Earth Angel (21 page)

She checked that she had the right tuning wrench stashed in the zippered pocket of the harp’s carrying case and headed out to the woods at Sea Salt, to the boulder Dara had shown her, the one she called Angel Rock. Dara had said Gwynne thought angels liked to gather there, that it was a doorway for them, an accessway to their dimension. Was that why it called to her? Because she wanted to feel close to the angels? Or to feel close to Gwynne?

No, it was because it was a nice, isolated spot where she could play her harp and not bother anyone. Besides, she didn’t see any angels around, glowing in the dark. And Gwynne…Something was going on with Gwynne and she didn’t understand what it was, but she needed to give her some space.

Even if she couldn’t stop thinking about her.

She settled on the sandy ground, one leg bent and one leg stretched to the side. She set the hurricane lamp where it would shine on the harp strings and not in her eyes, and warmed up with a series of scales. She plucked out a few bars of a new tune she was learning and noodled around, experimenting with the arrangement as she committed it to memory, repeating it, gradually picking up speed, training herself to smooth out the timing.

Playing the harp always calmed her when she was stressed. Focusing on getting the notes right blocked out everything else.

Except…it wasn’t blocking everything out. She was worried about what Elle had told her. Was the reason the harp had captured her heart all those years ago because it resonated with who she really was and tapped into a soul memory she didn’t know she had?

It made a nice story. But there were other possible reasons why the sound of the harp had enchanted her for as long as she could remember and tugged so possessively at her heart.

Besides, angels didn’t play harps, not that she’d ever seen. They sang, yes. But there were no harps, no heraldic trumpets, no nothing.

But if she had to pick one instrument for them to play, she’d follow the path of countless others before her and choose the harp. Because if the theoretical physicists were right about string theory, then the universe itself was a kind of harp with billions of gajillions of unseen, rubber band-like strings, vibrating at different frequencies in complex, multidimensional patterns, creating an unimaginably elaborate tune.

In the beginning…
In the beginning, God sang the universe into existence.

If the voice of God resonated through the stuff of creation, singing atoms, singing stars, singing gravity, singing light…

If we are the echo of that song…

If all life, and all matter, and all energy are the echo of a song that never stopped…

Then yes, the harp was the right instrument.

An angel the size of a wispy dandelion seed shining against the night sky floated down from above and wafted between the strings of Abby’s harp and out the other side. The angel’s song tinkled like a wind chime.

Elle.

Abby stilled her hands, unsurprised to see her. To be honest, she’d been subconsciously waiting for her.

“Have you changed your mind yet?” Elle asked.

Abby stared, praying for the right answer to pop into her head. She still didn’t know what to do. She’d been hoping for insight, but it hadn’t come.

She wanted to help. If there was any other way, she would do it in an instant. Working at the hospital, she’d seen patients miraculously improve after a visit by angels, or find peace with impending death. Angels comforted those in anguish and eased their suffering, whether the person was aware of their presence or not. They lightened fear and restored faith. They made the world a more relaxed, hope-filled place. If the bridge collapsed and they could no longer visit earth, the human race would have a harder time remembering the light that shone inside its own darkness.

“Can’t I help repair the bridge in human form?” Elle would likely shoot the idea down, but it was the logical win-win solution.

“You retain very little of your angelic power when you take on human form.” Elle grew to human size and came so close that if her body had had physical substance, one of her enormous, luminous wings would have brushed her face. “This is absurd. Are you sure you don’t remember being an angel?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re supposed to remember.”

“I thought you said I
wasn’t
supposed to remember. That my memories were suppressed.”

“They were suppressed, but I can restore them by touching your forehead with my wing. It usually works.” That must have been what she’d been trying to do with that blinding light at Penelope’s wedding. “I don’t know why it won’t work with you.”

“Then how do you know I’ll turn into an angel when I die? What if that doesn’t work, either?”

“It’ll work.”

“How do you know?” Abby insisted.

“Because you’re an angel. It’s the nature of who you are.”

“But the wing thing didn’t work.” Not that it made any difference. Whether she was transformed into an angel or not, her life here would be over.

“It doesn’t work with everyone,” Elle backpedaled. “But not to worry. Once you’re in your true form, you’ll be able to help us repair the bridge, and after that there’ll be plenty of time to—”

“Wait a minute—”

“We can worry about your memories later. But I don’t see why they wouldn’t eventually return.”

“How reassuring.” Knowing that Gwynne could see angels and even Officer Mawson had seen one—once—was enough to convince her angels were real, but that didn’t mean she believed everything Elle told her, especially when Elle sounded like she was making stuff up on the fly. How could she believe her? What she was telling her was insane.

“When did you get so stubborn?” Elle said. “You were always so helpful before you became human.”

Abby’s mouth fell open. “I’m trying to be helpful. Maybe if you understood your own technology…”

Elle fluttered her wings agitatedly. “I don’t know why it didn’t work. We’re not perfect, okay? You were supposed to regain your memories, and the bridge wasn’t supposed to crack.”

Abby took a deep breath. She’d always known angels to be lighthearted and full of love. She’d never seen one so stressed, and that worried her. “I can’t trust you. You don’t know how any of this works. If something goes wrong, you don’t know how to fix it.”

Elle glowed brighter. “When you play the harp for someone who’s dying and they don’t die, you don’t know how that works, either. That doesn’t stop you from doing it.”

“At least I know my music won’t make anything worse. If your plan doesn’t work, I end up dead.”

“If your music doesn’t work, that patient ends up dead too.”

“They would have died anyway!”

“As will you, eventually.”

“And when I do,” Abby said calmly, “it’s not going to be because I did something stupid.” Elle couldn’t be as cold as she sounded. She couldn’t be. “I can see why you need to send us down here to help you understand humanity.”

“So you do believe part of what I’ve told you. You do believe you’re an incarnated angel.”

The note of hope in Elle’s voice made her sad. An angel. Shouldn’t they know everything? Weren’t they watching from heaven?

“I believe you, just…not completely. I’d feel pretty stupid if it turned out you were just a hallucination.”

“A hallucination?” Elle screeched. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

“Okay…” Abby fumbled for her harp case. She didn’t want to travel too far with her instrument, but she also was not going to leave it here in the woods. “Where are we going?”

“Home.”

Abby froze. “You mean…”

“Look up. Do you see the bridge?”

“You said you wouldn’t kill me.” And Abby had been gullible enough to believe her.

“I’m not going to kill you. I just want to show you something.”

Against her better judgment, Abby craned her neck back to look. All she could see in the night sky was murky cloud cover.

Elle took her hands and for the first time she could feel physical contact with her. The feel of her hands was both solid and electric, amplifying the buzzing she already felt in her fingertips from plucking harp strings. She didn’t understand how it was possible for Elle to take physical form, but it made sense, really, because if they did deflect asteroids headed for impact with earth, how else were they supposed to do that? Officer Mawson had felt a physical jolt when she crashed into her white lady. And how else could that angel have unlocked the door to allow Abby’s toddler self to escape the apartment?

Elle squeezed her hands in a death grip that left no doubt about her ability to assume solid form and pulled her to her feet. A whirlwind rushed by and whisked them off the ground, leaving her harp behind. Wind roared past Abby’s ears at incomprehensible, exhilarating speed. A sound like harp strings resonating with unheard laughter filled the air. She caught a glimpse of distant mountains, great swaths of clouds swirling above the ocean which receded far below, the bright curve of the planet’s horizon.

Unexpectedly, her feet landed on something. Dizzying kaleidoscopes of shifting color made it impossible to see what she might be standing on. The air, if there was air, was so thin it hurt to breathe. Then she was flung again through space, past the fiery, erupting surface of star after star, her head spinning with vertigo.

It took her a moment to realize they’d stopped. “Where are we?”

“On the bridge, of course.”

“And I’m not dead?”

“Sadly, no.”

Elle released her hands and Abby patted her own arms and legs to make sure she was still alive, still in her body. She couldn’t see much in the dazzlingly bright light, but she felt solid enough. As her eyes adjusted, she realized she was on some kind of superhighway through space, with angels zipping by in both directions in a haphazard jumble of fast-moving traffic.

“How did we get here?” Abby asked, entranced.

“Remember that boulder?”

She nodded. So Dara and Megan and Gwynne were right about it.

“Anchored to the ground beneath that boulder is a shortcut to the bridge, a chute we can slide up or down, like a two-way zip line. Humans can’t use it, but as an incarnated angel, you can. If you were truly human I wouldn’t be able to bring you here. Setting foot on the bridge would kill you.”

“Nice of you to warn me about that.” Somehow the news didn’t concern her as much as it probably should.

“You’re in no danger. The Angelic Realm is your home. It’s why you’ve always felt cut off, abandoned. Because you left the Angelic Realm to live a human life.”

She had a feeling that if she felt abandoned, it might have more to do with her mother dying when she was three years old than with any forgotten angelic past, but that didn’t seem important right now. None of her life on earth seemed important. “I don’t remember leaving the Realm.”

“It is your home. It is where you belong. You’ll see. I stopped us here so you could try navigating on your own. You have the ability.”

Abby tried it and found it effortless, like standing on a conveyor belt. All she had to do was think how fast she wanted to go, and the bridge responded. Other angels moved by at different speeds, passing them or falling behind.

“This is incredible,” she said. “How come astronomers don’t know about this?”

“Their instruments can’t detect it. The bridge exists in a dimension that lies beyond your four-dimensional universe, although it intersects it too, just as it intersects the dimension where the Angelic Realm lies. It has to, otherwise it couldn’t connect the two. That’s also why you can travel on the bridge in human form.”

“What happens when I enter the Angelic Realm? Can I do that?”

“You can,” Elle said. “I think.”

“You
think
?”

“We’ll find out. We’re almost there.”

The angel who was ahead of them jerked to a stop, and as they caught up, a gaping fissure opened up beneath the angel’s feet, knocking her off-balance. The angel instinctively extended her wings and flapped furiously against the pull of the interdimensional vacuum, fighting to escape, but despite her struggle she spiraled slowly, inexorably down, trapped by the overwhelming force.

Elle seemed to be frozen in place. “Sidonie…” Her voice was a strangled whisper.

Without thinking, Abby jumped forward and grabbed at the struggling angel. Their fingertips touched and she tried for her wrists but the angel was already out of reach, falling…falling…falling into the void, screaming, disintegrating, lost between dimensions. Gone.

Abby looked down into the fissure in shock. She swayed as the edge cracked and started to give way beneath her feet. She stumbled and pitched sideways, scrambling for purchase, and wished desperately for a guardrail, for something—
anything
—to grab and use to save herself, but there was nothing but the crumbling surface of the bridge itself, too slippery to gain purchase.

Chapter Fifteen

Arms like steel snatched her from the edge.

It was Elle, yanking her to safety. Abby sucked in lungfuls of too-thin air that burned all the way down.

“We need to return to earth.” Elle held both her hands in a safety lock. They were already speeding away from the widening gash. “The bridge is too dangerous right now. It’s unstable.”

Elle could have let her die.

All the angels in existence
—according to Elle, that’s what they needed to repair the bridge. If she hadn’t saved her from obliteration in the interdimensional void, their bridge problems would have been over. She was probably kicking herself right now. Instead, she was taking her back to earth because the bridge wasn’t safe.

Almost as if she cared about her.

It didn’t make sense. Elle wanted her to die—she’d said so repeatedly. She had no business saving her. For the second time in her not very long lifespan, an angel had saved her.

Abby scanned with hyper-alert awareness for cracks and potholes as she watched the surface of the bridge glide by under her feet. Elle could have let her die. But she didn’t. Abby owed her, and more than that, she
wanted
to help. What if that had been Sapphire on the bridge when that hole opened up? If she could prevent more angels from dying, she wanted to. And protecting them meant protecting the earth too, making it possible for angelkind to continue to help humankind.