“Prescott’s a good egg,” he says, his voice strained. “He’ll take care of you.”
I don’t know what to say. He stands up, brushes the nonexistent heavenly dirt off his pants out of sheer force of habit. “Well, I should let you go, I think. I’ve got a hike ahead of me.”
He pulls me into his arms. We’ve had some good-byes, Tucker and me, off and on again, but nothing like this. I cling to him, breathing in his smell, his cologne and horse sweat and hay, a hint of Oreo cookies, feeling the solidness of his arms, knowing this is the last time I’ll feel that, and I look up at him all desperate and heartbroken, and then we’re kissing. I hang on to him for dear life, kissing him like the world’s about to end, and I guess in a way it is. I kiss him like I probably should be embarrassed to do in a place like heaven, which feels like church, a place where God is looking right at you, but I don’t stop. I give him my whole heart through my lips. I love him. I open up my mind and show him how much I love him. He gives a startled, agonized laugh, and breaks away, breathing hard.
“I can’t leave you,” he says hoarsely.
“I can’t leave you either,” I say, shaking my head. “I can’t.”
“Then don’t,” he says, and grabs me behind the neck and kisses me again, and the world is tilting, tilting, and everything goes black.
22
THE PROPHET
I wake up in my room in Jackson. For a minute I consider whether or not it was all a bad dream. It feels like one. But then reality settles over me. I groan and turn onto my side, curling into the fetal position, pressing my hands to my forehead until it hurts, rocking, rocking, because I know that Tucker is gone.
“Ah, now,” says a voice. “Don’t cry.”
There’s an angel sitting on the edge of my bed. I can feel that he loves me. He’s thankful that I’m all right. Home. I can feel his relief that I’m safe.
I turn over to look at him. “Dad?”
It isn’t Dad. It’s a man with clean-cut auburn hair, eyes the color of the sky after the sun’s gone down, when the light has almost left it. He smiles.
“Michael couldn’t come this time, I’m afraid, but he sends his love,” he says. “I am Uriel.”
Uriel. I’ve seen him before. Somewhere in my brain I’m storing an image of him standing next to Dad, looking all fierce and regal, but I don’t know where that comes from. I sit up and am instantly flooded with weakness, a hollowness in my stomach, like I haven’t slept in days. Uriel nods sympathetically as I sink back onto the pillows.
“You’ve had quite the adventure, haven’t you?” he says. “You did well. You did what you were meant to do. And perhaps more than you were meant to do.”
But not well enough, I think, because Tucker’s dead. I’ll never see him again.
Uriel shakes his head. “The boy is fine. He’s more than fine, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’ve come to talk to you.”
It’s like my whole body goes limp with relief. “He’s alive?”
“He’s alive.”
“So I’m in trouble?” I ask. “Was I not supposed to save him?”
Uriel gives a little laugh. “You’re not in trouble. But what you did for him, the way you poured yourself into him, it saved him, yes, but it will also have changed him. You need to understand.”
“It changed him?” I repeat, dread uncurling in my gut. “How?”
He sighs. “In the old days we called a person with so much glory, so much of the power of the divine inside them, a prophet.”
“What does that mean, a prophet?”
“He will be slightly more than human. The prophets of the past have sometimes been able to heal the sick, or conjure fire or storms, or see visions of the future. It affects the little things: their sensitivity to the part of the world humans don’t usually see, their awareness of good and evil, their strength in both body and spirit. Sometimes it also affects their longevity.”