by Lucia Ashta
Copyright 2018 Lucía Ashta
Amargento Books
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Cover design by Lou Harper.
I strive to produce error-free books. If you discover a mistake, please contact me at [email protected] so I may correct it. Thank you!
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For my mother, who fills my heart with gratitude
Reality is merely a matter of perspective.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
MAKE A DIFFERENCE
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Acknowledgments
Books by Lucía Ashta
About the Author
Beyond Amber
Beyond Amber Preview
Chapter 1
Lena had her eyes closed, but they flew open when Paolo cried, “Archangel Michael, protect us!” She snapped to alertness at the alarm and anguish in his voice.
She’d felt safe and supported in the company of her beloved just minutes before atop Cathedral Rock, beneath a nearly full, iridescent moon.
Time broke. Those experiences seemed like memories of another person, of someone whose life couldn’t end with a snap of grinding metal and ill intent.
It took Lena a fraction of a second to identify the threat. But it was hard to miss the oversized four-wheel drive vehicles gunning for their small sports car, pinning them in, front and back.
Sedona was dark and quiet. There were no street lamps to illuminate what was happening. Two sets of large, beaming headlights aimed through the front and back windshields to blind and disorient her. The vehicles were so big, coming at them from so much higher than she sat.
Powerful engines roared. The oversized vehicles were too close.
She threw her hands in front of her face and lifted her legs to her chest, up and off the floor of the little sports car.
The drivers of the massive vehicles slammed on their accelerators. Tires squealed.
Lena didn’t have the opportunity to process the latest bizarre turn her life was taking. If she had, perhaps she wouldn’t have been surprised. Her life was nearly unrecognizable compared to what it used to be. The cowered divorcée she’d started out as felt more like a different person than a part of her.
She was finally learning who she was and what she was meant to do. She was beginning to understand that she was far greater than the limitations she’d believed in. She was extraordinary—or, at least, she could be, if she didn’t die right here, right now.
That extraordinariness, that empowerment that was in the process of awakening, could draw to a close before she had the chance to embody all she’d learned already. Before she could claim the power she’d only just begun to realize she had.
Her back whipped forward, her neck snapped painfully. The seatbelt dug into her shoulder, abdomen, and thighs hard enough to leave rug burn marks beneath her clothing.
Metal crunched against metal, grinding, breaking, snapping. Glass shattered into tiny fragments, holding together because of a shatterproof treatment for several instants, before giving way to violent upheaval. Glass flew everywhere, sliding around, sticking to her hair and clothes.
One of the enormous four-wheel drive vehicles had plunged into their tiny sports car from behind, ramming the trunk all the way up against the backs of the driver and passenger seats, bare metal cutting through leather upholstery. Almost at the same time, the second one jammed the hood until the engine appeared where Lena and Paolo’s feet had been only seconds before. Paolo had done as Lena had. There was nothing he could do to avoid impact. No maneuver or acceleration on his part would make a difference.
Lena and Paolo were trapped inside the tight space between the crushed front and back ends.
In her mind, Lena kept thinking, Paolo, Paolo, Paolo, but she didn’t turn to seek him out. There wasn’t time.
Glass shards were everywhere, cutting her skin all over her body. But she couldn’t feel. She couldn’t process what was happening. It was all too sudden. Too unexpected. Too senseless. Why should they be victims to such an attack? She was nobody.
Even as she thought it—a surviving pattern of defeat from her earlier life—she realized it wasn’t true. She was somebody. Someone with an important purpose. She could make a difference in this world. And so could Paolo.
They just had to survive this.
And she didn’t see how they would. How they could.
Surrounding them, there was nothing but wild animals. There were no other cars she could see. No people. No pedestrians. Just a quiet, wild Sedona night.
If this was how she was meant to die, then she knew the night would swallow her whole, before she had a chance to be even a shadow of who she could become. The silence of the still, dark night would whisk Paolo and her away, a drifting whisper that would disappear in the night, dispersing until there was nothing left of them to inhabit this physical world. They’d scatter over the red rocks and be gone.
The screeching sounds of metal jarred her bones, some of which must already be broken, although she barely felt the pain. But she could feel disbelief running through her like a fever.
Her neck bounced back and forth, erupting in a spasm that made the rest of her body twitch each time. The trucks in front and behind were reversing, trying to break the mangled metal of their bumpers free of the sports car. Their tires spun. Metal crunched and squealed. And her neck continued to shake spasmodically.
She thought she should be afraid, but she wasn’t, even as she realized that the drivers must intend to ram their car again. Surely they wouldn’t survive another hit. She and Paolo couldn’t move. They were pinned, front and back, into their positions. Lena’s face wedged between her thighs, her arms circled her knees, and her hands lay atop her crown.
She couldn’t see the man she loved, the man she’d finally found, the one she’d lost to death in lifetimes past. Had they found each other again, through impossible odds, only to lose each other another time? To wait until another incarnation to begin the search anew?
That prospect was inconceivable. Such a terrible thing, such a great loss.
Yet she didn’t fear. Why didn’t she?
In the next moment, she discovered why.
First she saw from afar what she thought were flickering lights. Perhaps she was hallucinating. She’d received serious trau
ma to the body, surely. Any of her injuries—the ones she wasn’t feeling yet—would be enough to cause visual distortions at the least.
The flickering lights were a bright white. They grew larger and more defined as they neared.
Lena lost sight of them when they merged with the blaring headlights right on top of them.
Then they appeared again. She could only see them through a gap between her knees, her neck craned at an unfeasible angle, her view limited by the crumpled dashboard.
Were they…? Could they be?
She repositioned her head to see better. Stars burst in her vision. Regardless, she craned her neck to see.
The white lights crystallized into angels. It was her first time seeing angels like this—outside of a vision or her mind’s eye—but there was no doubting what they were. When you see an angel, you know it as surely as if they wore name tags.
Angels peered inside their car, looking through what had once been windows and were now distorted openings framed by deadly metal.
Their faces were pure and serene. Beyond any definition of beauty Lena had previously possessed.
Despite the continued danger and the knowledge that once the vehicles managed to separate from their sports car, they would ram them again, and that would be the end of her physical body, Lena could do no more than appreciate the beauty of the apparitions that looked in on her and her beloved.
They hadn’t been there a moment before, when the trucks first pounded into them, damaging their human bodies, all too fragile, easily broken by tons of angry steel gunning at them.
But the angels were there now, materialized from nothing. Even though they were truly present, Lena understood that her hand would pass right through them. As it was, her arms were pinned, and she couldn’t reach out even though she wanted to.
An angel slipped into the car and hovered over them. The angel’s body was half in and half out, unhampered by the constraints of the physical world.
Turned the way she was to see the angels, Lena was able to look at Paolo for the first time since the initial impact, which had knocked him unconscious.
But Lena didn’t panic. She was in a space beyond panic and the concerns of the world she thought she lived in. She watched the man she loved, the man she’d loved before, the man she was meant to be one with.
There was a peace and serenity about the scene incongruous to the violence and hatred of the attack. Later on, when she had the opportunity to reflect, she’d realize she was hovering above her body, watching. That’s how she was able to observe the damage to Paolo’s body with neutrality. That’s how she could observe her own mangled form from above and experience no attachment to the outcome. Whether she lived or died made little difference to the ethereal form she inhabited while she watched and listened to the sounds of screeching tires, gunning engines, and bone-crunching metal.
The vehicle in front managed to free itself from the remains of the sports car.
Another angel slipped in. Looking like holograms, the angels moved around Lena and Paolo, attending to them. Paolo’s left leg was twisted at an improbable angle, the splintered bone protruding through a gaping hole in his pants and the flesh of his shin. An angel lifted it, snapped it back into its usual position, and set it down gently. The angel then blasted healing light through his leg. The broken bone, glowing from within, fused back into one solid piece.
The flesh surrounding the site began to stitch itself back together. The process was methodical, the flesh knitting itself back together from the inside out. But after some time—Lena, floating outside the pain of her body, had no idea how long—the skin was whole once more, the red tint of new skin the only indication that something was amiss.
The other angel gripped Lena’s head, pulled it from between her knees, and set it against the headrest of her seat. The angel loosened Lena’s arms from their death grip around her knees. A bone pierced the skin of her right elbow. As with Paolo, the angel set the bone, guiding it back in through the gash in her skin. The angel pressed a hand against the open wound. With a flash of white light, the bone began to mend. The two pieces of bone reached for each other, gaining ground, until they fused into one. The flesh stitched itself back together, leaving behind a raw and ugly-looking patch of skin—a vast improvement.
Their bodies were broken everywhere. And everywhere, angels touched and healed them.
To Lena, it looked like a light show. The glowing white angels with their magic tricks of beaming, healing light. The mangled sports car glowed from within, announcing to any with eyes to see that a miracle was taking place. But only those with eyes to see a miracle for what it was could see the glow of angelic intervention.
The wounds Lena and Paolo suffered in the crash were severe—under ordinary circumstances, life-ending. Paolo received a deadly blow to the head. Lena’s lungs could no longer sustain the breath of life. Combined with some of the other injuries they received, they would have both been dead before the second impact.
But Paolo had prayed to Archangel Michael to protect them. It would seem that Archangel Michael heard his prayer and intervened. Without the angels’ involvement, Lena and Paolo would be dead. Even now, their lives teetered on the edge of the here-and-now and the in-between.
Tires spun as one of the vehicles prepared to ram them again. Metal grated upon metal as the second vehicle managed to disentangle itself from the sports car’s back bumper. But the sounds, though loud, seemed far off to Lena.
She continued to watch, still detached from her body and its usual emotions, as an angel tended to a gash on Paolo’s head. An otherwise fatal injury—the one that would have certainly killed him—healed from the inside out. The angel presided patiently over the healing process as curing the gash on his head took longer than the broken shin bone.
A piece of metal from the driver’s side door frame had pierced Paolo’s skull and sunk into brain tissue. The angel waited for the healing light to do its work, rebuilding brain tissue that couldn’t just be pieced back together. Restoring Paolo’s memories and faculties, his learning and personality.
The angel’s face showed the tender concern of a parent with a child, his touch, infinitely gentle and pure. When the angel finally moved away from Paolo’s head, the only external evidence of the severity of his injury was blood-matted hair that stood at odd angles.
He looked as if he were only sleeping, and she wanted nothing but to watch him and the peaceful rise and fall of his chest, the bliss of ignorance.
With difficulty, she turned her attention to her own body. Two angels tried to inflate her lungs. Her chest cavity was crushed. Her knees, the defense she meant to protect her, had pushed into her chest, breaking ribs. Sharp pieces of rib bone pierced the spongy organs. Seconds later, her lungs were heaving. Finally, they’d collapsed.
The angels labored to repair the many levels of damage. Quick, staccato bursts of light punctuated their work. But before they could finish the job, an insistent, blaring sound startled Lena back into her body.
She couldn’t place the source of the noise because for a few terrible, blinding moments, there was only pain, pain, and more pain. Every part of her body throbbed or screamed in anguish.
Whereas there had been so much light moments before, black crept in on the edges of her vision, making what she could see smaller with each strained breath. All the better. She couldn’t see for the pain, anyway.
Her vantage point was the size of a ping pong ball, and it continued to narrow. The darkness was pulling her in. She was collapsing in on herself. So much pain. So much noise.
In those last moments, while Lena still gripped this reality, she recognized the loudest and most insistent of the noises for what it was. It was a car’s horn. It honked, and honked, and blared.
Then Lena let go. Once she stopped trying to resist, the dark cloud closed in on her vision and whisked her away to the place of no thought and no pain.
The two massive four-wheel drive vehicles were disentangled
from the twisted metal of the former black sports car, now a heap of car parts, broken glass, and blood. The vehicles were about to ram the car again, the one in front spinning its tires over and again in a swirl of burnt rubber and smoke. The two vehicles of assassination were lined up and synchronized. The next blow would be Lena and Paolo’s last.
The sports car offered them no protection. It had become a razor-sharp death trap.
But a passing driver saw what was happening and laid on her horn, fearless of the risk at which she was putting herself. If the drivers of the two trucks were set on killing the passengers of the sports car, they could have easily turned their aggression on her.
They didn’t.
The passing driver’s intervention worked. She kept sounding the horn, and the drivers of the trucks, concealed behind tinted windows, hesitated.
Thirty long seconds passed in which the trucks could still barrel at Lena and Paolo. They could still kill them.
Lena’s breathing was labored and raspy in her unconscious state. Her breaths were too shallow, insufficiently nourishing. The human brain can’t survive long without enough oxygen.
