adult angel-blood to look up to, just her quiet, broody, fully human mom with all her religious beliefs, who right now is standing on the boardwalk waving good-bye with tears in her eyes, like she’s afraid she’ll never see Angela again.
Mom rolls down the window. “It’s all right, Anna. I’ll bring her back to you safe and sound.”
“Yeah, it’s fine, Mom,” Angela mutters, embarrassed. “I’ll be home Sunday night.”
“Yes, okay,” Anna says in a low voice. “You have a good time.” It’s quiet on the drive into the mountains. Jeffrey turns the radio on, but Mom lowers the volume so we can barely hear it. Then we wind our way up a series of hairpin turns, the road narrowing to a single lane, one side cut against the sheer rocky face of the mountain, the other dropping to a ravine below. I wonder what would happen if we came upon somebody on the way down. Finally, after more than an hour, the road levels into a small turnout. Mom pulls over and parks.
“This is as far up as we go in the car. We’ll have to hike from here.” She gets out. We’re met by a blast of absolutely freezing air as we open our doors to grab our packs from the back.
We stand for a minute staring at the trailhead and the distant ridges of the mountain over the treetops.
“At least it stopped snowing,” Jeffrey says.
Mom leads us into the fresh powder, followed by Jeffrey, then Angela and me walking side by side. The snow on the trail is halfway up our boots. We walk for a long time. The air seems to get thinner. The whole trip reminds me of the time Mom brought me to Buzzards Roost when I was fourteen, where she told me about the angel-bloods and flew out across the valley to prove that she was serious. I wonder what she’s going to reveal to us this time.
After a couple of hours of monotonous trudging, Mom turns off the trail and toward a deeply wooded part of the forest. It’s colder here, darker, in the shade of the towering pines. The snow is much deeper off the trail, sometimes almost to the knees. Within minutes I am chilled to the bone, shivering so violently that my hair pops loose from its ponytail. Beside me, Angela suddenly slips and falls, getting herself completely covered with snow. I reach down to help her up.
“Bet you’re wishing you’d given this whole camping trip thing a bit more thought,” I say through chattering teeth. Her nose and cheeks are bright pink, almost clownlike against her shock of black hair.
“We’re supposed to have an immunity to cold,” she says with her eyebrows drawn together, like she just can’t figure out why it’s not working.
From ahead of us, Mom barks with laughter.
“Sometimes, Angela,” she says, not without affection, “you really are full of crap.” Angela’s mouth opens in shock for a second, but then Mom keeps laughing, and it quickly spreads to the rest of us, even Angela.
“I read it in a book,” she protests. “Seriously.”
“It’s when you use glory,” Mom explains. “Glory keeps you warm. Otherwise, I’m reasonably certain you could freeze to death.”
“Like now, for example,” I chime in.
“Okay,” says Angela sheepishly. “I’ll have to write that down. Just as soon as I can make my hands work again.”
“It’s not much farther,” Mom promises. “Hang in there.”
Sure enough, after another ten minutes of miserable progress in the snow through the deep woods, Mom stops us. She lifts her head and smells the air, smiles in a kind of serene way, then tells Jeffrey to make a sharp right turn.
“There,” she says, pointing to a narrow gulley a bit farther down the mountain. “We need to go through there.”
Jeffrey leads the way, taking us down the slippery trail until he stops so suddenly that Mom almost crashes into him. His pack slips from his shoulder. Mom grins, a tired but triumphant gloaty expression, and steps aside to let Angela and me pass through so we can see what they’re looking at. Then we stop too, our mouths dropping open, our own packs dropping to the ground.
“Holy. .,” breathes Jeffrey.
Yep. That’s the right word.
It’s some sort of meadow, a vast, flat stretch of land surrounded on two sides by mountains, the third edge a beautiful shining lake that’s clear enough that you can see the landscape reflected back perfectly. A few feet from where we’re standing the snow disappears, becoming instead a long, soft grass, so green it almost hurts the eyes to look at it after so many hours of white on white. It’s not snowing here. The sun is sinking behind the far mountain, and the sky is a riot of oranges and blues. Birds are winging their way back and forth across the meadow, like they too can’t believe that they’ve stumbled into this paradise out here in the middle of nowhere.
But the meadow’s not what we’re looking at. What has the three of us (not Mom, of course, since she obviously knows all about this) gaping stupidly out into the sunshine is the fact that the meadow is crowded with tents. About two dozen people are bustling around, some building campfires, some fishing on the lake, some simply standing or sitting or lying down in the grass talking.
My eyes are drawn to one particular woman, mahogany-skinned with long, lustrous dark hair, a face like the Sacagawea golden dollar. And a pair of dazzling wings folded like a magnificent white robe against her back.
“This,” Mom says, gesturing around the meadow, “is what’s called a congregation. A gathering of angel- bloods.”
The lady with the wings sees us and waves. Mom waves back.
“That’s Billy,” she says. “Come on.” She removes her coat and the rest of her winter gear until she’s only wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. Then she strides off barefoot into the grass.
“Come on,” she calls back to us again. “They’ll be eager to meet you.” We leave our packs at the edge of the grass and move hesitantly into the meadow. Several people stop what they’re doing to watch us.
“What is this?” Jeffrey asks beside me, still confused.
