Black Creek Crossing

began to descend.

She watched it arc toward her, her eyes following the blade as it sank into her breast. For a second she felt nothing more than the heaviness of the blow as the fist that clutched the knife struck her chest. It wasn’t until the knife was yanked free of her flesh that the searing heat struck her.

“No…” she sighed once more as the knife rose high yet again.

This time she felt nothing as the blade plunged into her, for already her spirit had escaped her body.

For a moment the woman watched from high above, free from the pain, the cold, and the darkness of the night. Again and again the blade flashed down, slashing at the corpse that now lay still upon her bed. But the spirit hovering high above the bed was no longer concerned with the body that had once been hers. Now she thought only of another.

Her daughter… her little girl… the child she could no longer protect.

Too late… too late…

The eternal darkness swallowed her soul as her husband finished his grisly task…

Chapter 1

S THE LAST BELL OF THE DAY RANG, ANGEL SULLIVAN sat quietly in her seat in the last row of Mr. English’s room and waited for her classmates to disappear before she even started stowing her books in her backpack. Finally, when even the chatter in the corridor outside the room had died down, she stood up to pull on her jacket.

“You okay, Angel?” the teacher asked, peering worriedly at her from behind his desk.

Okay? she repeated silently to herself. How could she be okay after what had happened this morning? And if Mr. English didn’t know what was wrong, how was she going to explain it to him? After all, it had happened right there during the first period, just before the bell sounded, when Mr. English asked the class if they wanted to sing “Happy Birthday” to her. “Happy Birthday,” like it was still third grade! Didn’t he know that none of her classmates even spoke to her except to say mean things? So there she’d sat, in her seat in the last row, her face burning with embarrassment as a horrible silence fell over the room and half the class turned to stare at her. The only thing that saved her from bursting into tears of humiliation was that the bell had rung. Then everyone rushed for the door.

And now Mr. English wanted to know if she was okay?

Biting her lip but saying nothing, she hurried toward the door and the safety of the corridor beyond, which with any luck would now be empty.

“Angel?”

She heard Mr. English, but was already out of the room, the door swinging shut behind her.

Angel. What kind of name was Angel?

For a long time — well, maybe not all that long, but for a while, anyway — she had thought it was a wonderful name, maybe the most wonderful name in the world. Even now, memories of phrases from when she was barely more than a baby echoed softly in her mind.

Daddy’s little Angel.

Mommy’s little Angel.

Grammy’s perfect little Angel.

It had been Grammy who gave her the very first Halloween costume she could remember. It was a white dress that Angel was certain had been made of satin but her mother insisted was only cheap muslin. But it didn’t matter, because it had white sequins sewn all over it that glittered even when she was standing as still as she possibly could. On the back of the dress there were two wings Grammy had made of papier-mache and then covered with white feathers.

“I’ve been saving them ever since you were born,” Grammy had told her as she carefully fitted the wings onto her tiny three-year-old shoulders. “Some people might tell you they’re only seagull feathers, but don’t you believe them.”

“But if they didn’t come from seagulls, where did they come from?” Angel had asked.

“Angels,” Grammy told her, looking deep into her eyes. “Angels just like you. They come to me when I dream, and leave feathers on my pillow. Feathers from real angels for my own perfect little Angel.”

Angel still had those wings, but they no longer hung on the wall of her room, as they once had. Now they were wrapped in tissue paper and packed away in an old hat box she’d found in the basement of the house they lived in when she was nine, and even though her mother thought they should be thrown away, Angel knew they never would be. They were all she had to remind her of Grammy, who died a little while after that wonderful Halloween when she’d worn the angel costume, and Grammy held her hand and led her up to the porches decorated with jack-o’-lanterns. Angel remembered being too shy to knock on the doors herself, and too terrified of the strangers who answered the doors to call out “Trick or treat,” so Grammy had done that for her too.

Then, even before all her Halloween candy was gone, Grammy had died.

And she had been alone ever since, with only the wonderful feathered wings to remember her grandmother by.

After Grammy died, she’d still been “Mommy’s little Angel” and “Daddy’s little Angel” for a while, and wore an angel costume on every Halloween, but it wasn’t the same. Finally, as if they understood that she wasn’t anything like a “little Angel,” her parents stopped calling her that.

The other kids, though — the kids her age — hadn’t, and there wasn’t a day that went by when someone didn’t scream the dreaded phrases at her:

“Hey, Mommy’s little Angel — will your wings still get you off the ground?”

“Hey, Daddy’s little Angel! Why don’t you use your wings to fly to Heaven? Or don’t they want you up there, either?”

The taunts had gone on and on, year after year. Her mother kept telling her it would stop, that the other kids would get tired of teasing her, but it hadn’t.

A year ago today, on her fourteenth birthday, when her mother asked her what she wanted, Angel had blurted out the truth: “Another name! I don’t look like an angel, and I don’t feel like an angel, and I hate the way everyone always teases me.” Then she told her mother what she’d been thinking about for months: “I want everyone to start calling me Angie!”

Her mother had at least tried, though no one else did.

Except Nicole Adams. Less than a week after her birthday, Nicole Adams and some of her friends had cornered her in the girls’ room. “Don’t you know anything?” Nicole said, as if talking to a five-year-old. “Angie isn’t short for Angel. It’s short for Angela! If you want it to be short for Angel, it should be Ane- gey, with a long A.” Nicole’s lips had twisted into a mean-looking smile. “To rhyme with ‘mangy.’ ” Her eyes glittered with malice. “Hey, that’s what we’ll call you! Mangy-Angey!”

The rest of the girls had all burst out laughing, and though Angel felt like crying, she hadn’t. Instead she ducked her head, pushed her way through Nicole’s crowd of friends, and fled out into the sunlight of the afternoon.

And now a whole year had gone by, and it was her birthday again, and nothing was any better than it had been before. Except that wasn’t quite true, Angel reminded herself. After all, it was fall — her favorite season — when the trees turned glorious colors, and the heavy humidity of the summer gave way to cool days and cold nights. It meant she could start wearing the big bulky sweaters her mom hated but that she loved, because they covered up at least some of the things that were wrong with her.

It was also that over the summer most of the kids appeared to have lost interest in calling her Mangy- Angey, and had gone back to just ignoring her completely. Or at least they had until Mr. English reminded them that it was her birthday.

But now, as she left Mr. English’s room, the hall was as empty as she’d hoped it would be, and if she were lucky, she’d escape from the school before Nicole Adams or any of her friends saw her.