“The Creator has decreed for whom the next bell tolls. It is not whom we were told at first.”
This got the archangel’s attention—and froze that damnable cloth. “I thought all the souls were agreed upon before the game began?”
“They were. And it was assumed, at least by me, that there were but six because one side or the other would win early.”
“But now?”
“Oh, this soul was approved of. I was just unaware that there would be a second inning upon him.”
Colin’s surprise was satisfying; at least it proved Nigel could still get a reaction out of him.
With a powerful thrust, the archangel took a smooth dive into the waters and then stepped out of the river. As he emerged, dripping and still hard in that essential place, Nigel obliging proffered the male the toweling that hung upon the closest branch—it was not to save the archangel from a chill, however.
More because Nigel did not need to incinerate on the spot.
However, although Colin did dry off, the bastard merely looped the thing around the back of his neck when he was finished.
“Weren’t you getting dressed?” Nigel interjected.
“Aye.”
“Now?” Please.
“Who is the soul?”
“Matthias.”
Colin frowned. “Is the Creator redacting Devina’s victory, then?”
“The decision from on high is that the loss to her shall stand, but that Jim will have a second attempt to influence the man.”
“This is unprecedented.”
“The game is unprecedented.”
As the pair of them stared at each other, Nigel’s heart ached to the point of actual pain. Which was his cue to leave, wasn’t it.
“At any rate, I thought you should like to know,” he said briskly. “I bid you adieu, and . . . good evening. Clearly, you intend to have one.”
“I do.” Colin’s lids went low. “Indeed I shall.”
Nigel nodded stiffly and walked with no greater grace back to his tent. As he passed the tea table that had since been cleared, he was glad that the other two and that grand dog had returned to their quarters. He did not wish for even Tarquin’s canine stare to witness this walk of private humiliation.
He had gone o’er to present a gift, only to witness preparations for a tryst that obviously didn’t involve him.
Stupid.
Fool.
In his quarters, Nigel stripped down, but he did not retire to the bath—too many memories. Instead, he donned a new satin robe that he had never worn in the presence of Colin and stretched out upon his chaise longue, looking about his luxurious appointments.
Even with all the colorful drapery and the comfortable bedding, it seemed such an empty place.
Beside him, the flame atop a beeswax candle idly wafted to and fro, and he envied it its easy job. Unfortunately, the thing offered little in the way of company, so he just watched it cannibalize itself in silence, the tears of consumption dripping slowly down its ever-shrinking body.
How depressing: Even something as romantic as candlelight he interpreted in a vocabulary of loss—
“This scone is fantastic.”
Nigel looked up. Colin was standing in the entryway of the tent, his strong arm holding the tarp curtain aside, his long, lean form filling the space.
He was wearing the black and the gray.
Nigel went back to focusing on the candle. “I am glad it sustains you.”
“Thoughtful of you.” The archangel came in whilst finishing the thing. “You know, you haven’t paid me a visit in quite a while.”
Actually it had been very recently, but that hardly served to be mentioned.
“Were you not heading out somewhere?” Nigel muttered.
“Oh, aye.” When Nigel glanced over, Colin circled in a masculine way. “Do you like this?”
“The clothing?” Nigel waved his hand. “Not for me to judge.”
“I wore it for you.”
Nigel’s eyes shot back. “Surely you don’t mean to be that cruel.”
“Cruel?” The archangel seemed honestly confused. “For whom else would I wear such useless garb?”
Nigel frowned. “I thought maybe Adrian or . . .”
Colin’s laugh was immediate. And grating as all get-out. “You think that angel . . . and I . . . ?”
“He is fit.”
“Aye. But he is not whom I want.”
Nigel swallowed hard, and tried to hide his reaction by looking away. “It . . . is for me?”
“Aye. So what say you, lover mine.”
Eventually, he swung his eyes back and the two of them stared at each other for the longest time.
Then Nigel sat forward and brushed his hair back with a shaking hand: The desire for composure did not win, not here and in private. Not with Colin.
Never with that archangel, he feared.
Reaching out his hand to his love, Nigel said hoarsely, “I say . . . it was the one I would have chosen.”
The archangel came forward with a smile. “And that,” Colin murmured, “was why I put it on.”
CHAPTER 51
Down below, in an attractive suburb of Caldwell, Susan Barten sat in her living room, wide-awake even though it was four a.m. Upstairs, her husband and her remaining daughter were sleeping in their respective beds, and all was quiet above, around, and below her.
She was used to this silent, painful sitting in the dark. The last stretch of uninterrupted rest she had gotten had been the night before . . . “it” had happened.
As usual, she sat in the armchair next to her couch, with her eyes trained on the front door. This was her perch, the branch she locked her feet onto as the winds of fate blew gales at her loved ones, peeling off layers of who she was and what her family was and how she’d expected to pass her time on earth.
She always faced the door Sissy had once gone in and out of so regularly—and this had been true even after the first couple of nights, when the initial hope had bled out, leaving nothing but a paralyzing fear behind. It was still true even now, when there was a concrete reason to know that her daughter was never, ever returning home again.
God, to think she felt lucky there was something for them to bury.
At the thought, tears itched in the corners of her eyes, and she found herself thinking about that Dr. Seuss book, the one that had been so ubiquitous at the high school graduation, the one they had bought for Sissy along with those dove earrings and that dove necklace and that dove braclet.
An early grave was not what any of them had contemplated.
Why couldn’t this destination of hers have been medical school? Or Eurhen? Or New York City?
Or just to a hair salon in downtown Caldwell, or a vet’s office, or an elementary school to teach?
Why couldn’t it have been what all of her classmates had been granted?
Why did it have to have been that Hannaford supermarket on that particular night . . .
Susan balanced on the tipping edge of madness as the hundreds of different avenues open to her elder daughter presented themselves in a list . . . and she wondered yet again why, when the dice had been rolled, had
