Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (13 page)

“But she’s so pretty.”

“She only feels that way if a man’s eyes are upon her. Then she likes her reflection, and only then.”

Her attitude
and obvious favoritism had made me feel snarky in reaction, but what he said just left me sad for that girl. I paged through the menu, noticing the high prices and trying to remember what I had in my wallet. Ten dollars? I should just get the fruit cup side and some hot tea. Just then, Adriel said, “What are you getting?”

“Some fruit.
I’m not that hungry.”

“
You’re shielding a little more. Tell me.”

I sighed.
“This is exasperating! It’s nothing.”

“Gluten intolerant?”

“No.”

“Hate my company?”

“No!”

“Worried about
money?”

“No . . .” I said weakly, and he saw through it to the truth.

“I’m paying,” Adriel said. “Get whatever you want.”

The waiter took our order
s of crepes. The restaurant was bustling if not crowded, plates clattering in the kitchen and voices pattering at the tables. The hostess walked two guys to a booth and hung out there to chat with them. Seeing a tray of delicious meals go by, I said, “Why do you eat if you can’t die?”

“So I don’t get hungry,” Adriel said.
“I won’t starve to death from not eating, but I would feel the pain of starvation keenly.”

“Can you be hurt?”

“Yes, just like you, except I heal more quickly than a human. I’m made of stronger materials, shall we say. To fall from the cliff would have killed you; it would have wounded me greatly, yet I would heal given some time no matter how bad the breakage.”

“What if . . . not to be gross, but what if you were decaptitated?
Would everything just grow back?”

The fringe of the skirt swished past us to the podium.
Watching it ruefully, Adriel smiled. “No, it wouldn’t grow back. Though it would be really, really hard to decapitate me. You would have your best luck doing that with an angelic sword, not a human-made one. But if it happened, I would continue as a fully conscious head for eternity. That would be very unpleasant. Now I’m sure that being a fallen angel is interesting to you, but it’s deadly dull to me. Tell me something about your life.”

Oh God, there was nothing interesting about me.
“It’s basically been a lot of school and little else. The first amazing thing to ever happen was the cruise my parents won, and that wasn’t even about me.”

“You didn’t like that question.
I’ll ask you one that almost everyone has a ready answer for. What’s something you can’t stand?”

“My grandfather’s stupid disco fish on the wall
of his house,” I said immediately. “It goes off every time one of us goes up or down the stairs, the music makes me nuts, and I can’t get rid of it because it’s a memento of his from my late grandmother.”

“A disco fish?”

“It’s a novelty item.”

His eyes pi
erced into mine. I looked away with a teasing smile, and wondered what he was reading from my soul. Sitting back, he said, “You didn’t know your grandmother, did you?”

“How do you know?”

“Your soul had no reaction when you talked about her.”

“I didn’t know her,” I admitted.
“She looks nice in her pictures, but she died before I was born. What did you see when I mentioned my grandfather?”

“Amusement.
Distance. Irritation.”

That summed it up well, although I was embarrassed about the irritation.
“Can you read the souls of your family? Other angelic souls?”

“Yes, but it’s a more complex energy to understand.
And there you’ve done it, changed the conversation back to me.”

“It’s a gift,” I said.
“You don’t move from place to place and do high school all over again, do you? I could never live like that.” Though it explained how he could do the homework so rapidly, if it was all old hat to him.

“It’s lonely, having only the five of us for company,” Adriel said with a shrug.
“I enroll as a sophomore to go through three years in each place, and it gives me a community. Then I go off to the junior college for a while and take whatever looks intriguing, a class or two a semester. Kishi takes a full load since she’s a lot more social. You’ll like her. You can’t
not
like Kishi.”

The hostess seated two women and passed them the menus without any friendly
banter. Swinging by our table, she tapped her fingers on the tablecloth and refilled our glasses with water. With mock sternness, she said, “Shouldn’t you be at school, young man?”

“I’ll go right back,” Adriel said.
“Thank you.” He looked away from her to me, and she left in disappointment.

“What are Drina and Taurin like?
” I asked. “Are they really married?”

“Well, that’s complicated,” said Adriel.
“They go through cycles of being married and just being friends. It’s been over a thousand years of that. They’re in a friend stage currently, but the very best of friends. He interacts a lot more with humans at work, he’s really social like Kishi, and Drina’s a homebody. But that’s good for Cadmon, since he has to be home for the time being. She has a very soothing energy. I remember . . .”

“What?” I asked when he didn’t continue.

“My memories of my first years as fallen are full of big holes. I have the most vague memory of the woods I was living in, being hungry and cold and scared, hiding from hunters going through for deer. I remember Drina looking into this makeshift tent I had. That’s clear. She kept coming back day after day with food and water and blankets, until one day she convinced me to go with her out of the woods. She took me home. It’s what she does. She’s the closest thing we have to a mother.”

Our crepes came.
I didn’t want to eat, being fascinated by this conversation, but I tucked into my plate since he was enjoying his. “Do all of you . . . fly around together?”

“Sometimes at night.
There are places around here without any people, or we can go deep out over the sea. On overcast days, we might go above the clouds. We just need to catch a breath of that music.”

“It w
as louder when you flew faster,” I said.

He froze over his crepe.
“You remember that?”

“Yes.
A little.”

“We used to live in that music.
Before we fell, we could fly unnoticed anywhere in the world. That was what I did when my guarded soul didn’t need me, or when I was between souls. I just flew around and around this earth to listen to it, so soothed by those chords.” He glanced wistfully out the window to the sky. “That’s what hurts the most about falling, being severed from it.”

“Do you regret what you did?
The act that made you fall?”

Adriel met my eyes briefly and then looked away.
After a minute of quiet eating, he said, “No. I can’t regret it. But I miss the music with all of my heart and soul. We all do.” He paused. I readied for another silence, but then he kept going. “The one I was guarding at the time had a good soul. A kind one. I was lucky in all of my time to never have to face a decision like Drina or Cadmon. All right, your turn. Which one do you like better, Diego or Nash?”

“Neither,” I said.

“London or Savannah?”

“Nope.”

The hostess stopped by to check on our water glasses and smile at Adriel. When she went away, I said, “Why can’t you have a relationship with a human?”

“It’s part of the punishment.
That would change the tapestry.”

“But what does it matter if it’s with someone who isn’t an anchor?”
This whole eternity in punishment didn’t sit well with me. “No matter what you and the others changed, Adriel, it can’t be that bad since the world is still turning!”

He pushed his empty plate to the end of the table
, where a busboy going by collected it without a break in stride. “You don’t know that, how things should have been, and it isn’t your judgment to make but the Thronos. We committed an unforgivable breach, and to then change yet another thread of the tapestry, no matter how small, is also a breach. It will go very badly if it’s discovered, and I shouldn’t even be with you right now.”

“Then why are you?”
Not hungry for the rest of my meal, I pushed the plate to the end of the table.

“Because I’m being very selfish,” Adriel said, and motioned
to the waiter for the check. Discontent gathered in his forehead and muted the sweet sea blue of his eyes. “I let myself forget what I’ve done, and I should never do that. I shouldn’t even have brought you here. If I were good, I’d move away from Spooner and let you forget me. You would in time.”

I didn’t consider that a remote possibility.
He pressed sixty dollars into the little black book with the check inside. Horrified that he might carry through on his threat, I said, “Please don’t move! I’m going to be gone in June. Why disrupt your entire life over this?”

Intensely, he said,
“My life is meant to be a disruption to me, Jessa, just as I disrupted the natural order. This is the consequence. But it isn’t supposed to be a disruption to you, and I
caught
you. That’s the biggest disruption of all.”

It was like he was taking the most beautiful, miraculous moment of my life and twisting it into something vile and ugly.
We walked out of the restaurant. I was upset at having my rescue be the reason for further consequences for him. Standing at the car door, I exclaimed, “I don’t know what you did or how the world should have been, and I don’t care. It is what it is! Saving someone from a grisly death isn’t a bad thing, and screw a tapestry that says it is. And I think it’s pretty horrible to dole out angels depending on how important someone will turn out to be! My life matters to
me
, even if it doesn’t play a part on any grander scale.”

He flinched and averted his eyes.
In a temper, I demanded, “What?”

“Your soul blazes when you’re angry.”

We drove back to school in a stony silence. My arms were crossed as I looked out the window. He didn’t speak, probably sensing from my soul that I wasn’t in the mood. And it made me even angrier to have lost that privacy. Once back in the parking lot, I slammed the door and stalked away to the library, where I remained through lunch. The road rash on my leg burned and I hiked up my jeans to reapply the cream. The pain muted and vanished.

Kitts and I both got in trouble in fifth period, me for going too fast through the work, and she for persistently clinging to her hunt-and-peck method of typing.
We rolled our eyes at each other when the teacher walked away to land on another student for something petty and ridiculous.

“Why can’t I just read a book or something since I’m done?” I grumbled.

“Because this is
typing
,” Kitts chided playfully. “Not
reading a book
.”

I
stared out the window for something to do. The flowers looked lovely in the wine barrel planters. The planters which were doomed to rot, and make Zakia start all over again moving them out and putting new ones in. This was such a stupid school, and I didn’t want to hear anyone complain about budget problems. It was great that Zakia had a job, but it was for a really foolish reason.

Cutting sixth period was tempting, but I decided just to go and get it over with.
Adriel grimaced a little when I walked in two seconds before the bell. I guessed I was still blazing. The handicapped table in the front was unused this period, so I asked Mr. Rogers very sweetly if I could have it to stretch out my wounded leg. He shook my hand and said yes. The whole period was taken up by reading the play out loud. I wasn’t assigned one of the parts, so the hour passed with me only turning pages and trying to ignore that presence in the back row. As soon as class ended, I was out the door.

Nash and Diego were at my locker when I
got there, both wanting to talk about movies our group of friends could see on Friday. Switching out textbooks quickly, I said, “You know, I think I’m just going to have a quiet evening at home with my grandfather after last Friday.” They protested but I held fast and went out to my mail truck.

A
plastic bag had been tucked under the windshield wipers. I pulled it out and let myself in with it, assuming it was a joke or trapped there by the wind. Not until I got home and was about to drop it in the garbage did I realize there was something inside. It was another container of the cream for my leg, and a note in awful handwriting from Zakia that his sister thought I might need more.

Gratitude was definitely in order.
Feeling out of my century, I searched the phone book for the last name Cooper. There were far too many of them. When Grandpa Jack walked in, I asked, “Do you have the number for the Coopers? Lotus sent more cream and I’d like to say thank you.”

“Oh, just call the store, she was there an hour ago when I dropped off the mail,” Grandpa Jack said.
“Botanic Wonderments, look up that.”