Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (20 page)

“That’s good though,” I said.

“It will be good for him next year. It’s a slow awakening, and he needs to integrate into this world a little bit more first. We’ll start with grocery store trips and the library. Don’t you intend to ask where we’re going?”

“I
assume that you want me to watch you skateboard like Nash does.”

“Another time,” Adriel said.
I figured when he turned onto Sutter that we were going to the Gap, but almost at once he took a sharp left turn onto a nearly invisible side road. From there we went at a steep grade upwards. I brushed off my dress, the one I’d worn on the first day of school. The weather was going to be too cold for it soon, and I wanted one more day in something other than jeans.

When we crested the top of the hill, the sunlight was dazzling.
I brought down the visor as he drove slowly over a poorly maintained road of only a single lane. Deciding I was curious after all, I said, “All right, I’m asking. Where are we?”

“I found this road while flying one night.
I have no idea if it used to be a trail or something else, but it goes all along the top of this hill and ends in a viewpoint of the redwood valley. It’s very private. To the west of the hill there aren’t any housing developments. Or anything else but trees for more than a mile.”

We got to the viewpoint
twenty minutes later, most of the drive spent in silence since the road was jouncing us up and down so hard. The concrete ended in a wide dirt circle. I got out of the car and walked nearer to the edge, although keeping a safe foot from it. Beneath was a sea of green. There was no noise of cars or people, nothing but the green below and the blue above.

“It was pity,” Adriel said
. I tried to look at him, but he settled his hands upon my hips and held me steady.

“
You told me that it was why you fell,” I said. His hands were very warm through the material of the dress.

His voice was quiet and solemn
in my ear. “My guarded soul at the time of my fall was a boy. As the tapestry was woven, he was to be an inventor, a great one. One day upon the ice of a lake near his home as an adolescent, it broke and he fell in. His guardian angel was to pull him out.”

“But you didn’t?” I asked.

“I arrived there in time to see him go under. I also saw his younger sister going down with him. They were ice-skating, and they didn’t realize that this part of the lake had much thinner ice than the rest of it. So they both went down. I flew over and caught his hand. As I pulled him out, I saw his sister down there drowning. Her eyes . . . she looked straight at me in desperation. So I pulled her out, too.”

When I began to speak, he squeezed his hands to silence me.
“She was not a guarded soul, and was doomed to die at that lake. I had no right to change what happened. And that act, Jessa, it changed all of history. That boy was to grow into a man, always guilty that his sister had died on a trip to the lake that was his idea. She hadn’t even wanted to go, but there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her beloved big brother. That guilt spurred him on in his work, kept him up late at night and tormented him. He worked harder and harder to stay ahead of it. But his sister
didn’t
die, and that which was being woven changed. The Thronos rectified it by having her killed soon after that. Yet the circumstances were a little different, as you cannot exactly recreate a moment in time, and the boy didn’t blame himself as intensely. He grew up into a man who was still an inventor, but his inventions were not as great nor as numerous. He wasn’t as driven by guilt. This man was an anchor, and so millions of threads, billions in time, have changed and will change.”

“All yo
u did was save a drowning girl,” I said.

“And with that, I changed history.
I gave her just a few short months extra of life, and then she died anyway to bring what had been woven as close as possible to what was being woven.” Drawing me away from the edge, he took my place there and casually stepped back. A pebble skipped over the side and fell. He removed his shirt and tossed it to the dirt circle. “Her name was Annabeth. She was twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t sure. But she looked so much like you, Jessa Bright. I looked into her eyes and I couldn’t look away. So I reached in that second time to save her and fashioned the world the way I wanted it to be, rather than how it was and should be. So I was cast out, and I fell.”

He
took another step back and fell over the side. I screamed and darted forward to catch him, even though I knew it was too late. But below he had wings, all of the golden pinpricks on each white feather catching the sunlight and transforming him into a blur of gold skimming over the treetops. I watched him fly far away from me, until his wings beat hard and pulled him up into the air. There he looped and shot higher until I could no longer see him in the sky. I shielded my eyes and searched for him, jumping when I heard his voice at my back. “So now you know what I have done.”

I stared at the white and gold of his wings, which extended out from his shoulders and rose above his head.
Then I reached out to touch one, to lose myself in that melting softness. Something this soft shouldn’t exist on earth, just like that music could not. His feather had turned common a few days after its separation from his wing, but these were glorious. They felt alive, and were as full of soul as his eyes.

“They’re beautiful,” I said with a catch in my throat.
It was such a paltry adjective to use for a sight and sensation as strong as these. “Can you . . . can you feel me touching here? Or is it like hair and you feel nothing?”

“I feel it,” Adriel said.
“Like you feel your arm or leg, and more so.”

I couldn’t
stop myself from burying my other hand in his wing, to have more of myself gathered into this softness. Smoothing the feathers, I brought my hands to his cheeks. “I wish you weren’t punished for that.”

“You shielded a little.”

I had done so because it was selfish. “But then I would not have met you.”

“You shouldn’t want
to have met me, a fallen angel. Your world is no longer
your
world, for what I did, for what all of my family has done.”

“This is the world I know,” I said.
“It hasn’t hurt me, and I don’t know that other world.”

His hand slipped over mine, and he gathered my fingers into his.
His wing brushed against my back as he stepped to the edge of the hill and pulled me with him. “Would you like to fly?”

I smiled, too overcome to speak, and looked out to the horizon.
Wind swayed the tops of the trees, which stretched out as far as I could see. Beyond them would be the ocean, the sea of green turning to a sea of blue and going out to infinity. When I looked down, I expected to see my feet still upon the ground. I hadn’t felt his wings move, and I was surprised to see that we were hovering high above the hill. The wings beat steadily and held me aloft, linked only to Adriel by my left hand. An invisible ground was under my feet to bear my weight, although I felt as light as helium.

“I won’t let you fall,” Adriel said.

“I’m not afraid,” I answered. The floor tipped beneath me gracefully and tilted us forward. We raced over the trees, the wind a caress across my face when it should have buffeted. My hair rippled out in lazy waves as I looked to the sun.

At the periphery of my hearing, I heard the faintest strain of that celestial music.
Somehow, it felt like a home, one I had never known, but one in which I belonged. I wanted to go faster to hear more of it. Adriel moved his other hand to mine and dropped the first to my waist. Drawn against his body, we picked up speed and the wind moved against me with slightly more force. The chords grew tantalizingly bright.

Just as a hint of blue
touched the horizon, we looped high into the air. His wings beat faster, the softness brushing along my shoulder every time the feathers curled and released for another pulse. We pushed through a low layer of clouds and the wetness of them did not touch me. Then the floor tilted and we were shooting down, through the clouds and to the trees, spiraling around and around without making me dizzy. The music played more loudly at this great speed and each chord lulled me. No earthly instruments could summon this music, which pulled me under and pushed me up in its impossible beauty.

The sunlight
blurred the golden points of his wings so that the green and blue of our surroundings vanished to gold. Trusting he wouldn’t crash us into the trees, I closed my eyes to hear the music without distraction. It thrummed, the chords sinking through my skin to my bones, and my bones thrummed in reply. I would not be able to hold onto the memory once I was no longer flying. Then everything would be the palest shadow and I would be in mourning. Cadmon wept for this and I would weep, too. But caught up in it now, I could only be within it, and captivated.

When we landed back upon the viewpoint, my heart stopped in grief for what was gone.
And then Adriel kissed me softly upon my cheek, and my heart had something new to spur it on.

****

I slept in the car on the way back. It was evening. When the car came to a stop and I opened my eyes, I expected to see campus and not Grandpa Jack’s house. Adriel was already out of the car and knocking on the front door. I got out unsteadily, Grandpa Jack saying, “Hey there, Adriel!”

“Hi, Mr. Bright,” Adriel said.
“Jessa and I went hiking in the hills this afternoon and she looked too tired as we were coming back to drive. I can drive you to the school so you can get the mail truck, would that be all right?”

As
I came up the walkway, Grandpa Jack said in concern, “Are you doing okay, Jessa?”

Sheepishly, I replied, “It was totally my fault, Grandpa Jack.
I overdid it. I’m okay to drive my mail truck.”

“You shouldn’t drive when you’re that tired, and you fell asleep the second you sat in the car,” Adriel said.
“Maybe it’s being overcautious-”

“No, no,
that’s smart,” Grandpa Jack said firmly. “Go on in and rest, I’ll get the truck. Last thing we need is another accident.”

Once inside, I
lay down on the love seat and closed my eyes. The music was bleeding away from me and I stretched after it to no avail. The phone rang, a jarring sound, and I rolled over intent on ignoring it. I knew it was either Nash needing my attention, or Savannah wanting to know what Adriel and I had done all afternoon.

We had
flown
.

The twenty minutes it
took Grandpa Jack to come back with the mail truck felt like seconds to me. When he came in, he said, “Feeling better?”

“
Yes, much better. Spooner has some lovely scenery,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew Adriel.”

Grandpa Jack
gave me a funny look. “I’m the mailman. I know pretty much everybody. They’re a nice family, the Graystones. Shame about the younger boy, he’s got something real tweaked in his noggin. They’re patient with him, all of his running wild.” Going into the kitchen, he harrumphed. “Well, let’s see about adding some vegetables to that dinner I was making.” A bag of veggie chips rustled.

“Eat a green one, Grandpa Jack,” I prompted.
A chip crunched after a grumble. Dragging over my backpack, I peered into my compact. Although I felt exhausted, more emotionally than physically, I looked utterly serene.

Dinner, homework, even my home in Bellangame seemed very distant.
I ate since a plate was put in front of me and diddled about with my assignments in front of the television. In my head, I rushed up into the sky and plunged down to the earth in a sweep of green and blue and gold. Putting my work away without completing it, I struggled to bring the music back.

My parents called.
The connection was poor, and all I could get out of the broken conversation was that they were doing great. They also reminded me to start looking into colleges. State applications were due at the end of November.

College.
My cheek burned where Adriel had kissed me. I didn’t want to think about leaving the area, not now. What was
college
to flying with a fallen angel? Bad dorm food, weird roommates, expensive books, picking majors . . . it didn’t hold a candle to that music, the softness of his wings,
him
. If he went to the junior college next year like Kishi, I’d go there, too.

I drifted upstairs at nightfall.
My fingers paused on the light switch in my room. Something was glinting on my pillow. I turned on the lights and stared at the feather from his wings. The gold pinpoints were dazzling in the sudden light. My eyes went quickly to the window, and I remembered opening it this morning since my room smelled musty. I’d closed it but not done the latch before I left for school. He’d been in and out of this rickety old house without me hearing so much as a squeak downstairs.

He
wasn’t on the branch or in the sky when I checked, racing away for home or a flight through darkness. It was pity that pulled Annabeth from the water, and perhaps pity that caught me from the plunge off the cliff. But it wasn’t pity that took me flying this afternoon or kissed my cheek. This was going to be a memory I cherished forever, the very limited
forever
of a mortal life. I wondered if it would be one he even remembered in a thousand years, in ten thousand years, in a million years. When the last humans were gone and he finally lay down to die . . . what in all of those years would come into his mind as his last thoughts? I hoped it was something as beautiful as the memory he’d given me today.