Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (21 page)

I
slept with my hand on the feather, and dreamed of flying with him over the ocean. The tapestry was being woven around us in the air, so that I could see the individual threads in infinite colors. The anchor threads were brighter than all of the rest, each glowing in silver or gold. I did not look to Adriel, though his fingers were entwined with mine. We soared from high to low, where a master and slave of ancient Egypt became down their generations a boy and girl who sat beside each other in a Connecticut schoolroom and were friends. Further down the generations, two women sat at different tables in the same coffee shop, taking no notice of one another as they worked on laptops. And further down still was an old man in a park . . . no, it was a hologram of a park for we were far in the future, and the squeal of laughter from a child on a Ferris wheel came to his ears. He looked up and smiled to see a boy in thrill while his rocking seat swooped down to the ground. Thousands of generations had come and gone from ancient Egypt to this city not even built within a country that did not yet exist. Still these threads touched and parted, touched and parted once more. Neither the old man nor the happy child knew of the distant relationship between them, nor would they ever, but I could see it spread out before me and it was beautiful.

“More,” I said, the plea coming not from my throat but my soul for
Adriel to read.

We came to my
own thread. It was a deep rose in color, and we circled it. Here around me was everyone I knew, and we floated up the tapestry to see an intersection of my father’s thread and the one belonging to Savannah’s mother. It was the briefest passing in an airport twenty years ago, where they walked past one another to reach different flights. Laughing at the coincidence, I sank down to watch the later generations. Savannah’s thread split into her two children and carried on. Far below one of her descendants would encounter one of London’s, and one of Downy’s, too. They wouldn’t know of any significance, nor was there any in truth. There was only meaning to me.

“I wish I could see it all,”
I said in delight.

“You would go blind,” Adriel said. “
It’s too much for mortal eyes, and too much for lower angelic like mine truthfully.”

I spotted Zakia’s thread, a
dull gray that was wound around mine. The other threads were so gaily colored, and they made his stand out strangely for its plainness. I followed it up yet it did not stop. Now Zakia’s thread was contemporary with my father’s thread and then my grandfather’s, and it stretched onward still. I couldn’t follow any further, since Adriel restrained me from flying up higher. I craned my neck and was just able to make out the dull gray thread’s end. It led to a gap in the tapestry, and above the gap, a cobalt blue thread hung down into the nothingness. The gray was rooted to no other threads, coming from nowhere to continue on through the generations. Both the dull gray and the lovely blue belonged to Zakia somehow, as did the empty space between them.

“It’s time to go,” Adriel said.
We flew through the tapestry the way we had come in order to leave. I spotted occasional gaps in other places, bright threads going down to nothing, and picking up as duller threads.

Adriel paused at a thread of deep rose that was very short.
That was Annabeth’s, and for a split second I looked down into the icy water at my own face. The girl’s eyes were wide open, frantic and fearful, and a hand reached in. A white cord tinged with gold began below the termination of the deep rose. This was Adriel’s birth as a fallen angel.

I woke up with the feather still soft under my fingers.
Wishing it would not grow dull and coarse with time, I set it in my pencil holder. All of the urgency I hadn’t felt for my schoolwork the evening before struck me, and I scribbled out answers furiously between going about the tasks to get ready for school.

Once there, I sat in the mail truck since I still had
fifteen minutes and raced through more. The work for fifth and sixth could wait for lunch in the library, but I had four classes’ worth of work to get through fast. If there was a pop quiz in any subject today, I was out of luck.

Five minutes to the bell, I got out of the truck and rushed to my locker.
The hallways were crowded, no one feeling obliged to go into a classroom until the warning bell rang. When I saw Savannah at her locker, I smiled and thought of her mother and my father at the airport. It was just a coincidence that they had both been there at the same time, and that Savannah and I were friends at the same school now. Yet I liked to know of our previous connection, even if it was just something my subconscious created in a dream.

“So, are you with Adriel?” she called.

“I’m not with him,” I answered, “but I’m not
not
with him either.”

“Only a girl could make sense of that sentence,” Nash said behind me as Savannah nodded in total understanding.

Walking up, London said, “Stop dogging her, Nash, how many ways can she tell you that she’s not interested?”

“Is that true?” Nash demanded of me.
“Adriel! Hey, Adriel!”

Jogging in from the parking lot, Adriel called, “Hi, Nash.”

“Are you with Jessa?” Nash asked.

Adriel
looked at me, reading my face and whatever it was he saw in my soul. Everyone stood there, eager for the answer. His lips lilted upwards on one side. “I’m not sure. We might be.”

“Bunch of funny guys, you two,” Nash
grumbled. The warning bell rang. Students split apart to the classrooms until it was only Adriel and I in the hallway.

“I shouldn’t be with you, Jessa,” Adriel said.

“You’re going on to infinity,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to do the whole length of it alone.”

He hitched his backpack over his shoulder and offered his hand.
“Would you walk with me?” My heart beat harder, since I knew he meant more than just to class. I took his warm hand into mine, and we walked to my first period where he had to let go.

Chapter Nine: The Family

A good week passed at school, everyone shocked that I was with Adriel. As he had turned down every request for a date until now, and Kishi hadn’t dated in all of her time at the school, this was an unprecedented event that was gossiped about from end to end of campus. In fifth period one day, Kitts stopped hunting and pecking to lean over and whisper, “Okay, you did the impossible with Adriel. Tell me your secret so I can land Zakia.”

There wasn’t a secret, and I had no idea how one would go about winning a date with Zakia Cooper.
He was going back and forth outside the window while we typed, and I wondered about his broken strand in the tapestry. That had been the most lucid dream of my life and I
felt
the truth of it. Maybe it was due to sleeping with the feather under my hand. I had done the same on subsequent nights, the feather slowly turning dull and regular, but I never had a dream as vivid as that again. I didn’t mention my little experiment to Adriel, not wanting him to tell me that the first dream was meaningless when it had been so amazing.

Now it was Saturday.
The weekend was promising to be beautiful, the sun so bright that it managed to penetrate even shadowy Spooner. I lazed about through the morning, alone in the house since Grandpa Jack was covering for someone who fell sick at work. He often just walked over, the post office not even half a mile away, but today he took the mail truck since it was an emergency.

I ate a leisurely breakfast and fought with the Internet
for hours, having to pull the curtains behind the love seat since the sunlight was coming in so strongly through the window. The phone rang not a minute after I gave up on a music video in the early afternoon. I picked it up, hoping desperately that Nash had gotten the message. A thrill went through me to hear Adriel’s voice. “Hey, Jessa?”

Sitting up straight, I said, “Hello!”

“Would you like to come over for the afternoon?”

My heart both dropped and soared at the exact same moment.
“Yes, I would love to, but my grandfather has my mail truck.”

“
That’s not a problem. I’ll pick you up. Is half an hour okay?”

“Make it an hour?” I asked, wanting to shower first.
He agreed and I hung up. Then I charged up the stairs, setting off the disco fish and almost slipping in the bathroom. Once washed and dressed, I ran downstairs to write a note to my grandfather. Adriel pulled up just as I slapped the note to the refrigerator under a fish magnet.

He
dressed nicely even on a weekend, in pressed jeans and a button-down shirt. As I got into the car, I said, “It’s still my first thought. Text my grandfather and tell him where I’m going. Then I remember that I can’t text, and my second thought is to call him on my cell. And then I remember that I can’t do that either. The handwritten note is the third thought.”

“By the time you’re back in Bellangame,
” Adriel said, “you’ll be thinking in the reverse, with texting the last thing to occur to you.”

I didn’t want to think about bei
ng back in Bellangame since he wouldn’t be there. I also didn’t like that he was thinking about me being gone, and appearing untroubled. He looked at me curiously and I knew that he’d seen the shielding. “Sometimes it’s my business, and should stay that way,” I said.

“You aren’t as
eager to go back to Bellangame as you have been before.”

“That’s annoying, Adriel!”
Thinking about it made me despair. I’d go back in June to pool parties and long conversations on my cell phone, shopping for clothes and college supplies with Downy and Taylor. They were going to be the same people having the same conversations when I had changed so much. I didn’t want to sink back into that old life, my experiences here fading to less-than-real. “You have to let a girl retain some mystery.”

“You
do
have mystery,” Adriel disagreed. “I can’t read your mind. I have to ask questions like any other guy.”

“I have a
mystery you can solve,” I said. “What exactly is the Spooner mascot?”

“I have no
clue,” Adriel answered, turning onto Jacobo. “My last five schools have been the bearcats, the demons, the wolves, the llamas, and the fighting eagles. Then I came to Spooner with its critter of mystery.”

“The llamas?”

“The spitting llamas. It was strange. Yet not as strange as Crazy Critter. Hey, that’s Easton over there.”

I waved to Easton, who was
going down the sidewalk with a family as redheaded as he was. “You mentioned fallen angels that don’t stay. Who are they? Can you tell me about them?”

“We haven’t had many, not since I joined the family.
Some are . . .” His fingers tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully. “. . . guilty. Remorseful. Angry. Some essentially become hermits to wait out the end of time; others move on to different families or create their own. Jacquiel was an angry one, an angel who lived with us for a few years in the nineteen thirties. His fall was five hundred years in the past, but he couldn’t cope with it. Drina forced him to leave since it wasn’t a good fit. There was Sersha for six months in the seventies. She still writes now and then to Taurin. They fell for the same reason. He’s made better peace with it.”

“What reason?”

“Love. Sersha fell in love with her guarded soul and had a clandestine relationship with him. We’re forbidden to do that obviously. Taurin fell in love with a lesser thread of the tapestry, a woman destined to have no husband or children. He told himself that it was not so great of a crime, since he wasn’t interfering with anything destined to happen. Angels aren’t allowed to do that either, however, and the Thronos expelled him once they discovered it.”

Grouchily, I looked out the window and said, “Where is this Thronos authority?
Someone needs to file a complaint about their leadership.”

“It’s here,” Adriel said.

“In
Spooner
?” That was too much for me to believe.

“
No. It’s everywhere and nowhere all at once, temporally hidden. Only a full angel can shift from this time to access theirs. I would be summoned there when it was time to be assigned a new guarded soul. The twelve of the Old Guard sat upon their chairs in the grand sanctuary as I knelt before them, and above us was the source of the music. It’s the most beautiful light. Chords I couldn’t understand came down to the Guard with messages, and they translated them for me. So I knew where to go and which times to arrive, what to do while I was there.”

We pulled up the driveway
to his incredible home. He pressed a button on the ceiling of his car to open the gate. Cadmon was on the lawn, half-dressed and pressing his hand to the trunk of a tree. Motioning to him, I asked, “Do you think that he’ll be like the others? The ones who left since they couldn’t take it?”

“I hope not,” Adriel said
while we traveled around the driveway. “I trust that he had reason for what he did. All I’ve ever seen in his soul is a gentle nature. Jacquiel was arrogant to think as an angel that he could make the tapestry better than how it was, to dare to rearrange threads to suit his liking. Mine was an impulse save; his was deliberate. He was arrogant as a fallen angel as well. Drina is thousands upon thousands of years old, and Taurin nearly as much. Kishi and I have voices, but they run this family. If we disagree with something, we are free to leave and run our own. It was not for Jacquiel to come in and attempt to take over. When he left, he tried to get Kishi and I to go with him.” He parked the car. Three others were also here, so I assumed the whole family was home.

I climbed out and s
pied Cadmon up on the highest point of the roof, the sun turning his wings to blazes of silver as he sat there. His flight had been silent. Nervously, I looked out to the road. That must have been why they picked this house, pushed back from the street and far apart from other homes. As we walked through the front door, a window pushed up on the level above and Drina stuck her head out to shout upwards, “Cadmon! I saw that. No fly zone!”

The house was just as beautiful inside as it was outside.
Instrumental music played. A majestic foyer with a chandelier opened to a vast living room with a vaulted ceiling. Sunlight streamed through the windows to brighten the dark wood of the furniture. A handsome man was sitting upon a leather sofa, a newspaper crinkling in his hands as he read. Adriel called, “Taurin? This is Jessa.”

He lowered the paper.
Though appearances meant nothing of age with angels, he looked to be in his early forties. The sun brought out red tones in his dark brown hair, and his eyes were the gray of a gathering storm. Extending a hand, he said, “Jessa Bright, the girl who tumbled off a cliff indeed!”

“Oh, don’t remind her of it!” Drina chided over the iron railing of a hallway on the second floor.
Something thumped on the roof and in exasperation she shouted to the ceiling, “Cadmon!”

I shook
Taurin’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“And now your thread continues.
I wonder where it will go.” He spoke only with curiosity, not recrimination.

“With any luck, anywhere but off a cliff again,” I said.

“Let me show you around,” Adriel offered. We walked through the living room to a kitchen, which was large but cozily designed in yellow tiles and homey touches like small vases of fresh flowers and bowls of fruit. Lights hung low from chains over the counters. Doubling back through the living room, he guided me to a hallway. Two bedrooms were down here, one for Drina and one for Taurin, and there was also a library.

I looked at the books, having never seen so many in one place save an actual library.
Some were so old that they were under glass cases to protect them. Among the books on the shelves were vases and displays of ancient coins from all over the world. “Wow. Which one of you is the collector?”

“I don’t kn
ow that it’s so much collecting.” Adriel stretched up to pluck one of the small displays down. “These were mine over a hundred years ago, some Indian Head pennies minted in 1906. I’ve only ever lived in America. Drina and Taurin have seen the world, and the rest of these are coins they saved.”

“
Think of the history behind each one, how many hands they passed through in their time,” I said. All of those hands and coin pouches and pockets, and they ended up here in the same room with me. “This is a museum.”

As we walked down the hallway, Drina was calling, “Kishi, will you get him down?
I’ve been up there twice today and he’s not listening to me in the slightest.”

“Sure,” Kishi called back.
Her voice was much louder. I looked up as we stepped into the foyer and saw her right overhead, balanced on the railing and framed by wings of ocean blue. She grinned to see us and put a finger to her lips.

“
Without
wings,” Drina shouted. “The ladder is in the back.”

“Damn,” Kishi whispered.
Hopping off the railing, she clattered down the steps while we walked up them. She let herself out the front door and then a brilliant sapphire light shot past the window up to the roof. It happened so fast a blink could have missed the whole thing.

“He fell in autumn, so autumn is worse for him,” Adriel said.
“The anniversary is painful. We’ll have to take him flying tonight.”

“I’d like to come,” I said.
“If that’s all right, to watch.”

“I don’t think anyone will mind.
This is Cadmon’s room.” The door was open to a comforting scene, the walls a soothing blue and stars upon the ceiling to glow at night. It was a very bare space, and I realized that I was looking for toys and children’s books. But he wasn’t really a child. There was no bed but mounds of pillows on the floor. Before I could ask, Adriel said, “When our guarded souls didn’t need us, we could rest in a non-corporeal form as we flew.”

“Listening.”

“Yes. Or we stayed steady within trees or clouds once sated . . . to sleep in a bed feels strange at first when an angel falls. In a few years, he’ll be ready for it.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the happy disaster of Kishi’s room, which was the chaos of the back seat of her car given much more room to flourish.
Only if one had eternity to live could a person fit in all of the hundreds of projects lying out, from quilting to painting to music to puzzles. The walls were covered in posters of BBG and The Plug Nickels, which made me like her even more. She had good taste in pop bands. Unlike Cadmon, she had a proper bed. “Does she ever finish anything?”

“It’s always surprising, but she does
quite often. I think she made some of those pillows on the bed herself,” Adriel said. “Would you like to see my room?”

I wanted to see that most of all, and followed him to the last door in the hall
way. He opened it to a simple room with big windows looking out into trees. Sparsely decorated, I perused the slim bookcase and pulled out a framed picture of an advertisement for a carnival that took place seventy years ago. Adriel said, “Kishi and I had a good time there.”

“You don’t know what to do with this space, do you?” I blurted.