Outcast by Adrienne Kress Read Free Book Online Page B

an introduction. This maybe hadn’t been such a good idea after all. I turned it off and pushed it to the side.
    “Why…?” Gabe stopped.
    “Yes?” I asked quietly. The mood in the shed was somber.
    Gabe looked at me with that penetrating gaze of his. “Why doesn’t this scare the bejebus out of you?”
    “Well, for one thing I’m not sure I’ve ever had a bejebus to begin with…” Stupid joke, Riley. Honestly this really isn’t the time. “And second, well, when you’ve spent most of your life dealing with angels and stuff, you get used to weird things happening.”
    “Angels.”
    “Yeah.”
    Gabe leaned back against the wall. “Tell me the story again.”
    “About you?”
    “Yeah. You said something about shooting me in the face.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Tell me the story again.”
    So I told him the story again. This time with a lot more detail, as much as I could remember about what he’d looked like before, about the timing of everything. When I’d finished, he just sat there, thinking.
    “I just don’t remember any of it,” he finally said. “Not that night. Not the fifty years that’ve passed.”
    “What do you remember?”
    “I remember I was walking home. It was late. I was drunk. I’d gotten into a fight. I remember…feeling dizzy. I thought I blacked out, happened a lot, been drinking a lot this summer. Then I woke up here.”
    “Where’s your home?” He had a home. Of course he had a home.
    “East. On the edge of the bayou. Just me and my ma…” He stopped. “She’s dead.”
    I looked at him, not really sure what to say. “I guess…I mean, yeah, she would be. I’m so sorry…”
    He looked at me funny for a moment and then gave a wry laugh. “Yeah, I guess she would have been by now, yeah. But no. No, she died couple months ago, reason why I left school. Well, one of the reasons.”
    “You mean in 1956.”
    Gabe stopped.
    “You said a couple months ago. But you meant 1956.”
    “Well, for me, sweetheart,” he sounded angry, “I mean a couple months ago. Sorry that I’m not all used to the time traveling thing yet.”
    I felt stupid, and insensitive. “I’m sorry, Gabe…”
    “This is off the wall.”
    “It is.”
    We sat in silence some more. There was a lot to process. Suddenly the magnitude of everything came into focus for me. Gabe had had a life back in 1956…well, okay, if he was telling the truth about who he was, and it just seemed like he was. Still there was a part of me that couldn’t totally believe him. There was a part of me that thought maybe this was an angel taking the form of some kid from the 50s, though why an angel would do that, I had no idea.
    But I’d seen him. He’d had wings, and he’d come at the time of the Taking…
    “Could be a good thing,” said Gabe suddenly.
    “What would be?”
    “Could be kinda interesting. Get a chance to be a new person.”
    “I guess…”
    “You don’t think so, sweetheart?”
    I shrugged. “I guess it could be kind of interesting, yeah. But I think we need to focus more on figuring out what happened to you, whether you are an angel or not, and most importantly why people are being taken.”
    “Especially your Chris guy.”
    “Yes, I have a vested interest, I know that, but we could still totally…”
    “All this talk of ‘we,’ sweetheart. Seems to me, you’re making all the decisions.”
    “Gabe…”
    “Look, you’ve still got me tied up in your shed. Why don’t we figure out a way to fix this situation before we figure out all the angel stuff?”
    “I…”
    “One day at a time. Right now, maybe you could let me go?”
    I looked down.
    “You are going to let me go now, aren’t you?”
    “I don’t know if I can. You could be lying.”
    Gabe sighed hard. “You’ve got the damn evidence in that yearbook that I’m not.”
    “I don’t trust angels.”
    “Which is kind of bullshit because I thought angels were usually considered the good guys.”
    “Not these