again, and he tried to minimize the times it crept into their interactions from that moment on.
But he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to hide it from Tucker for very long at all.
For one thing, Tucker didn’t do what was asked of him—or even expected. Angel couldn’t coach him through his first ghost encounter; it had already happened.
Angel had seen it unfold clearly in his mind, like humans saw a movie projected against a wall.
Much like he’d seen the image he’d based his form on. Not too close—just close enough to inspire trust. Angel needed to inspire trust. He needed Tucker to talk to him. Not so much in order to accomplish the mission but to… to satisfy that thing, that thing inside him that had gotten him into this position in the first place.
The closest Angel could put voice to it was an itch. Fifty-five years ago, when Ruth Henderson had been young and carefree, the great-granddaughter of Seth and Gretchen Henderson, who had built Daisy Place, Angel had gotten an itch, and he’d been trapped here ever since.
Ruth had helped him—her natural talent had let her see the ghosts even before Angel had gotten caught in the trap that was Daisy Place. It wasn’t until Angel had become trapped there and had spoken to her that they’d developed the rapport that allowed them, as a team, to free the spirits. She’d been talkative once, and excited about her invisible friend, Angel. When he’d been there to hear the stories of the other spirits, they’d both felt the catharsis, the joy, of giving another being freedom.
Angel had been so confused—he really couldn’t remember how he’d become trapped, beyond the itch thing. And his own memories had been dark and filled with pain with no remembered source. But that joy, after Ruth had told the first story, that had been important. He’d seized on that. That was his purpose here; he’d been sure of it.
And he’d convinced Ruth that it was her purpose too.
Only then Angel had watched, helplessly, as Ruth’s youth, her spirit and joie de vivre, had shrunk in upon itself, had shriveled, leaving bitterness and loneliness in its place. He’d had no idea what to say to her, what to do for her. The work they were doing was vitally important. He could let her leave for brief sojourns, let her brothers and their families visit, but he could never say the words that would allow her to be free.
Three little words.
Let it be.
And the worst part, the most frustrating part, was in spite of his enforced stay here, in spite of working so hard to escape, to resume his full duties as he should wish to (what were those again?), that itch, that abominable itch, the thing that had so ensnared him in Daisy Place to begin with, was a constant irritation in the pit of what should have been his groin.
And the only time it went away, was even close to assuaged, was when he was watching the lives of the departed scroll across the memories of Ruth Henderson, and now, hopefully, her nephew Tucker.
Angel had watched, half-yearningly, half-despairingly, as Tucker had experienced his first vision. He loved this part. He did. He never understood the motivations—not the way Ruth had—but seeing the lives of the departed had been his movie, his novel, his long-running TV series, the one that broke his heart.
And then he’d seen what Tucker had seen, and if he’d known how, had possessed the mechanism in his heart or soul or form, he would have wept. There was a quality to Tucker’s visions that had been missing from Ruth’s. He’d witnessed human innovations in the last fifty-five years, had seen televisions go from black-and-white to color, from tubes to pixels, from standard definition to high definition.
This was the difference between a black-and-white, fifteen-inch screen and high-definition color in 3D with surround sound on a screen the size of the house.
Immersed as he had been inside Tucker’s mind as it lived through the simple conversation between a woman of privilege and her maid, he’d felt closer to those people than he ever had before. They’d lived for him, and for those breathless moments, that itch in his core had been soothed, and he’d been able to breathe as though he had a real chest, sucking real oxygen into pink and healthy lungs.
He wanted to enjoy this feeling, to revel in it. He wanted the time to savor what this could mean