All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,91

that. Could we?”

Tucker shrugged. “Do you think the ghosts will wander in and out while we’re in there?”

“Probably.” Angel’s shoulders slumped as he started down the stairs, and Tucker considered.

“Well, it would be a good way to size up the next project. I’ll think about it.”

Angel’s spine straightened, and Tucker followed him with a half smile on his face. This having a partner thing was nice. He could deal with having someone—anyone—to talk to about the uncertainties of what he was doing. He knew for damned sure he could have used some help trying to figure out what he was supposed to do when his gift was tugging him in the other direction.

The oppressive heat of July had faded into the more mellow heat of August, and Tucker rolled the windows down for part of the journey. Angel’s hair didn’t flutter back with the breeze, but Tucker caught him, eyes closed, turning his face to the sunshine on more than one occasion. When they passed the road that led to the fairy hill, he shuddered and frowned.

“What’s up?” Tucker asked.

“There’s… there are complex things here,” Angel muttered. “I’d never thought of this, uh, pagan place as a bastion of good, but good is exactly what I felt coming from it.” He made a complicated movement then, a sort of rippling of his back and ass, like a bird settling feathers. “I need to realign my view of the world, that’s all.”

Tucker laughed. “That’s all? That sounds dire.”

“I just….” He frowned again. “I don’t know where that prejudice came from,” he said after a moment. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense at all. But I thought all of the things about a fairy hill must be evil—promiscuous sex, rampant desire, terrible indulgence, and blood. But that’s not what energy the fairy hill is giving off, and it feels like I was wrong.”

“Wow, Angel. That’s quite a change.”

“Change is not weakness.” Angel made that back-ruffling motion again. “It’s when we refuse to change in the face of upheaval that we fail.”

Tucker thought about it as he drove through the foothills under the August blue sky. “Okay.” And the more he thought about it, the more it filled him with joy. “All right!” His iPod was playing something that was simultaneously melancholy and thunderous, and he turned that up, immersed in the sudden freedom of a basic truth.

Change was not weakness.

Tucker’s life had changed—most assuredly—since he’d gotten the summons to Daisy Place, but answering the change didn’t mean he was weak. He may not have been being used for his magic wang anymore, but that didn’t mean this thing he was doing—giving peace to the long-since departed—wasn’t just as important. Maybe, on some level, it was even more important.

Angel wore a half smile as the music pounded, and Tucker grinned. Small moments, Damien had taught him. Small perfect nuggets of time and place. A good hamburger. A sugar cookie. A favorite song.

A moment shared with someone who seemed to understand.

Can’t Find My Way Home

THE FOOTHILLS of the Sierra Nevada languished in the summer. Hot and weighted by dust and sun, even the sky had heft and mass, as blue and as clear as it may have appeared.

If the Manzanita Cemetery in Lincoln had been crushed under the footsteps of time long ago, the sun and the dust had rendered it almost flat to the eye. The marble headstones—usually representing the family patriarch—were all well spaced, and some even cleaned, but most of them bore carved words so faded they may as well have been runes in a language ages ago forgotten. The grass was watered once a week, and a few spare blades of crabgrass clung to a defiant green, but most of it was withered, sere, and too dead to even be called brown.

It was beige. Beige grass.

Angel had never seen anything quite so deceased, and he lived in a haunted mansion with a haunted garden. Even the multidimensional cemetery with the ghosts that wanted to jump Tucker’s body looked more alive than this place.

If the zombie apocalypse that seemed so prevalent on Tucker’s selection of videos ever occurred, it would be on a ruined landscape like this one.

“Angel, would you stop obsessing over the grass?” Tucker scowled with impatience. “They water as often as they can.”

“It’s much browner this close to the valley,” Angel said mournfully. “I wonder if the cemetery would be less depressing if the grass were greener.”

“Probably,” Tucker conceded. “But seeing that even the people who mourned these