“She lost her ability to speak to the dead?”
“No, not even close.”
“It increased?” Adriel’s stomach flipped over; it was a sensation she found particularly unnerving. “She didn’t lose her…”
“No, her vision is fine.” Zack assured.
“And you? You crossed over and back as well. Did you suffer any…repercussions?”
A twist of his lips told her he had. She really didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Her chances of coming out looking good were somewhere between naught and nil.
Zack huffed out a breath that was half laugh, half rueful exclamation. “Ever meet a human lie detector?”
“I’m sorry. Everything happened so quickly—I didn’t think it through. Maybe I could have found another way.”
“And what? Take a chance on not getting Kat back? Even if I’d known, you couldn’t have stopped me going. Besides, I can think of worse gifts for a cop to have.”
“I suppose.” Adriel searched his eyes for the conviction of truth. He wasn’t the only one with that ability, though hers had only been enhanced by her supernatural power. It was an eternity’s worth of experience that had turned her into a shrewd judge of character.
“You know I’m going to have to tell them I saw you, right?”
“Yes.” Adriel’s eye twitched. She could have hugged him when he changed the subject.
“In the meantime, tell me what happened here.”
“Something told me I needed to come outside, and to hurry. I found her on the ground—unconscious”
“You didn’t move her, right?”
“I checked her pulse then ran to call for help. When I got back, I covered her with a blanket and waited for the ambulance to arrive. She remained unconscious the entire time.”
Standing quietly under his scrutiny and justifying it as an omission instead of the lie it was, Adriel left out the part about using her diminished power to stabilize Lydia’s condition. Zack knew her as a full angel; trying to explain her current status would have to wait until she had a better handle on it. Accessing supernatural talent to heal had raised questions she couldn’t yet answer for herself—much less for him.
“Is she your next assignment?”
It was a hard question to answer. “Not technically,” she offered, hoping he would let it go.
He did, but not before giving her a hard look. Adriel remembered his newfound ability to tell a lie from the truth. It shouldn’t have worked on an angel, but then, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was anymore—and she hadn’t lied. “How well do you know the victim? Does she have any enemies?”
“I’ve never seen her before today. The only people I know in town are my boss and the people I work with at Just Desserts.”
“Your boss? Are you an undercover angel now?” That look again. The one that made her want to squirm. Heat flared up her neck, burned her face.
“Something like that.” How was she supposed to explain? Should she say she was so undercover she was human? “Speaking of my boss reminds me how late I am for work. Are we finished? I am sure I have told you everything I know.”
A twist of his lips said he doubted her veracity, but other than treating him to a level look, she let it go.
“If you think of anything else, you’ll call me.” He made it a statement of fact rather than a question, and seemed satisfied when Adriel nodded. He handed her a card with his phone number on it. “I’ll tell my sister and her friends I’ve seen you and you aren’t dead. They won’t be at all upset to learn you were nearby this whole time and never let them know.” Dry sarcasm did not go unnoticed.
“Honestly, I didn’t know I was still nearby, but thank you.” With a graceful bow of her head, Adriel beat a hasty retreat through the waving grass while a frowning Zack watched her go. She wasn’t about to tell him she had lost three months somewhere along the line. There would be too many questions for which she still had no answers.
Lost in thought, Adriel failed to notice the boy on his bike until he was nearly upon her. He looked to be about eight, or maybe ten years old, a shock of bright blond hair falling over his eyes. The bike he rode was right out of the ‘70s. Purple metal flake paint sparkled in the sun, and a chrome bar curved behind the elongated white seat set low behind tall, up-curved handlebars. The playing card he’d clipped on with a clothespin ticked against the spokes with each revolution of the wheel.
Speeding past, he shot her a cheeky grin before standing up on the pedals and quickly propelling himself up the hill. She couldn’t swear to it, but she thought it was the same boy from the day before.
Pam’s shop nestled in the center of a short block of stores making up the commercial section of Longbrook. On one side, it was flanked by a hair salon—on the other, a larger building hosted several businesses including a real estate office, a notary public, and an attorney. Today, when she walked up to Just Desserts nearly three quarters of an hour late for her shift, Adriel found a small group of people milling around outside.
“What happened? Did
