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  Soulmates

  ( Kissed by an Angel - 3 )

  Элизабет Чандлер

  Tristan must rescue Ivy, but if he does so his mission will be finished and he will have to leave his true love forever.

  Элизабет Чандлер

  Soulmates

  Chapter 1

  With her chin held high and her cloud of curly blond hair tossed back from her face, Ivy shut the school counselor's door and walked down the hall. Several guys from the swim team turned to stare as she moved toward her locker. Ivy forced herself to return their glances and to look confident. The pants and top she wore for the first day of the school year had been selected by Suzanne, her oldest friend and fashion expert.

  Too bad Suzanne didn't pick out a matching bag to go over my head, Ivy thought. She walked past the senior class bulletin board. People whispered. People pointed her out with small nods. She should have expected it.

  Anyone whom Tristan Carruthers had fallen for would be pointed out Anyone who had been with Tristan the night he was killed would be whispered about. So naturally, anyone who had tried to kill herself because she couldn't get over Tristan's death would be pointed to and whispered about and watched very, very carefully. And that was what everyone said about Ivy: brokenhearted, she had taken some pills, then tried to throw herself in front of a train.

  She could remember only the brokenhearted part, the long summer after the car accident, the nightmares with the deer crashing through the windshield. Three weeks ago she'd had another of her nightmares and had woken up screaming. All she could recall from that night was being comforted by her step-brodier, Gregory, then falling asleep, looking at Tristan's photo. That photo, her favorite picture of Tristan, in which he was wearing his old school jacket and a baseball cap backward on his head, haunted her now. It had haunted her even before she'd heard her little brother's strange account of that night.

  Philip's story of an angel saving her hadn't convinced her family or the police that this wasn't a suicide attempt And how could she deny taking a drug that had shown up in the hospital's blood tests? How could she argue against the train engineer's statement to the police mat he wouldn't have been able to stop in time?

  "Chick, chick, chick." A soft quivering voice interrupted Ivy's thoughts.

  "Who wants to play chick, chick, chick?"

  He was calling to her from the shadowy space beneath the stairs. Ivy knew it was Gregory's best friend, Eric Ghent. She kept on walking.

  "Chick, chick, chick…"

  When she didn't react he emerged from the dark stairwell, looking like a skeleton startled out of his tomb.

  His wispy blond hair lay in strings across his high forehead, and his eyes looked like pale blue marbles set in bony sockets. Ivy had not seen Eric for the last three weeks; she suspected that Gregory had kept his jeering friend away from her.

  Now Eric moved quickly enough to block her path.

  "Why didn't you do it?" he asked. "Lose your nerve? Why didn't you go ahead and kill yourself?"

  "Disappointed?" Ivy asked back.

  "Chick, chick, chick," he said softly, tauntingly.

  "Leave me alone, Eric." Ivy walked faster.

  "Uh-uh. Not now." He grabbed her wrist, his thin fingers wrapping tightly around her arm. "You can't blow me off now, Ivy. You and I have too much in common."

  "We have nothing in common," she replied, pulling away from him.

  "Gregory," he said, tapping one of his fingers. "Drugs." He ticked off a second item. "And we're both champions of the game of chicken." He grabbed a third finger and wiggled it. "We're buddies now."

  Ivy kept walking, though she wanted to run. Eric bobbed along with her.

  "Tell your good buddy," he said, "what made you want to do it? What were you thinking when you saw that train rushing down the track at you? Were you stoked? What kind of trip was it?"

  Ivy felt repulsed by his questions. It seemed impossible to think she would have deliberately jumped in front of the train. She had lost Tristan, but there were still people in her life she cared deeply about-Philip, her mother, Suzanne and Beth, and Gregory, who had protected her and comforted her after Tristan's death. Gregory had been through a lot himself, his mother having committed suicide the month before Tristan died. Ivy had seen the pain and anger caused by that death, and it seemed totally crazy to her that she would try the same thing.

  But everyone said she had. Gregory said so.

  "How many times do I have to tell you? I can't remember what happened that night, Eric. I can't."

  "But you will," he said with a quiet laugh. "Sooner or later, you will."

  Then he stepped away from her and turned back, like a dog that had reached the end of its territory. Ivy continued toward her and her friends' lockers, ignoring more curious stares. She hoped that Suzanne and Beth were finished with their senior orientation meetings.

  "Ivy didn't need to look at the locker numbers to find Suzanne Goldstein's new nesting place. Suzanne wasn't there, but the locker was being fumigated with an open bottle of her favorite perfume, which guided Ivy-and all guys interested in leaving Suzanne a note-directly to the spot Suzanne had found three new guys to date recently, but Beth and Ivy knew it was just a ploy to make Gregory jealous.

  Beth Van Dyke's locker, which was close to Ivy's this year, already had a piece of paper sticking out of it, but it probably wasn't a note from an admiring hunk. More likely, she had shut the door on a scrap of a steamy romance, one of the many that filled her notebooks.

  Ivy went ahead to her own locker to drop off her new books. Kneeling down, she dialed the combination and pulled open the door. She gasped.

  Taped inside her door was a photograph of Tristan, the same picture that had haunted her for the past three weeks. For a moment she couldn't breathe. How had it gotten there?

  Frantically she recalled everything she had done that morning: roll call in homeroom, then a general assembly, then- the school store, and finally a meeting with the counselor. She ran over the list twice, but she couldn't remember taping the photo to the door. Was she really losing her mind?

  Ivy closed her eyes and leaned against the door. I'm crazy, she thought.

  I'm really crazy.

  "Am I nuts, Gregory?" she had asked three weeks earlier as she stood in her bedroom on her first day home from the hospital She held Tristan's photograph in her trembling hands. Gregory gently took the picture away from her, giving it to Philip, her nine-year-old savior.

  "You're going to get better, Ivy. That much I'm sure of," Gregory said, drawing her down on the bed next to him, putting his arm around her.

  "Meaning I'm crazy now."

  Gregory didn't answer right away. She had noticed the change in him when he came to see her at the hospital. His dark hair was combed perfectly, as always, and his handsome face was like a mask, just as it had been when she first met him, his light gray eyes hiding his deepest thoughts.

  "It's a hard thing to understand, Ivy," he said carefully. "It's hard to know exactly what you were thinking at the time." He glanced over at Philip, who was setting the framed photo on the bureau. "And Philip's story sure doesn't help much."

  Her brother responded with a stubborn glare.

  "Maybe now that no one else is around, you can tell us what really happened, Philip," Gregory said.

  Philip glanced up at the two empty shelves where Ivy's collection of angels had once stood. He had the statues now. Ivy had given them to him on the condition that he would never again talk about angels.

  "I already told you."

  "Try again," Gregory said, his voice low and tense.

  "Please, Philip." Ivy reached out for his hand. "It'll help me."

  He let her ho
ld his hand loosely. She knew he was tired of being interrogated, first by the police, then by the doctors at the hospital, then by their mother and Gregory's father, Andrew.

  "I was sleeping," Philip told her. "After you had your nightmare, Gregory said he'd stay with you. I was asleep again. But then I heard somebody calling me. I didn't know who it was at first. He told me to wake up. He said you needed help."

  Philip stopped, as if that were the end of the story.

  "And?"

  He glanced up at the empty shelves, then pulled away from her.

  "Go on," Ivy prompted.

  "You're just going to yell at me."

  "No, I won't," she said. "And neither will Gregory." She gave Gregory a warning look. "Just tell us what you remember."

  "You heard a voice in your head," Gregory said, "and it was telling you that Ivy needed help. The voice sounded something like Tristan's."

  "It was Tristan," Philip insisted. "It was angel Tristan!"

  "Okay, okay," Gregory said.

  "Did this voice tell you why I was in trouble?" Ivy asked. "Did the voice tell you where I was?"

  He shook his head. "Tristan said to put on my shoes, go down the stairs, and go out the back door. Then we ran across the yard to the stone wall.

  I knew I wasn't supposed to go over it, but Tristan said it was okay because he was with me."

  Ivy could feel Gregory's body tense next to hers, but she nodded encouragingly to Philip.

  "It was scary, Ivy, climbing down the ridge. It was hard to hold on. The rocks were real slippery."

  "It's impossible," Gregory said, sounding frustrated and perplexed. "A kid couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it."

  "I had Tristan with me," Philip reminded him.

  "I don't know how you got to the station, Philip," Gregory said heatedly, "but I'm tired of this Tristan story. I don't want to hear it again."

  "I do," Ivy said quietly, and heard Gregory draw in his breath. "Go on," she said.

  "When we got to the bottom, we still had to get over another fence. I asked what was going on, but Tristan wouldn't tell me. He just said we had to help you. So I started climbing, then I kind of messed up. I thought because Tristan was an angel we could fly"-Gregory got up and started pacing around the bedroom-"but we couldn't, and we fell off the top of this high fence."

  Ivy glanced down at her brother's wrapped ankle. His knees were cut and bruised.

  "Then we heard the train whistle. And we had to keep going. When we got closer we saw you on the platform. We shouted to you, Ivy, but you didn't hear us. We ran up the steps and over the bridge. That's when we saw the other Tristan. The one in the cap and jacket, just like in your picture," he said, pointing to it. Ivy shivered.

  "So," Gregory said, "angel Tristan is in two places now-with you, and on the other side of the tracks as well. He's playing a trick on Ivy, calling her over to him. It wasn't a very nice trick."

  "Tristan was with me," Philip said.

  "Then who was across the tracks?" Gregory asked.

  "A bad angel," Philip replied with complete certainty. "Someone who wanted Ivy to die."

  Gregory blinked.

  Ivy sank back against her headboard. As bizarre as Philip's story sounded, it seemed more real to her than the idea that she had taken drugs and thrown herself in front of a train. And the fact remained that somehow her brother had gotten there and he had pulled her back at the last moment. The engineer had seen the blur in front of his train and radioed in that he could not stop in time.

  "I thought you saw Tristan," Philip said.

  "What?" Ivy asked.

  "You turned around. I thought you saw his light." Philip gazed at her hopefully.

  Ivy shook her head. "I don't remember it. I don't remember anything from the train station."

  Perhaps it would be easier if she never recalled what had happened, Ivy thought. But every time she looked at the photo now, there was a prickling in the back of her mind. Something wouldn't let her look away and forget. Ivy stared until the picture ran blurry. She didn't realize she had begun to cry.

  "Ivy… Ivy, don't."

  Suzanne's words jolted Ivy back into the present. As she lifted her head her friend crouched down next to the school locker. Her mouth was a grim, lip sticked line. Beth, who had also come back from orientation, stood above her, fumbling through her knapsack for tissues. She glanced down at Ivy, her own brimming eyes reflecting Ivy's tears.

  "I'm okay," Ivy said, wiping her eyes quickly, looking from one to the other. "Really, I'm okay."

  But she could tell they didn't believe her. Gregory had driven her to school that day, and Suzanne would be taking her home. It was as if they didn't trust her to drive herself, as if they thought that at any minute she'd lose it and steer right off a cliff.

  "You shouldn't have that picture taped inside your locker," Suzanne said.

  "Sooner or later you're going to have to let go, Ivy. You're just making yourself-" She hesitated.

  "Crazy?"

  Suzanne smoothed back her mane of black hair, then toyed with a gold hoop earring. She had never been shy about speaking her mind before, but now she was being careful. "It's not healthy, Ivy," she said at last.

  "It's not good to have his picture here to remind you every time you open the door."

  "But I wasn't the one who put it here," Ivy told her.

  Suzanne frowned. "What do you mean?"

  "Did you see me do it?" Ivy asked.

  "Well, no, but you've got to remember-" her friend began.

  "I don't."

  Suzanne and Beth exchanged glances.

  "So someone else must have," Ivy said, sounding a lot more certain than she was. "It's a school picture.

  Anyone could get a copy of it. I didn't tape it here, so someone else must have."

  There was a moment of silence. Suzanne sighed.

  "Did you see the counselor today?" Beth asked.

  "I just came from there," Ivy told her, closing her locker, leaving the picture inside. She stood up next to Beth, whose outfit had also been selected by Suzanne. But Beth, no matter how fashionably dressed, would always look to Ivy like a wide-eyed owl, with her round face and feathers of frosted hair.

  "What did Ms. Bryce say?" Beth asked as they started down the hall.

  "Nothing much. I'm supposed to come talk to her twice a week and check in if I'm having a bad day. So you're both coming Monday?" Ivy asked, changing the subject.

  Suzanne's eyes brightened. "To the Baines Bash? It's a Labor Day tradition!" She sounded relieved to be talking about a party.

  Ivy knew that the last month had been hard on Suzanne. She'd been so jealous of the attention Gregory paid Ivy that she'd stopped speaking to her oldest friend. Later, when Gregory told Suzanne that Ivy had tried to commit suicide, she blamed herself for turning her back. But Ivy knew that she herself was partly to blame for the rift. She'd gotten too close to Gregory. In the three weeks since the incident at the train station, Gregory had cooled toward Ivy, treating her more like a sister man a girl he was romantically interested in. Suzanne had reached out to Ivy again, and Ivy was glad for the change in both of them.

  "We've been going to the Baines Bash since we were kids," Beth told Ivy.

  "Everybody in Stone hill has."

  "Except me," Ivy pointed out.

  "And Will. He moved here last winter, like you," Beth said. "I told him about the party, and he's coming."

  "Is he?" Ivy had noticed that Beth and Will were hanging around together more and more. "He's a nice guy."

  "Real nice," Beth said enthusiastically.

  They studied each other for a moment. Were Beth and Will getting to be more than friends? Ivy wondered. After writing all those romantic stories, maybe Beth had finally fallen. It wouldn't be hard to do: A lot of girls had crushes on Will. Ivy herself found that whenever she looked into his dark brown eyes- She caught herself and quickly shoved aside that thought. She would never let herself fall in love again.


  The girls pushed through the school doors, and Suzanne led them on a roundabout route to their cars that conveniently ran past the field where the football team was practicing.

  "I have to get a team program," Suzanne said after several minutes of watching. "What if I start drooling over number forty-nine and discover he's just a sophomore?"

  "A hunk's a hunk," Beth replied philosophically. "And older women with younger guys are in."

  "Don't tell Gregory I'm looking," Suzanne said in a stage whisper as they moved on toward their cars.

  "Isn't looking allowed?" Beth asked innocently.

  "On second thought, tell him, tell him!" Suzanne said, flinging her arms out dramatically. "Let him know, Ivy, I'm out and looking."

  Ivy just smiled. From the beginning, Suzanne and Gregory had played mind games with each other.

  "I mean, why should I tie myself down to one guy?" Suzanne continued.

  Ivy knew this was just an act. Suzanne had been obsessed with Gregory since March and wanted desperately to tie him down to her.

  "I'm going to start at the Baines Bash." She unlocked her car door.

  "That's where a lot of school romances have started, you know."

  "How many are you planning for yourself?" Ivy teased.

  "Six."

  "Great," Beth said. "That's six more heartbreaks for me to write about."

  "I'd settle for five romances," Suzanne added, giving Ivy a sly look, "if you'll take the other one and stop thinking about Tristan."

  Ivy didn't reply.

  Suzanne got in her car, closed the door, and reached across to unlock the passenger-side door. But before Ivy could open it, Beth caught her hand.

  She spoke quickly, quietly: "You can't forget, Ivy. Not yet. It would be dangerous to forget."

  In the back of her mind, Ivy felt that prickling feeling again.

  Then Beth yanked open her own car door, hopped in, and drove away fast.

  Suzanne glanced in the rearview mirror, frowning. "I don't know what's gotten into that girl. Lately she's been hopping around like a scared rabbit. What did she just say to you?"