I felt so clever, so stupidly proud of myself, heart thumping with the guilty little thrill of watching her.
Until she caught me.
She’d stepped away from Rhiannon’s grave, and walked slowly off into the mist.
And I’d not checked that she was out of view before I’d slunk over to see how things were and stare at the fresh flowers that she had left.
I had tended graves before, after all; this one was neat and well-contained. Plain stone borders containing a patch of green, Rhiannon’s family had elected not to seed her resting place with flowering plants that would die over winter.
A simple Celtic cross was chiselled into the headstone, and the dates and words that were never enough to express the loss the living had suffered.
Daughter. Sister. Light of our lives.
So poignant.
I wondered how Rhiannon was, in her healing sleep Above. I wondered how long she’d be there.
I knelt down, straightened the vase and the fresh Arum lilies…
“What are you doing?”
Her tone cracked like a whip.
I froze.
Shit.
“I said…”
And then I straightened and slowly turned to face her, heart hammering.
She went white and clutched at her stomach as if she’d been punched.
“You…” she gasped.
“Please don’t freak out!” I begged, stepping back, trying to be as unthreatening as I knew how…
She took three swift steps forward and grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t you dare disappear on me again,” she snarled. “You! You have some explaining to do…”
I stared helplessly at her; there were at least three different ways I could free myself and escape that I could think of off the top of my head; not a single one of them would extricate me from this incredible mess of my own making.
I sighed and slumped, trapped.
“Yeah. I suppose I do, at that. Just… please don’t make a scene. It’s really important that… that you don’t draw attention to me. Let’s… let’s walk. Please?” I begged her.
She eyed me, intensely suspicious, and tightened her grip.
“Ow,” I protested. “Please. You’re hurting me. My wrist. Please.”
She slackened her grip by a notch or two.
“I promise I’m harmless,” I added, for good measure.
“You’re not though, are you?” she said, softly. “Who the hell are you and what the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’ve been… watching you,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed.
“Why.”
“I was… concerned.”
“Why.”
“I just… was. Please. Please, just walk with me and I’ll… I’ll do my best to explain. For… for what good that will do either of us now…”
She stared at me, then took a deep breath and sighed it out.
“Alright. I’ll walk, and I’ll listen, but if you so much as step one foot out of place I’m going to punch you right in the nose.”
“You’ll just hurt both of us. Look. We’re getting damp,” I said. I glanced upwards ruefully – the mist was slowly becoming drizzle. “Make that damper. Come. It’s more sheltered this way. There’s a group of Yew trees not far from here that we can stand under. It’s dry there, if a bit gloomy.”
I turned; she tightened her grip again.
“I’m not going to run away, Caitlyn,” I said. “I swear.”
“You’re also going to tell me how you know my name,” she said, low and angry. “I don’t like people knowing things about me.”
“Just walk with me and I’ll tell you everything.”
She stared at me for a moment longer, as if making up her mind. Then she let go of my arm, and shoved her hands deep into her jacket pockets. I rubbed my wrist where she’d grabbed me; she had a vicious grip and I knew I’d have a bruise to show for it.
I turned and took a step, and after a moment she took three quick skips to catch up to me.
We stalked, side by side, through the slow and mournful morning.
She shot me several direct and furious glares, but I could see something else in her eyes. Bafflement? Hurt? Madness, maybe? Who knew.
“I’m waiting,” she said, after a minute or two.
“How much do you want to know?”
“Start with how the fuck you know who I am. I’ve never seen you before, well, bar…”
She paused, and bit her lip.
I took a breath.
Stupid habit… part of me reminded me.
“I’m… oh… fuck, how do I put this…. well. lets… lets go with Angel. I mean, you saw me. Wings included. My birthday suit, as it were. It would be kind of futile to deny what I am.”
“Oh fuck me…” she whispered. “Are you… real? I mean, I’m not in the loony bin, right, doped up to my eyeballs on happy juice? Right? This is actually happening? I’m actually talking to… you?”
“If you were mad, how would you know?” I asked. “For what it’s worth… I don’t think you’re mad. And you’re not hallucinating. Though to be fair that’s what a hallucination would tell you, I suppose.”
“That’s not helpful,” she muttered.
She wrapped her arms around herself and took a shaky breath.
I slowed to a halt and waited for her to look up at me.
Her eyes were such a vivid green…
I swallowed, focussed on what I wanted to tell her.
“This is real. All of it. Really, really real. Your friend is dead. I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. You’re walking through the graveyard her body lies in, talking to… to the being who was tasked with leading her soul away.”
I held her bitter gaze for a moment, then looked away.
“So she’s… in Heaven, then?”
The words were wooden.
I started walking again, she followed.
“Kind of. It’s… somewhat different to how you maybe imagine it. Are you religious?”
“No. Not really… though that seems a bit of an oversight now.”
“You know the Bible, right? Life after death, that sort of thing?”
“Sort of.”
“Okay. Imagine a… a local council office full of… things like me…”
“Things?” she said. She turned partly towards me, looked me up and down. “You’re a girl, not a thing.”
“I… that’s… that’s kind of you. But I stopped being a girl… long ago.”
Something about her put me off balance; I couldn’t work out why.
“You’re a girl,” she said. “Pretty bloody obviously, really. It’s kind of hard to miss.”
She adjusted her coat, tucked herself further into it. “Doesn’t matter what else you do. So. Christ… this is weird. So… what? You’re the Angel of Death, then?”
“No. He’s far older and far more… profound. I’m…”
“A… minion?” she said, seemingly amused.
I relaxed, just a little.
“That’s not such a bad way to describe it. He always calls me his Usher, which pisses me off a bit.”
“Are you allowed to swear, then?”
“Like a fucking sailor,” I said, mostly just to see if she’d smile again.
She snorted, then glanced away.
So much for that idea, I thought glumly.
“At least I know how you know my name, now. I suppose that’s something, even if I’m fucking crackers. How… how long have you been watching me?”
“Since maybe a week… after.”
“Oh,” she said.
We rounded a lovingly-pruned stand of hawthorn, turned right onto another grey gravel path, and carried on walking past the lines of watching headstones.
“Did you steal my sketch book?” she asked, at length.
“Yes. I’m really sorry about that. I was… ”
“Stalking,” she suggested.
“… checking on you and you stirred while I was snooping and I freaked out and…”
I shrugged.
Angels supposedly can’t blush, but that’s crap. My face was flaming.
“Not nearly as much as I did,” she said, softly. “I knew someone had been in my room, and… and everything was all over the place. I thought I’d been robbed, or that someone had been doing vile things to my underwear.”
“I swear I didn’t touch your underwear…”
“I know that. Don’t be silly. But you did scatter everything everywhere. And anyway… isn’t theft… like… major black marks or something?”
“They’ll pull out my feathers, one by one,” I said, deadpan.
“Oh, as if.”
This time the tiny smile was actually there.
I liked the tone and timbre of her voice.
She paused at a small bench under a canopy of an ancient oak, glanced at me, then sat.
She raised her eyebrow at me when I hesitated.
“I don’t bite,” she said.
“Oh. Um. Good,” I answered, strangely perturbed by her statement.
I sat down next to her, not quite touching, and stared out into the mist.
She shifted next to me, her leg brushed against mine as she changed position.
I tried very hard not to notice.
“So… how old are you?” she asked me. “Billions of years, I guess?”
“Sometimes it feels that way. I was born in 1793, here, in Wales.”
“Born?” she said, surprised. “Angels are…”
“Oh. No. I was human like you, once.”
She stared at me.
“How…”
“Dunno. I… died; some time later I woke up in the Celestial city with pair of wings and a… I guess I should call it a powerful urge to meddle. Nobody’s ever given me a satisfactory explanation for the first, and as for the second, I guess that’s just who I am.”
“And… and you basically just go along…”
“Helping the dead,” I said, softly, after a brief but heavy silence.
“Did you help… her?”
I flinched; I hadn’t been ready for such a direct question.
“No,” I whispered, ashamed.
“Why not?” she demanded. “Didn’t she deserve…”
“Yes! Fuck me, yes, she did, and yes, I fucked up, and don’t you think I feel so fucking guilty…”
“Hey. Stop. It’s okay.”
I suddenly noticed that she’d taken my hand.
I stared down at the way her fingers fiddled nervously with mine.
“I’m… sorry,” she added. “I’m just… seventeen different kinds of bitter. Did… I mean… was everything…”
She sighed.
“What I mean is… was she okay? Wherever she is now?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “She’s… she’ll be somewhere where she can heal. Sleeping. We all sleep for a while, until… well, generally until the people we knew are gone as well. It’s… easier that way, supposedly.”
“Oh,” she said, softly.
“She’ll be… fine, in time, though.”
“How do you know?”
“I was,” I said, softly. “Mostly, I suppose. It took a while, several decades. I was eighteen when I died…”
“Oh my God. So young? You were barely out of childhood!”
“Times were different back then. But yes. I was young, and stupid, and I… paid for it.”
“Paid for… oh. Oh no. Were you…”
“Murdered? Yes. Amongst… other things.”
Her hand clenched hard on mine.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she breathed.