Something Deadly This Way Comes

minutes, and we’ll leave. I know this looks weird, but we’re trying to help. If you don’t listen to me, you’re going to die tonight. Johnny, too.”

Her expression blanched, and Barnabas leaned toward me. “Uh, that might not have been the best thing to say,” he whispered.

Tammy gestured violently. “Get out!” she shouted. “Get out, or I’m calling the cops!”

She was frantic, and I stumbled when Barnabas took my shoulder and drew me back.

“Tammy, there’s a fire!” I said loudly, not caring if I sounded crazy or not. The horror had been too real. “I watched you both die. You need to leave tonight. Just go somewhere else! Anywhere!”

“And you think me talking about souls makes us sound crazy,” Nakita said.

“Get out!”

Tammy was screaming, and Johnny had opened his door, staring at us with one eye through the crack.

“I told you this wouldn’t work,” Barnabas said, his grip on my elbow tightening as he pulled me back another step.

“Okay, okay!” I said, scrambling. We were backing up past the fridge, and I grabbed the little sticky note from it that had a grocery list on it. The little pencil tied to it swung, and I caught it. “I’m going to give you a number,” I said, writing it down. “Call this guy, okay? His name is Shoe. He’s in Iowa. I helped him last month. Well, I helped his buddy Ace, but Ace is in a mental institution right now, so you’re going to have to talk to Shoe.” You can shut up anytime now, Madison.

“You’re just like friggin’ Mary Poppins, huh?” Tammy said sarcastically, clearly feeling braver now that we were backing toward the door.

“Just call him,” I said. “He was going to be accused of killing three people when his friend dumped a computer virus he made into a hospital system and screwed it up. We managed to fix that. We’re trying to help, Tammy!”

She stood with her arms crossed, phone tucked against her. “You’re crazy.”

I bumped into Nakita, and the warmth of the hall soaked into me. “Just call him, okay? And here’s my cell number. Call me when you want to talk.”

“One way or another, she’s not going to be alive when the sun comes up,” Nakita said dryly, and I took a deep breath, feeling my heels scuff on the carpet in the hall.

“Call Shoe,” I said, throwing the pad of paper to the floor between us. “Find out I’m not crazy. Or don’t call him, I don’t care. Just don’t be here tonight. You or Johnny. I know he’s a pain, but take him with you when you go to the movies, or ice cream, or whatever. Just don’t be here! You’ve got to believe me, Tammy! There’s going to be a fire!”

She had come forward, more confident now that we were in the hall. Johnny was wide-eyed behind her, and the dog was wagging his tail, toy in his mouth. Tammy glared at us, but it was Johnny who picked up the piece of paper with the phone number. With a shove, she slammed the door shut in our faces. The thump echoed in the hallway. From inside, the music grew louder.

“That went well,” Barnabas said glumly, his hands in his pockets.

Chapter Five

Closing my phone, I tucked it away, having texted CUL8R, THX to Josh after his message that he was on his way to bed but wanted to give it another thirty minutes before trying to sneak out. I glanced at Barnabas sitting next to me between the outside wall of the Laundromat and the Dumpster. If it was nine here, it was eleven at home. I had an hour before my curfew. I didn’t know when the fire was going to start, but Tammy had been outside of the apartment in my first flash, so it was likely going to happen sometime between nine and midnight, local time. It’d be just my luck that the fire would start when I was convincing my dad I was going to bed.

Right now, Tammy and Johnny were out. Barnabas and I were watching to make sure it stayed that way.

Across the street, the apartment complex had come alive with lights and the sound of too many TVs. From the Laundromat, we had watched the cop car, which Tammy had called, leave about an hour ago. It had taken them almost three hours to show up and forty minutes to leave, both cops laughing at Tammy’s story as they got in their vehicle and drove away, which was really sad because three crazy people had been in her house uninvited, and they weren’t taking her seriously. Tammy and Johnny had left right after the cops, Johnny whining as she dragged him down the sidewalk as the sun went down, looking scared as she got into her friend Jennifer’s dented two-door. I should’ve felt relieved that she’d taken my advice and left, but the fear that they might come back had me tense and worried.

It was dark now, the lights from the cars between us and the apartment complex creating moving spots of clarity in an otherwise depressing night. Nakita was out doing a flyby of the area. My back was to the red bricks, and my knees were bent almost to my chin as I swung my amulet on its silver chain, idly concentrating on it to shift its form. It was a skill that Nakita had taught me.

I miss Josh. “Barnabas,” I said softly, feeling alone though he sat right next to me. “You have a soul. How can you not?”

He was silent, watching as I played with the glittery black stone safely encased in its wrapping of wire. I focused on it, modulating the light bending around it until it looked like a little silver cross with a black stone in the center.

“You are the best of us,” I said, looking at my amulet. I was pleased with the result, though it still felt like an oval, river-washed stone to my fingers. “Unflawed and beautiful. You have to have a soul.”

“Angels weren’t made for the earth,” he said. “Only those of the earth have souls.”

“Okay, but you abandoned heaven for earth,” I said, not believing that God would be so cruel. But then again, look what he’d fated for me. “Maybe that means you really belonged here. That you’ve had a soul all this time and you just didn’t know it. It’s not like angels all look or act the same. If it’s not a soul that makes us different, then what is it?”

In my hand, the cross melted into a pair of black angel wings. Barnabas was silent as he looked at them, and then he muttered, “I left heaven because I was forbidden to return, not because I was gifted with a soul.”

Gift, I thought. I doubted it had even bothered him that he might not have a soul until Nakita said she had a sliver of mine, with the memories the black wings stole from me, memories of being afraid of the dark, of dying, of an end of everything. “Nakita said you were kicked out because you loved a human girl.”

The back door to the Laundromat creaked open and an employee click-clacked out, checking to make sure the door was locked before heading for one of the nearby cars. Silent, we watched until her red Pinto roared to life and puttered away.

“Is that true?” I asked in the new silence. Barnabas didn’t say anything, his jaw clenched and his eyes looking black in the dark. Suddenly embarrassed, I let the angel wings shift back to the more familiar vision of a smooth rock. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll shut up now.”

God, what was I doing, prying into his past? He might look my age, but he was over three thousand years old to my seventeen. Like he really wanted to share anything with me.

“There were no timekeepers back then,” he said abruptly, and I jumped even though his words were very soft, almost unheard over the nearby traffic’s thrum. “Scythings were meted out by the seraphs, like they’re doing now until things are settled with you. I was told to end the life of a girl whose soul was going to die. Pride was going to prevent her from asking forgiveness.”

Barnabas shifted his weight, his hands clasped loosely over his drawn-up knees, but his eyes were not seeing the back of the Dumpster. The lost expression on his face was scary.

“The earth was so fresh back then,” he said, the lines in his face smoothing. “Not this cement, carbon- polluted ember of what it’s become. It was almost as if creation energy still rang in the rocks and echoed in the hum of the bees, or the breath of a child on the verge of becoming a woman, a woman so perfect that heaven was willing to cut her life short to bring her soul back to them unsullied.”