Cloud Wrangler

Long before Cecilia MacDougal understood the clouds, she understood that people disappeared.

Some went through doors.

Some drove away.

Some died.

And some simply became unreachable while remaining close enough to haunt the heart.

As a child, Cici believed the sky kept them.

It seemed reasonable.

Clouds came and went without explanation. They gathered when the earth was calm, vanished when storms ought to have remained, and sometimes hung so low over the Texas fields that she imagined she could climb a fence post and touch them.

Her father had always looked toward them as though expecting company.

Duffy MacDougal never explained why.

He would stop in the middle of ordinary things—a conversation, a chore, a meal—and tilt his head.

Listening.

Then came that faraway look.

Sometimes a hum.

Sometimes a smile meant for no one Cici could see.

And sometimes he left.

Her mother hated that most.

Constella would stand at the window with her arms folded and anger arranged carefully across her face, while Cici waited for the sound of her father's return.

He always returned.

Until he didn't.

After Duffy died, the clouds changed.

Or perhaps Cici did.

She dreamed of falling.

Night after night she dropped through darkness, through mist, through great white mountains that opened beneath her and swallowed her whole.

She always woke before reaching the ground.

Then one night—

she didn't fall.

She stopped.

Suspended between heaven and earth, Cecilia opened her eyes inside a cloud.

There was no floor beneath her.

No wings upon her back.

No reason she should have remained there.

Yet she did.

The vapor moved around her like breath.

Light bent through droplets and painted colors she had never seen from the ground. The air smelled of rain and something sharper, almost electric. Somewhere in the distance came a low familiar hum.

Cici turned toward it.

For one impossible instant, blue-white sparks danced beyond the mist.

She knew that light.

She knew that sound.

"Da?"

The cloud shifted.

The presence disappeared.

Cecilia woke with tears on her face and the taste of rain on her lips.

Years would pass before she understood what had happened.

Longer still before she understood what her father had been doing whenever he looked toward the sky.

Duffy MacDougal had carried secrets.

Her mother carried others.

Their blood carried more.

And somewhere between the world of flesh and the place beyond rainbows, an inheritance had already awakened in their daughter.

Cecilia would eventually learn that clouds could be molded.

Storms could answer anger.

The dead were not always gone.

Blood remembered things people forgot.

And some doors opened only for those willing to step where there appeared to be nothing beneath their feet.

But first—

Cici had to learn not to fall.