I am suddenly very aware that I do not like his attention on her; he is too wolfish, too predatory. I do not trust him.
“Why are you here?” I ask, my tone making it clear that I wish he were not.
He shrugs, eyes leaving my niece to settle on me. I am almost as uncomfortable under his gaze as I was when it rested on Rose.
“This is my free time,” he says, throwing my words back at me. “I can do with it what I want.”
“And what you want is to sit here and pester me?”
“Apparently,” he says.
I study him for a moment, though it intimidates me to do so. The knowledge that he could shred me without breaking a sweat makes my heart pick up pace.
Then movement within my peripheral draws my attention back to my niece, and my phantom heart stops dead in my phantom chest.
An hourglass appears over Rose’s head, the kind that only the creature sitting next to me and I can see.
My niece has only twenty-four hours left to live.
4 1:15 p.m.
“Whatever you’re thinking, you should stop thinking it.”
I hear his words, the deep timbre of his voice, the threat in the tone, but I cannot respond. For several moments, I can do nothing at all, as though my own internal hourglass has fallen upon its side, halting the grains in place.
“Cecilia, are you listening to me?”
My name from his lips yanks me out of my stupor. I have every reason to know who he is, as one of the most feared and brutal enforcers among my kind, but he has no reason to know mine.
My back stiffens.
Unless he does.
I turn to him. “What are you doing here?” I ask again, this time with a tone that forbids argument or evasion.
His wide shoulders are not tight, his fine jaw not set, his barbed tail flicking lazily at his side, but I can sense the tension running through him. I can feel the threat.
The reaper nods toward my niece. Toward my little Rose. “The real question is what are you going to do here?” His head tilts, his eyes locked on me as if by target. “The smart answer is nothing. Nothing at all.”
I suddenly realize why he is here, the obvious reason for his presence earlier this morning. He is an Enforcer, after all, one of the few, very powerful reapers who are tasked with keeping the rest of us in line. The police of our world.
Across the way, my niece is standing, gathering her belongings, folding the blanket upon which she’d been sitting. Leaving.
I stand. To follow her.
Samael stands as well. When I go to move, he catches my arm. The contact sends an electric shock through me. It has been so long since I’ve felt the touch of another.
“Don’t,” he says. It is a command. An order.
Though I have been starved of physical sensation these past seven years, I yank out of his grasp, fear of him be damned.
“Leave me alone,” I say, and hate that I sound like a child, especially as that seems to be his favorite title by which to address me.
Vladimir departs from his perch upon the lamppost near the pathway cutting through the green grass. He lands upon my shoulder with a squawk. His beady black eyes watch the senior reaper, his head flicking from side-to-side.
“Leave her alone,” Vlad squawks, echoing my words in his avian oratory.
The reaper only smiles, his teeth straight and white against the darkness that surrounds him, ringing him like an aura.
It is only just then that real fear steals over me, blanketing me, covering the green around me with frost, a chill only I can see.
Rose is all packed up now, slinging a backpack over her shoulders, starting toward the path that leads out of the park. I move to follow, expecting him to stop me again.
But he does not.
In fact, when I finally work up the nerve to glance over my shoulder, I see that he is no longer there.
The sun continues its arch across the sky, following the turning of the earth.
I follow my niece.
Vlad sits on my shoulder. I can feel the tension emanating through him. He snaps his sharp beak, staring at me with those beady, infinite eyes.
“What are you doing?” asks the bird.
I say nothing. Vlad knows damn well what I am doing.
I feel the dig of his talons into the skin of my shoulder, a touch I can feel only because he and I both walk the Realm Between Realms; most commonly referred to by my kind as the Between.
“Let it go,” he says. “You cannot save her. You must not think of it.”
Again, I do not respond. I stride forward, leaving behind my motorcycle to continue my pursuit on-foot. Rosie is heading back to the small bookshop at which she works. Above her head, the grains of her hourglass continue to slip through the neck, a reality of which she is wholly unaware.
Just like the rest of the poor souls.
“For the love of the Fates, child, are you listening to me? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Samael is hanging around you all of a sudden? Are you trying to get shredded?”
That was a long speech for Vladimir. The Crows can speak, but they do not communicate in the same way people do. They had other ways of conveying thoughts and feelings.
His claws dig a bit deeper into my shoulder. I scoot around the mortals on the sidewalk, though there is no reason not to walk through them other than it feels a little weird. Rosie’s dark hair bobs twenty feet ahead.
“Fates be damned!” squawks the bird. He takes flight, the flap of his wings stirring my hair. “It’s your soul that risks being shredded. If you don’t care, why should I?”
As Rose rounds the corner, I slip between a mailbox and a biker pedaling down the sidewalk. I watch her reach The Little Book Shop, hear
