Earth Angel (12 page)

Abby looked like a cornered rabbit weighing the odds of escape. “Didn’t anyone try to convince
you
?” She squeezed her head and started to get up, but she still couldn’t manage it.

Oh, no. She shouldn’t have assumed Abby was comfortable with the weird, angel-filled reality they shared. Holding her by the shoulders at her harp had muddled her brain, made her say things she shouldn’t. But hadn’t Abby ever talked to anyone about her ethereal companions?

“You must have told your parents when you were little, right? And your parents told you the angels you saw were imaginary.”

“Not my parents, my grandparents. They raised me,” Abby said. She still looked pale, but at least she wasn’t trying to get up. “They sent me for psychiatric testing.”

“Yikes.” Gwynne sat back on her heels. “Isn’t that taking it a bit far?” No wonder Abby didn’t know whom to trust.

“They were worried I’d turn out like my mother. They felt like they failed her, and, no matter what it took, they weren’t going to fail me.” Abby pushed herself up from the ground and stood. “It’s not that I don’t believe angels are real,” she said. “I do. Sort of. I mean, they seem real to me. It’s just that I’ve never met anyone else who can see them.”

“We’re pretty rare.” That had been surprising, watching Abby have a conversation during the wedding reception with a being she shouldn’t have been able to perceive. Gwynne had stared at her for far too long, trying to figure out if she was really observing what she thought she was observing. “Megan sees them too.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what Kira was saying. She really can?”

“Yeah. And Kira won’t think you’re wackadoodle, either, even though she can’t sense them herself. It’s pretty funny watching her make small talk with thin air ever since Megan told her she sicced one of her angels on her. And you—you’ve got hordes of them following you around. More than I do. I think they must like hanging out with people who know they’re there.”

“You really saw Sapphire? The one who was circling you?” Abby’s face lit up, so innocently delighted that Gwynne couldn’t bear it.

What was she doing, talking to Abby about angels? She’d assumed Abby could see them. It hadn’t occurred to her that Abby would doubt the evidence of her own eyes. And now Gwynne had just gone and confirmed for her that no, she was not crazy, and yes, angels were real. Perfect. Just freaking perfect. As if getting Heather killed because of this exact same information wasn’t enough. When would she learn to keep her mouth shut? She should do it for the good of humanity.

She couldn’t stand the look on Abby’s face. She looked so happy, and all Gwynne could do was wish she’d never met her.

Because Abby would have been so, so, so much better off believing angels were not real.

Chapter Eight

Potential hallucination or not—with a strong vote for
not
from Gwynne Abernathy—Abby didn’t completely trust Elle. She needed proof.

Penelope had assigned her a place at one of the tables for the wedding dinner and told her not to work the whole evening, but she wasn’t hungry. Instead, while the guests enjoyed grilled tuna steaks and chicken cordon bleu by candlelight flickering in hurricane lamps, she walked down the beach, away from the tent, and phoned her grandmother.

“Grams. Do you remember me talking about angels when I was little?”

There was a long pause, just as she expected. The pause had been honed all through Abby’s childhood to give her plenty of time to feel guilty.

“I thought we’d put this behind us.”

We.
Like it was Grams’s problem too.

“When are you going to outgrow this, Abby? This unhealthy fascination with the supernatural?”

“Can’t we talk about it?”

Another silence. Abby rubbed her ear. The infection was back. She needed to go to the doctor and get more antibiotics, but she never could get around to making the time to do it.

Was Grams going to say anything at all? Maybe she was doing the wrong thing by bringing this up. She’d stopped talking about her so-called hallucinations long ago and discovered it made her relationship with her grandparents go much more smoothly.

“I know you don’t like to talk about it…”

Her grandmother cleared her throat. “You were such a tiny little thing when you lost your mother. Such a precious little thing. Only three years old. You were too young to know the difference between fantasy and reality. And you’d been through a terrible shock. We weren’t surprised when you clung to these…stories. It was a coping mechanism.”

“What stories?” Abby said quickly, biting her lip and hoping she didn’t sound too eager.

“The problem came when you were nine, ten, eleven years old. You should have outgrown it by then. After what happened to your mother…”

Grams was getting sidetracked. “What stories, Grams?”

“Never mind.”

“Grams!”

“Does it really matter?”

“Yes!” So much for not sounding too eager. She hoped she hadn’t just screwed her chances of getting any helpful information out of her, because it felt like she might actually be on the verge of getting an answer instead of a lecture.

Her grandmother sighed. “You seemed to believe you lived with a family of angels.”

Abby almost laughed. This was the big, terrible secret her grandmother never wanted to talk about? That she thought she lived with angels? Of course she thought she lived with angels. She lived with angels
now
. She’d always been able to see angels, as far back as she could remember. Which meant she must have been able to see them even when she was a child. Which explained the stories.

Unless the real explanation was that her younger self was babbling about a previous incarnation in another world that she could remember at age three and still talked about at age ten, but had since forgotten? That was Elle and Sapphire’s take on it. It certainly wasn’t her grandmother’s.

“Did I ever say I
was
an angel?”

“I’m sure I don’t remember.”

“Please, Grams, try.”

More silence. Abby waited patiently.

“Seeing your mother unconscious from drugs, maybe even seeing her dead…We hoped you’d forget what you’d seen. It was a mercy you were too young to understand what was going on. We thought you’d forgotten all about it.”

“I did forget.”

“It’s better that way. It was such a relief when you stopped talking about your mother and those fanciful angels.”

“But what did I say about them? Aside from the fact that I lived with them?”

“Who can remember? It was all childish nonsense.” Her grandmother sighed again—a feeble, put-upon sigh. “You can come see for yourself. We saved some of your things in the attic.”

* * *

“I need to talk to you.”

Gwynne turned at the urgency in Abby’s voice. It was after midnight and the wedding was winding down, and Abby could have gone home a long time ago, but hadn’t, because it was her friend’s wedding, after all, not some stranger’s.

“How are you feeling?” Gwynne asked.

Abby’s fainting had her worried, but after a short break, Abby had returned to her harp as if nothing had happened, as if she wasn’t the least bit wigged out. She’d even performed with the two brides and another woman in some kind of college band reunion, and to look at her, all jazzed and flinging her arms around like a crazed rock star whenever her hands left the strings, you’d never guess she had anything on her mind other than the music.

“Do you want to walk on the beach?” Abby asked.

“Sure.” She was done with her serving and cleanup duties. All she had left to do was help Abby carry her dragon harp and her amp and what all back to the minivan. “What about your stuff?”

“Ramona said she’d keep an eye on it.” Abby took Gwynne’s elbow and pulled her away from the tent and the guests who spilled onto the beach. She stepped out of her dressy, impractical heels and shivered.

“Are you cold? I have a sweatshirt in my beach bag that I left in your van, if you want to borrow it.”

“Will it fit?”

“We’ll find out.”

They changed direction, away from the beach. When they reached the van, Abby slipped Gwynne’s hooded, kangaroo-pocket sweatshirt on over her dress and Gwynne tried not to think about how good it felt to see her wearing it. Before her personal energy field could become any more protective, Gwynne turned away and rummaged in her bag for the flyers and stapler and roll of duct tape she took with her everywhere she went, just in case, because there were always good places to post her flyers, which currently featured a great photo of her calico kitten posing with the two rabbits, looking all Dr. Doolittle and peace on earth, which to tell the truth was not exactly the normal state of affairs at her place.

“I liked your band,” Gwynne said with her head practically inside her bag. “Interesting instrumental mix.”

“Penelope wanted to start a chamber ensemble—flute and harp and a couple other strings—but I was an archaeology major and I thought it would be more fun to have drums, because flute and drums are the oldest instruments. Not counting sticks. Which we also had. We also had a gourd rattle at one point.”

Gwynne upended her bag and dumped the contents onto the seat. “Did I see sticks?”

“You know, hitting two sticks together. It’s believed to be the oldest instrument if you don’t count the human voice.”

Oh yeah, the drumsticks they were high-fiving each other with.

“I thought it would be fun to teach myself the lyre,” Abby continued, “but they’re not easy to find, so Penelope researched it and said what would be
really
cool would be if I played a hunter’s bow like the cavemen, but I said, ‘What the crap am I going to do with a one-stringed instrument?’ and then Nat jumped in and volunteered to learn because she was always trying to impress Penelope and she didn’t care that she was being obvious.”

“Seems like it worked out,” Gwynne said.

“Their relationship, yeah. The musical cave bow, no. We never could get it to stay in tune and even when it was in tune, it sounded…not good. The rest of it, though—it was a great band. I miss it.”

They headed back to the beach and Gwynne scouted for potential flyer locations along the way. It didn’t take long before they reached a lifeguard stand dragged up beyond the high tide line and tipped upside down for the night. Gwynne stuck a flyer on it and taped it down so it wouldn’t flap in the wind. Some of the lifeguards would remove her flyers in the morning, but not all of them. It was worth a shot.

“Look how cute Peter is with his head resting on his paws,” she told Abby. “Who could resist?”

It was hard to make out the photo in the dark, so Abby took an extra flyer from her hands to get a better look. “Which one is he?”

“The black rabbit.”

“He is cute,” she agreed. “I can’t wait to meet him tomorrow at the birthday party.”

“Do you want to adopt him? He’s really sweet.”

Abby handed the flyer back. “Megan McLaren has met your rabbits, right?”

Uh-oh. Any mention of Megan in the same sentence with the word
rabbits
was not a good sign.

“Not these ones,” Gwynne assured her.

“Huh.”

“Why?” she asked innocently. Not so innocently. Oh, come on, what did Meg say about her rabbits this time?

“Because every time she walks by your desk and sees the photos of your rabbits she gets this look on her face.”

“What kind of look?”

Abby sounded apologetic. “I think she’s cringing.”

Gwynne waved her hands dismissively, the roll of duct tape bouncing around her wrist. “Meg’s not a rabbit person.”

“Apparently not.”

“But
you
might be.”

Abby gave her an understanding smile as she slowly shook her head. Gwynne stumbled in the sand. That smile was dangerous.

She rolled her flyers into a tighter tube. “You could adopt a different rabbit if you don’t like these. I’m always fostering new ones, and it’ll get worse after Easter—that’s always a busy time of year.”

Abby kept shaking her head. “Where do they come from?”

“Oh, here and there,” Gwynne said vaguely.

Was it her imagination, or was Abby standing closer? She’d switched her high heels to her outside hand as they walked side by side, and her empty hand swung freely between them, close enough to accidentally brush against Gwynne’s leg. Not that there was any accidental brushing going on. But there could be. The possibility was all she could think of. She swore she could feel the pressure of the space between them, aura pushing against aura.

“Why don’t you keep them?” Abby asked. “Your rabbits. If you love them so much.”

“I’d like to, believe me, but I can’t keep every abandoned rabbit who comes in my door. It’s the only way to keep the influx under control. I’m a regular rabbit homing signal.”

“So you’re completely blameless. Rabbits mysteriously show up at your door.”

“Kind of like you and all your harps,” Gwynne retorted.

Abby’s path drifted off-center, widening the distance between them. Good. Distance would lessen the tingling that threatened to overwhelm her senses. The high heels were switched to her other hand, adding a physical obstacle in that empty space between them.

“They call out to me and I can’t say no,” Abby said.

“I can say no.”

“Oh, suck it up and admit you can’t.”

Gwynne thrust the flyers toward her and unrolled them so Abby could see and stabbed her finger at the words
Free to Good Home.
It killed her to look at those words. She hated saying goodbye, but she made herself do it over and over again. She’d love to keep every single one of her bunnies and the occasional cat or guinea pig, but that wouldn’t be healthy—for her or for the animals. They were better off living in homes that weren’t overrun by furry creatures, where they could each be the center of attention.

“I can,” Gwynne insisted. “I give them away.”

Abby gently relieved her of the flyers and rolled them up, her movements so unnaturally calm and deliberate that Gwynne got the feeling she was being treated like a crazy person waving a knife around. She wasn’t that bad, was she? Maybe she got a teensy bit emotional about the rabbit situation, but it was under control. So sue her.