Earth Angel (7 page)

“Although you are a jerk for not going out with me,” Dara said. “If you ever change your mind about that, let me know.”

Oh, yeah, let’s not forget Dara also wanted a doomed sexual relationship with her. She’d feel worse about that if Dara wasn’t already drowning her sorrows in the dating pool with someone else.

Megan slid the file cabinet shut. “You’re not a jerk, Gwynne. You did Kira a huge favor by taking this spa manager job. If you were a jerk, you’d never have done something so generous.”

“I needed a job,” Gwynne grumbled.

“You could have looked for something else,” Megan pointed out. “I think you wanted to help out.”

“Believe what you like.” She poured Megan a glass of Kira’s latest concoction. “Ginger iced tea?”

“Thanks.”

“It’s got a kick,” Gwynne warned. “Did you watch Kira make this? Because this is not just ginger, lemon and honey.”

“Cayenne pepper,” Megan said absently, taking small sips as she read over Dara’s file.

“Right. Sure. Of course. That’s what I was going to say.” Gwynne put the pitcher away in the mini-fridge beside her desk. “It’s not like ginger doesn’t have enough kick on its own.” Perhaps Kira could have informed her of the ingredients before foisting it on her customers.

A client came through the arched entryway and Megan slipped silently away like the professional she was, taking Dara with her. Gwynne switched on her customer service smile. She checked in the new client and then the one she’d just zapped returned to the desk and said, “I also have this pain in my throat when I swallow.”

“Your throat hurts too?” Why hadn’t she picked up on that?

She sank her focus into the throat’s energy pathways, looking for patterns, cursing her instinctive need to check it out. She did
not
need to feed the rumor mill with more stories about her supposedly amazing abilities. At least Megan and Dara were on their way to Megan’s treatment room and weren’t watching, poised to accuse her of not being a jerk.

The truth about the client’s pain floated effortlessly to the top of her awareness. “A medication is causing this. Something you’re taking is burning your esophagus. What are you taking?”

“It’s called…it’s called…I forget.”

“Do you know what it’s for?”

“Uh…”

Gwynne sent a glow of healing energy into the woman’s throat to soothe the inflamed tissues. “It’s good that you’re conscientious and want to protect your health, but try not to go overboard, okay?” Because it wasn’t just the doctors, it was the patients, too, who ignored the risk of side effects and insisted on medical intervention instead of leaving well enough alone.

Yeah, like she was one to talk. Intervention should be her middle name. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Not
should be
. Used to be. No more trying to play God.

“Go back to your doctor,” Gwynne said. “She can fix this.”

“You did something to me, didn’t you? My throat feels better already.” She swayed and caught her balance by grabbing the edge of the desk. “I think I need to sit down. I feel dizzy again.”

“Sorry, I should have warned you about that.”

The client collapsed into the nearest chair. “What did you do?”

“Nothing, really. Can I get you a glass of ginger iced tea? You heard it has cayenne pepper, right?”

“Thanks.”

When her dizziness passed, the woman left—limping much less—and then it was just her and Abby, who had said nothing the entire time and stayed busy playing her quiet background music, fingers flashing over the strings, seemingly incapable of hitting a wrong note.

Abby finished her tune and looked up from her harp. “Why don’t you want to go out with Dara? She seems to like you.”

Not the question she was expecting. At least she didn’t ask how she’d made that woman’s pain go away. She hadn’t even been touching her when she eased the pain in her throat, and that kind of thing tended to make people assume there were no limits to her magic. Gwynne picked at a stray rabbit hair stuck to her sleeve. “Dara’s still mad at me for something I did a long time ago.”

“She’s mad at you for turning her down?”

“How do you know that’s what happened?” Gwynne countered.

“Please. I heard what she said.” Abby rested her cheek against her harp and gazed at her expectantly like she was settling in to hear the whole story.

She had the most wonderful smile hiding behind all those freckles. Or maybe it was just nice for a change to see someone who wasn’t in pain. Someone who didn’t expect her to work miracles.

“She doesn’t want me,” Gwynne said. “She wants my healing skills. That’s all she sees.”

A hint of concern crept into Abby’s eyes.

She didn’t want her pity, for God’s sake. She didn’t
want
Dara to want her. Dara deserved someone who would appreciate her adoration.

“I’m not attracted to her. If we both pretend it’s about my healing abilities, we can both save face.”

“Hmm.” Abby flipped through her sheet music. She seemed to sense this wasn’t a conversation Gwynne wanted to have, and she was right.

“And she’s dating someone!” Friends were always teasing them that one day she and Dara were going to give in to the inevitable, and the fact that Dara actually did have feelings for her—and that the attraction was completely one-sided—made those comments uncomfortable for both of them. Because if Dara felt anything for her at all, it had to hurt to be reminded.

Abby didn’t ask for more details, but Gwynne volunteered them anyway. “I’ve never hidden my healing abilities, so anyone who goes out with me ends up either idolizing me or deciding I’m too weird for them. Except for Megan, but she and I were never going to work out because Megan—even though I love her dearly—takes everything way, way too seriously.”

Abby stopped flipping through her music. “Kira’s Megan?”

“I guess it’s been so long, nobody cares anymore so they don’t gossip about it. Or they’ve forgotten.”

“And now you’re friends,” Abby said. “That’s impressive.”

“It’s not that hard to do when neither one of you secretly has the hots for the other.”

“Or hates each other,” Abby pointed out.

“Megan’s too nice to hate anyone.”

“What about you?”

“Do we have to talk about me?”

“Maybe you’re too nice to hate anyone, either.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Gwynne leaned back in her chair.

“So you’re saying you’re a jerk, if I heard you correctly when you were arguing with Dara, but it seems to me you’re not a jerk, because you don’t hate Megan, except that’s only because she’s too nice?”

“I feel like I need to say something mean now to make you stop.” How had Abby heard all that, anyway? Wasn’t she focusing on her music? She must be good enough that the playing didn’t take all her concentration.

“Let me know when you think of something.” Abby turned to her harp and ran her index finger up the strings, creating a waterfall of sound that led into an enchanting, complicated melody that put an end to their conversation.

The tension in Gwynne’s neck eased. The days that Abby worked at the spa had quickly become her favorite. Even full of clients, the lounge felt empty without her—without her cheerful presence and her bizarrely attractive fairy-tale dresses and her music. Her mood lifted whenever Abby showed up for work, and she was starting to wonder if that was because the harp generated a healing vibrational frequency—she could feel the air molecules pulsate—or whether it was due to Abby herself.

Gwynne closed her eyes and imagined the music seeping into her body, into every cell, making her feel alive, waking up the dead, numb places she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Was she kidding herself to think that someone else playing the same notes with the same perfection wouldn’t make her feel quite the same? This wasn’t the glow of music appreciation, this buzz that made everything more beautiful when Abby was around. This was something deeper.

Abby played on and on and on, until eventually, as the last note hung in the air, her hands floated to the wooden body of her harp and she hugged it to her chest.

“You’re an amazing harpist,” Gwynne said.

“Harper,” Abby corrected with a quirky smile that was part apology, part sass. “Harpists play the pedal harp. You know, the kind you see in an orchestra. When you play the lever harp you’re a harper. It sounds more Celtic-y.”

“You’re kidding. People really make the distinction?”

“Says the woman who calls herself an energy healer instead of a faith healer.”

Gwynne quirked her brow. “You noticed that, huh?” Abby must have been paying attention when she talked to her former clients. She didn’t remember the exact conversation Abby might have overheard, but it was true the faith healer label was one she was constantly trying to shake. She hated it when people put her up on the faith pedestal, like she had some special connection to God. Especially now. “Point taken.”

“Every profession has its lingo,” Abby acknowledged. “Gotta keep the riffraff in its place.”

Okay, that was so not her reasoning, but if it was Abby’s…“Maybe you shouldn’t have told me about the harper thing. I don’t want you to get in trouble with the other musicians.”

“I’ll take my chances.” Abby’s pale blue-gray eyes flashed with amusement.

Her eyes were…She’d never noticed before how compelling they were, how they sparkled like ancient starlight, a glint of something beautiful in the vast darkness.

Gwynne regrouped before she got lost in those eyes. “I didn’t realize your harp was a different type. Although I did notice you don’t have a Grecian column with all the sparkly, sparkly gold leaf.” She’d never paid much attention to harps, but that was her memory of them.

“Not a fan of gold leaf?”

Not a fan of sparkly,
Gwynne almost said, except everything about Abby was sparkly, lit up by her bright aura. Sparkly looked good on her.

“Watch.” Abby plucked a string on her harp and then flipped one of the little metal levers near the top where the strings were attached. She plucked it again, and the note had changed. “Pedal harps do the same thing with pedals instead of sharping levers.” She flipped more levers, her left hand flying across the instrument, and then began to play, her tapered fingers alternately curling into her palm and extending to pluck the strings with lightning-fast precision.

It was beautiful. As beautiful to watch as to listen to.

“You don’t have to play when no one’s here,” Gwynne said. There was something about the look of crazy joy on Abby’s face when she made music that reminded her of her mother, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be reminded. Her sister had had that same look when she was little, when she was playing tag and racing on her little-girl legs as fast as she could go. She didn’t want to be reminded of that, either.

“There isn’t no one here. You’re here,” Abby said. “I’ll play something you can sing along with if you want.”

“Trust me, your harp sounds a lot better without me.” She smiled ruefully at the harpist…uh, harper. “But you can feel free.”

“I don’t sing.”

“You too, huh? Never?”

“Not in public,” Abby conceded. “I don’t want you to run screaming from the room—you might not come back.”

“My mother sang,” Gwynne said, despite herself, embarrassed by the hint of wistfulness she was sure Abby could hear in her voice. “She would have loved to hear you play.”

“What kind of songs did she like?” Abby asked, picking up on Gwynne’s use of the past tense—if someone hadn’t already told her what happened. “I’ll play something for her. For you,” she corrected herself. “For her memory.”

“She sang opera. She studied voice when she was young.”

“Opera. Okay. Wow. What do I know that would be…Oh! I know. How about
Lascia ch’io pianga
?”

“I don’t know the titles, but…sure, okay. Maybe I’ll recognize it. I mean, she could sing anything.”

She sang along with the radio when she drove Gwynne and her friends to T-ball and later softball practice, singing the wrong words, making her die of embarrassment. She sang when she made dinner, belting out the recipe. She woke her for school by singing historical dates because she thought it would help, and the funny thing was, it did. Gwynne aced her tests because she’d hear her mother’s ear-splitting opera voice in her head singing battle trivia. Come to think of it, she should have asked her for help in massage school when she struggled to memorize all those muscle attachments, but it never occurred to her. Her mother’s singing had been an embarrassment. It was only now that she could admit to herself that her mother had a beautiful voice and a sense of fun Gwynne was lucky enough to have known.

“Was she the one I saw you with at the hospital? I don’t remember if I saw the patient, if it could have been your mother or…”

“It was,” Gwynne said dully, guilt twisting like a knife in her gut, tangling with the grief. Her mother shouldn’t have died that day. Not her mother, not Heather. None of it should have happened.

“I’m sorry,” Abby said.

Someone had definitely told her what happened, because she didn’t seem surprised, just sympathetic. Which was good. It meant she didn’t have to explain. It was too soon to talk about it to someone she barely knew, someone who would listen politely and make her feel worse. Even though there was something about Abby that made her want to tell her everything.

“Do you still want me to play the aria?” Abby asked. “I won’t if you don’t want me to, if you don’t want to be reminded right now.”

“No, it’ll be nice. She always sounded so happy when she sang.”

Abby started to play and Gwynne was glad it wasn’t anything she recognized. It meant she wouldn’t lose it.

* * *

Dara was back at the spa for her weekly appointment with Megan, early as usual because, Gwynne suspected, she liked hanging out in the lounge.

“Are you still doing magic shows?” Dara asked her. “My niece is turning seven and my sister’s trying to figure out what to do for her birthday party.”

“Are you referring to The Great Gwynnini, Illusionist and Rabbit Conjurer?” She hadn’t performed as The Great Gwynnini in ages. “Sure.” Gwynne handed her a glass of Kira’s latest experimental beverage, a blend of grenadine, lime and coconut water. She gave one to Abby too, who was taking a break on one of the guest sofas. “I’m a little rusty, but I can do it.”