Avi Marie's Arc

Chapter 1 of 30

Avi Marie failed the one job an angel cannot fail. Her mortal was dead, and she had not been watching when it happened. Now she sat on the floor of her villa, a graceful house crowned with silver moons and hung with flowering vines, and stared at the empty spot where his soul should have arrived. Guardian angels see their charges die. They stand beside the deathbed. Avi Marie had blinked, and the man was simply gone, with no memory of how. She had no wound to study. No last words. No place to begin. A murder needs a scene, and she owned nothing but a hole where the moment should be. She pressed her palms to the cool floor and forced herself to think. If she could not remember the death, then someone had taken the memory from her. That itself was a clue. It meant a hand strong enough to blind an angel. She rose and went to the tall windows. Below her garden stood a man who did not belong among the roses. He wore a red plaid shirt and a hunter's vest, and he studied the ground the way a tracker reads a trail. Garrett Thorne. She had met him once, years ago, a woodsman who guided lost souls out of the wild places between worlds. He did not knock. He crouched and touched the soil beneath her window. Avi Marie flew down and landed hard in front of him. "You're on my land." "Somebody else was too." He did not look up. He pointed at a print pressed into the wet earth. It was not a boot. It was long and clawed, three toes, sunk deep. "This came the night your mortal died. Followed the scent right to your door." Her breath caught. "How do you know when he died?" "Whole forest went quiet that night. Animals feel these things." Now he stood and met her eyes. His beard hid most of his face, but not the grim set of his mouth. "You lost your man. I lost three souls on the same trail. Same tracks. Whatever took your memory took them." Avi Marie stared at the clawed print. For the first time since her charge vanished, the emptiness had an edge. She knelt and traced the mark with one finger. It was cold, colder than dirt should be. "You can follow this?" "I can follow anything that walks." He shouldered a coil of rope. "Question is whether you can stomach where it leads. These prints run toward the low places. Nothing good lives there." She pulled her gown up and knotted it at the knee so she could move. The murder was no longer a blank wall. It was a trail, and the trail had a direction. "Then we go to the low places," Avi Marie said. "Before it takes another soul."