“Mental picture taken,” Adriel said with a chuckle.
“How do you choose your subjects?”
“Some scenes just stand out more than others. Some people. I don’t know why. I just find myself drawing them.”
Past the gazebo was a playground. A swarm of children was clustered on a jungle gym and little legs pumped on the swings. Toddlers dug in a sandbox and the seesaw squeaked every time a child pushed off on one of the ends. Parents and babysitters sat on benches all around the periphery, some reading books or on cell phones, and others shouting it was time to go and to stop throwing sand.
“That doesn’t mean eat it!” a father was howling at his preschool-age daughter as we strolled by.
“Were you mischievous as a little girl?” Adriel asked.
“I was a jewel of good behavior,” I said. “Most of the time.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“And the rest of the time, I was kicking and screaming on the living room floor like a spoiled brat.”
“Age of first grounding?”
“Eight, although it only lasted a few minutes.”
“What was your crime?”
“I stole a little stuffed Easter bunny from a toy store. I didn’t realize that it was stealing. There was a sign by the bunnies that said TAKE ONE, with an arrow pointing to them. It meant the pages underneath the sign for kids to color, an Easter bunny in a field full of eggs. Someone had moved the arrow to be funny. Once we sorted it out, I wasn’t grounded any longer.” I’d been so distraught to be called a thief by the store manager that I never wanted to play with the toy even though I was allowed to keep it. “The first real grounding was when I was nine or ten for having a sassy mouth. I don’t even remember what I said, but once my mom yelled Jessa Brynne Bright, I knew I was in for it. The only time I ever heard my middle name was when I’d really outdone myself.”
We came to the first bridge, which crossed over the stream. It was as sweet as everything else in Seataw, a little curling arch of wood that we crossed in eight steps. Colorful fish swam in the water, flickering in and out of the light. Loving this place, I said, “I guess you won’t have any naughty angel boy stories to tell me.”
“No, nothing but the reason I fell,” Adriel said.
“That wasn’t naughty but kindness.”
“I did have a game I liked, especially right after I came to be. I’d let myself tumble in a non-corporeal form through the air and into a bird of some kind, where I stayed for a time as it flew. Then I’d jump to the first animal I saw in air or on land or in sea to travel with that one. Well, sometimes I’d jump from first to first. Other times, I’d do second or third, or tenth, or make my jump at random or by color. When I got older, I left that game behind just to move with the wind around the world. Sometimes we did that together, angels all tumbling in the current.”
“Do you speak to one another?”
“Not really. We were just pulses of energy.”
The second bridge was made of stone blocks, the spaces between them green with moss. Down below, rocks and plants choked the stream, causing the water to burble as it fought to move among the blockage. “Adriel, this place is beautiful.”
I stopped at the highest point of the bridge to enjoy the view over the side, setting down the bag of clothing and the purse at my feet. His arm went around my waist and we looked out together in peace. When I turned, he kissed me. It was the gentlest sensation on my lips, yet electric at the same time. I felt it reverberate all the way to my toes, a charge that built until I had to break away from him to release the tension.
“This isn’t fair to you,” said Adriel quietly.
“I don’t care about fair!” I cried, angry to have to think about that now, and pulled him back to me. I threaded my hands into his hair as we kissed. The sensations were even stronger this time, and his hands upon my lower back sent a heated current through my body. It felt like I was falling, but those hands were keeping me aloft just as they had when I truly did fall.
Just as it felt like he was losing himself in it, he forced me away. “You should care. What do I have to offer you, Jessa? I can’t age with you; I can’t have children with you; I can’t die with you. We can’t have anything!”
“I wasn’t supposed to have had any of those things but be dead from a drop off the cliff!”
“But you’re not dead,” he said intensely. “I gave you that, and that’s all I can give. You should take it and go.”
“No,” I said. This was where I was supposed to be, on this bridge, and this was the person I was supposed to be with. I knew it with the same certainty that I knew my own name. “We’ll find a way to make this work.”
“There is no way.”
I was frustrated to see that we were going to be interrupted. A couple of young women were coming down the path from the other direction. They crossed the stone bridge in a hurry, without so much as a look to us. Something in their demeanor distracted me. I looked after them curiously, since they weren’t in jogging clothes, nor were they even speaking to one another. Maybe they were having a fight. Adriel was also gazing in their direction until they passed into trees. He said, “They were worried about something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something . . . alarmed them.”
We looked back the way they had come. No one was there, so I said, “This isn’t your unilateral decision to make.”
“I am going to hurt you,” Adriel said dismally. “Maybe not today, maybe not in a year, but one day I’ll hurt you. This will hurt you. I can’t stand to be a part of it and I can’t stand to stay away.”
“I can’t stand to be away from you,” I whispered.
Children yelled at a distance, gathered on the first bridge and starting to come in our direction. We finished crossing the stone bridge and pressed on down the path. I took Adriel’s arm, wishing we could have just kept kissing. He said, “When I’m with you, I’m glad I fell. That I’m not just in the wind that rushes through your hair, thinking only of where I want to go and what I want to do next. That’s what being an angel is when you’re not guarding your charge. It’s empty. And the person you’re helping . . . you do it because you’re ordered, and that’s usually the only reason. You never grow as an angel. Outside of your orders, all of your decisions are for yourself. People think of angels as these perfect, loving, altruistic beings and they’re not. It’s the most selfish, mindless existence imaginable, and it lasts for all of eternity. You’re static.”
The third bridge was tiled, but I didn’t take the time to dwell upon its features. Before I could speak, he continued. “Pulling the girl from the water was the first kind act of my own volition that I’d ever made in the millennia of my life. It was a revelation, one that I was forbidden to experience. So I wasn’t sorry for helping her, not for her sake and not for mine. Then meeting you . . . I’ve gone from not being sorry to happy that I did it. You make me happy, but being with me will one day destroy you.”
It was going to destroy me even more to not be with him. “You can’t see into the future. And if you really can see into my soul, then you know I’m not going to turn away.” I stopped at the midpoint of the bridge, the children’s voices having faded away. The tiles were blue and white, and whoever tended the grounds here had color-coordinated the plants. White flowers blossomed on both sides of the stream, and the trees hung low with bluish-green leaves.
“What I see in your soul is a gentle and sensitive person, and I don’t want to be the reason that light dulls,” Adriel said. At the moment, my soul must have been blazing since he winced and looked down to the flowers. “That would make me feel worse than anything, even than how it feels to know I’ve lived since the dawn of humanity doing essentially nothing except what served myself.”
“Well, then serve me chocolate to make up for it,” I said tiredly. My body was still racing with that electric sensation from our kissing, but the moment for it had passed. I didn’t know
how else to ease his torment save sugar.
He glanced at me. “You’re sick of this whole conversation.”
“You didn’t need to peep at my soul for that,” I said.
“Pirri’s, then. And I’m buying.”
We still had the rest of the path to walk, since the ice cream shop was on the other side of the park. Every bridge was different, the tile succeeded by a winding one of wood that split in the center around a tree growing straight out of the water. The graduating classes of Seataw High School had signed the next one, so names and years and drawings were all over it going back fifty years. As we passed over it, I said, “You walk around with the world weighing on your shoulders, Adriel.”
“It is. I changed the world, for better or ill. We all did. It’s a lot to live with.”
In gaps of the foliage we could see out to a lawn where people were throwing balls and sitting on blankets to have a picnic. A group of Spooner guys hustled through the grass, not noticing us on the bridge as they imitated blasting things with guns. Everyone was so happy, and I was torn between the joy of being with Adriel and the sadness, too. I didn’t consider him selfish for being what all angels were, and he had fallen due to the most beautiful act anyone could perform.
The path wound away through one more glorious burst of flowers to a final bridge with the end of the park beyond. It was a long bridge, dipping down instead of arched or horizontal to the ground, and I held to the chain railings as it swayed and creaked under my feet. Definitely made for children, a path almost obscured by bushes wound down and underneath it through a ravine so one did not have to rock on the bridge. Seeing how slowly I was going, Adriel skirted to the path and said, “I’ll meet you on the other side.”
“I’m not that bad!” I exclaimed while inching along. To prove I wasn’t a coward, I forced myself to keep going with small steps.
Children came my direction at a sprint, ten of them engaged in a race. Hastily, I pressed myself to the side when they stormed it. We rocked up and down and swung from side to side violently while they charged past to the end of the bridge. Touching the posts, the kids spun around to run back. Coming in last place, a girl of four or five in a red dress bypassed the bridge for the path. It sounded like she collided into something down there, because a crash sounded.
I couldn’t see Adriel, but I heard him say, “Are you okay?”
The bridge creaked and swung while the kids darted by me. I clutched to the chain until the last child stepped off. Below, the girl was sniffling and talking to Adriel.
“Go! Go! Go!” the kids shouted. Now they were dashing away down the trail. I called to them, not wanting the girl to get left behind. They didn’t hear me and vanished around the curving path.
“Are you all right, Jessa?” Adriel called.
I caught a glimpse of Adriel down there, kneeling on the path to look at the girl’s extended legs. She had fallen. “I’m okay. They didn’t flatten me.”
“Where are your friends going, Abby?” Adriel asked.
“They’re running the last three bridges, back and forth,” the girl said. “My mom is over there. Look, there’s blood on my legs. Ow.”
“Do you want me to come down there to help?” I offered.
“No, don’t,” said Adriel. “Broken glass and garbage is all over the path. Wait for me up there, okay? I’ll carry her back to her mom. The glass cut up her knees pretty badly.”
“And a broken sprinkler is making big slippery puddles,” added the girl about what lay in wait below. She was a tough little kid. I would have been screaming my head off to see blood all over my legs at her age. Bracing myself, I let go of the chain. If the kids could run it without tipping over, I certainly could walk it.
“All right, I’m lifting you up,” Adriel said. “One, two, three, whoosh.”
“Whoosh!” Abby exclaimed. Grateful to reach the end of the bridge, I looked back the way we had come. Long black braids swung over Adriel’s arm as he ferried the girl away.
The ice cream store was across the street. Quite a line was inside, but it didn’t extend out the door. There was a pair of picnic tables here by the sidewalk, one unoccupied. Two men and two women were sitting at the other one. Adriel’s voice echoed back. “Abby’s mom? We’re looking for Abby’s mom!”
“Mom, I fell on some glass!” the girl yelled.
All four people burst out in raucous laughter as I sat down at the second picnic table to wait. Beer bottles were all over the table between them. A bare-chested man picked up an empty one and chucked it over the foliage to shatter on the path below. When he resettled on the bench, he glanced over to me. I looked down to the graffiti carved into the wood of my table, thinking I should recross the bridge and catch up with Adriel. These people were drunk.
The guy was still looking when I checked. He was a few years older than me, with narrow yet handsome features and black hair. His eyes were strange, the color of charcoal with a bright blue ring around them. He nudged a woman at his side. She was older, and had long sepia-colored hair and dark green eyes. Something about her was bitter, a pinch to her lips, the way she had her arms crossed in front of her on the table more in defense than relaxation.
“Look at that,” the guy whispered. Then the four of them were staring at me, every one attractive and with expressions that set off alarm bells in my brain. I looked down the path and figured Adriel would come back any second. The girl’s mother couldn’t be that far away.
“You can’t be right, Japheem,” the older woman said.
“I’m never wrong,” said the guy. He raised his voice. “How long ago was it?”
“How long ago was what?” I said, deciding to go after Adriel and standing up.
“How long ago was death cheated of you?”
Startled, I stared at them. The oldest was in his mid-forties, a muscular and grim-featured man with a beer bottle in his fist. The youngest was a girl of my age, honey blonde and stunning. I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I think she does,” said the woman with a sharp laugh. Turning around, I walked back to the swaying bridge.
“Hey, girl, where are you going?” she called.
“Come back!” the guy with strange eyes yelled.
The swaying made me nauseous. I went across it as fast as I could and hurried down the path. Then something dropped in front of me, a blur of dirty gray and murky yellow, coarseness brushing along my skin and the park swept from view. A strange, jangling music filled my ears, sinking into my body to pull it apart piece by piece. I screamed in panic, “Adriel!” before succumbing to it.
Chapter Eleven: The Rippers
Colors.
They were an assault of ugliness, sweeping and twisting over one another, folding me in and pulling away. My eyes hurt merely from looking upon them, the swathe of dingy green flecked with brown, the lifeless maroon smudge with dead black points. A murky yellow overcame them. Buried deep within it were jarring blues, and then those were brushed away by a drained lilac being stormed by burnt orange. I put up my hands to force the colors away, not wanting to see them and not having the sense just to close my eyes. It was the music doing that, the chords disconnecting my body from my mind, reaching deep into my brain and severing the synapses.
Coarseness licked over my arms and the sensation was just as repugnant as the colors and music. Catching and pulling at my skin, though I couldn’t hear the rasp of it over the music, I felt it. This was a living sensation, a thrumming darkness on my flesh, and I couldn’t bear it nor could I pull back.
Jessa. The name didn’t belong to me. It was just one that I had borrowed for a while, and was being forced to return. That dream rose up in my mind, the rightness of my fall, my death and my grave. The rightness of me gone while the world turned on without Jessa Bright.
That was my name. I clung to it desperately and demanded to remember more. I had gone over the cliff . . . and I had not stopped there. Right or wrong, I’d walked away. My s
tory still had pages to turn. Colors raced overhead, beautiful ones in another time and upon another cliff, and I turned to watch them go.
The sensation fell away from my arms. I blinked hard and the colors retreated to wings. The people from the picnic table were surrounding me on the path. Although it felt like some time had passed, that couldn’t have been true. The older woman was telling the man with strange eyes to back off, and as he did, more and more sense returned to me. It was not my own wrongness in existing that I sensed; it was his. He was the one with the ugly yellow wings; the woman had the dull, dusty green. The beautiful blonde girl was inches above the trail, the only one still hovering with her hideous lilac and burnt orange wings beating slowly.
“Maybe she doesn’t know,” the older woman said. “What was it, girl? A car accident? An illness when you were small? Japheem, what do you see?”
“This is recent, very recent,” said the guy with yellow wings. The woman touched the fabric of my clothes. I jerked away and bumped into the second man, who was standing behind me. Even as I looked back in fright, his maroon wings vanished.
“Trenton will be coming back soon, Makala,” the blonde said in a querulous voice.
“Then go and greet him at the tables,” the woman answered. She jerked the shopping bag out of my hand to inspect the contents. The blonde set a foot to the ground with reluctance and walked around us to the swaying bridge, her wings snapping out of sight.
“She fell,” Japheem said, coming a little closer. The jangling music increased and I winced from it. Jessa. I was not going to lose myself again.
“Leave me alone!” I exclaimed, and tried to run between them. A hand locked painfully over my shoulder and then a golden light blasted out around us.
“Release her!” Adriel commanded, suddenly there upon the path. The sunlight on the points of his wings was almost blinding. I had never seen such fury on his lovely face, and while I wanted to shrink in response to it, the angels around me laughed in mockery.
Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) Page 21
