Free Stone Angel by Christina Dodd Page A

off to watch over Liam’s Sunday
meeting with Amanda.
    It wouldn’t be long now, and the Sculptor
waited for Irving to emerge and for the Others stationed around the
Chosen Ones’ mansion to bring the old man to him.
    If the Sculptor could pull this off, Osgood
would reward him.
    If the Sculptor failed … if he failed, he
shuddered to think of the consequences.

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
     
    SOPHIA … HER green eyes are glassy like peridots, her tears
frozen in trails along her cheeks. She holds her arm toward Amanda,
calling, “Mandy ! Mandy ! Help
me !”
    With a gasp, Amanda sat straight up in bed,
her forehead slick with sweat, her body trembling. She pressed her
hands to her eyes, holding back her own tears, then she wrapped her
arms around her waist and rocked back and forth, back and forth,
trying to find comfort where there was none. She knew there was
none; the dream came to her every night, and every night she was
once again desolate and broken.
    In her tissue-thin t-shirt and worn old
boxers, she slipped from her bed. Going to the window, she looked
out.
    Spring was supposed to be coming, but the
cold, hard winter refused to give up. New York sidewalks glittered
with frost, and the tall, old, homeless woman who trudged down the
street waved her arms as if trying to fend off the cold. Or … or as
if she were giving a tour of the nineteenth century mansions that
lined the street.
    With a shiver, Amanda grabbed her blue cotton
bathrobe from behind her closet door, pulled on her fuzzy green
socks, and grabbed her blanket. But when she went back to the
window, the old woman was gone, pushed by the north wind onto a
different block.
    Amanda supposed the old woman was crazy. So
many of the street people were. But if she didn’t free Sophia soon,
Amanda could see herself walking the streets, giving tours to
invisible crowds of people. Sometimes it seemed as if the stress
was too much. Already, at night when she couldn’t sleep, she paced
the lonely corridors of Irving's mansion, making plans to rescue
Sophia, or imagining vengeance on Liam, or futilely seeking
tranquility.
    She
placed her blanket back on her bed, opened her door, and down the
dimly-lit hallway she went, trying to remember what it was like
before Sophia was taken. She had slept like a baby then, always
tired from a long day of getting Sophia to school, working at the
hospital all day, and making dinner for Sophia in the evenings,
while her little sister did her homework. On the weekends, they
watched Harry
Potter films and played
Scrabble.
    Amanda didn’t have her own life. She had no
time of her own, and while she knew what she was missing, she also
knew what she had; a sister and a family. When Liam came along, he
had had to ask and beg and grovel before she would date him, and
even then she was always home early. Sophia had no parents. She had
little enough of the normal existence. Amanda was determined to
always be there for her.
    She had failed miserably, and all because one
wicked Irishman had convinced her she could have both — her sister,
and a lover.
    Now Amanda wandered the wide and elegant
halls, wishing for her old cramped apartment back if it meant she
could be with Sophia and not know that Liam was one of the
Others.
    Padding down the main stairway in her
stocking feet, she started to glide along the front hallway’s
marble floors, pretending to ice skate in Central Park. She twirled
and smiled, a pretend flirt on pretend ice. It reminded her of the
way she and Liam had been a few weeks before Christmas, silly in
love … or at least she had been.
    Who could have blamed her? He had looked
amazing, the color in his cheekbones heightened from the cold, his
black hair hidden by a ridiculous fleece hat with earflaps.
    She’d never learned to ice skate, so Liam had
led her around, skating backwards and holding her hands so she
could easily follow.
    As she glided past the stairway that led down
to the kitchen, the sound of clattering plates