I got up, or at least I did in my vision. I was starting to find the way to dissociate myself from it so I could just watch, making the heartache in the girl easier to bear. Barnabas holding me might have had something to do with it, too.
My fingers traced the name of the city on the fire truck: baxter, ca. My gaze rose and I saw the street sign: coral way. My heart pounded as I realized I had some control of this memory that had yet to be lived.
“Here you go, Tammy,” a smoke-smudged man said, draping a blanket smelling of too much fabric softener over my shoulders. I shivered, unable to speak, but I had a name now, and that would help. “Your mom is coming,” he added, and Tammy’s panic slid through me anew.
Oh, God. Mom. I turned to the fire in a panic. I wanted to undo this, but I couldn’t. Johnny was dead. It should be me there, not him. Not him!
“Madison?” Nakita said, and I blinked at the man as his features melted into hers. “Are you all right?”
I had to run away, leave. Facing this was too awful, and the guilt made it hard to breathe. I should be dead, not Johnny. He was my brother, and now he is dead. Because of me. It should have been me. It should have been me!
“Madison!”
Barnabas was calling my name, and I gasped as the two realities—one real, one yet to be lived—clashed violently. The blue tint flashed red, and then the future vanished.
The echo of my heart pounded, and I stilled it as I stared up at Barnabas, Nakita, and . . . Josh. Above me, people cheered the last runner to cross the line. It was over. I had flashed into someone else, lived the foretold death-strike of her soul, and . . . survived.
I swayed, trying to shake the guilt and heartache over the girl’s brother’s death. Tammy. Her name was Tammy. Her belief that she caused her brother’s death still rang in me, a despair so heavy that it crushed all else and denied her soul the love it needed to survive. She would run, mentally if not physically, from those who would help her live again, and her soul . . . would wither and die long before her body did. Fate, the seraphs called it, but I didn’t believe in fate.
The old dark timekeeper, Kairos, would have sent Nakita to kill Tammy without a thought, taking her soul to save it at the expense of her life. Ron, the current light timekeeper, would, in turn, send a light reaper to stop the scything, saving her life at the cost of her soul, gambling that she would somehow learn to live again. But I wasn’t the old dark timekeeper, and I was going to use the opportunity to prove to the seraphs that fate could be sidestepped and we could save her life as well as her soul. All we needed to do was show Tammy a different choice.
Smiling weakly, I extended my hand. Josh took it, pulling me to my feet. I brushed off my butt and shivered in the shade. I gazed across the track, remembering the vision of billowing smoke and fire leaping as if it was a living thing. Silent, they waited.
I looked at them, seeing Barnabas’s knowing resignation that this was not going to be as easy as I wanted it to be, Nakita’s fear that I was going to ask her to do something she didn’t understand, and Josh’s eagerness to do something, anything, different.
“You guys up for a field trip?” I asked.
As one, they all exhaled, Josh grinning widely. “And how!”
Chapter Two
The gravestone I was standing behind came up to my chest, and I rested my arms across the top. The dry, hot breeze shifted the purple tips of my short hair in and out of my eyes as I waited for Barnabas to come back from his on-foot reconnaissance. Nakita was taking shots of the tombstones with her camera, always ready in her little red purse. And Josh was trying to keep from throwing up after his first angel-assisted flight.
Nakita insisted she’d chosen to land in this graveyard because the school was directly across the busy street, but I thought that it might be a dry sense of humor developing in the otherwise humor-deficient and deadly dark reaper. I’d admit the graveyard was probably a better choice than the fast-food place next door—especially with Josh still hyperventilating.
I glanced at Josh’s hunched, shaky outline as he leaned against a nearby grave marker, his gym bag at his feet and his back to me as he recovered. It probably hadn’t helped that we hadn’t just been flying, but flinging, as well. The awful nothingness of traveling between space was frightening at best, and the first time Nakita had wrapped her wings around me and flung us from Indiana to a Greek island on the other side of the earth had been awful. I suppose Kairos’s island was mine now, since I had his job and he was dead.
But whether we were there to give Josh a chance to catch his breath, or because of Nakita’s idea of a joke, the graveyard was quiet and out of the way, with a good view of the buses lining up on the far right—car pickup on the left. We’d crossed a couple of state lines to get here, and it was only three in the afternoon. School was just now letting out.
Smelling lightly of sweat and tennis shoes, Josh wobbled his way over to me. I gave him a smile and shifted down to make room, and together we leaned on the stone, our elbows touching. I was glad he was here.
“Do you see her?” he asked, his blue eyes finally starting to show his excitement.
“No,” I said, mentally thanking Beatrice, whose stone we were leaning on. “I never saw Tammy’s face. I figured I was lucky to see the name of the town and her street and that the fireman knew her name. But I’m sure she’s in there.”
I indicated the school with my chin, and he eyed me. “Your timekeeper-sense tingling, eh?” he kidded me, and I gave him an embarrassed look.
“Uh, yeah, actually,” I said, not wanting to admit that I’d felt an odd sort of shiver through my aura when we had flown over the school. The same thing had happened on my last prevention, and I was going to trust it this time.
“So how are we going to find her?” Josh asked, watching the kids just now starting to file out in threes and sixes.
Nakita, who was taking sideways pictures of a pollution-stained statue, dark with smoke and mold, said, without looking at me, “I could find her with a street address and a description of her aura, but if you flashed forward, then Ron probably has, too. We need to move fast before he puts a guardian angel on her and we can’t do anything.”
“We have at least a day,” I said, and Nakita looked at me from around her camera. “The flash forward was fuzzy around the edges,” I explained. “You only get the clear visions when it’s just hours ahead.” Grimacing, I looked from her to the school. “I think the seraphs sent this one to me early, knowing I’m not good at this yet.”
Though why they wanted to help me was a mystery. Maybe they didn’t like Ron, my timekeeper opposite. I knew I didn’t. Or maybe they hoped that once I got better at this that I’d start to believe in fate, not free will. Whatever the reason, I was sure that we were at least a day ahead of Ron’s natural, seraph-unassisted flash forward, and I wasn’t going to squander it.
Nakita glanced at Barnabas, and when he shrugged, she looked at the school through the lens, snapping a few shots. “The school is still the best place to look,” she said. “Standard reap stuff. Go where the humans are.” The shutter clicked, and she straightened, frowning at the back of the camera. One of her pictures in our school’s expo at the mall had won top honors, and Nakita had been taking shots ever since.
Ron, I thought, scuffing my yellow sneakers against the stone and wishing the annoying man would ignore me like most adults did. Ron worked for the light instead of the dark, and though we both believed in the same thing—that choice was stronger than heaven’s fate—he’d rather slap a guardian angel on someone than try to get to the root of the problem and change their life. Which was exactly why I was causing trouble with the seraphs, God’s muckety-muck high angels, and trying to change things. Even after having already saved one person’s life and soul, I knew no one but Barnabas believed I really had a chance. And most times, I wondered about Barnabas.
“If we can’t find her here, we’ll just go to her apartment and wait,??
? I said, scanning the skies past the shifting leaves for black wings. The mindless, dripping sheets of black always seemed to congregate when a scything was about to occur in the hopes of snitching a bit of unattended soul—which sometimes made me wonder if the creepy things could read the time lines as well as a timekeeper. Dark reapers on the hunt brought them in faster than crows on carrion. That they weren’t here was a good omen. I hadn’t seen one in months, partly because Nakita hid her resonance much of the time, and partly because she wasn’t hunting.
Josh turned to sit with his back to the stone. Digging in his gym bag, he brought out his phone. “I’m going to text my mom. Tell her I’ll be home later. If anyone asks, I’m with you.”
I looked at my watch and added two hours. “Good idea. Where are we supposed to be? The Low D?” Okay, so I lied to my dad. I didn’t feel that good about it, but he wasn’t going to believe I was somewhere in California, much less dead and trying to change heaven’s policy on culling lost souls.
The soft scent of feathers drew my attention, and I smiled as Barnabas strode across the graveyard, hands in his pockets and eyes roving.
“No light reapers, no black wings, and no Grace,” he said, running a hand over his frizzy, loosely curling hair and squinting at the buses. “You want me to go check Tammy’s apartment?”
No Grace? I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d brought Grace into question, but I nodded, glancing at Nakita as the snap on her purse clicked shut. She’d put her camera away, refusing to let Barnabas be involved in anything she wasn’t. “You remember the address?” I asked.
“Coral Way,” he said, then touched the top of my hand. I’ll come back and tell you if she’s there, echoed in my thoughts, and I jumped. Blinking, I stared at him. Nakita had been shielding my resonance since leaving Three Rivers so Ron wouldn’t know where we were if he checked up on us, and I hadn’t known it was possible to touch thoughts while shielded. But Barnabas had been touching me physically, so maybe that’s how he was able to bypass the shield.
“Hey!” Nakita said, eyes flashing a divine silver for an instant. “No passing notes.”
Josh closed his phone and looked up at us in question.
“Relax,” Barnabas said sourly as his fingers slipped from the top of my hand. “I was just making sure that it was possible.” He paused, then said, “See? She didn’t hear that.”
“Because I’m shielded,” I said, and Barnabas nodded, his gaze across the street and on the cars lining up. I figured his sudden sour mood wasn’t coming from Nakita’s mistrust but from his ability to talk to me silently at all. It meant he wasn’t a light reaper anymore. He was moving toward the dark side, toward me. That a light reaper had abandoned his millennium-long beliefs to follow me into the enemy camp was a sobering thought. If I could get Nakita and him to work together to save a marked person’s body and soul, then I might be able to convince the seraphs to do things my way, and the early scythings would stop for good. If, if, if. And if I couldn’t, then as soon as I found my body, hidden somewhere between the now and the next, I was giving up my amulet and going back to being normal, alive, and knowing nothing about reapers, timekeepers, and guardian angels.
But the thought lacked the thrill that it once had. I wanted this to work. Bad.
Josh got to his feet, his gym bag in hand, shifting awkwardly at the tension between Nakita and Barnabas. “Hey, um, I’m going to go behind the mausoleum and change, okay? I’ll be right back.” He turned and walked away to the small building nearby, gray with age and neglect. I watched him go, thinking he looked good. Confident.
Two kids passed him on their bikes, cutting through the cemetery as a shortcut. School was out, and I turned back to the buses, hearing kids yelling at each other. Beside me, Nakita fidgeted. I was starting to feel the tension, too, and I leaned back from the grave marker, brushing the bits of old stone off my shirt as I looked for black wings.
This felt like a real reap. I had flashed forward. I had found the place. I was trying to find the mark. If I wasted my head start, a light reaper would show up to stop me. It didn’t matter that our goals were the same—save the mark’s life—because if I couldn’t, Nakita would be there to kill Tammy. Sacrifice the body to save the soul. It was a sucky reason to die.
“Barnabas,” I said, still wondering about Grace. “Do you think I should call Grace?” I liked Grace, but she was my contact with the seraphs, and if she wasn’t here, it might mean they wanted to see if I could do this without her help. She was too close to the divine for me to see more than the glow of her wings most of the time. Nakita, Barnabas, and I could hear her chimelike voice, but no one else could. Grace thought she was a poet. Which might be why Josh seemed to be the only one glad when she was around.
“I wouldn’t,” Barnabas said, his expression closed and worrying me all the more. “I’ll go check the apartment.”
“Thanks,” I said softly, and he walked away to find a quiet place to find his wings, and then, the air.
“I thought he’d never leave,” Nakita said.
“Oh, come on,” I coaxed, walking backward to the high fence between us and the street. “Barnabas is okay. Admit that you’re mad he’s turning into a dark reaper, and get over it.”
“Him?” She laughed. “The day Barnabas becomes a dark reaper is the day that I’ll kiss his amulet.”
Silently we watched the kids pouring out of the school, each seeming to know exactly where they were going. Whether she knew it or not, Nakita’s own views of the world were changing. When we had first met, she had been a typical dark reaper, ready to scythe people at a moment’s notice to save their souls. To her, the body wasn’t important. Life wasn’t important. The soul was. It had taken me ages to get a grasp of that. Dark for heaven’s fate, unseen; light for human’s choice to glean.
Technically speaking, it was the light reapers who were the bad guys in heaven’s sight, having been kicked out and banding together to protect those the dark reapers targeted. They saved lives at the expense of the soul. So who was doing the most good? I didn’t know anymore.
Nakita was silent beside me, scanning faces. I wasn’t sure if Tammy was going to be picked up by her mother, or if she was going to ride the bus home. “Maybe trying to find her at the school isn’t such a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we need to get closer,” I added when Nakita said nothing.
“Why don’t you try to use the time lines to find her?” she finally said. “Kairos always showed me the mark’s aura in the time lines so I could recognize him or her by that.”
I winced. “Tammy’s aura, huh?” I offered. “That’s great. Except I can’t see auras.”
“I can,” Nakita said. “Kairos would show me the time line where he flashed, and the aura that mixed with his was the one we were looking for. We can do this, Madison.” Her brow furrowed. “We can find her before Barnabas does, I bet.”
A knot of tension eased in me, and I smiled. Barnabas. The rivalry was that bad, even now. “Worth a try,” I said cheerfully, then turned my back on the school and sat down. The bars of the fence pushed into my back, and the grass tickled my ankles. Dappled sun made a cool wash of light on me. Taking a breath I didn’t need other than to speak with, I exhaled, trying to settle myself using the technique that Barnabas had taught me. My hand crept up, and I grasped the stone that was at the center of my amulet. The silver wires cradling it were warm, and I closed my eyes. It was my amulet that let me see the time lines, and if I could use it to see auras, it would be a very good sign that I was becoming better at this.
Finding the time lines was easy, and with hardly any effort, I found the bright glow of the present, shifting off into infinity. Now all I had to do was find Tammy on it.
Everyone’s life had a different color or aura. I couldn’t see auras, but Barnabas had gone over them countless times as we sat on my roof and waited for the sun to rise. For most people the color was a reflection of their age and state of mind and could change
with the seasons, but for reapers, it was a reflection of what side of the fate or free-will fence they were on. Light reapers tended to be a dark red in color, and dark reapers, violet, and those in the middle a neutral, greenish yellow. When I’d first met Barnabas, his amulet had been a respectable dark red. Now, though, it was clearly moving up the spectrum, showing more certainly than actions that he was starting to doubt his own beliefs. Doubt in an angel was a scary, unexpected thing, like finding out rocks were really made of water.
My original aura had been blue, or so Barnabas had once told me. Now it was violet, so dark it was basically black thanks to my timekeeper amulet. It was easy to find my aura in the bright time line, looking almost like a sinkhole. Beside me was Nakita’s cheerful violet glow, her thoughts weaving among mine. Barnabas was absent, but if I looked down the fabric of time into the past, I could see where he had been with us. Josh, too. As I settled myself, Josh’s aura jumped from somewhere else, joining mine and Nakita’s. He was back from the mausoleum, and I didn’t need to open my eyes to know it.