All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,8
you,” Tucker said. The naked gratitude on his face did something fierce and unprecedented to the center of Angel’s being, where humans maintained the heart sat, regulating emotion. The twisting, swelling sensation where Angel’s chest would have been, had he had a corporeal form, was both unpleasant and exhilarating, and it shook him to the marrow of his invisible bones. As he watched Tucker walk down to take the crate of groceries and sandwiches from the delivery boy, he felt the slightest flicker in the projection he’d chosen to show Tucker for their acquaintance, and he thought frantically, trying to figure out what he’d changed.
Tucker was smiling to himself as he walked back up the porch steps, and he looked at Angel to share the smile and stopped abruptly.
“Man, that is some shirt!”
Angel looked down, and in place of the plain white T-shirt—which, it had seemed, every human had been comfortable in for at least the last fifty years—he was wearing a button-front Hawaiian shirt that looked like the victim of a tie-dye grenade.
“Oh my God,” he said, heedless of the blasphemy. “What in the—”
“You got puked on by a rainbow!” Tucker chortled, his good will apparently easy to earn with food and bright colors. “Dang, ghost guy, I don’t know what made that happen, but if you keep doing stuff like that, you might be useful to have around after all.”
“Useful?” Angel sputtered, embarrassed. “Useful? Do you have any idea who I am?”
“No,” Tucker said. He set the groceries down on the porch and reached into his pocket. “Yes! I knew I had the key.” He put his hand on the doorknob to unlock Daisy Place and let out a low moan.
“Oh hells!” Angel muttered. “Tucker, let go—”
“Stop.” Tucker fell to his knees, his hand still locked around the handle. “Oh God, make it stop.”
Dammit! All those spirits, all of that cold energy locked in the house for weeks. Of course the cold iron of the doorknob would be where that energy was stored. Oh Jesus. Poor Tucker. He convulsed, moaning, his hand locked on the doorknob like it contained an electric current.
He couldn’t let go, and his deathlock on the doorknob was hurting him.
Angel needed to make it stop. Oh, Angel hated to do this. Ruth hadn’t talked to him for a week the first time he’d done it to her.
“I’m sorry, Tucker,” he murmured, hoping Tucker would forgive him, and then placed his hands over Tucker’s and pushed until the cold iron of the doorknob burned against his palms. Tucker groaned and crumpled to the porch, sobbing.
“What in the hell?”
Angel sighed and sat cross-legged, running phantom fingers through Tucker’s hair, watching as the strands were disturbed by the breeze of his movements.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” he said in the silence that followed. “You need me. I’m your contact for the things in this place—sort of a psychic filter, really. There are too many souls here in Daisy Place, their stories locked inside by silence. Once they tell you their stories, they’re free to move on. It’s… well, your aunt called it a catharsis exorcism. You’re an empath, right?”
Tucker grunted, still shaking in pain. “Yes, I’ve been cursed by the fucking karma gods. What do they want now?”
Angel didn’t know how to answer that. “Ghosts speak to you, right?”
“Sometimes. Usually, it’s… something else,” Tucker muttered. “But yeah, I see ghosts all the time. They’re not usually that talkative.” He gave Angel a sour look before closing his eyes again. “With one exception.”
Angel sighed because, while he didn’t remember the details, he assumed this was how he’d come to be trapped here himself. “This entire house is the exception,” he said. “The ghosts here are trapped—they need to talk. This house was built on a foundation of iron.” How did one explain supernatural metallurgical alchemy to a man who was barely conscious? “And there’s an iron track that circles the entire property, with just enough gold, silver, platinum, and lead mixed in. It attracts souls—some who died here, some who just stayed here, and some who….” He thought about all the things he couldn’t remember about himself. “Some who wander in. They get stuck here in the silence of all the metals. They can’t go up or down by themselves. It’s like, all the metal here, it freezes them in place. So they need an empath, someone with abilities, to see their stories, give them just enough humanity to set them free.”