Angel Dreams (An Angel Falls Book 2) Page 19

  I begin to wonder if he’s going to fall off the bench. His face is one of sheer mirth. I frown, not finding any of this funny whatsoever. I may not have the most grand and important life, but it’s mine, and I thought I would have at least a few more years. He covers the front of his mouth with a fist and coughs. Then he clears his throat.

  “I apologize,” he says, taking on a more serious tone. “Ah, but it’s only you remind me of being young and innocent and what a delight it is to be alive. I work all the time you see, and I very rarely speak to my clients before they pass on. When I do, it’s usually not a joyous occasion. You surprised me.” His smile is huge. The gap in the center of his white teeth seems to glare at me.

  I grimace deeper. He likes talking to me because I can see him, and I’m still alive. Oh happy-happy-joy-joy for me. My head shakes side to side with utter disbelief.

  “Let me set one thing straight for you, Jules.”

  His now sober demeanor catches my attention and I stop my next sarcastic remark.

  “I am not sitting here for you, young one. Your time will come to pass someday, but it’s not in the near future. With the exorcism, I’m sorry about that by the way, and the loss of Nathaniel, I thought maybe you could use a companionable ear. If I am mistaken, forgive me, but I thought the two of you have been makin’ friends with one another. He was also a good friend of mine. Nathaniel is gone, but he is also still alive. We will meet up again in another life, I am sure. As will you, if it’s in the highest good. As for the other, it is truly unfortunate. What a wicked creature she was. Taking over your body like that. You’re one lucky girl to have someone around like your shaman man. He probably saved you a heck of a lot of heartache and trouble.”

  I hear words coming out of the angel’s mouth, and I know it’s processing inside my head, but the part I can’t quite get past are the words “loss of Nathaniel” and “Nathaniel is gone.”

  I’m not sure if time has just stopped, or my heart did.

  “You in good health over there?”

  “What?” I breathe out.

  “Looks like you’re about to fall over.”

  “I, um, what?” I manage to garble.

  The confused expression mixed with concern on the angel’s face makes me try to find a more coherent statement. It doesn’t really work. “Nathaniel. Where is he?” I mumble.

  Deep creases line the angel’s face as he watches me. “He moved into the next level of his afterlife, Jules.”

  I’m speechless. Not only because I’m unsure what he means exactly, but because I also know somewhere deep inside that it’s not good. That it’s abysmal.

  “To be frank with you, Jules, I was wonderin’ if you saw what happened. You were the only one there, besides that demon-loving sucker, and Lord knows I won’t be speaking to him about it. Jared and I came in too late, but I saw enough to know Nathaniel passed on.”

  A long silence fills the space between us, and in those countless seconds my world is suddenly tilted, and I’m left standing a little off center, turned around, and upside-down.

  “I didn’t see,” I tell the angel. “The succubus…” I say and then stop. “Will you excuse me?” I rise from my chair, amazed that I’m capable of moving at all, but my body somehow knows what to do.

  “Would you like some assistance? You look whiter than a swan.”

  My body feels hollow again and I seem to float toward the back door. I don’t answer him but I suddenly feel someone take my arm and guide me to the house.

  “I’ve been asked to stay outside, so this is as far as I go,” he says as he opens the door for me.

  “Okay,” I say automatically.

  “Jules, I think your shaman man will understand if I step inside to help you while he’s away.”

  “No. Not necessary,” I murmur.

  “If you change your mind, it would be my pleasure to assist you. Call me by my name and I will come. I am Marcus. It is so simple. So please, anytime or anywhere, you are a friend of my friend, and these last few days have been as strange as they come. Call for me. I’m close by anyway.”

  My head jerks in acknowledgement of his words and then I step away from his almost overbearing presence. The door clicks closed behind me and I’m alone in the sunroom. I look over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t just imagine the whole bloody rotten conversation. The angel, Marcus, sits on the bench, watching me with his wide brown eyes.

  In this odd state of numb, I don’t feel my body move, but then I’m lying on my side on the stiff canvas cot facing the wall. An engorged river of thoughts floods my brain. The debris swirling around is bulky and doesn’t belong in the water, but there it is anyway. It’s creating an immense amount of pressure on the sutures of my skull and I don’t know how long I’ll be able to handle it before the floodwaters burst and tiny bits of brain matter explode onto everything. The morbid side of my personality smiles at the thought of Chris walking into his sunroom to find his recently recovered patient missing her head. But in truth, I wouldn’t want him to have to clean up the mess, so I better keep the maelstrom contained. On the other hand, a quick and morose ending to this misery called life would be welcome right about now. It just seems easier than having to deal.

  My Nathaniel — I already think of him as mine, which is weird but true — has passed away. What does that even mean? He wasn’t exactly alive to begin with. And if he’s gone, where did he pass away to? Heaven, Hell, the Great Cosmos? What happens to an angel when they die? I have no freakin’ idea. It’s one of a thousand things I don’t understand about my otherworldly boyfriend. If a friend of mine were to confide in me about a mysterious new boyfriend and she told me even one of the things that has happened between me and Nathaniel, I would shake her by the shoulders and scream that she run away and never look back. What has happened to me? Why can’t I walk away from this guy? Not that it matters now. Nathaniel is gone, right? At least according to Marcus he is.

  An enormous weight presses on my chest as the reality of the situation dawns. He is really gone. And I know when it happened. Marcus said I was there. Me and Travis. In the basement. I couldn’t see him but part of me knew. I knew it and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Heavy-hearted, my breath hitches. The increased pressure is unbearable and my head does explode after all. It’s not in the way I had imagined, however. A stinging sensation, like razor burn, creeps in around my eyeballs and causes them to leak like mad. The wood grain on the rough-cut boards of the wall blur into a swimming brown mess. I throw my arm over my eyes to hide. My lungs finally give in to the unseen weight of sadness and push a heaving sob from my lips. My core shudders from my pubic bone to my throat in a wrenching swell of emotional vomit.

  This is ridiculous! I hate crying. No, let me be clear about this, I detest crying. I force myself to turn over and then push my body into a sitting position. My fists rub angrily over my eyes trying to erase all evidence of my vulnerability, but the tears carry on, so I keep wiping them away. So what if I fell in love! So what if I didn’t get a chance to experience what lasting love is! So what if I may never find anyone else again! So damn what! People lose the loves of their lives all the time. It happens every day. Think about all the wars and the sickness on this planet. I’m not special. People live with all sorts of pain, and so can I. Even if it’s a monstrous, gripping hole full of what-if’s and if-only’s.

  “Hmm-hmm,” I hear a quiet clearing of the throat.

  I cup my face with open palms leaving only the tip of my nose sticking out between my fingers. My hair falls forward as I bend my head down. With effort, I manage a shaky inhale and wait for some courage so I can face my brother, but I can’t find any. Jared eases down next to me. The canvas creaks and the metal frame groans under our combined weight, but it holds. I don’t look at him. He wraps an arm around my shoulders and squeezes me in close. To my relief he doesn’t say anything. The smell of burnt sage is strong on his shirt, but underlying that, he smells familiar, like our home, and of the la
undry soap we use, and also his own unique Jared smell.

  Swallowing my sadness feels similar to having a pill stuck in my throat, but this pill is the mother of all pills, bigger than a walnut and bristling with thorns. I force it down, and then my eyes finally quit leaking. My hands lower to my lap, exposing my face, which feels puffy and tender, but I still don’t have the balls to look up at Jared.

  After I’ve watched the shadows of the window frames move across the wall with the setting sun do I realize that I’ve been sitting here for a long time. Once I have the conscious thought of time passing, my back cramps. Shifting my body slightly, prompts Jared to do the same. I feel him lengthen his spine and then he straightens each of his long legs, one at a time. His left knee pops loud enough to startle me. We don’t move away from one another, but only stretch a few inches and then settle back into our grooves on the canvas.

  The silence in the room is starting to become its own entity. It hovers near my ears and is daring my voice to chase it away. But I stay silent, unable to think of one appropriate thing to say in the moment. Saying, “my angel boyfriend died,” aloud is more than I can do.

  “So, who are you today?” Jared forces the silence to leave the sunroom first.

  Did I hear him right? I let myself look up at him just long enough to meet his chocolate brown eyes for one second. His face is completely serious, except for the tiny crinkle of mischievousness at the corner of one eye. I look away, but only because I’m embarrassed about how awful I must look right now.

  I feel him shrug his shoulders. Then he says, “I thought Chris exorcised you, but he obviously screwed it up because my sister, Juliana Crowson, never cries. Well, at least not in front of people. So, who are you?”

  I listen to his taunting and don’t comment.

  “Okay, how about twenty questions? I’m pretty awesome at this game. Are you the Lady of the Lake?”

  I shake my head at him in incredulity, but he takes it as an answer no.

  “That’s one, but I’m not going to need all twenty. I think I’ve got it. You’re a bean-sidhe, right? No, I take it back. Yo! This is it.”

  The excitement in him grows and so does his tone. He’s getting louder and more animated with every word.

  “I’ve figured out who’s taken over your body this time. You’re one of the muses. The inventor of tragedy, Mel something. Go ahead and confess, so I can win.”

  I gnaw at my lower lip, trying not to succumb to his whimsy. He leans forward slightly and looks over at me. I give him a pitiful look that hopefully says I’m not in the mood for games.

  “I’d like to have my sister back now,” he tells me. “So the sooner we can get Mel to leave, the better.”

  “I think you mean Melpomene,” I squeak. My voice cracks and sounds worn out.

  “Ah, so you do admit it,” Jared says.

  Using my pointer finger, I make a cross over my chest. “Swear to God, I am not — hmm-hmm,” I clear my throat, and then continue. “No longer possessed by anything, or anyone.”

  Jared seems willing to accept my declaration. His hand rubs my back, a little too briskly, as if to say, ‘Good, now let’s move on.’ Then he confirms his gesture by asking, “Chris still gone?”

  I don’t really feel like making small talk, but I answer Jared’s question and it helps redirect my pain. “He went to Earth’s Heart Spring for more water.”

  “Yeah, he made you some crazy smelling drink with it.”

  Jared rises from the cot, stretches his long skinny body from fingertips to toes, and then turns and looks down at me.

  “Hey, why did you have that bottle of water and all the plant stuff in the car anyway? Chris was shocked to find exactly what he needed in the trunk.”

  Thinking and making my tongue work simultaneously is challenging so I answer in multiple sections. “I, um, I had the water because he dropped it and I wanted to give it back to him. And what plant was in my car?” This part of the question isn’t finding an answer no matter how hard I try to come up with one.

  Jared walks over to the workbench in the sunroom and picks up a limp stem of some large plant and tosses it at me. It lands on the cot next to me, a wilted and lank dead thing. I recognize it anyway. I pick it up and toss it back across the room where Jared snatches it out of the air.

  My brain works furiously at putting together the missing pieces. I had tried like heck to get the devil’s club roots out of the ground with a stick, but instead I gave my finger a nasty splinter. I look down at the scab. I know I didn’t put the plant in my car, so that leaves only one explanation.

  “Nathaniel,” I say aloud. “He must have gone back and gotten the roots for me.”

  “Nathaniel’s not the name of the succubus, is it?”

  “No,” I say mildly exasperated.

  “Just checking. I haven’t ever heard you talk about Nathaniel before.”

  He wiggles his brows at me as he says Nathaniel’s name, adding his own silent innuendo.

  In spite of my grief, I feel my cheeks flare with embarrassing heat. Damn my fair skin. “Chris treated me with devil’s club? I’ve heard it could be used for spiritual issues,” I can barely say these last words, but I choke them out. “I guess I didn’t really believe it. Shows you what I know.” I can’t meet Jared’s eyes as I attempt to stay off the Nathaniel subject, so I stare out the window instead. The Angel of Death, Marcus, is kicked back in one of the patio chairs with his feet propped on the table.

  Staring between Marcus and Jared, my head turns very slowly back and forth. I think I do at least three double takes. Something is happening and threads of understanding are slowly weaving together. My eyes finally land on Jared. He appears to be entertaining himself by perusing the contents on top of the workbench. The fingers of his good hand fiddle with a string of multi-colored beads. I just now notice he’s not wearing the sling over his casted arm like he’s supposed to be. The small detail registers in my mind, but doesn’t carry near the weight of my other epiphany.

  “Jared?” I whisper.

  “Yup?” he answers as he lifts a long black feather from a clay bowl, turns it over, and then puts it back.

  “Is there someone outside?”

  His focus moves to the window in front of him. After a brief perusal of the yard, he turns to me and says, “No. Why? Did you hear something?”

  His level of concern appears to be about as worried as if I just heard the pizza delivery guy ring the doorbell.

  “Jared, do you see anyone on the patio?” I ask again, this time slower.

  Now he’s starting to catch on. First his eyes shift to the window and then his head rotates to follow.

  “Jules? Do you see somebody out there?”

  “Answer me first.”

  “No, Jules, I don’t see anyone.”

  Jared takes two steps back from the workbench.

  “Is there anyone else in this house?” There’s a noticeable shake to my voice.

  A crease of apprehension makes Jared’s brows knit, and his normally wide and soft mouth hardens a little.

  “No. Not unless Chris is back. Hey, do you need to lie down or something?” he asks.

  I shake my head, now incapable of forming words. No. Yes. I mean no, I don’t want to lie down. And no, no, no! Marcus is outside waiting for someone and that someone isn’t me. God please. Please, this can’t be happening. Marcus is here for my brother.

  Jared comes closer to me. “Can I get you something…like tea?”

  I must look really ill if Jared is offering to bring me tea. In fact, I do feel off. There’s an itching sensation in the center of my head and it’s growing like a swarm of angry bees.

  The last thing I remember, other than a million bees, is Jared’s perfectly cut face hanging over mine and his low timber voice calling my name.

  Chapter Fifteen: Learning to Say Goodbye

  Juliana

  “Jared,” I call out.

  My head smacks against something hard. Reaching u
p, I feel smooth glass, and the edge of a, a what? Another jarring bump causes me to bonk my head again.

  “Ow.” My eyes flutter open and I’m in my car, staring out the window. The streetlights along Route 160 are lit even though it’s still light out. We’re heading east on the highway, and for all the life in me, I have no idea why. I hold the side of my head where I hit the car door and turn to my driver.

  “What the hell, J?”

  He must not have heard my previous grumble because his eyes nearly pop out of their sockets and he yanks the wheel, sending us into the median.

  This sends me bolt upright in my seat as I look around for other cars, curbs, or signage we are about to crash into. Jared corrects and puts us back in our lane. As I look back to see the dust cloud he’s stirred up in the turn lane, I let out a loud, “Bejesus, F-ing, criminy,” and grip my chest.

  “Learn how to cuss, damn it,” Jared orders. “It sounds like this. Fuck Jules, you scared the shit out of me.”

  I can feel his eyes boring into me, but I’m temporarily frozen in my seat and can’t respond. What he doesn’t know is I didn’t scream because of the near accident, but because of the man sitting in the back seat of our car.

  I take another look over my shoulder at Marcus. “I don’t like cussing,” I say.

  “He’s takin’ you to the hospital,” Marcus tells me.

  “The succubus had a dirty mouth,” Jared says. “Don’t you remember? She must’ve really screwed with your head.”

  “You’re kidding,” I burst out, directed at Marcus’s words, not my brothers. “Jared, pull over.”

  “Yeah right. You’re going to see Mom.”

  “Jared, stop the car. You have no idea what’s happening. Stop, now!”

  One long curved eyebrow rises. The look makes me think he is not only patronizing me, but he also feels sorry for me. The car doesn’t slow down.

  “This is the part where I tell you if you try to prevent the future from happenin’, it’s gonna worsen the overall effect of the upcoming situation,” Marcus says calmly from the back seat.