my fear of the dark here is just ridiculous."
She'd survived, Keller hadn't. What foolishness was it to bid her
soulmate goodbye in the place where he had died when his soul had risen
again as the Avenging Angel Ezekiel?
Which left her virtually no reason to be down in the yawning depths of
the Hallelujah. None but Lucy's tight-lipped resistance to the notion
that Jerome Clarke had been murdered. And even that seemed meaningless
at the moment.
"Lucy? Say something."
"What did you expect to find down here, Robyn?" Her voice was
curiously wooden.
She swallowed hard. "I wish I knew, Lucy. I'm sorry." "Not sorry
enough, are you?" "I don't understand .... "
"You push too hard, Robyn. You won't take a friend's advice. You want
to pick things apart for all the ways they can go wrong? Pick this
apart. You went looking for trouble like you always do. This time,"
she jeered, "you hit the jackpot."
Chapter Fifteen
"Lucy, wh-what are you talking about? I--"
"I--I--I. I'm sick to death of your do-gooder attitude. I won't let
you ruin me or my name, Robyn. I'm putting an end to it, here and
now."
Robyn sank to the uneven surface of the stope floor, solid rock to her
left, a deadly precipice a few feet to her right. The implication in
her friend's words became crystal clear. Panic rose in her on a wave
of nausea. "Lucy, are you saying Lucien Montbank murdered Jerome
Clarke?"
From across the expanse of blackness came the soft and deadly Voice of
Kiel Alighieri. "That's what she's saying, Robyn." He switched on a
lantern. His stern, handsome face appeared disembodied by the light.
"Kiel?" Robyn cried, her heart alight, her body shaking. "You came
back?"
"Oh, brilliant," Lucy mocked. "For all the good it will do either one
of you."
"She's always known, Robyn. Jerome Clarke's murder has always been the
dirty little family secret, hasn't it?"
"This town is full of dirty little secrets," Lucy spat out. "And
without proof--"
"Ahh, but there is proof, you know," he interrupted softly, "in a cage
submerged at the depths of this mine. Isn't that right, Lucy?"
He'd struck Lucinda Montbank temporarily speechless.
Clutching her backpack, Robyn looked to her Avenging Angel. "Kiel?
What proof?"
"A skeleton, minus one hand, with a slug in the skull." "Submerged?"
She knew the lowest levels of mines often filled when the water table
rose. And that cages were the means of lowering and raising whole
mining crews to the deepest levels. "How did you ever find--"
His stern visage cracked as he grinned in the lantern light across the
chasm that separated them. "Tricks again. Sorry, little earthling.
Some things just can't be done any other way."
Lucy snorted. "What gibberish is this?"
Kiel's smile faded. His eyes fixed on Lucy. He withdrew from a breast
pocket a slug and tossed it across the cavernous space. The slow
gentle arc landed the old bullet in Lucy's hand. "The same rifling,"
he said, "exactly the same markings as the bullet you dared to put on
display in your office. This slug and the one that killed
Blackjack Turner came from the same gun."
"My grandfather's Colt .45."
Robyn's flesh crawled. "You knew this," she accused. "You knew."
"I knew," she granted disdainfully, shedding her backpack at her feet.
"Of course I knew. And I put that slug and that gun in the display
case and I laughed."
"Why? Why did he resort to murder?"
"Why?" she mocked, laughing her contempt. "Figure it out, Robyn.
You're the high-and-mighty author."
She remembered, then, the research she'd done, the pieces that didn't
fit. "Lucien Montbank outsmarted himself, didn't he. How many times,
Lucy? How many surface claims did he sell to Clarke for pennies on the
dollar and think he'd swindled an easy mark?"
"You do have a gift for the obvious, Robyn." Lucy's features twisted
in derision. "Too bad it's going to be wasted."
"I don't think so, Lucy," Kiel intoned.
She swore at him and pulled a handgun from her backpack, swung around
and shot off her weapon, aiming perfectly at Kiel's lantern. A
horrible crack of gui-fire resounded. The slug shattered the lantern
and cast Kiel's side of the tunnel into blackness. "Die, you meddling
clod!"
A scream caught in Robyn's throat as the light of the lantern sprang to
life again. "The truth, Lucinda Mont-bank," he commanded, pointing at
her.
Lucy's face slackened in disbelief. With both hands she leveled the
pistol at the lantern again and fired. Kiel deadened the noise and
plucked the slug from thin air and held it up. Awestruck by his might
and power, Robyn swallowed.
"The truth, Lucinda Montbank," he intoned again. "Who are you?" she
shrilled.
He stood then, clothed in his magnificent male human form, legs spread
wide, arms outstretched, the light of the lantern setting a glow around
his body and bronze hair. "Ezekiel," he pronounced, "Avenging Angel of
the Almighty."
Shrieking her disbelief, Lucy stood and aimed and fired into the chest
of Kiel, but the bullet slowed, slowed, and fell away into the yawning
pit at his feet.
Lucy's hand dropped, and she stumbled backward. "I'll ask you one more
time," he said, pointing a finger at her. "Say it! Unless Jerome
Clarke died, your great-grandfather was a ruined man. Your empire
comes tumbling down when the truth is known!"
She hurled the gun down, and it clattered out of her reach. "I have
nothing to lose! I could never be held accountable for things that
happened a hundred years ago."
Robyn stared in the beam of the light of her helmet lamp at the woman
she had believed to be a friend. Lucinda Montbank had profited
immensely from the fruits of a poisoned tree. Robyn saw that whether
her fortune was at stake or not, Lucy could never bear the onus, the
derision, the snickers and disparagement and sheer stigma of being a
false claimant in a town like Aspen.
"But you are now called to account for the attempted murder of Robyn
Delaney, and the murder of Keller Trueblood," Kiel charged. "You sent
Tee Palmer on a fool's errand so he could not witness your treachery.
You set those charges, and you must pay."
Her pulse racing, her throat locked in fear of what Lucy would do next,
Robyn knew this must be a bluff--there was no proof, no evidence of
whatever charges Lucy had set off that couldn't be attributed to mining
operations a century ago.
But Lucy couldn't know for sure. Kiel had found proof where she'd
believed none would ever be found of her great-grandfather's crime. She
stood, shaking her head sadly. "How many times, how many ways, did I
try to stop you, Robyn? You would not stop! You wouldn't let it go,
you refused, even to die when you should have."
Overcome as she always was by the tortured reasons of tortured souls
for their crimes, Robyn shiver
ed hard.
"All you ever had to do was tell me the truth, Lucy." "And go down in
ignominious disgrace?"
"Lucy, you were not responsible for what your ancestors did!"
But Lucinda Montbank was beyond reasoning. "Do you think I've lived my
whole life for that end, you idiot woman? Do you think I'll stand for
it?"
Her face contorted and she screamed in her fury and grabbed a grenade
from her backpack. Horrified, frozen, Robyn watched as she pulled the
pin and stood there shrieking until the last possible second. She
hurled the live explosive with all her might at Robyn's feet and then
ran for cover,
Kiel's furious roar filled the stope. The grenade went flying but
exploded in a horrendous blast that shook the earth and rattled the
skeletal remains of the mine to its core. Beams splintered and crashed
and the earth rumbled.
"No-o-o-o-o!" Kiel bellowed, but Robyn was thrown into the wall at her
back, her helmet was ripped from her head and the lamp shattered.
Tossed around like a doll in a violent, nightmarish black
conflagration, she screamed for Kiel.
Desperately he searched for her life form by the ivory angel wings
around her neck. In the instant a rock slide would have crushed her to
death, he cast a force field around her and flew to her side.
He materialized in his human form at her side. Rocks hurtled and
crashed down all around them, but in the eye of the fury, she was safe.
By the eerie, hot red-orange glow surrounding him, Robyn saw the anger
in his body and the fear that he had not reacted quickly enough to
prevent the crashing, collapsing disaster. She saw the overpoweringly
vulnerable position he was in of loving her as a mortal man and what a
colossal, terrible drain it was on his powers to hold back the tons of
rock from crushing her then and there.
"I'm all right, Kiel," she cried. "Go after Lucy. She's not in her
right mind. Don't let her be killed."
"I love you, Robyn Delaney." He grabbed her shoulders and kissed her
hard and fast. Then, in a split second, he was transformed to the
manifestation of the Avenging Angel Ezekiel.
When he left her with a powerful beat of his wings, she was in the
darkness again, her worst nightmare unfolding, buried alive again, her
life hanging by a thread in the space of a force field she didn't know
if Kiel could sustain, or for how long.
Her life passed before her eyes, her girlhood, standing at that
chalkboard scribbling, Fighting is never the answer, her endless hours
interviewing twisted murdering souls, her brief moments in the
spotlight when her books hit the bestseller lists, her all-too-brief,
too-precious hours with her beloved Keller.
She had brought this calamitous and death-dealing moment upon herself
because she'd been looking for trouble and refused to see the danger,
but she knew in her heart that if she made it out again this time, if
Kiel could save her this once, she would look for the good instead and
use the power of her words for the cause of real and abiding justice on
earth.
She heard Lucy's screaming rage and Kiel's booming, heavenly commands.
Another blast rocked the earth and then another. In some zone she had
never known, she saw in her mind's eye the terrible battle being waged.
She saw Kiel try again and again to save Lucy from herself, but it was
as if the forces of evil had consumed her and invested in her powers
equal to Kiel's.
In a mighty sweep of his wings Kiel deflected an avalanche of rock, and
the power of her own furious attack turned back on Lucinda Montbank,
rained down on her and crushed from her human body all life.
And all the evil power at her command turned tail and fled in the face
of the might of Ezekiel's heavenly wrath.
THE ARGUMENT GOT HEATED in Angelo's office at the DBAA.
"The rescue teams will reach her in another few hours," Angelo
stated.
"I won't leave her there another five minutes," Kiel snapped. "I won't
do it."
Angelo glowered. "She's human, Ezekiel. You are not. You have saved
her life. That, and that alone, was your obligation. She has found
peace with herself, and she will now fulfill her destiny. For you to
go back to her now is to make a grave error."
"May I say something, here?" Clarence interrupted persistently.
"No!" Angelo bellowed.
"No," Kiel snapped, meeting the awesome power in Angelo's eyes with an
awesome strength of his own. "What destiny? The child you spoke
of?"
"Yes," Angelo equivocated. "Among other things."
Kiel stared hard, the Adam's apple of his human manifestation pitching.
"About the child," he demanded.
Angelo's mighty head rolled on his shoulders. He knew exactly where
this was leading, to an even more critically depleted staff of Avenging
Angels. One more heretofore unutilized exception to the rules, when a
miracle occurred and a mortal woman's mating with an angel produced a
life inside her body. "The child is yours."
Such a profound joy pervaded Kiel's heart and mind and soul and
physical presence that his earthly tear ducts emptied. He jammed his
fingers into his mortal's jeans, and his head fell forward in deepest
gratitude.
"Surely," Clarence piped in during the first available silence,
clacking the beads of his-abacus in a frenzy, "surely even you can see
that the odds of such a love as is shared by Ezekiel and the mortal
Robyn Delaney are one in eighty-nine trillion... and six," he added,
trembling, clearing his throat in the face of Angelo's mighty scowl.
"In the next fourteen millennia," he finished defiantly.
The numbers astounded even Angelo, rendering him speechless for a time.
Kiel met his fierce and penetrating blue eyes. "I don't want to hear
anything about it when her mortal life expires in seventy years," he
warned. "You're mine, then, and for all time."
Kiel's thousand-candle smile nearly blinded the crusty old angel.
"We'll both be yours to command then."
"Don't toy with me, Ezekiel," Angelo thundered. "Never happen, sir,"
Kiel cracked.
Eavesdropping behind the door, Gracie clapped her hands.
The kiss to end all kisses, better than any princess bride had ever
known, was recorded that day in history, and what do you know?
The spirit of Kiel and Robyn's baby clapped her tiny hands, too.
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