I take a deep breath and as I exhale I say, “His name is Marcus.” I run my fingers over my scalp and through my hair. Of course Chris knows. He sees spirits and ghosts like I do. A sigh pushes itself out of my lungs and my shoulders droop. “I had a little talk with Marcus on your patio. The truth about Jared hit me like a sledge hammer. I’m not sure if I can talk about it right now,” I say as emotions begin to rise.
“The one you called your friend, with the brown hair, he was also following your brother? Not you. Am I correct?” Chris asks.
“Yes.” Chris had it figured out. Why didn’t I see it before?
“You need to protect yourself, Miss Crowson. The Creator’s Shadows cannot make friends with the living. They take away life. Do not be confused by their disguises.”
I don’t care for the turn in this conversation so I move on. “Will you drop the Miss Crowson, please? Really, Chris, I thought we were past formalities. And what’s with you not coming upstairs anyway?”
Chris blinks and says nothing else about Angels of Death. “Jules, in case you haven’t noticed, I am a male,” Chris says as if this should explain everything.
“And what? I’m a girl. Is that it?” Instead of waiting for his answer, I make one more point. “In case you didn’t notice, I live at home with my mother. If I want any privacy I have to go to my room.”
“You’re very attractive and young, and I am a professional of the opposite sex. It is not appropriate for me to be in your bedroom.”
He says this with his usual straight face, although possibly frowning at me, it’s hard to tell, but I can see a change in the color of his aura as this subject progresses. Chris’s aura is very earthy looking, with a lot of oranges and browns, some yellow and some greens. Looking at him is like seeing a vibrant semi-translucent haze of fall colors that follows him around everywhere he goes. Except now that we’re talking about him coming upstairs to my room, the colors around his middle are condensing, darkening and changing to reddish. The meaning of this doesn’t escape me, but I wish it would. I don’t have any feelings for Chris that aren’t completely platonic. Although, in all honesty, I do find him oddly curious and extremely intriguing but only in a friendly way. How does someone end up being so serious all the time?
“So, you’re a professional, and you’re also kind of old fashioned,” I say.
Chris narrows his eyes at me. He knows I see people’s auras. He’s the one who helped me develop the ability. So, he also knows I can see his aura right now. Who knows what mine looks like? I’m sure it’s mortifying.
I scan the yard and fix my gaze on my little garden, avoiding eye contact with him. The garden is in full bloom. The chamomile has outgrown the boundaries of the raised bed and is migrating along the fence row. I can also hear the weeds calling my name from all the way over here.
“Let me get this straight. You and I are having a strictly professional relationship, right?” I say, trying to clarify because I’m sure we’re both feeling the uncomfortable honesty in the air.
“Yes. Since you showed up at my door and I worked on you as a patient. I do have integrity and morals, Jules. Something humans are sadly lacking these days.”
“Yeah,” I agree. I glance back at him wearing an apprehensive smile, hoping we can still get along even though I know he’s attracted to me. “I hope I’m not one of them, but I probably am.”
Images of the dream flash inside my mind. Nathaniel’s description of what Travis Dawson was doing at the cemetery replays in my head. There are no morals in that evil man.
“You have more integrity than most people I’ve met, especially for your age,” Chris says.
Evading his compliment, I shift the focus of the conversation. “How old are you?” It’s something I have been wondering for a while.
He’s definitely frowning now. “You may have integrity but you lack tact. I am twenty-five,” he says through tight lips. “I don’t think age matters. I’ve always been the same.”
I smile unwillingly. He’s so funny when he isn’t trying to be. “Born an adult,” I say and then add, “I can believe that. So, can professionals be friends without everything getting weird?”
Now Chris looks away, not meeting my eyes. He stares across my backyard, “Right now, you are my patient. Then we will have to see,” he says noncommittally.
“Okay, Chief.” I notice his aura returning to normal. “Then tell me what I have to do to feel like myself again.”
From somewhere in the trees behind my house I hear the raspy squawk of a Steller’s jay followed by the false scream of a hawk call. Power and imitation. Should I be learning to use my power, or is someone using theirs against me?
Chapter Nineteen: Unfortunate Events
Nathaniel
As far as I can tell, the only benefit to losing my angel powers is Travis has no effect on me. He’s aware that I’m lingering in the foreground. I caught him looking at me more than once, but he was indifferent to me being in his house and made no move to send his demon slaves after me. I think he knows the damage is already done. The man is less worthy than maggot food. Although, if it were possible to feed him to the nasty little worms, I can’t think of a better place for him.
While contemplating how I might be able to help Corrine leave this nightmare of a house, I saw a wraith of a man float through the living room. The ghost was unresponsive to me. It drifted through the house looking tortured and in a serious amount of pain. It couldn’t be described as anything other than a ghost, but it was unlike any lost spirit I’ve ever seen. It was barely visible for one, and its behavior was too remote, expressing only agony as its entire spectrum of emotion. I have a strong suspicion one of the demons kept in the mirror downstairs is the corrupted soul of this man. I’m starting to believe Travis is so used to having the spirits of his demented labors hanging around that he’s past the point of doing anything about them. Then again, maybe he finds perverse enjoyment in it. Either way, I never want to fully understand what makes him tick.
Travis is a neat and tidy little freak, but the longer I’m here, the more I notice how little he does to keep the house the way he expects it. Corrine is expected to cook for her brother and Travis and keep the kitchen and bathrooms spotless. She’s currently ironing Travis’s shirts and pants. The bedrooms and living room are so sparse of personal items that there is almost no picking up to do. The only effort I’ve seen Travis make to help out, other than order his stepdaughter around, was to pick up a pair of Patrick’s shoes off the living room floor and put them in the trash. Corrine retrieved them for her brother when Travis was busy in the basement.
Corrine doesn’t clean the basement. In fact, I’ve never seen her or Patrick go down there at all.
“Hey Corrine, phone’s for you,” Patrick says as he walks into the kitchen.
He holds out the phone to his sister. Corrine looks surprised and not a little confused.
She doesn’t receive calls. In all the time I’ve been here, I have only seen her talk to her brother or stepfather on the telephone.
She sets down the iron and takes the phone then heads for her bedroom.
“Hello,” she says quietly.
Corrine closes the door behind her and walks over to the bed and sits down. It’s the only place to sit other than the floor. She hides her eyes as she stares down into her lap. Her breathing is shallow as she listens.
“I don’t know,” she finally says. Another silent pause, and then she adds, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m not sure when he’s leaving again.”
There’s some more talk on the other end and then Corrine says, “Let me check. Hold on a minute.”
Corrine leaves her room, crosses the hall to her brother’s bedroom and looks inside. I follow, wondering what the call is about. No one is in Patrick’s bedroom. Corrine walks into the living room and out the front door. She stops when she sees Patrick and Jared standing by one of the BMW’s parked in the drive.
She puts the phone up
to her ear. “Yeah, Jared’s here. Do you want to talk to him?”
I pull up short and hug the side of the house when I see Marcus across the treed yard. A familiar flash of green near him catches my attention, but I move before getting a good look at who is with him. I’m not sure I’m ready to face my mentor yet, or anyone else either. And who is asking for Jared? Juliana? Could it be her on the phone? Corrine hands the phone over to Jared. My eyes close involuntarily at the thought of her voice so close. It’s an ache that has become my new normal. Knowing I have to be without her, without love, and without a life that has any meaning. Then there’s last night. My God, what was that about?
She found me in her sleep. If it were a dream, then I could keep the memory to review, like watching a favorite movie over and over again, but I do not dream. She found me as I watched Corrine do Travis’s dirty work, and I’m not talking about scrubbing the toilet this time.
Last night, in the hours when very few people are awake, Travis forced Corrine to go with him to the local cemetery. She put up little resistance to his unholy errand, but I could see the remoteness in her eyes and the dread in her heavy steps as she wandered from grave to grave searching for the pieces he wanted. Corrine has an unusual ability to find things. He makes her find raw gems in the earth, but also horrible things, like last night. His request was a silver watch, buried for at least a decade.
She had told him where to dig. Then he made her help him. In no way, to the visible eye, can I say how she finds what she’s looking for, but Corrine can find anything as far as I have witnessed. The only thing that appears to limit what she can find is how specific the description of the item. I watched her thin little body and those tiny arms dig in the rocky soil, scooping away pathetic amounts of grave dirt with each heft of the shovel and it made me sick.
All I could do was try, with every ounce of ingenuity in me, to come up with a way to get her away from him. Unfortunately, the nagging uncertainties of my ability to be of any help at all kept picking away at me like a hungry vulture and a resolution to Corrine’s problem kept escaping me. I have to figure this out for Corrine, even if I am a shell of what I once was. This was the situation when I felt, knew, smelled, sensed…Juliana come near to me.
How had she done it? She was there, and we were of our spirits only. Free and weightless, in the physical, but also free of the mental responsibilities that keep us bound in our daily lives. Amazing doesn’t begin to describe what her short visit felt like. Her smile and her enthusiasm radiated all the way to the next galaxy. She made me wonder if I was somehow dreaming. When she began to fall, I knew it couldn’t be a dream, because I could never watch her be in danger in any way inside of my own head. And how would a spirit fall? Does the answer matter? Juliana dreams about me. And the dreams are real. She has to stop it. For all the ecstasy it brings, in the end it will only serve heartache when we part again.
Now, she’s calling Corrine. Doubt makes me second guess my assumption. Maybe I only want it to be her, and it isn’t. I miss any words spoken by Jared. He turns and hands the phone back to Corrine and I hear confirmation that it is her.
“Jules, I’m really sorry about everything that happened. I needed to tell you that,” Corrine says softly into the phone and then pushes the button to disconnect.
I walk away from the house, away from this insanity, away from my client, and away from the damned telephone.
Marcus must have seen me leave, but he doesn’t approach immediately. Had I thought of it sooner I would have buried myself under a rock and disappeared, but I didn’t, and now I’m staring straight up into the face of one of my only friends. There’s no feeling of the grass and dirt under my back as I look at the blue sky framing Marcus’s broad face. I’m little more than nothing. It’s exactly what I deserve.
“I would be there for you, if I could,” he says.
“I know.”
“There are only so many laws in this universe and I’m not one for breakin’ them.”
“Please don’t. I know you’re not allowed to help me,” I say.
“My boy’s in that hell house again right now. I won’t step a foot inside there. ‘Specially after what’s happened to you.”
“Please don’t,” I say again. “Whatever Jared’s doing, it’s not worth going inside Travis’s house.”
“Buyin’ drugs. He wants to get high before he no longer can,” Marcus says.
I can only shake my head with pity. Jared is so talented and intelligent. He’s wasting so much time and energy poisoning his body.
“He chooses to spend the last of his breath altering his reality.”
“He’s addicted,” I say. The truth hits me solidly for the first time. Jared is an addict. I don’t think he realizes it yet, or Juliana either.
“Some say it’s a sickness, like catchin’ a flu bug. But I never met a single person who went lookin’ for a fix of the green apple quick step.”
I sit up and Marcus takes a seat on the ground across from me. As large as he is, he still looks perfectly comfortable in his loose linen pants and shirt with his legs folded yogi style in front of him.
“No one wants to be addicted. It happens and then they realize it after it’s too late. Jared doesn’t know he has a problem.”
“You could be right, but he keeps using and he doesn’t have to.”
“Addiction’s the worst,” I say and stare at the blades of grass growing beneath me. “The world is full of meaningless waste.”
“Nathaniel, we’ll figure this misfortune out. The universe always has a plan.”
“Do you understand Juliana’s role in this grand plan? Has she told Jared about you yet?”
“I’m fairly certain she told him everything. Jared keeps looking over his shoulder, like he’s expecting to see the devil himself.”
“Hmm,” I answer. Of course Juliana would tell him.
Staring across the yard, I can partially see the muddy brown color of the house through the trees. The color mimics my disposition almost exactly, dull, uninspired, and depressed.
“Nathaniel, I may not be able to help you, but I can talk with you.”
Looking into eyes that have witnessed centuries of human history, I can tell ideas are brewing inside my soulful friend.
∞
For the human experience, time is a limited resource. Since I became an angel, I’ve noticed most people pay very little attention to the fact that they have a limited supply of time. They go about their daily lives as if tomorrow is always waiting for them. Corrine and I have everything and nothing in common when it comes to the perplexities of time. She has an ample supply of it and doesn’t want it, and I am stuck observing eternity but have no effect on it. We both want out of our miserable predicaments while time seems to laugh in our face.
Travis, Patrick, Jared, and Marcus left some time ago in one of the BMW’s. He didn’t make Corrine come along because she wasn’t needed to go buy and pick up another used BMW. The minute the car was out of hearing range, Corrine went straight to the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of pills from the medicine cabinet.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen her with these pills before. Last time however, she didn’t swallow them. I don’t blame her for wanting to end her own life. If I were in her situation — even though it sort of feels like I am — well, I don’t know what I would do.
Corrine walks out of the bathroom and down the hall to Travis’s bedroom. The room could be any guest room in any average house from the sixties to the early eighties. A full size bed with a blue plaid bedspread, two nightstands, and a matching brown dresser furnish the room. But I know better than to think that an average man sleeps here. In the closet there are two safes, and in the top dresser drawer Travis keeps a gun, talismans for rituals, and drug paraphernalia. Corrine opens the closet door and steps inside. I watch as she opens the smaller of the two safes, surprised she knows the combination. She’s quick about her errand as she reaches inside and grabs a baggie of some capsules.
> Now, Nathaniel. This is the time to help her. But the only thing Marcus and I had been able to come up with was to try to reach her in her sleep. She has no idea I’m here. She can’t see or hear me. What can I do? This is really looking bad.
She takes the bottle of pills and the bag of drugs to the kitchen and lays them on the counter next to the sink. Then she fills a tall glass with water.
“No, Corrine. This isn’t your time,” I say.
She starts with the drugs. I don’t know what the capsules are, but I’m sure that taking a bag full of them will be hazardous to her health.
“Think about your brother. Patrick still wants you in his life,” I say with some desperation. Corrine swallows three of the pills, one after the other, and without pause.
Reaching my hand out to grab the pills off the counter is useless, but it doesn’t stop me from trying. My fingers pass straight through the gold speckled laminate countertop.
“Believe me, I know how awful it is here, but we’ll figure something else out. Put the drugs down, Corrine.”
I see her gag reflex kick in as she tries to swallow another one. Good, her body is rejecting this suicidal mission. The pill makes it down her throat as she forces her mouth to stay closed. That makes four.
What will happen next? She should be able to see me and hopefully speak to me, but I will not be able to take her the entire way to the afterlife. The path has been closed to me. If I can’t show her the way, will she still want to go? Lost souls often want to stay on earth with familiar surroundings. I couldn’t let her do that. If she is this determined to leave her life behind she must pass to the next level. Would Marcus take her for me? “Arrrrrhh,” I groan, and rub my hands over my scalp. Have I ever mentioned how my afterlife didn’t turn out the way I thought it might?
And then, as I’m about to face my fate, and Corrine hers, we both hear knocking on the front door. Corrine grips the glass of water. She doesn’t turn around or make a move for the door.
Angel Dreams (An Angel Falls Book 2) Page 24
