Earthbound Bones

by ReGina Welling

  “I…” That was exactly what Adriel had been thinking. “What do they want me to do?”

  “I’m trusting that when the time comes, we’ll both get the answer to that question. The way you took care of Billy the Earthwalker got their attention. You and the others managed to save Logan once he became a vessel.” Estelle’s nose wrinkled with distaste. No one who knew the details of how Logan degenerated into someone evil enough to carry an Earthwalker had any sympathy for him.

  Estelle continued, “Most times the vessel dies. My sense is they want you to continue with some type of work along those lines.”

  “I made an absolute hash of things. What would make them think doing it again is a good idea?”

  “You know, I gave you credit for being smarter than this, and yet, you persist in thinking you are somehow being punished for what happened to Kat.” A flicker of some deeper emotion furrowed Estelle’s brow. “I worry they want you to enlist my granddaughter and her friends to help,” her voice lowered, “Also, I’m scared Julius and I won’t be experienced enough to protect you or them.”

  Shaking off a shiver of worry, Estelle added, “You’re going to be contacted soon about your first assignment. Don’t ask me for details because I have none to give. Apparently there’s a loop and I’m not in it.”

  One weight came off Adriel’s shoulders while another, newer one took its place. One having nothing to do with the physical burden of flesh she now carried, and everything to do with the way she’d gotten it. If she hadn’t been entirely cut off from grace, maybe she could still be useful in some capacity, which was all she ever wanted anyway.

  Even though it gave her a renewed sense of purpose, she harbored no illusions about the various ways that wish could come back to bite her in the butt.

  Chapter 4

  “Go outside. Now. Hurry.”

  Used to this form of communication, Adriel obeyed the voice in her head without thinking twice. Every mission she had ever performed started out with exactly this sort of directive, so it never occurred to her to question.

  On the porch, she paused to orient herself. A tugging sensation in her belly directed her to the left. She leapt off the porch and turned obediently in that direction. With each step the sense of urgency grew like a bubble within her, until Adriel was compelled to break into a slow jog past the ragged end of the trench forming the leading edge of the new ditch, and snaked toward the next house farther up the hill.

  Unmanned equipment lined both sides of the narrow road, left there by a crew who all lived close enough to go home for lunch.

  “Here.” Without that voice in her ear, she might have rushed right past the prone form nestled in the tall grass on the other side of the newly-opened earth, so well was it hidden. As it was, she had to retreat and go around the raw hole in the earth to reach the spot where the body lay.

  At a dead run now, Adriel called out, “Are you all right? I’m coming.” There was no movement or response, and that worried her more than anything. The only sounds she heard were the buzzing of insects and the sharp caw of a crow flying overhead.

  Nearing the prone form, Adriel dropped to her knees. The field grass closed in around her with a shushing noise, and above the earthy smells of soil and plants, she caught the coppery tang of fresh blood. Dread at what she might see filled her as she reached out to move the waving stalks away from the injured person’s face

  A disordered cap of hair stained with red framed a small, gently-lined face. A pair of over-sized glasses with dark frames knocked askew by her fall rested on the bridge of an upturned nose.

  Adriel gently tested the tender spot at the victim’s throat, hoping to feel the flutter indicating life still flowed. When she detected a single heartbeat, remnants of her angel instinct took over. Adriel knew exactly how little time left to the injured woman. With divine intervention, there was a possibility, however slim, she could be saved. In the past, if it was within the will of providence, Adriel’s healing ability would have been more than sufficient. Now, she could only mourn the loss of that power.

  “Try.”

  Ingrained by an eternity of listening to that small voice, Adriel laid hands alongside the prone woman’s face and let her body remember what had once come so naturally. Energy channeled through trembling hands to funnel into the bleeding head wound. At only a portion of her normal strength, Adriel knew it probably wouldn’t be enough. The woman’s injury was so grave it absorbed every ounce of her healing power and still needed more.

  All Adriel could hope was what she had was enough to stabilize the poor victim until help could arrive.

  “Ma’am if you can hear me, I’m going to get help. Don’t move.” Confident she had done everything she could for the moment, Adriel sprinted back to the cabin to call 911. With help on the way, she pulled a blanket from the bed and raced back to tuck it around the injured form. While they waited, Adriel kept up a running commentary that earned no response. She only hoped it eased the woman’s mind.

  “Stay with me, help is on the way.”

  It was only a few minutes before the sound of wailing sirens soared across the air, and moments later Adriel abandoned her charge in order to meet the first responders and lead them toward where the injured woman lay in the grass.

  When a county cruiser pulled up behind the ambulance and Zack Roman stepped out onto the newly-churned gravel to stride toward her with purpose, Adriel got the second shock of the day. His eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed with some other emotion as Zack recognized her. Later, his look said, there would be some explaining to do.

  Leaving him unconscious on the floor, arms clutched around the love of his life—the woman he had crossed the rainbow bridge to save—had not been Adriel’s finest moment. The past had now come to roost, and she was afraid no explanation for abandoning him or the rest of the group would satisfy.

  “Galmadriel,” he greeted her tersely, then turned his attention to the scene before him. “That’s Lydia Keough.” The name rang a bell in Adriel’s memory. Pam had mentioned the woman with some venom, if she recalled correctly.

  For the next few minutes, Zack listened while the paramedics discussed Lydia’s condition. He asked a question or two, and was answered with technical jargon.

  While work continued on her head and neck, Zack’s keen eyes took in the position of Lydia’s body, and when careful hands turned her to get a better look at the wound on the back of her head, they narrowed. Adriel saw the same thing he did. A bloody rock had been positioned to make it look as though a simple fall was the cause of Lydia’s injuries, but he was not fooled. Zack was good at his job and could spot a staged scene when he saw one.

  Using his cell phone camera, he snapped several shots of Lydia and the rock before pinning Adriel with a look and ordering her in a low voice to stay put while he pulled gloves and an evidence bag from the trunk of his car.

  He worked quickly collecting evidence from the scene, and didn’t stop until Lydia was already on her way to the hospital.

  “Well, it seems you survived our little ordeal. There are people who have been worried about you. It might have been polite to let them know you were okay.” The words were mild, but Adriel felt the rebuke.

  “There were circumstances,” she knew it was a lame excuse; the lift of his left eyebrow told her he felt the same. “Is everyone okay? Kat?”

  “She’s fine. Her trip to the other side had…” He trailed off to find the correct word. “Consequences. Or maybe perks. I guess it depends on how you look at it.”

  Of course; Adriel should have realized something like this could happen. Conduits to the other side are not static. They alter shapes depending on human perception. For some, the portal appears as a tunnel filled with white light; other souls preferred to cross over a bridge made from a rainbow. Still others simply floated up, or rode a boat, a white horse, or even a unicorn. Being a guardian and not a reaper, Adriel’s duties lay with the living—and in policing any entity threatening mo
rtals. Messing around with the bridge had been a desperate act, and outside her scope entirely. Kat had passed through the portal in both directions without the precautions a true reaper might have taken. In trying to cover up her original error, Adriel had thoughtlessly exposed her to backlash.

  “She lost her ability to speak to the dead?”

  “No, not even close.”

  “It increased?” Adriel’s stomach flipped over; it was a sensation she found particularly unnerving. “She didn’t lose her…”

  “No, her vision is fine.” Zack assured.

  “And you? You crossed over and back as well. Did you suffer any…repercussions?”

  A twist of his lips told her he had. She really didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Her chances of coming out looking good were somewhere between naught and nil.

  Zack huffed out a breath that was half laugh, half rueful exclamation. “Ever meet a human lie detector?”

  “I’m sorry. Everything happened so quickly—I didn’t think it through. Maybe I could have found another way.”

  “And what? Take a chance on not getting Kat back? Even if I’d known, you couldn’t have stopped me going. Besides, I can think of worse gifts for a cop to have.”

  “I suppose.” Adriel searched his eyes for the conviction of truth. He wasn’t the only one with that ability, though hers had only been enhanced by her supernatural power. It was an eternity’s worth of experience that had turned her into a shrewd judge of character.

  “You know I’m going to have to tell them I saw you, right?”

  “Yes.” Adriel’s eye twitched. She could have hugged him when he changed the subject.

  “In the meantime, tell me what happened here.”

  “Something told me I needed to come outside, and to hurry. I found her on the ground—unconscious”

  “You didn’t move her, right?”

  “I checked her pulse then ran to call for help. When I got back, I covered her with a blanket and waited for the ambulance to arrive. She remained unconscious the entire time.”

  Standing quietly under his scrutiny and justifying it as an omission instead of the lie it was, Adriel left out the part about using her diminished power to stabilize Lydia’s condition. Zack knew her as a full angel; trying to explain her current status would have to wait until she had a better handle on it. Accessing supernatural talent to heal had raised questions she couldn’t yet answer for herself—much less for him.

  “Is she your next assignment?”

  It was a hard question to answer. “Not technically,” she offered, hoping he would let it go.

  He did, but not before giving her a hard look. Adriel remembered his newfound ability to tell a lie from the truth. It shouldn’t have worked on an angel, but then, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was anymore—and she hadn’t lied. “How well do you know the victim? Does she have any enemies?”

  “I’ve never seen her before today. The only people I know in town are my boss and the people I work with at Just Desserts.”

  “Your boss? Are you an undercover angel now?” That look again. The one that made her want to squirm. Heat flared up her neck, burned her face.

  “Something like that.” How was she supposed to explain? Should she say she was so undercover she was human? “Speaking of my boss reminds me how late I am for work. Are we finished? I am sure I have told you everything I know.”

  A twist of his lips said he doubted her veracity, but other than treating him to a level look, she let it go.

  “If you think of anything else, you’ll call me.” He made it a statement of fact rather than a question, and seemed satisfied when Adriel nodded. He handed her a card with his phone number on it. “I’ll tell my sister and her friends I’ve seen you and you aren’t dead. They won’t be at all upset to learn you were nearby this whole time and never let them know.” Dry sarcasm did not go unnoticed.

  “Honestly, I didn’t know I was still nearby, but thank you.” With a graceful bow of her head, Adriel beat a hasty retreat through the waving grass while a frowning Zack watched her go. She wasn’t about to tell him she had lost three months somewhere along the line. There would be too many questions for which she still had no answers.

  Lost in thought, Adriel failed to notice the boy on his bike until he was nearly upon her. He looked to be about eight, or maybe ten years old, a shock of bright blond hair falling over his eyes. The bike he rode was right out of the ‘70s. Purple metal flake paint sparkled in the sun, and a chrome bar curved behind the elongated white seat set low behind tall, up-curved handlebars. The playing card he’d clipped on with a clothespin ticked against the spokes with each revolution of the wheel.

  Speeding past, he shot her a cheeky grin before standing up on the pedals and quickly propelling himself up the hill. She couldn’t swear to it, but she thought it was the same boy from the day before.

  Pam’s shop nestled in the center of a short block of stores making up the commercial section of Longbrook. On one side, it was flanked by a hair salon—on the other, a larger building hosted several businesses including a real estate office, a notary public, and an attorney. Today, when she walked up to Just Desserts nearly three quarters of an hour late for her shift, Adriel found a small group of people milling around outside.

  “What happened? Did you see anything? Was it a car accident? Who’s hurt?”

  Of course. The sound of screaming sirens had drawn attention.

  Before she could address the rapid-fire of questions thrown at her, Pam swung out through the door and beckoned her inside.

  “I’m late. Please accept…”

  Pam waved her attempt at an apology aside. “Never mind that, tell me what happened.” The small crowd followed them into the bakery.

  “One of my neighbors was injured.” The brief answer was not what Pam wanted to hear. She wanted a name. “Lydia Keough.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “I went out for an early morning walk,” was what Adriel meant to say. The partial truth seemed safer than complete honesty. The lie would not pass her lips. Omitting certain facts had been her stock in trade for all the centuries of time. Humans rarely ever needed or wanted complete truth, though no angel was allowed to out and out lie. Surely now she was human, Adriel was free to exercise free will and fib if she felt like it. She opened her mouth and tried again. The words stuck in her throat and would not emerge. Thinking fast, she covered, “I found her lying unconscious in the field, so I made her comfortable,” an allowable partial truth, “then called for help. Zack thinks she was attacked.”

  “You’re on a first name basis with Zack Roman?” The revelation distracted Pam for a split second. “Never mind. Is Lydia…”

  “Alive. Her condition is critical. She took a hard blow to the head.”

  “Head injury. So someone bashed the meddling old busybody,” Pam said thoughtfully. “This is going to be the biggest story since my own family tragedy; a nine day’s wonder that lasted thirty years.”

  A family tragedy would explain those fleeting moments of sadness Adriel detected every once in a while when Pam let her defenses down. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “It’s no secret. Thirty years ago this summer, my little brother, Ben, disappeared without a trace. Just like that, our lives were turned upside down and my family never really recovered.”

  Adriel laid a hand over Pam’s, trying to communicate her sympathy with the simple touch.

  Chapter 5

  Halfway through Adriel’s first official shift, the electronic cash register emitted a series of demented pinging noises before going dark and silent. Oh great, she thought, my first day after training, and I’ve already broken something. What an auspicious start.

  The customer, a rather stout woman wearing a hand-knit sweater crafted from variegated yarn in shades of pink and purple unflattering to her sallow coloring, fixed Adriel with a look that plainly said she was not amused by this little blip in her day. Impatience translated in
to the tapping of a foot quite dainty in size compared to the rest of the woman, and only succeeded in flustering Adriel more.

  It was early afternoon; Pam and Hamlin had already returned with the empty food truck, elated to have sold out in under two hours. So, when Pam pulled out a little device attached to her cell phone to read the woman’s credit card, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Don’t worry, it happens sometimes when you bump two numbers at once.” Pam shrugged off the incident and unplugged the machine. “Cutting power for a minute or two usually resets it without a problem,” and sure enough, when she connected the plug, the register beeped a few more times and went back to working properly.

  After the customer sailed out the door like a battleship on a mission, Pam glanced pointedly toward the plate glass window where they could see the annoyed woman easing herself into a very large, very old car and whispered, “Mrs. Donato must have gone off her diet.”

  Because it seemed expected, Adriel nodded and matched the knowing grin on Pam’s face, but had no idea why her new boss found the prospect amusing. She might have asked, but was interrupted by Hamlin letting Pam know he had a tray ready for the case.

  When the tinkling of the bell signaled another customer, Adriel squared her aching shoulders. Tired feet carried her back behind the counter where she looked up to meet the gaze of a woman in her early sixties. Thick-lensed glasses with dark frames intensified a pair of piercing dark eyes carrying a speculative expression. Shallow grooves set into a round face, framed by chin-length, time-streaked hair, evidenced she wore this particular expression often enough it had begun to leave marks in her skin. Something about her looked familiar.

  “What can I get for you?”

  “Who are you?” The tone carried just a hint of aggression.

  “My name is Adriel. I just…I’m new here.” Adriel offered no additional information since there was none to give.