All the Rules of Heaven

by Amy Lane

Angel nodded. He could still remember it dangling from the mirror as he and Tucker had driven back in Tucker’s body, while Angel was trying to force out the interlopers.

  “But you didn’t have it on last night,” he said.

  Tucker sat up and frowned. “No, it’s been in the truck.” He fingered it softly. “It’s not hot. When I first tried it on, it was too hot for me to wear comfortably, but it’s not hot now.” He smiled faintly. “Maybe you broke the rules of heaven and it can protect me now. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know why it couldn’t have protected you before,” Angel sniffed.

  “It’s a pagan symbol. You know, the same sort of thing you won’t acknowledge that exists fifteen miles away?”

  “Oh.” Angel wrinkled his nose in annoyance. “That.” He frowned. “Do you think that’s why it was hot before?”

  “Because I was”—Tucker frowned—“protected by heaven? I don’t think so!”

  “Well.” Angel shifted uncomfortably. “I… I am oddly possessive of you,” he said humbly.

  Tucker blinked. “It practically leaped into my hand, but you didn’t like pagan forces. And now that you’ve vowed to break some rules….”

  Angel didn’t like this speculation. It led too uncomfortably to that big blank spot in his brain that didn’t know where he’d come from or why he was here. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe this is altering the rules of heaven. If it keeps you a little safer from the spirits in this place, then I will gladly let it break some more rules. Although I don’t know if it counts when I didn’t know I was breaking a rule in the first place.”

  And then, glory of glories, Tucker smiled. “So we’re both not excited about the rules of heaven. I think that’s one more thing that puts us on the same side.”

  Angel brightened. “That—and we want to see happy endings. Tucker, I know the letter got ruined, but would you like to hear what was written in it?”

  Tucker sat up, frowning. “I almost forgot. You got a chance to read it?”

  “Yes! Yes, I did. Would you like to know who it was from?”

  He slouched, the excitement draining from him like blood. “It was Sophie’s brother,” he said miserably. “I saw what happened, remember?”

  Angel shoved at the table and then jumped when it scooted across the floor with a groan. “I need to figure out when I’m doing that.” Then he concentrated on what frustrated him so badly. “We don’t know what happened. I mean, yes—Sophie’s brother probably killed Thomas Conklin Senior. I can’t say I’m sorry about that.”

  “Me neither.”

  Tucker was still so pale. Angel closed his eyes and went on. “Well, he deserved to die. But we don’t know if Sophie’s brother was arrested for the crime. We don’t know if Bridget was dead or hurt badly. She could have just been knocked unconscious. And Sophie was still alive. So we saw a moment—a bad moment, I won’t argue—but maybe it didn’t end as badly as that. Conklin’s grave was here, but in dimensional space, not in real space. And James Beaufort’s was not. Neither was Bridget’s or Sophie’s. Now, that’s not the only cemetery in this area. There’s one out on Church Street in town and one in Auburn, where James said he lived.”

  “I thought he lived in Sacramento,” Tucker mumbled.

  “Well, the railroad went through Auburn. I assume he moved.” Angel felt vaguely superior and then continued. “But you’re missing the point. The girls had safety. James Beaufort wasn’t going to condemn them or reject them. He was going to give them a cottage—just like you wanted, Tucker! They would have a cottage behind the house, and chickens and laundry and peace.”

  The lines of tension in Tucker’s forehead and jaw eased. “Do you think they got it?” he asked wonderingly.

  Angel let out a breath, his entire body, corporeal or not, easing with Tucker’s optimism. “We can find out,” he said. “But first, a nap. You need to rest. When you wake up in the afternoon, we’ll go looking for them. There are record offices and graveyards, and you have a computer, Tucker. I understand they are quite useful.”

  Tucker laughed like Angel hoped he would. “Okay,” he conceded. “A nap. Because apparently, I can’t get through breakfast without one. And then we’ll go looking for a happy ending. Then I can rip off that damned wallpaper and resurface the goddamned floor.”

  Tucker pushed away from the table, and Angel followed him into the bedroom. It would be good to get out. This house had been the center of Angel’s world for so many years. He didn’t want to do that to Tucker too. It felt bad enough to remember how that claustrophobic view of the universe had become Ruth’s world.

  “Tucker?”

  “Nungh?” Tucker had put jeans on that morning, and now he kicked them off and threw himself across the bed.

  “What color are you going to make the walls?”

  Tucker smiled, even though his eyes were closed. “Blue,” he said dreamily. “Like the sky. When I’m done with my nap, let’s get out and see some sky. How’s that sound, Angel?”

  “Like you read my mind.”

  But Tucker was already napping, and Angel was taking comfort in his snores.

  TUCKER DIDN’T wake up until late afternoon, and he was still groggy and tired. Angel watched as he made himself a sandwich and then urged him to eat out on the back porch.

  “You can see the garden,” Angel said wistfully. It was the one part of his time with Ruth that he was proud of. He’d cared for the woman, but their relationship had developed into such a fractious push-pull. Angel had babied her gardens as an attempt to say thank you, to show care, to show that he appreciated the life she’d spent in service of the dead.

  At the end, he thought she’d understood, but he still wasn’t sure if it had been enough.

  He wanted Tucker to see the things he’d done, even though nature was already starting to take over, wreaking entropic destruction over the already riotous flower beds.

  Tucker sat in the shade of the porch steps and nibbled on his sandwich, his eyes tracking the figures of Daisy Place’s ghostly residents. Angel settled next to him, feeling that strange weight on his shoulders again.

  “Stop looking at the ghosts,” he urged. “Just for a minute. I want you to see the flowers.”

  Tucker turned to study him for a moment, and Angel knew his face had probably gone flush by now.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m just waiting for you to turn into a woman again.”

  “Why? Why would you want me to do that?”

  Tucker shrugged. “Because if you do it again, I might figure out why you do it.”

  Oh, that was embarrassing. Angel did not want to go there. But Tucker had been so honest with him that morning.

  “Well, at first I wanted to find someone you trusted!” he blurted.

  Tucker grimaced. “Except you found someone whose memory hurt so badly, I hated you on sight.”

  Angel shrugged. “That was a failure on my part.”

  Tucker snorted. “And then?”

  Angel frowned. “Then I was trying to find someone you would trust—so that’s this form. And then….” Damn. “Well, I was confused. I was attracted to you, and you seemed to be attracted to me, and that broke the rules. So I tried to find someone you weren’t attracted to.”

  Tucker’s throaty belly laugh was his reward and almost worth the embarrassment. “Epic. Fail!”

  “And then… then I just gave in and tried to find forms you would find appealing.”

  Tucker’s glance went coy, and Angel’s heart did a little flutter.

  “I find most of your forms appealing, Angel. Last night’s form was probably my favorite.”

  Their activity the night before flooded Angel’s memory, and he felt honesty was required here too. “I’m not entirely upset about that,” he admitted.

  “No,” Tucker said softly. “I’m not either. Not in the least.”

  Angel wanted it again. Wanted to feel Tucker’s flesh under his hands, wanted Tucker’s hands on his own skin.
The sudden, surprising weight of sexual desire flooded him, and he had to fight to remember what they’d been talking about.

  “Would you just look at the daisy bed, please? The nasturtiums? The prairie fire and the asters? There are asters all over the damned yard, Tucker—asters! Five different varieties. And big purple morning glories climbing over the fences. This was not easy to achieve!”

  Tucker—gratifyingly—turned his attention back toward the garden, which ran riot in the setting sun. Ruth had hired a gardener to set up an automatic watering system as she’d aged, and Angel—with his gift for phone messages and basic electronic intervention—had kept watering the garden during Tucker’s absence. He’d managed to find a boy to mow the lawn once a month, but that month was almost over, and the grass was more than ankle deep. But it was grass, thick and luxurious bluegrass and not the stingy, deep-rooted Bermuda grass. Angel had worked so hard to keep these things. Ruth had loved them. This garden, in the evenings, in the spring and fall, had provided Ruth’s happiest moments, and Angel wanted Tucker to see that he could be kind.

  Tucker had needed kindness. Angel was capable—with some prompting—of providing it. He may not have started out that way—he still couldn’t remember what had brought him here to Daisy Place, but he remembered his single-minded need to leave it. It was what had driven him, had driven Ruth, at the very beginning. He’d been selfish in a way Tucker could never understand, for all his talk of self-indulgence. But those years with Ruth had taught Angel to care about someone else’s needs, no matter how fractious their relationship.

  And this week with Tucker had been a master class in how another person’s needs could supersede every agenda he’d ever had.

  “It’s beautiful, Angel,” Tucker said softly.

  “Yes.” Angel couldn’t help the pride that resonated in his voice. “Your aunt used to say flowers were the best people she knew.” The garden faded, and he saw instead a lonely woman, staving off bitterness, taking great draughts of peace and beauty in her own backyard. “She dealt with some of the worst actual people—you’ve seen that. So I tried to give her the most beautiful flower people I could.”

  “Mm.” Tucker had set his sandwich plate down and was leaning forward, chin on his hand, elbow balanced on his knees. “You did good, Angel. You’re right. The flowers are beautiful. You can keep them up?”

  Angel smiled, appreciating that Tucker could see it was no small endeavor.

  “If you could pay the boy who mows the lawn in cash, it would be a whole lot easier.” Angel’s head started to actually ache in the human way, and not in the figurative way it had been aching every time he tinkered with the lawnmower boy’s bank account.

  Tucker’s chuckle warmed his heart. “I don’t even want to know.”

  Angel made vague gestures and then realized his words got fuzzy when talking about electronics. “Let’s just say that once I got over my surprise, I welcomed computers and all that came with them,” he said delicately.

  Tucker laughed some more, and then he frowned. “But Andy told me he stopped mowing lawns after Ruth died. Why didn’t you hire him back?”

  Angel grunted. “Because he wanted cash only, Tucker. That didn’t work for me.”

  More laughter, and Angel glowed a little inside. Then Tucker raised his head quickly, like a rabbit sensing a hunting cat, and gazed out into the purpling shadows of the garden.

  “The ghosts are coming in,” he whispered.

  “We should go.” Angel didn’t want a reprise of their first night, when Sophie and Bridget had introduced Tucker to the harsh world of otherworldly redemption.

  “But look.” A sweet smile tilted at Tucker’s mouth, and Angel checked the direction of his gaze.

  The two women, arm in arm, walked toward the stairs. Sophie’s spectral face was full of mischief, and Bridget scowled as she tried to resist Sophie’s charms.

  For a moment, love was bright as a star in the sky, and the lovers possessed more hope than fear.

  The tension in Angel’s shoulders relaxed in that moment, and he and Tucker both turned their heads and watched as the two ghosts walked up the steps on the other side of Tucker, avoiding the two men out of their time as though by instinct. Angel smiled, a shaft of joy penetrating his heart like sunshine through storm clouds, and for the first time since he’d started this quest, he felt, fully throughout his being, the thing that would be gained by setting the spirits free of this very earthly prison.

  He wanted what Tucker wanted. For these human souls to be happy.

  He reached to squeeze Tucker’s knee, to share the revelation, and his hand slid through. Tucker didn’t even shudder, and Angel opened his mouth to tell him, to share, when he saw Tucker’s gaze fixed on a point not five feet in front of the stairs.

  Angel turned slowly and froze.

  The rules of heaven indeed.

  I Know You

  TUCKER WATCHED the women pass by, feeling the breeze from Sophie’s skirt. They didn’t see him or Angel, and he was pleased with that.

  They deserved privacy, and he’d already intruded so much.

  He was aware of Angel’s touch—and as he felt the point of sorrow that they seemed to forever be either too much flesh or too much spirit, he turned his head—

  And froze.

  He recognized this ghost from Sophie’s point of view. To her eyes, he’d loomed like the monster he was, but in truth he was a midsized man, even for the turn of the twentieth century. He might have once been handsome, square-jawed with high cheekbones, but his face was lined with more than age and more than greed. Every line, every burst capillary, every bag and pouch of skin was twisted with the work of the twin destroyers: malice and madness.

  His nose, bright and bulbous, should have made him a ludicrous figure, and so should his great drooping mustache, but instead both features added to the grotesquerie of his fury.

  He was glaring at Tucker with so much hatred Tucker’s stomach roiled.

  His mouth worked: “I see you!”

  Tucker stood, his weariness falling away. “I see you too, fucker. You know what I saw you do?”

  The apparition snarled like an animal, and as Tucker watched, it crouched. “You watched me die!”

  “You were hurting them,” Tucker snarled. “I would have killed you myself!”

  The ache in his chest, the one that had dogged him all day, exploded, and he crouched, mirroring his opponent. He wasn’t sure what he would have done then, enraged by pain, but another shadow stepped forward.

  “You wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t wish it! Let me take it back. It’s ridden me these years, every day another twist in my heart!”

  Tucker straightened, trying to put this new contender into context. Tall and broad, with hair that might have been blond in his youth, James Beaufort had been a true railroad man in life. His hands were rough and bore the scars of working with hot metal and sharp iron, and his biceps bulged, as did his chest and thighs. He had a mustache too, trimmed into his goatee, and something about his weathered face, some curve of his lip or line by his eyes, suggested that here was a man capable of great tenderness.

  Which made the anguish in his eyes that much harder to bear.

  “You had to,” Tucker told him. He pushed with his feet to make sure the ground was solid beneath them. The women had strolled right by, not sparing him a glance, but these men, the ones bound by violence, they were squaring with Tucker as though readying for a fight.

  “He was hurting her. You came to rescue her, right?”

  “She was my baby sister,” James pleaded. “And he was… he was….”

  Tucker closed his eyes against the memory—Bridget, sprawled against the wall, Sophie on the floor, skirts hiked up over her head.

  “Violating her,” Tucker whispered. “I understand. You had to.”

  “She was a whore!”

  Tucker and James Beaufort turned toward the cry, and James launched himself at Conklin, ever the protector, even in death.

/>   Whatever metaphysics were at work, James flowed right through the man, and Tucker reached for his pendant automatically, holding it in his palm, hoping for protection, any protection, as the maddened ghost surged forward, ready to dive into Tucker’s body and live inside his skin.

  The idea of feeling what this monster felt, being this monstrous human being, terrified Tucker right down to the pit of his balls.

  Whatever he hadn’t done with his life, whatever he’d become instead, he was his own person, forged in the crucible of his gift, given the most basic of imperatives: help people, however you can.

  This thing rushing at him was the bitter corruption of a man who caused pain because he could.

  James rolled across the lawn toward them, bounding to his feet in a way that told Tucker all he needed to know about violence and being a railroad man back when a man’s body was his livelihood and fighting wasn’t a sin. Tucker squared his feet and held on to his symbol of protection, offered casually by a woman whose family had slid under his skin with their kindness.

  “C’mon, Conklin, c’mon. You think you can hurt me? You think you can hurt me?”

  With a roar, Conklin was upon him, a wiry, enraged hurricane, battering with fists, kicking, biting. Tucker let go of the necklace and fought back.

  The connection of his fist with Conklin’s jaw rang up Tucker’s arm like a bell, and Conklin fell back with a grunt.

  “You hit me!” he growled, and Tucker didn’t care about metaphysics.

  “Felt good,” he snarled. “Let’s do it again.”

  They squared off then, opponents in the ring, and James Beaufort bounced on his toes by Tucker’s side.

  “He’s vain,” he muttered. “And afraid of pain. Go for his nose.”

  “I’d rather knee him in the balls,” Tucker growled, sick all over again at what Sophie had endured. “C’mon, man!” he shouted. “C’mon. If we’re gonna do this, let’s do this, ghost to psychic. Let’s see who walks away!”

  “Tucker, don’t!” Angel called, and Tucker turned his head.

  Conklin attacked, his first punch getting Tucker in the stomach, the second breaking his nose. He howled in pain and struck back, his muscles, honed in hours of boredom at the gym, finally getting to do something interesting.