Page 32 of Calling All Angels
“I’m not. I’m worried about you.”
Aubrey rubbed her forehead. “I won’t let whoever did this make me a victim.”
“You already are,” Jacob told her. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Taking his hand, she said, “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
Emma moved close to Aubrey. “No, you can’t. Listen to him.”
Jacob frowned. “Whoever did this, Aub? They’re not messing around. They nearly killed Emma. They could do the same to you. What if you’re right about them mistaking Emma for you?”
“I still can’t wrap my brain around why.”
“Nor can I,” Emma murmured. She glanced at Connor, who was staring down at the Emma in the bed. She couldn’t read his expression except it read as conflicted, as it usually did when he looked at her. Who was he seeing? Her or Violet?
“The police want to know if they took anything,” Jacob continued. “We’re going to have to go back. You’re going to have to go back. With me.”
“Now?” Aubrey said. “But I need to be here.”
Emma leaned close to her ear. “Aubrey,” she said, using one of their favorite Oda Mae Brown lines fromGhost, “you in danger, girl.” That line used to make Aubrey laugh, even when Emma had been grounding her for some infraction or other as a teenager. If only she could laugh her way out of this mess.
But in the end, he convinced her, and Aubrey agreed to go. Emma watched with Connor as they left the hospital to go back to her house.
Emma stared down at her body on the bed. She felt very separate from that Emma. Disconnected almost. That Emma looked frail, vulnerable. Not at all like who she thought herself to be. Most of her life, she’d been called willful, headstrong—words, she suddenly realized, that were rarely, if ever, used to describe a man. She was all of those things, but in a good way. But now no one would look at her and think of that other Emma she had been only two days ago.
“Look at me. I look awful. Am I dying?” she asked Connor again.
“Do ye feel like you are?” he asked, his gray eyes going dark as they swept over her form lying in the bed.
“I don’t know. How does it feel to die?”
Her question caught him off guard. For the briefest of moments, a flicker of pain crossed his expression. “Come with me,” he said, taking her hand in his.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Chapter Six
Before she couldblink, she found herself in a place that seemed as far away from that stifling room at the hospital as she could be. They stood together at the top of a knell above a vast field that reached toward the sea in the distance.
Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.
The rolling land below them, scored in a thousand hues of green, pink, lavender, and purple, was covered in flowers of some sort. The fragrance of all of that was wrapped up in a ball of woodsy, sweet, and salty air.
Emma inhaled deeply of the intoxicating scent.
“Where are we?” she asked, scanning the unfamiliar landscape in surprise. “Is this…heaven?”
He laughed, the sound shockingly unfamiliar to her, but it brought a smile to her lips.
“No,” he said, gazing out at the spectacle before them. “’Tis Scotland.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “Scotland? But how…?”
“Ye must disremember all the limits ye know for now,” he said. “There’s nothing bindin’ ye to the way things were.”
He was right about that. There was nothing familiar in the way things worked in this in-between world. Connor’s steady presence was her only anchor to the life she’d known. Yet she could still feel the brush of heather against her legs. Take in the heady fragrance of the sea and the mossy sweetness of the summer bloom. Feel his skin against her own when he held her hand. Somehow, she’d imagined—when she’d even allowed herself to imagine such things—that all those things would disappear in spirit, that it would all be more ephemeral. That she would never look at a man the way she did Connor and long for him to touch her again.
