if no bullet had ever pierced her flesh and Isobel smiled for him, her lip caught between her teeth, her heart soaring with joy.
Isobel was alive again. Truly, mortally alive.
When his beautiful brown eyes filled with tears, she knew that he was truly, mortally alive as well, without his powers, and that he was hers for this lifetime. And that in the spectacular Vail valley of Colorado, they would raise Seth, and other babies as well, together.
eISBN 978-14592-6856-2
Copyright © 1997 by Cheryl McGonigle
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
Dear Reader
Title Page
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Copyright