All the Rules of Heaven

by Amy Lane

  Tucker half laughed. “Thanks, Angel.”

  “And you try so hard to laugh, even when your heart has been sore for a long time. You don’t want anybody in your life to feel your pain. That’s… that’s hard. You try to find happy things about life, even if it’s only a television show, and you like to share. I think that’s very important.”

  “Well, it does benefit you,” Tucker mumbled, soothed by the sound of her voice.

  “It’s a gift,” Angel admitted. “And I’m grateful. And I’m sorry, because you still sound sad.”

  “I….” The ache pounded in the pit of his chest, but he stomped it down like he always did. As Angel had said, if he’d learned one thing in the last thirteen years, it was how to function. Eat, sleep, be happy with what you couldn’t lose. A nice meal, a pretty day, the particular nice qualities of his hookup du jour—all of those things were in the moment.

  Right now, he had a comfortable bed, a kind voice in the night, and the smell of lavender and… he smiled. Mint.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said and then closed his eyes.

  He was almost asleep when he heard her whisper, “But you’re not. You won’t be. Please, Tucker, talk to me.”

  He wanted to say “Not now,” but by then he really was asleep.

  THE NEXT morning, he stumbled into the kitchen in his underwear, the better to make coffee. Angel hovered at the far end, where Josh had stacked his boxes and the dresser, her long dark hair twisted into a knot on the top of her head, her jeans and T-shirt fitting her slim body ever so perfectly.

  It was like she knew which people turned Tucker on the most and only picked them—right down to the leather daddy, who had been his type once upon a time.

  The look on her face tore a little at Tucker’s soul.

  “Angel, get away from there,” he ordered gruffly. “There’s no reason for you to—”

  “This stuff is haunted,” she said stubbornly. “And you haven’t told anybody the story. Don’t you know by now that you have to tell the story or it becomes a ghost?”

  “Yeah, well, I figured that out when I saw my friend’s headstone in the goddamned cemetery,” Tucker snapped back.

  By the surprise on Angel’s face, Tucker figured she hadn’t realized that.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

  “You’re a horrible detective,” he said back.

  She shrugged, the pain in her green eyes hard to take. “Ruth said as much, many times.”

  “You’d think if the powers that be were going to send someone to help clean this place out, they would have picked somebody with better skills,” Tucker said, and then he grimaced. “That’s no slam against you, Angel. It’s only you’re not really… adept at all of this, you know? You’re brave and clever, but—”

  “I’m not usually good at following clues.” Angel’s disheartenment cut him a little deeper.

  “Maybe you were learning too, just like Ruth, just like me.” He dug deep and found his most winsome smile. “Think of it as improving, right?”

  She smiled a little and then completely brightened. “Actually, Tucker, I wanted to tell you—Squishbeans and I found something last night!”

  “Yeah?” Oh, it was good to see those green eyes light up like that.

  “Yes. I want very badly for you to see it. It’s important. That letter you saw on the table of Bridget and Sophie’s room, remember?”

  He nodded, bemused, because he did. “Yes?”

  “I know who it was from!”

  She was bouncing on her toes, smile sparkling, cheeks flushed, and Tucker felt a totally inappropriate shaft of attraction. He smiled back at her, caught up in her enthusiasm, and tried really hard to use this moment to break her away from the pile of objects she was still hovering around.

  “That’s great. Let me eat breakfast first. Then I can go see after I’ve showered and changed. How’s that?”

  Angel’s expression hardened. “You’re evading the point, Tucker. How are you going to tell me Sophie and Bridget’s story when you won’t tell your own?”

  Crap. “I’m starving. Ham omelet? Maybe some tomatoes? Some spinach? Oh, hey, we’ve got garlic. Let’s throw the whole thing in the pan!”

  With cheerful determination, he started raiding the refrigerator, figuring he was feeling adventurous enough to cook eggs in his boxers but not to go through those boxes of emotional eggs.

  “Fine,” Angel said behind him, sounding resigned. “Eat. You need it. You look pale. But I’m not going upstairs again until you tell me what your pain is, Tucker. And you need me to set these ghosts free.”

  Tucker plunked his armload of omelet fixings down on the counter. “Fine,” he muttered, pulling a chef’s knife from the clean dishes. “I’ll go look at the letter anyway. You pout because you’re not getting your—”

  “I’m not pouting! This is killing you!”

  Tucker gasped and dropped the knife on the floor. “Goddammit, Angel!”

  But she was gone, out of the kitchen entirely, and he didn’t have the heart to find her.

  Blurred Letters

  ANGEL DIDN’T go far. She hovered on the ceiling, looking down at Tucker as he cracked eggs dispiritedly into a pan and chopped up meat and veggies to go on top of them.

  She realized she was frantic.

  This place—it was going to kill him. It was going to destroy him, inside and out, and he didn’t seem to care or mind or even want to avoid it. And all of that indifference to his own safety seemed to center around that pile of… of… excrement he’d brought from his home.

  Augh! Tucker! Couldn’t you have brought your knitting?

  And nothing she could do seemed to help.

  He finished the omelet and set the table, then poured himself coffee and settled down heavily to eat. Angel studied his body helplessly, seeing the fading scars from the psychic burns and wishing she’d been able to save him some other way.

  He said his friend was in the dimensional graveyard. What does that mean?

  She would never figure it out without him.

  Tucker sighed heavily and lifted a bite of food to his mouth, and Angel wafted down from the ceiling and materialized in the chair next to him.

  He changed form, back to the auburn-haired warrior he’d chosen the first time he’d seen Tucker pleasure himself and had wanted to give Tucker that same pleasure. He was starting to admit, deep inside, that he understood the significance of this body and why it was becoming his go-to.

  God, he wanted to please Tucker. And protect him. And make him safe and warm.

  “I’m sorry,” Angel said quietly. Tucker didn’t even start, which probably meant he knew where Angel had been all along. “I shouldn’t use ultimatums. They’re wrong. You’ve done everything I’ve asked of you. You’ve done more. You’ve made more progress and asked more questions than Ruth and I did in fifty years.”

  “I can do the job,” Tucker said tersely, taking a bite of omelet.

  “Of course you can.” Angel had no doubts. “I’m just worried about the cost to you. And before you say you’re fine, you need to know, I’m not like this. I probably could have used your aunt like a pawn for many more years and not worried. But you I’m worried about. So please….” And that was when he ran out of words.

  Tucker sighed and took another bite. His usual zeal for food seemed to have deserted him, and Angel mourned that he’d been the cause of that.

  “Tell you what,” Tucker said after swallowing deliberately. “I need a nap—which is pissing me off by the way. And Josh is probably going to show up around two with the truck. We’ll wait until then. I’ll shower, shave, try to look and act like a human being, and we’ll just leave it for a while. Will that make you happy?”

  Angel closed his eyes, so damned grateful he had no words. “Can we watch Buffy?” he asked plaintively.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Tucker cleaned up, showered, and then slept through two episodes of Buffy. As promised, Josh Greenaway came kno
cking around twoish, his wife waiting to take him home.

  “Don’t you have a job in Auburn anyway?” Tucker teased.

  Angel was looking over his shoulder and saw Josh roll his eyes good-naturedly. “Yeah, yeah. This is the weekend, son, and guess how I used it.”

  “D’oh!” Tucker muttered. “I’m sorry! Didn’t mean to suck up all your spare time.”

  Josh winked and gave a brief salute. “Sir, you just gave my boy a chance to live in the big city. With any luck, he’ll get laid and chill out a little about the whole psychic business. That would make my life just peachy, I shit you not. So you suck up my weekends all you want, hear?”

  Tucker nodded and waved goodbye, then hung his keys on the hook by the door.

  “You ready?” he asked Angel, and Angel’s heart fell.

  When Tucker had first arrived, Angel would have accused him of taking his duty too lightly, not having the comfort of the undead at heart.

  Now Angel knew better.

  Tucker would push himself as far and as hard as he needed to in order to escape the sorrow hanging over that pile of objects in the corner of the kitchen like a funeral pall.

  “Sure,” Angel replied with a game smile. He was not used to lying—he was pretty sure the smile looked sad and sickly, but it was all he had.

  So Angel was reluctant already, but he was not prepared for what awaited them when they walked into the room.

  “That’s the letter?” Tucker asked, his voice cracking in disappointment.

  “Yes!” Angel stuttered. “No. I mean, the pages were there but…. Tucker, they didn’t look like that when I set them down. Don’t touch that!”

  Tucker snatched his hand back from the seascape paperweight as though it were molten iron.

  “What in the hell? How did you even get that on top of them?”

  “I didn’t!” Raw terror bloomed deep in Angel’s bowels. He’d worked with ghosts for fifty years, and not once had one of them pulled something like this. He looked at Tucker, letting his panic show. “Tucker, I put the glass bottle on top of the letter. I… I had Squishbeans in my hand, Tucker. I never would have….”

  “Shh. It’s okay, sweetheart,” Tucker said softly, surprising him. “You wouldn’t do anything to hurt the kitten. I hear you. But… what happened?”

  They both drew near the desk, although reading the letter was obviously not going to happen. Great red stains, like new red wine or fresh blood, completely obscured the pages, soaking through to the top of the desk and spreading in a pool under most of the “good” objects they’d gathered there.

  The green bottle lay toppled in the resulting mess, and the paperweight sat, heavy and irrevocable, on top of the bloody letter.

  Tucker took a deep breath and moved closer.

  “Maybe we should have Josh do it.” Angel spoke rashly. “He has no talent, no empathy. Maybe if he cleans up the mess, it won’t hurt him!”

  Tucker looked over his shoulder and shook his head. “Angel, we can’t fob this off on someone else. If we can’t fix this, nobody can.”

  “But what are you going to—”

  “The paperweight. Isn’t it obvious? There’s something buried deep inside it that someone wants us to know.”

  And without another word, Tucker stepped forward and lifted it off of the desk.

  Blood

  AT FIRST, there was just the cool weight of the glass in his hands.

  And then the weight changed.

  HE LOOKED down at it, frowning, because it was on a base now—a hard bronze base, thick and heavy, with sharp corners.

  His hands were not his own.

  These hands were coarse, wide-palmed, perpetually dirty from working with steel, picking up hot bolts before they were cooled, putting oil on a wheel axle before it turned red, warping with the friction. They were dependable hands, the hands of a good man, and they were shaking with anger.

  The paperweight rose, his heaving muscles barely straining as he raised it over his head.

  “Leave ’er alone, damn you!”

  Sophie’s screams echoed through the room, and the redheaded girl, Bridget, lay inert in a corner, blood dripping from a wound on her forehead. Oh God, that man! Sophie was terrified of him, was fighting him like a hellion, biting and scratching, and the man didn’t look up, just flailed at her clothing, cracking her hard across the face, across the breasts, battering her with his body.

  “Leave ’er alone!”

  “This hardly concerns you!”

  Oh God—it had to stop! It had to stop!

  The paperweight crashed down on the back of the attacker’s skull, so hard the bronze base flew off into a corner.

  The crunch of bone followed, and brains, and a full-grown man fell with a thump, bleeding and convulsing, blood puddling from his hair, from his nose, his body a heap of useless flesh.

  TUCKER SCREAMED, thunking the paperweight down on the desk and backing away, shaking.

  Blood.

  So much blood.

  Blood streaming from a wound, through graying black hair.

  Blood and brains in a nest of dark blond—God no.

  No.

  He couldn’t remember that.

  Couldn’t remember a face, one moment beloved, the next moment destroyed.

  Couldn’t remember the sound of wind chimes in the silence following a gunshot.

  Couldn’t remember a body thrown into him by the force of the blast, by the momentum of a footstep, just one footstep, putting the skull in the line of fire….

  Couldn’t remember….

  “Damien!”

  He took a breath and tried to figure out if the sound came from his mind or his heart or his throat.

  His throat was raw. It must have been from his throat.

  “Damien! Oh God, Damien!”

  “Tucker!”

  Tucker dragged in a breath through lungs that burned fiercely, like acid, like rusty wire, like the putrid memory of long-rotted souls.

  “Tucker!” Angel screamed. “Tucker, stop. Stop! It’s not him.”

  Tucker shook his head and looked around, the wind-chime garden disappearing, Damien’s corpse disappearing, the real world—the empty room, the curling wallpaper, the desktop full of haunted objects—falling into hyperreal focus.

  “Not who?” he asked, feeling lost.

  “The man you saw die. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Damien.”

  Angel was standing in front of him, hands on his shoulders, and Tucker could feel them. Could feel firm human flesh and bone, and see the panic and gold flecks in Angel’s green eyes.

  “How do you know about Damien?” Tucker asked, trying hard—so hard—to be in the here and now.

  “Oh God, Tucker. How could I not know his name?”

  Angel was crying. Tucker reached out and brushed his fingertips across a freckled cheek, feeling the softness of skin, the roughness of stubble, the heat of tears.

  He brought them to his tongue and tasted.

  Salt.

  And citrus and lavender.

  “Angel, how are you doing this?” he asked, desperate to not be in the place with Damien’s shattered skull and brains and blood.

  “You’re bleeding,” Angel said through his tears. “Oh, Tucker, your heart is bleeding. It’s in the air. It’s sinking into the woodwork. Please, Tucker. Tell me your story!”

  Tucker scrubbed at his face, his hands coming away wet, and shook his head.

  “I’m hurting you,” he said thickly. “I’m hurting you. And I’ve got to get out of here.”

  And with that he ran blindly down the hallway and out the door, barely remembering his car keys and wallet as he put Daisy Place in his rearview.

  The pull under his breastbone started as soon as the truck’s tires hit the pavement.

  HE ENDED up at the Ore Cart again, finding his way on instinct and hoping for a beer before he was farmed out to cosmic stud.

  He was greeted by the Greenaways—Rae, Josh, Tilda, Murphy, and Coral—
sitting around the biggest table in the place, splitting two giant burgers between them.

  “Come sit down, Tucker,” Josh called, smiling and waving.

  Tucker had to blink several times to frame a refusal. What was he going to say? “No, I’m going to sit in a corner and drink until a stranger comes along to use me for my magic fuckstick?”

  “Come on, Tucker,” Coral said. Their ten-year-old girl had thick curly brown hair and Rae’s witchy brown eyes. “You have ghosts in your heart.”

  Tucker gaped at her, and then, just like that, he felt the pop.

  He was supposed to find this family, find this place.

  He was supposed to sit here and eat pieces of hamburger soaked in ketchup and drink soda.

  That was the reason he’d been pulled out of Daisy Place?

  You weren’t pulled out of Daisy Place.

  The voice wasn’t Angel’s, but it could have been.

  This is where I’m supposed to be if I’m not there.

  Oh.

  Tucker smiled at them weakly and sat down, allowing Coral to make him a sloppy plate of burger and fries and letting Dakota Fisher’s old student serve him root beer.

  “You’re looking sort of shitty,” Rae said gently. “Rough day at the ranch?”

  Tucker shrugged and looked at Tilda and Murphy, who were arguing over which Overwatch character was the best and who had the coolest skins.

  “You could say that,” he said. His voice sounded scratchy to his own ears.

  “Did you leave Angel all alone?” Coral asked plaintively. “He hates it when you do that.”

  “Angel has the kitten for company,” Tucker told her automatically. He was thinking about the taste of Angel’s tears on his tongue, and his next breath felt more like a sob.

  Coral patted him gently on the back. “It’s okay, Tucker. He still likes you more than Squishbeans.”