We both hear the noise in the brush behind us at the same moment. We turn.
A bear has just come onto the trail. I know immediately that it’s a grizzly. Its massive shoulders glow in the rays of the rising sun as it stops to look at us. Behind it two cubs tumble out of the bushes.
This is bad.
“Don’t run,” warns Tucker. Not a possibility. My feet are frozen to the ground. In my peripheral vision I see him slide his backpack from his shoulder. The bear lowers her head and makes a snuffling sound.
“Don’t run,” says Tucker again, loudly this time. I hear him fumbling with something. Maybe he’s going to hit her with an object of some kind. The bear looks right at him. Her shoulders tense as she prepares to charge.
“No,” I murmur in Angelic, holding up my hand as if I could hold her back by the force of my will alone. “No.”
The bear pauses. Her gaze swings to my face, her eyes a light brown, absolutely empty of any feeling or understanding. Sheer animal. She looks intently at my hand, then rises to stand on her hind legs, huffing.
“We won’t harm you,” I say in Angelic, trying to keep my voice low. I don’t know how it will sound to Tucker. I don’t know if the bear will understand. I don’t have time to think. But I have to try.
The bear makes a noise that’s half roar, half bark. I stand my ground. I look into her eyes.
“Leave this place,” I say firmly. I feel a strange power moving through me, making me light-headed. When I look at my outstretched hand I see a faint glow rising under my skin.
The bear drops to all fours. She lowers her head again, woofs at her cubs.
“Go,” I whisper.
She does. She turns and crashes back into the brush, her cubs falling in behind her. She’s gone as suddenly as she appeared.
My knees give out. Tucker’s arms come around me. For a minute he crushes me to him, one hand on the small of my back, supporting me, the other on the back of my neck. He pulls my head to his chest. His heart is pounding, his breath coming in panicked shudders.
“Oh my God,” he breathes.
He has something in one of his hands. I pull away to investigate. It’s a long, silver canister that looks vaguely like a fire extinguisher, only smaller and lighter.
“Bear repellent,” says Tucker. His face is pale, his blue eyes wild with alarm.
“Oh. So you could have handled it.”
“I was trying to read the directions on how to spray the thing,” he says with a grim laugh. “I don’t know if I would have figured it out in time.”
“Our fault.” I sink down so I sit on the rocky ground near his feet. “We stopped talking.”
“Right.”
I don’t know what he heard, what he thought.
“I’m thirsty,” I say, trying to buy myself some time to come up with an explanation.
He slips the canister back into his backpack and retrieves a bottle of water, opens it, and kneels beside me. He holds the bottle to my lips, his expression still tight with fear, his movements so jerky that water spills down my chin.
“You did warn me about the bears,” I stammer after I try to drink a few swallows. “We were lucky.”
“Yeah.” He turns and gazes down the trail in the direction that the bear went, then back at me. There’s a question in his eyes that I can’t answer. “We were pretty lucky, all right.”
We don’t talk about it. We hike back down and drive into Jackson for breakfast. We go back to Tucker’s house later in the morning for Tucker’s boat and spend the afternoon on the Snake fishing. Tucker hooks a few and throws them back. He catches a big rainbow trout, and that one we decide to eat for dinner along with fish he caught the day before. It’s not until we’re standing in the kitchen of the Avery farmhouse, Tucker teaching me how to gut the fish, that he brings the bear up again.
“What did you do today, with the bear?” he asks as I stand with the fish at the kitchen sink, trying to make a clean incision up the belly the way he showed me.
“This is so gross,” I complain.
He turns to look at me, his expression hard the way it always gets whenever I try to get something past him. I don’t know what to say. What are my options? Tell the truth, which is against the only absolute rule Mom has really given me about being an angel-blood: Don’t tell humans—they won’t believe you and if even they did, they couldn’t handle it. And then there’s option two: Come up with some sort of ridiculous-sounding lie.
“I sang to the bear,” I try.
“You talked to it.”
“I sort of hummed at it,” I say slowly. “That’s all.”
“I’m not stupid, you know,” he says.
“I know. Tuck—”
The knife slips. I feel it slide into the fleshy part of my hand below my thumb, slicing through skin and muscle. There’s a sudden rush of blood. Instinctively I close my fingers around the gash.
“Okay, whose brilliant idea was it to give me a knife?”
“That’s a bad cut. Here.” Tucker curls back my fingers to press a dish towel over the wound. “Put pressure on it,” he directs, letting go. He dashes out of the room. I press for a moment, like he said, but the bleeding’s already stopped. I feel suddenly strange, light-headed again. I lean against the counter dizzily. My hand starts to throb and then a flare of heat like a tiny lick of flame shoots from my elbow to the tip of my pinkie finger. I gasp. I can actually feel the gash closing itself, the tissue knitting together deep inside my hand.
Mom was right. My powers are growing.
After a moment, the sensation fades. I peel back the dish towel and examine my hand. By now it’s only a shallow cut, little more than a scratch. It seems to have stopped healing itself. I flex my fingers back and forth gingerly.
Tucker appears with a tube of antibiotic ointment and enough bandages to fix up a small army. He dumps it all on the counter and crosses quickly over to me. I pull the dish towel tight across my palm and tuck my hand into my chest protectively.
“I’m okay,” I say quickly.
“Let me see,” he orders. He holds out his hand.
“No, it’s fine. It’s only a scratch.”
“It’s a deep cut. We need to close it.”
I slowly lower my hand to his. He takes it and gently turns it so my injured palm faces up. He tugs back the dish towel.
“See?” I say. “Only a minor flesh wound.”
He stares at it intently. I’m holding my breath, I realize. I tell myself to relax. Just act normally, like Mom says. I can explain this. I have to explain this.