He dressed nicely even on a weekend, in pressed jeans and a button-down shirt. As I got into the car, I said, “It’s still my first thought. Text my grandfather and tell him where I’m going. Then I remember that I can’t text, and my second thought is to call him on my cell. And then I remember that I can’t do that either. The handwritten note is the third thought.”
“By the time you’re back in Bellangame,” Adriel said, “you’ll be thinking in the reverse, with texting the last thing to occur to you.”
I didn’t want to think about being back in Bellangame since he wouldn’t be there. I also didn’t like that he was thinking about me being gone, and appearing untroubled. He looked at me curiously and I knew that he’d seen the shielding. “Sometimes it’s my business, and should stay that way,” I said.
“You aren’t as eager to go back to Bellangame as you have been before.”
“That’s annoying, Adriel!” Thinking about it made me despair. I’d go back in June to pool parties and long conversations on my cell phone, shopping for clothes and college supplies with Downy and Taylor. They were going to be the same people having the same conversations when I had changed so much. I didn’t want to sink back into that old life, my experiences here fading to less-than-real. “You have to let a girl retain some mystery.”
“You do have mystery,” Adriel disagreed. “I can’t read your mind. I have to ask questions like any other guy.”
“I have a mystery you can solve,” I said. “What exactly is the Spooner mascot?”
“I have no clue,” Adriel answered, turning onto Jacobo. “My last five schools have been the bearcats, the demons, the wolves, the llamas, and the fighting eagles. Then I came to Spooner with its critter of mystery.”
“The llamas?”
“The spitting llamas. It was strange. Yet not as strange as Crazy Critter. Hey, that’s Easton over there.”
I waved to Easton, who was going down the sidewalk with a family as redheaded as he was. “You mentioned fallen angels that don’t stay. Who are they? Can you tell me about them?”
“We haven’t had many, not since I joined the family. Some are . . .” His fingers tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully. “. . . guilty. Remorseful. Angry. Some essentially become hermits to wait out the end of time; others move on to different families or create their own. Jacquiel was an angry one, an angel who lived with us for a few years in the nineteen thirties. His fall was five hundred years in the past, but he couldn’t cope with it. Drina forced him to leave since it wasn’t a good fit. There was Sersha for six months in the seventies. She still writes now and then to Taurin. They fell for the same reason. He’s made better peace with it.”
“What reason?”
“Love. Sersha fell in love with her guarded soul and had a clandestine relationship with him. We’re forbidden to do that obviously. Taurin fell in love with a lesser thread of the tapestry, a woman destined to have no husband or children. He told himself that it was not so great of a crime, since he wasn’t interfering with anything destined to happen. Angels aren’t allowed to do that either, however, and the Thronos expelled him once they discovered it.”
Grouchily, I looked out the window and said, “Where is this Thronos authority? Someone needs to file a complaint about their leadership.”
“It’s here,” Adriel said.
“In Spooner?” That was too much for me to believe.
“No. It’s everywhere and nowhere all at once, temporally hidden. Only a full angel can shift from this time to access theirs. I would be summoned there when it was time to be assigned a new guarded soul. The twelve of the Old Guard sat upon their chairs in the grand sanctuary as I knelt before them, and above us was the source of the music. It’s the most beautiful light. Chords I couldn’t understand came down to the Guard with messages, and they translated them for me. So I knew where to go and which times to arrive, what to do while I was there.”
We pulled up the driveway to his incredible home. He pressed a button on the ceiling of his car to open the gate. Cadmon was on the lawn, half-dressed and pressing his hand to the trunk of a tree. Motioning to him, I asked, “Do you think that he’ll be like the others? The ones who left since they couldn’t take it?”
“I hope not,” Adriel said while we traveled around the driveway. “I trust that he had reason for what he did. All I’ve ever seen in his soul is a gentle nature. Jacquiel was arrogant to think as an angel that he could make the tapestry better than how it was, to dare to rearrange threads to suit his liking. Mine was an impulse save; his was deliberate. He was arrogant as a fallen angel as well. Drina is thousands upon thousands of years old, and Taurin nearly as much. Kishi and I have voices, but they run this family. If we disagree with something, we are free to leave and run our own. It was not for Jacquiel to come in and attempt to take over. When he left, he tried to get Kishi and I to go with him.” He parked the car. Three others were also here, so I assumed the whole family was home.
I climbed out and spied Cadmon up on the highest point of the roof, the sun turning his wings to blazes of silver as he sat there. His flight had been silent. Nervously, I looked out to the road. That must have been why they picked this house, pushed back from the street and far apart from other homes. As we walked through the front door, a window pushed up on the level above and Drina stuck her head out to shout upwards, “Cadmon! I saw that. No fly zone!”
The house was just as beautiful inside as it was outside. Instrumental music played. A majestic foyer with a chandelier opened to a vast living room with a vaulted ceiling. Sunlight streamed through the windows to brighten the dark wood of the furniture. A handsome man was sitting upon a leather sofa, a newspaper crinkling in his hands as he read. Adriel called, “Taurin? This is Jessa.”
He lowered the paper. Though appearances meant nothing of age with angels, he looked to be in his early forties. The sun brought out red tones in his dark brown hair, and his eyes were the gray of a gathering storm. Extending a hand, he said, “Jessa Bright, the girl who tumbled off a cliff indeed!”
“Oh, don’t remind her of it!” Drina chided over the iron railing of a hallway on the second floor. Something thumped on the roof and in exasperation she shouted to the ceiling, “Cadmon!”
I shook Taurin’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“And now your thread continues. I wonder where it will go.” He spoke only with curiosity, not recrimination.
“With any luck, anywhere but off a cliff again,” I said.
“Let me show you around,” Adriel offered. We walked through the living room to a kitchen, which was large but cozily designed in yellow tiles and homey touches like small vases of fresh flowers and bowls of fruit. Lights hung low from chains over the counters. Doubling back through the living room, he guided me to a hallway. Two bedrooms were down here, one for Drina and one for Taurin, and there was also a library.
I looked at the books, having never seen so many in one place save an actual library. Some were so old that they were under glass cases to protect them. Among the books on the shelves were vases and displays of ancient coins from all over the world. “Wow. Which one of you is the collector?”
“I don’t know that it’s so much collecting.” Adriel stretched up to pluck one of the small displays down. “These were mine over a hundred years ago, some Indian Head pennies minted in 1906. I’ve only ever lived in America. Drina and Taurin have seen the world, and the rest of these are coins they saved.”
“Think of the history behind each one, how many hands they passed through in their time,” I said. All of those hands and coin pouches and pockets, and they ended up here in the same room with me. “This is a museum.”
As we walked down the hallway, Drina was calling, “Kishi, will you get him down? I’ve been up there twice today and he’s not listening to me in the slightest.”
“Sure,” Kishi called back. Her voice was much louder. I looked up as we stepped into the foyer and saw her right overhead, balanced on the
railing and framed by wings of ocean blue. She grinned to see us and put a finger to her lips.
“Without wings,” Drina shouted. “The ladder is in the back.”
“Damn,” Kishi whispered. Hopping off the railing, she clattered down the steps while we walked up them. She let herself out the front door and then a brilliant sapphire light shot past the window up to the roof. It happened so fast a blink could have missed the whole thing.
“He fell in autumn, so autumn is worse for him,” Adriel said. “The anniversary is painful. We’ll have to take him flying tonight.”
“I’d like to come,” I said. “If that’s all right, to watch.”
“I don’t think anyone will mind. This is Cadmon’s room.” The door was open to a comforting scene, the walls a soothing blue and stars upon the ceiling to glow at night. It was a very bare space, and I realized that I was looking for toys and children’s books. But he wasn’t really a child. There was no bed but mounds of pillows on the floor. Before I could ask, Adriel said, “When our guarded souls didn’t need us, we could rest in a non-corporeal form as we flew.”
“Listening.”
“Yes. Or we stayed steady within trees or clouds once sated . . . to sleep in a bed feels strange at first when an angel falls. In a few years, he’ll be ready for it.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the happy disaster of Kishi’s room, which was the chaos of the back seat of her car given much more room to flourish. Only if one had eternity to live could a person fit in all of the hundreds of projects lying out, from quilting to painting to music to puzzles. The walls were covered in posters of BBG and The Plug Nickels, which made me like her even more. She had good taste in pop bands. Unlike Cadmon, she had a proper bed. “Does she ever finish anything?”
“It’s always surprising, but she does quite often. I think she made some of those pillows on the bed herself,” Adriel said. “Would you like to see my room?”
I wanted to see that most of all, and followed him to the last door in the hallway. He opened it to a simple room with big windows looking out into trees. Sparsely decorated, I perused the slim bookcase and pulled out a framed picture of an advertisement for a carnival that took place seventy years ago. Adriel said, “Kishi and I had a good time there.”
“You don’t know what to do with this space, do you?” I blurted.
He froze temporarily. Then he looked away from me and said, “No.”
“Your brother isn’t fully here yet, and your sister is immersed in here. But you’re neither. What do you do besides go to school?”
“I read. I go downtown and get a coffee, sit down and just watch people.”
Forever part of the world yet not, I thought, and it saddened me. A painting was affixed to the wall framing the window seat. At first I startled, thinking I was looking at myself. But the dress was old-fashioned, and the girl a little younger. She was standing within a garden bursting with flowers, every detail intricate and exquisitely done. There was so much love put into every brushstroke of the painting. “You painted Annabeth. Adriel, you’re really skilled.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to become skilled.”
It seemed like such a waste, that he had saved her and fallen as punishment, and she was killed regardless. “I’m sorry she died.”
He sighed. “I was, too. There was a lot of music in her soul. It sounded . . . well, it sounded exactly like yours.”
A blur of silver and sapphire raced by the window. Crisp footsteps went down the hallway and Drina called, “Taurin, the natives are restless. Will you stuff them into the car? We can drive out to the Point.”
“Let me go and talk to her about you coming,” Adriel said. Then I was alone in his room. He had made so little mark upon it. I wondered if I were immortal if I would have a room like this, or one like Kishi’s. Maybe when the threat was very real of running out of things to do, it was hard to do any of them. Yet he had crafted this painting, and I knew from the way he did it that he didn’t regret pulling her from the water.
I looked through the rest of the room, which bore scant evidence that its inhabitant was over a hundred years old. His art supplies were in the closet, carefully organized and nothing fresh in progress. I spotted sketchbooks on the upper shelf and brought some of them down. Sitting on the bed, I tucked my hair behind my ear and flipped through the first one. It was labeled 1920-1929. On each page was a different scene, each with a date scrawled along the bottom and the initials AG. A child in a long coat stood behind an old-fashioned car; two elderly men played chess at a park as pigeons ate crumbs on the ground. Next was a wedding party with men in suits and women in luminous white gowns. I flipped again through students in a classroom, a dog chasing a cat across a lawn, and a baker holding loaves of bread.
Putting it aside, I opened the one for 1930-1939. The clothing styles changed but the pictures were much the same, people he saw and sketched. He had lived through the Depression, which turned up on page after page of children in rags and men in line for free soup. People wept around a small grave.
I skipped the other sketchbooks for the last in the pile, labeled 2010-2019. Here I saw familiar faces from school, both teachers and students. There was Jacobo Road on one page with people going into the stores, and on another page, a mail truck was paused at boxes. A hand extended out to push letters into one.
The sketchpad was only half-full, and I turned to the last pages of pictures. On a picture dated in June, the school janitor knelt down by the dumpster to offer a can of moist food to a stray cat. For the summer there was only one sketch. It was a busy street in San Francisco, the sky shaded for evening and well-dressed people hurrying through a crosswalk to a restaurant on the other side.
I turned to a picture of myself on the first day of school, standing outside in the sunlight. He had added a bit of color to me, where almost all of his sketches were done in black-and-white. The school remained in shades of gray, but I burst from the page at the center.
The last picture was of the party at the reservoir, which he had not attended. Yet it was done as perfectly as if he had been among us. I sat on the log between Savannah and London as we toasted weenies, Nash sprawled out and Zakia . . . every detail of this scene was life-like, save the blurry smudge of Zakia Cooper. Adriel couldn’t have drawn this unless he was there! From the perspective of the picture, he was looking down upon the scene, like from a tree branch. He had not just been flying around and happened to see me fall off the cliff.
I realized that he was standing in the doorway. Holding up the picture, I said, “Why?”
He came in angrily and gathered up the sketchpads except the one I was holding. They were shoved back into the closet. “Because I had to watch.”
“Watch for what?” I said in exasperation.
“You invited Zakia to come!” He held out a hand for the last sketchpad, which I snapped shut and gave to him. Adding it to the others, he closed the closet doors.
“You say that like Zakia was going to hurt me or something,” I said. “He isn’t, Adriel. He’s-”
“He’s an abomination, and so is his sister and some of the others!”
My temper rose to match his. “You were watching that whole time. When I went for a walk and Zakia brought me back . . . that was you I heard in the trees!”
“I had to make sure.” His blue eyes were stony. “They aren’t supposed to be here. They should have been dead long ago.”
“So what are you saying, that they inject themselves with preservatives and stick around for eternity like fallen angels instead?”
He whitened. “Zakia told you that?”
“No, I went down to their store a while back and found a box in the bathroom with ampoules of some weird liquid and a list of ingredients. I looked it up and that’s what it was, some odd combination of old-fashioned preservatives.” I hadn’t honestly thought that people were injecting them. It was too crazy.
Laughter rang out. I glanced down to the lawn, where Kishi had caugh
t Cadmon in a hug. He giggled and thrashed to get away. Then he cried, “Fly! Fly fast with me!”
“No flying!” Drina yelled from somewhere out of sight. “We’ll leave in five minutes so keep them holstered.”
I looked back to Adriel, with whom I was feeling extremely frustrated. “I don’t know what Zakia is, and you’re not telling me. But he hasn’t ever been anything but decent to me. So whatever he is, it isn’t very scary. If he’s some psycho, he’s had plenty of opportunities to hurt me yet passed them by!”
“It’s not what he has done; it’s what he has the potential to do,” Adriel said.
I held up my hand. “No! I’m not going to listen to riddles about him. Either you tell me the reason he freaks you out, or you let it go. I’m not going to dump a friend off your indirect warnings. He’s a nice guy.”
Adriel closed his bedroom door to give us privacy. “He’s not a guy, not anymore. He’s . . . he’s dead, Jessa. So is Lotus, and two others who live there, and some of the relatives that pass through. They died a long time ago.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s still not a reason.”
“You believe me?”
I couldn’t do anything but believe him. “I don’t think you would lie.”
“That he’s dead should be enough reason for you.”
“But it’s not. I’ve been in his room, in the store, I was alone with him as a child. I’ve never once, not once gotten the faintest iota of a creepy feeling from him. So whatever he has going on, I don’t think it’s much of my business.”
Looking as frustrated as I was feeling, Adriel said, “If you trust me enough to believe what should sound fantastical to you, then you should trust me enough to take my guidance.”
“And just let you pick out my friends for me?”
Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) Page 18
