***
How was she supposed to help Lydia with blocked powers? All the signs were there: feeling sorry for herself, descending into a pit of why-me thinking, and petulance—Adriel was in the midst of a pity party. Any one of her former charges would testify to her lack of patience with those types of soirées, and yet, she couldn’t seem to shake it.
In all the hullabaloo, she had forgotten about her charges. Little Beatrice, who lived in foster care and despaired of ever finding a family to call her own. Who would the collective send to help Beatrice? Surely not Calamiel. His gruff manner and deep voice erred on the side of too stern. Maybe Hamith? No, she was good with kids, but something of a pushover. Beatrice needed a strong hand to keep her in line. Three sets of prospective parents had already caught her on bad days, and missed seeing the bright spirit bubbling under the prickly armor of her exterior.
And what about Amethyst? Her transformation to full reader had not come with an instruction manual. She would need guidance to use her elevated abilities, or they could backfire and cause repercussions in the future.
Winston’s soft purr couldn’t pull Adriel out of the funk she was in. If she could only go home; even a short visit would recharge her batteries. Never had she felt so depleted.
“Estelle. I need you,” Adriel called out into the silence. “Please, I need to go home.” Winston, now only feigning sleep, watched through slitted eyes as Adriel sank to her knees on the floor—pounding against it with sharp blows until she was spent, her hands bruised and torn.
Adriel huddled there on the weathered wood, amid the smell of her own blood mixed with the dry powdery dust, and tried to recapture the sense of rightness she had felt in the past. No matter how hard she tried to find it, peace remained as distant as a purple mountain horizon.
Estelle couldn’t tell an outright lie. So, she must have been wrong. There was no such thing as an earthbound angel—a divine being in fleshly form. It was impossible.
Don’t be so sure about that, a voice whispered over the silence. The sound of Adriel’s heartbeat rushing through her ears reminded her of the soft rustle her wings once made. Instead of comfort, the memory brought more pain.
Thinking sleep would be her best form of escape, Adriel levered up off the floor, her body moving like it had aged a hundred years. She threaded her way through the wall of boxes to settle down on the bed, where her head was still sinking into the pillow’s softness as she fell into dreaming. A rapid-fire series of images rolled past—highlights of time spent in service to both man and the divine.
A million lifetimes passed by before dreamtime slowed to a crawl to show her the moments when the food truck bore down with certain death. Her perspective doubled until she was both experiencing the near miss and watching it from the outside. From the distant vantage point she saw the truck start to slide. Simple physics predicted there was no way that many tons of rolling metal could stop in time. So what had happened?
Closer and closer the truck skidded. Adriel watched her own hands lift in what should have been a futile effort to stave off the collision. When the subtle wave of power flowed from the dream Adriel to alter the bounds of reality and bring the truck to a stop, the sleeping Adriel saw what Hamlin and Pam had seen in that moment. Not adrenaline-fueled wishful thinking, but a true vision of a beam of light and the shadow of wings.
The same beam and shadow hovered when she watched her dream self lay hands on Lydia.
It was enough of a shock to startle Adriel fully awake.
Adriel raised both hands, turned them over to search them intently. She had no idea what to look for, since angel powers left no trace. All she saw were smears of dried blood.
Closing her eyes, she reached for the power that once pooled at the seat of her grace. She pictured her hands clean and unbroken; all traces of her emotional upheaval wiped away. She imagined the familiar feeling of connecting to the energy flowing through the universe—the sensation of shaping that energy, directing it to suit the need.
Like a radio station incorrectly tuned, a short burst of energetic static proved her connection was tenuous, but still present. Maybe all was not lost.
Hope snapped Adriel’s eyes open, lifted her hands slowly to where she could see what, if any, healing effect had occurred. The smears of dried blood still decorated her milky skin.
She growled in frustration, because the way to the bathroom was blocked again by a stack of boxes moved there during a recent bout of sorting. When she finally reached the sink to run trembling hands under the water, her breath caught and held while the blood sluiced down the drain to reveal pink skin and days-old scabs where freshly torn wounds had been.
A prayer of thanks arrowed homeward, elation flooded through every molecule of her being until she felt filled to the brim with hope. If she could bend energy to stop a truck, and at least partially heal her own skin, this earthbound angel thing might not be so bad after all.
Maybe there was a way she could go home.
***
“You cheated,” Estelle accused Julius. “She didn’t do that all on her own.”
“Best way to push through a block is to believe you can. She fails, we fail—they made that point quite clear, as you well know. All I did was give her a nudge.”
“I’m surrounded by renegades.”
***
Right in the middle of deciding what the next test of her powers would be, Adriel was interrupted by
