Author’s Note
To get the full story behind Tab & Addy, read the Angel’s Grace Trilogy by myself and Jeffrey Cook.
Never ride faster…
Addy…
“You two need some much needed time off,” Gabriel said and winked one of her bright blue eyes in my direction.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Tab told her and I smiled, hefting my pack onto my shoulders.
“I know what I’d like to do,” I said.
“Oh?” Tab turned to look at me as he adjusted the collar on his long black coat.
“Yeah. I’d like to go for a drive. Just go, find someplace I’ve never been and take a few days, you know? Too bad my car is toast.”
“Mm, I have a better idea anyway,” Gabriel said with a wicked grin. She let a key chain dangle from her hand and tossed it to me. I caught it and before I could look, another flash of metal sailed past me for Tab to catch.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Come down and look,” she said, and without seeing if we would follow, left out of the room Tab and I had shared at the frat house that wasn’t a frat house and wandered up the hall.
We trailed her, Tab and I exchanging bewildered looks, all the way to the frat house front door. Gabriel opened it and leaned against the doorframe, her arms crossed nonchalantly under her breasts. She raised her eyebrows, and I laughed at the same time that Tab declared a dubious, “No!”
Two shiny motorcycles waited, parked at the curb. Harley Davidsons if I had to guess from here, which wasn’t exactly my first choice in bike. I liked my bikes like I liked my cars – fast and Japanese – but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Oh, my God! This is the best idea ever.” I looked at Tab, who looked decidedly less thrilled than I did.
“Oh, come on!” I cried.
“Adelaide, just because you are immune to death, does not—”
“Mean I’m immune to debilitating injury,” I finished and rolled my eyes. “What? Are you telling me you don’t know how to ride?”
“I know how, though I admit, it has been quite some time.”
“Yeah, how long?” I asked, stepping out under Seattle’s overcast skies.
“The fifties, or was it the sixties, Tab?” Gabriel tapped one long fingernail against her lips. I looked back at her.
“There you go again,” I complained.
“Not my fault you’re just a wee wittle baby,” she mocked. I gave her a one-fingered salute and, laughing, stepped off the front steps and took the broken pathway to the street.
I stepped up to the smaller of the two bikes and trailed my fingertips along the buttery soft leather saddle. I wanted this. I wanted to go for a ride with Tab and let the wind wash over us and tear the sadness, bitterness, and all the rest of the heavy emotion of the whole ordeal from us. I wanted to go someplace secluded, someplace where we could finally just be together, just me and him.
“Addy?” he murmured softly from behind me and I startled as if waking from a dream where my deep thoughts had carried me. I turned and looked up into his concerned, gray eyes.
“I’m okay,” I reassured him.
He touched the side of my face, and didn’t look like he believed me, but behind us were the days where I could be lying. I had been stripped of the grace of Iaoel, the Angel of Visions, and it was only me now. No more visions, no more angel in my head, trying to possess my body. No more slivers of Hell, either around my neck or trying to inhabit my body… just me, just Adelaide… finally.
I smiled, and hand shaking, placed it over the back of his, turning my head so I could lay a kiss in the center of his palm, closing my eyes and breathing him in, that reassuring scent of wind, metal, and leather. I looked up at him, a small contented smile playing on his sensual lips, his hair grown a bit too long; the black locks flopping into his beautiful gray eyes.
“Okay! Great, so you two go on, take off, have a good time and take some time for yourselves… with each other… you know, away from anything and everything to do with saving the world and stopping the apocalypse.” Tab and I turned our heads in unison to take Gabriel in. I raised an eyebrow, and she rolled her eyes. “Get the message here, cupcake! It is, after all, what I do! You know, being the messenger and all?”
“You gonna rain a plague down on us if we don’t get moving?” I asked.
“Addy, don’t…” Tab said. Gabriel grinned super wide, and I laughed.
“We’re going, we’re going! Spare us the locusts or the—”
Thip! Ribbit…
“You just had to bring it up, didn’t you?” Tab asked with a gusty sigh.
“Seriously?” I cried. “You’re gonna make it rain frogs?”
“Goodbye, you two! See you when I see you.”
I pulled the helmet off the handlebar it was hanging from and undid the chinstrap, getting it onto my head before I got a frog in my hair. The rain was coming down in a light sprinkle, and for every five or six raindrops, a tiny frog fell from the sky.
“Where are we even going to go?” I cried through the open facemask of my helmet at Tab. He put on his own helmet – not for any real need of using one other than to not get pulled over by the human authorities. Helmet laws still applied, immortal or not.
“Ride by my side” he said. “I know a place.”
A sense of excitement and freedom thrummed to life along with the motorcycle between my thighs. I smiled to myself and took a deep, satisfied breath, making sure to familiarize myself with the new and unfamiliar instruments. I’d ridden before, but it was a different sort of bike. Plastic and colorful paint versus leather and shiny chrome. Still, a motorcycle was a motorcycle, and the principle was the same.
I rode beside Tab, and kept it slow and steady until I could get the feel of the handling, but the American bike, unlike the Japanese one I’d ridden before, was actually way different; its center of gravity lower and as a result, the bike was more cumbersome. Probably because math, but I’d always sucked at the subject and didn’t really want to think too hard about it when I was navigating down Seattle hills, newly slicked with rain.
We carefully wended down off the hill and made our way toward I-5, the excitement ratcheting up a notch when it was clear that that was where Tab was heading. I so wanted to hit the freeway, open this up and ride until the wind washed the residual heavy feelings of everything we’d been through these long months off of me. I needed to leave it as far behind me as I could.
I quickly discovered that the Harley was much less nimble and far less quick than the sport bikes I’d learned on and grown used to. It was also, on the flip side, way more comfortable. It was made for the long haul and distance riding rather than the short, quick trips that city driving had afforded me on the occasions I could borrow a bike to ride.
I missed my Subaru, but I couldn’t deny the motorcycle I was on was a definite trade up from my car. Leave it to Gabriel to go with comfort and luxury over speed. Of course, knowing him, and yes, I did say him, because despite his massive gender-bending, that’s how I first met him. He probably thought the thrill ride would come later. Of course, I was kind of hoping so too.