Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (24 page)

I returned to perusing the racks, although I’d seen pretty much everything there was to see in the shop.
This was definitely a place to visit again during my stay in Spooner. London called for me to judge shirts she was waffling between, and after that I went to the counter to make my purchase of two shirts I couldn’t live without. The amount didn’t even come to the full twenty from Grandpa Jack. Even if I found nothing else worth buying the rest of the day, this trip was deemed a success. I’d wear the sweater tank to school on Monday.

“Hey, Je
ssa,” Zakia said when I moved away from the counter and rattled through the bag for the receipt.

“Hey,” I said, hoping I wasn’t showing any of the nervousness that I
felt. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

“I wasn’t expecting to be here,” Zakia said.
“I stopped in the flower store to get a card for Lotus’ birthday. Kitts said you were all descending on Seataw and invited me along. What have you been up to lately?”

“Getting smacked with exams at school,” I said.
It was so easy to be lulled into complacency by his sweet nature and handsome face. “Tell Lotus happy birthday from me. She must be so excited.” I couldn’t think of that little girl as being dead, or anything else but the child she appeared to be.

“She is.
I’ll tell her,” Zakia said.

“Don’t you have to work?”

Kicking off his shoes, he folded his arms behind his head. “No, I’ve got today off so I was killing time downtown. But I can do that just as well up here.”

I stuffed the receipt into my wallet and slid it into my purse.
Was he allowed to travel a certain distance out of Spooner without the Kreelings tailing him? The air conditioning let out a fresh blast and I shivered. Zakia’s good earth smell filled my nostrils. With my mouth outpacing my brain, I blurted, “You know, Zakia, I would swear on my grave that that was you helping me home when I was lost as a little girl. You and Jaden are that close to identical.”

He just grinned.
“We should make a Cooper calendar, twelve months of my brothers and my cousins and me. You’d think you were looking at the same guy on every page.”

One of the girls going through the racks muttered, “I’d buy that calendar.”

Once everyone had visited the cashier, we left the shop. This was such a sweet place. Many of the stores had benches outside for passerby to rest upon, and down an alley were more little shops around a penny-filled fountain. We flicked coins in for luck on our exams, with London tossing in a second penny since she had no idea which college to apply to when so many of them looked more or less the same.

Where the guys had gone we had no clue, so with Zakia among us, we sto
rmed a shoe store and afterwards a candy shop. I filled a bag with goodies to enjoy at home later. Some of the girls headed out to make a movie showing of a new release they were eager to see and one that wouldn’t make it to Spooner for a few more weeks.

Leaving the alley, we pressed on past two wine bars, a children’s clothing store, and a bakery
that smelled so good we stopped outside just to breathe it in. Eventually breathing was not enough, and we went inside for croissants and turnovers. I wished that I could have texted Adriel to meet us here. Seataw had cell service, but I hadn’t brought my cell phone and he didn’t even own one.

A bookstore was
beside the bakery and there our group split once more since others wanted to walk around the park. Bells tinkled as Savannah opened the door to the bookstore. I went inside to look around. A tabby cat jumped up on a stack of books to stare at me and make a demanding meow. He was little more than a kitten of six or seven months old. Letting him sniff my fingers, I said, “Should you be in here?” He had a collar on, and the employees in the two levels of the store weren’t paying him any attention.

“He’s a shop cat,” Savannah called over the aisle.
I patted him and moved on, the cat leaping to the next stack of books to demand more affection with a piercing voice.

“Okay!” I said as he reached out to swat at me.
Slinging him over my shoulder, I inspected the shelves with the little cat purring loudly in my ear. Twice I tried to interest him in getting down, but he was content to ride around with me and look at books. “What do people with allergies do with you, cat?”

“Not shop here,” Savannah said with a laugh.

A display of bookmarks was by the nonfiction section. The prettiest one was made of metal, an intricate design of little gold and silver leaves connected by point and stem to one another. Carrying it over to Zakia at the counter, I said, “Do you think Lotus would like this for a birthday gift? I know she likes to read.”

He put down a journal and examined the bookmark.
“She would love it. But you don’t have to-”

“She made me that fantastic cream for my road rash.
I’d like to send something along with you for a present to give her.” The cat nuzzled the side of my head. “But I need you to either take the kitty or the purse so I can pay for it.”

“
The kitty.” The creature went willingly into his arms, happy as long as someone was holding him. Zakia checked the name on the collar. “Hello, Remainder. You must be new. Wasn’t the old cat here named Remainder?”

“The last Remainder passed over the summer,” said the c
ashier at the register. He motioned to pictures of cats on the wall, each one with a plaque underneath that read REMAINDER with birth to death dates.

I didn’t think an animal would be so content to be pressed to the chest of someone without a soul.
Then again, what did I know about it? The bells tinkled at the door as I passed money to the cashier for the bookmark and gift-wrapping. Adriel appeared at my shoulder, as tense as a piano wire to see Zakia. Looking like politeness was coming at great cost, Adriel said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Zakia said with the same amount of strain.

The bookmark was given back to me in white tissue paper with blue ribbons tied around it. I pushed it over the counter to Zakia. “There. I hope she has something fun planned for the day.”

“What’s going on?” Adriel asked.

“Lotus is having a birthday tomorrow,” I explained. “Where have you been?”

“The stores on the other end of the p
ark. Most of the guys are in a new arcade over there. What would you like to do now?”

“I’d like to see these bridges
that everyone is talking about.” I felt uncomfortable between the boys. Zakia was paying deliberate attention to the cat, and Adriel was paying the same deliberate sort of attention to me. That way they didn’t have to look at one another. Turning to Zakia, I said, “It was good to see you. Have fun today.”

“I will,” Zakia said.
Kitts called his name, so he and the cat headed down an aisle while Adriel and I left the store.

“He has a soul,” I said once the door had closed on the tinkling bells.
“You just can’t sense it.”

“I can’t believe the Kreeling let them live.”
When he saw my expression, he hastened to add, “I’m not trying to start a fight with you. Kreolos hunters live to kill creatures like him. This agreement they have between them is unprecedented. Now, come on! Let’s talk about anything else.”

“Anything else,” I agreed.
We crossed the street to the park. Offering his arm, Adriel guided me to a trail that ran between mounds of flowers. A stream trickled beyond them. Plaques jutted up among the vegetation to describe the kind of plants they were. A side trail wound to a white gazebo, which held within it a group of artists all busily sketching the stream and the flowers down below. I said, “You should draw that, everyone in a gazebo drawing something else.”

“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?”