Earth Angel

by Siri Caldwell

  There was no node for Gwynne.

  Abby gripped Sapphire’s hand, expecting to feel the flicker of connection she’d felt the last time, but there was nothing. She hesitated.

  Gwynne approached the bridge, closer than looked safe, and blew her a kiss. It wasn’t a jaunty, lighthearted gesture, the way blowing a kiss ought to be. Instead, her eyes were downcast and a muscle worked in her jaw as she pressed her fingers to her lips before she reluctantly raised her eyes, her gaze boring through her, and sent the kiss.

  “We can do this,” Gwynne said. She reached for her hand but stayed where she was, far enough away that they wouldn’t touch unless Abby wanted to.

  Abby looked at her outstretched arm and took a deep breath. “We can.”

  From her position a foot above the ground, Abby bent her knees and started to reach for her. Electricity arced between them, jumping across the space that separated them, shocking them before they even touched. In the split second before Abby could instinctively pull back, Gwynne had already launched herself at her and held her in a fierce hug, her arms tight around Abby’s waist, her head to her chest. Abby braced herself for electrical overload, but it never came. Instead, everything around them went still. No birdsong, no angelic choir, no wind whistling through the trees.

  “I can hear your heartbeat,” Gwynne whispered, still alive.

  The angelic link rushed through her like a stream of musical notes forming a chord. The chord wavered, teetering on the cusp of dissonance. Abby held her breath. Her fingers tensed as if they were on harp strings and could physically wrest the vibration under control. Her lungs screamed and the chord reasserted itself and stabilized. Abby reeled with light-headedness, sure that she would fall if Gwynne weren’t holding her.

  Gwynne was alive. Gwynne was alive and Sapphire was beside her and they were part of this endless chain of angels. The rightness of that filled her with an overwhelmingly pure, aching sweetness. And deep within that sweetness, a whisper of angelic essence woke inside her, tingling in her spine. The essence spiraled and hummed and spread through her whole body and finally she gave in to the unbearable urge to stretch her arms out to the sides, still part of the chain, until the muscles between her shoulder blades reached their limit. Huge wings, immeasurable times the size of her body, swept open like a cascading fan with ribs of blinding white light. Silence echoed in a vast white emptiness.

  Eternity passed.

  Then out of the silence, the mountain began to hum, chanting an ancient, volcanic melody. The sound rose from the depths of the earth, up through layers of molten rock and crystal, and rumbled in the clear, dry air.

  The bridge glowed. The angels’ unearthly love filled her again as it had before, but this time Gwynne was there too, clinging to her with legs, chest, arms, joining them in the link. She could feel Gwynne’s love pouring into her, modulating her energy, maintaining the phase shift, supporting her.

  Abby melted into her, allowing their energies to merge. Everything she was merged with everything Gwynne was, and the rush nearly shook her apart. Together they gasped for breath and became a churning dynamo that generated more power, and more love, than either of them could alone.

  Beneath her and into the distance, the bridge rippled with currents of energy, shimmying and realigning itself. Through her link with the others, she sensed breaks in the structure disappear.

  It was working. The bridge was repairing itself.

  * * *

  Gwynne knew she held Abby in her arms because she could feel the shape and warmth of her body, but, engulfed by the bridge’s electrical maelstrom, all she could see of her was an explosive field of white light crackling with sparks of gold. Abby was magnificent. She was a fierce, determined conduit powerful enough to handle the energy of the bridge, and of the angels, plus everything Gwynne could throw at her.

  Gwynne didn’t hold back. She surrendered everything. It was unlike anything she’d ever experienced, to feel Abby welcome her energy and integrate it into her own and use it. Her thoughts merged with Abby’s thoughts; her edges blurred. They were both completely open. A whisper of angelic essence floated through the link, and Gwynne reached for it with everything she had.

  A jolt of electrical current slammed into her with unimaginable force.

  A scream pierced the air. The sound reverberated in her jaw and bounced around in her head. Was she the one who screamed? Would she scream, if she was dead?

  Like a smashed Christmas ornament, her mind splintered into jagged, weightless, silver shards flashing in the glow of a thousand twinkling lights before the world flattened out into stark white oblivion.

  * * *

  Gwynne felt like she’d been slammed to the ground by a two-ton truck. Everything ached. Worse than ached. If she opened her eyes, would she still be on the mountain? Or would she find herself hooked up to life support in a hospital bed? Or not on earth at all? She went for it and noted with relief that she was flat on her back a few yards from the bridge. Abby sat at her side, holding her hand, surrounded by angels who were as somber as if they were keeping watch over a deathbed. She knew the look—she’d seen them like this once before, watching over her dying mother. She wasn’t dying, was she? She hoped not. Reflexively, she shut her eyes against the angels’ brightness and groaned in pain.

  Abby’s small, gentle hand touched her forehead. Hesitantly, as if she were afraid her feather-light touch might hurt her.

  She should let Abby know she was okay. Reassure her, even if it was a lie. She made an effort to open her eyes again. Squinting, this time. It wasn’t so bad.

  Abby smiled wanly, deepening the worry lines around her eyes. “How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live,” Gwynne said. “I am alive, right?”

  Abby squeezed her hand. “Sorry I don’t have a butterscotch for you.”

  It seemed so long ago that Abby had been the one who collapsed and Gwynne had given her candy and made the stupid-ass move of confirming for her that angels were real. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad move after all.

  “There’s one in my pocket. Left side,” Gwynne said.

  “Do you want it?”

  “I wouldn’t mind your hand in my pocket.”

  Abby obliged with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, and Gwynne, satisfied that Abby was no longer worried about her, gave up the fight to keep her eyes open. Getting hit by a truck was exhausting.

  She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until she woke and found that Abby’s hand was resting on the center of her chest, pouring love into her, filling her heart with warm sunshine that eased the aches in her body and seeped into her soul. Gwynne was so used to being the one who helped other people that she’d never fully allowed herself to receive what others had to give. What Abby had to give. And what Abby had to give was astonishingly powerful, a flood of love and aliveness that touched every molecule of her being and awakened an almost unbearable joy. Her chest expanded with a deep, effortless breath that went on and on and on. Abby was her life.

  * * *

  The next time Gwynne woke, she felt surprisingly fine. She sat up and the world swayed to the left but it didn’t tip her over, so she tried to stand. Abby was there, gripping her arm to steady her.

  “You okay?” Abby said.

  “Yeah.” The world stabilized but the air was thinner, brighter, more sparkly. Even her body seemed to glow. And there were angels absolutely everywhere, spinning and tumbling and dancing. “Did we do it?”

  Abby laughed, a sound of relief mixed with the thrill of accomplishment. “Look how happy they are. Of course we did it.”

  One of angels approached. A very familiar angel. Or…not. No, it was her. It was. The world slipped and Gwynne swayed against the support of Abby’s body.

  How she recognized her mother, she couldn’t say. But it was her. Her aura was different, but the same. Brighter, clearer, free of the mask of human form. It felt like her. A warm ache lodged in her heart. Could it really be her?

  “
Gwynne, my little star.”

  “Mom?” She threw her arms around her. She looked like an angel, but she felt as solid and alive as ever.

  “I’m so proud of you, Gwynne.”

  “Mom? You’re an angel? What…” Her head reeled. It didn’t make sense.

  And then it did.

  “Like Abby? You incarnated? How…Oh my God. You killed yourself. Elle asked you to kill yourself. And you believed her.”

  She couldn’t accept that her mother was that naïve. Sure, it was obvious at this point that Elle had been right, but nothing had been obvious back then. Her mother was worse than Abby.

  “It’s not wrong to believe others, Gwynne. I’d been talking to angels all my life, just like you. I trusted her.”

  She trusted her. And that was enough? “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Abby stepped forward and hugged her mother before she could respond—just jumped in and flung her arms around her like they were long-lost friends who’d known each other forever. Come to think of it, if they were both angels, they had known each other forever—except Abby couldn’t remember. Or had that changed?

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” Abby said. “Gwynne may not act like it, but she’s happy to see you.”

  Her mother’s smile was warm and welcoming, and as Abby stepped out of the embrace she gripped both of Abby’s hands. “She’s lucky to have found you.”

  “Thank you for raising her and helping her grow up to be a wonderful person.” Abby drew their clasped hands together and toward her heart in a gesture of gratitude. “Thank you.”

  Gwynne squirmed with embarrassment. Abby was so nice. Leave it to Abby to find the exact right thing to say to her mother and to sincerely mean every word.

  They stepped apart and her mother turned to Gwynne. “You’re upset that I hid the truth from you.”

  Was it time for questions? She’d be happy to continue to watch Abby be her amazing self, but she did have questions. “I wish you’d said something.”

  “I wish I could have, but it wasn’t possible. You know I couldn’t have told you.”

  “Why? Why couldn’t you tell me? Or Dad? We could at least have said goodbye.”

  Her mother shook her head sadly. “You would have tried to stop me. I couldn’t afford to risk that.”

  Gwynne thought of all those angels hovering over her mother’s hospital bed, watching over her but refusing to help.

  “That’s why they wouldn’t help me heal you.” It was so clear now. “They wanted you to die.” She rubbed her forehead, trying to get at the headache lodged firmly behind her eyes.

  “Nobody planned for it to happen that way—for you to see me in the hospital.”

  Of course nobody planned it that way. Why plan for the interfering daughter to get in the way?

  “I cried over you.” She felt so stupid. “You let me believe you were dead!”

  “My human form is dead. That wasn’t a lie.”

  “But your spirit…” And it wasn’t her only lie. “All this time I thought you died trying to save Heather.”

  Her mother shrank and her light dimmed. “I did try to save her. I wanted to save her more than anything. I was willing to give my life for it. Yes, I was planning to help Elle anyway, but in that instant I wasn’t thinking about that. All I wanted to do was save my child. Not that it didn’t occur to me that I could save Heather’s life and then slip away afterward under the ice, make it look like an accident. But I miscalculated. In the end it really was an accident.”

  It was impossible to stay mad at her when she looked so defeated. Gwynne gave her another hug, but this time her arms passed right through the illusion of her mother’s form, nothing but air and a lingering essence. “Can I tell Dad, or will that just upset him?”

  “He…” Her voice was a quiet, hesitant tinkling of glass. “He…knows. I’m not supposed to show myself to him, but…I do, sometimes. I can make him see. Even when I don’t, he senses my presence.”

  “Wow, that’s good.” Her dad had been devastated by her mother’s death, still in love with her despite their divorce. Anything that could help him was great, even if it meant that her mother had been visiting her father but had apparently been hiding from her daughter. She was surprised Elle hadn’t forced her to make an appearance to convince Gwynne to put pressure on Abby. “You could have maybe told me.”

  “I couldn’t let you see me. I was trying to protect you. I was afraid that if you knew what I was, you’d think you were something you’re not, and you’d do something foolish and end up like your sister.”

  “You mean like help with the bridge?” The pieces suddenly fell into place. “If you’re an angel, that makes me half angel. That’s why the bridge didn’t kill me. You must have known it wouldn’t kill me.” She rubbed at the diffuse, white light that, although gradually fading, still glowed from her forearms. An aftereffect of touching the bridge, she guessed. Abby had it too. “You must have known. Elle must have known.”

  All that arguing. All that crap about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, about Abby being the only one who could help.

  “Elle knows you’re my mother, right?”

  “She knows.”

  “She didn’t act like it.”

  “Humans cannot touch the bridge.”

  Gwynne’s irritability seemed to have triggered the angel’s parental instinct to keep her in line. She’d been relatively easygoing as a mother, but when she got that look on her face, Gwynne knew she was in for a lecture.

  “But—”

  “You have to understand, we know very little about our children, what they are. We’ve always assumed you were just like any other human being, although the genetics are highly unpredictable.”

  “You really didn’t know?”

  “I wanted to stop you. I didn’t think it would work.”

  “So Heather’s not…”

  “Heather’s dead,” her mother said softly, her voice cracking. “Her spirit moved on.”

  “But not to the Angelic Realm.”

  “No. Hybrids have an angelic signature in their energy field, but in every other way you’re human.”

  “Except that I can see angels,” Gwynne pointed out.

  “As can some humans.”

  And Heather couldn’t. Because the genetics were unpredictable, and an accident of birth saddled Heather with a blindness she could never accept.

  But why would people like Megan McLaren be born with the ability to see angels when half angels like Heather weren’t? Unless Megan had angel’s blood too. Genes didn’t always show up where you expected them to.

  “There could be people who are one-quarter angel, one-sixteenth angel, one untraceable fraction from generations ago,” Gwynne said. “There must be hundreds of us. Thousands.”

  Elle swept in and joined their small circle. “As a matter of fact, no, there aren’t. Even if you look at the entire history of humankind, there have been very few angel-human unions that resulted in children. We’re a female society. Not female in quite the same way you think of it, but laying with a man…” She shuddered. “That’s something only a human would want to do. Very few angels have the stomach for it. Even you, being only half angel, wouldn’t do it. Artemisia was an exception.”

  Gwynne stared. Her mother, a sexual renegade. It was almost more bizarre than her being an angel.

  “We didn’t know what you were capable of. Helping to fix the bridge…” Her mother’s wings became a blur of movement. “I thought it would kill you. Half human or one hundred percent human, the human part of you shouldn’t have been able to handle the high voltage. And fifty percent dead becomes one hundred percent dead pretty much immediately.”

  “We didn’t know it would transform you,” Elle said.

  “It transformed me?”

  “You’re an angel now,” her mother said.

  Abby stiffened at her side. Gwynne was sure she’d done the same thing.

  “What?”

&nb
sp; “Look at yourself.”

  Gwynne rubbed her arms. Sure, they glowed a little, but that was temporary, right? As far as she could tell, she still had solid form. Her energy field did feel different, but it was hard to be sure what exactly was different about it, considering the dizziness hadn’t completely gone away.

  “I have human form.” Glowing human form, but still. She knew that much, at least.

  “Human form, yes. Human thoughts. The appearance of human karma. But inside, you’re an angel.” Her mother brightened with pride. “When the energy of the bridge and the energy of all of us surged through you, it magnified your angelic DNA and burned out your old identity. It turned you into an angel.”

  “An incarnated angel,” Elle said. “We’re thrilled to have you onboard.”

  An angel. She didn’t know how she felt about that.

  “Is this glow going to wear off?”

  “Eventually. And look,” Elle said. “The bridge has an extra node. A new one, just for you.”

  Perfect. Gwynne narrowed her eyes at the happy angel. “I never, ever want to hear about this bridge ever again. If it gets damaged again it is staying broken, do you hear me?”

  Her mother sparkled with indulgent, maternal laughter. “Okay, honey. We’ll discuss it in a few decades when you join us in the Angelic Realm.”

  “I cannot believe this is happening to me,” Gwynne muttered.

  Abby put her arm around her waist. “I’m just glad we’ll be together.”

  They would be, wouldn’t they? Gwynne softened. Together forever in the Angelic Realm. She leaned into the comfort of Abby’s arm and pointedly did not look at the two angels who blazed with unbearable light. She didn’t want them to know how happy they’d made her.

  Or maybe she did. She squinted in their direction. “I look forward to it.”

  They blinked out.

  Gwynne pressed her forehead to Abby’s shoulder. “Having you around will make it worth putting up with my mother for eternity.”