Something Deadly This Way Comes

pulled into my awareness the shimmering silver sheet of time that stretched to infinity in either direction. It glowed from the auras that comprised it, people that existed this very second. Falling from it like water or a drape, was the past. It still glowed, but not nearly as bright as the present. It was the light of collective memory. Go back too far, and the canvas grew black except for people that humanity had chosen to remember, silver triumphs and disasters that transcended time itself. But here, so close to the present, it was alight with color as lives intertwined, connected, and parted.

Going forward from the ribbon was vastly different. A black so intense as to almost not be there made a hazy patch of what-might-be. It was conscious thought, and it was what pulled us from the present into the future. It stretched wide in some places, and narrow at others, almost as if some people were living a tiny bit into the future by pushing their thoughts into it. Artists, mostly. Teachers. Children. The movers and shakers.

But it was the glowing ribbon of “now” that I was interested in, and I searched it, looking for Tammy. I knew Demus was likely looking for her, too, and a spike of fear almost broke me from my concentration. “Steady,” I whispered, hearing a commotion down the hall. An argument about me, probably.

My mental sight grew clearer, and it was as if I hovered over the glowing blanket of light, searching for a particular note among an entire concert. Down one way, then retracing my steps and going farther down the other, searching among the thousands of souls near me. And then, like the small sound a vibrating glass makes when you run your finger across the rim, I felt her.

Tammy, I thought, elated. It had to be. She was alone by the looks of it, and not too far away. I focused on her, trying to put myself in her thoughts, but I only got the impression of wet hair, aching knees, and a sense of fear and hopelessness—of giving up and abandonment. The vibrating-glass sound grew louder, almost sour, and I wondered if it was this off-key sound/taste that the seraphs used to find souls in danger of becoming lost. It grated on me.

She wasn’t thinking of the future at all, her thoughts pulling her into the next moment hardly stretching past her existence. I tried to slip my awareness into that dull gray haze that existed between everyone’s present and future to try to reach her mind like I could Nakita or Barnabas, but it was like trying to thread a needle when you can’t see the eye or feel the thread. I didn’t think it was even possible. But changing the sound her aura was making . . . I might be able to change that.

A sliding thump in the distance jolted my eyes open, and I looked at the clock. Not even a minute had passed. Okay, I’d found her. Now to see if I could make a change. I shifted on the thin padding of the chair, trying to settle myself.

I willed my thoughts to slow and my focus to sharpen on my mindscape, making her aura my entire world and surrounding myself in her green and orange. I changed the color of my thoughts when I talked silently to Barnabas and Nakita. I really didn’t know how I did it, apart from focusing on them and bringing them clearly into my thoughts: Nakita’s willingness and desire to understand, Barnabas’s deep-set melancholy for the human tragedy. But thinking of Tammy would only strengthen her existing aura, which was not what I wanted.

Frowning, I wondered if the answer might be in her past, and I looked down its length, seeing one sorrow layered over the next until it looked like that was all that existed for her: the birthday party her dad promised he’d come to, and then the argument he got in with her mother, which in turn took all the joy from the present he’d given her—and the purse he lovingly picked out for her was never used, forever stained with the memory of it.

There was the shame from a failed test, and another failed test, and another, until it was easier to pretend it didn’t matter than to try, and to fail again. Deeper went the ugly words her friends spoke about another girl, but it was the knowledge that if they said such lies about one person, they probably spoke that way about her, too, which ruined any joy she might find with them.

But what tore at me was her understanding that the promises made in childhood were not true, that the lies our parents told us about being nice to others and others will be nice to you, that people were kind on the inside, and that love was more abundant than hurt . . . all of it was lies. No wonder her soul was lost. It wasn’t that she had a harder life than others, but that she was blinding herself to the joy, that the little things were being brushed aside, forgotten. Her perception of good and bad was off because she refused to put the good on the scale, too.

And as I looked over her life, it was all I could do not to cry along with her. What about this? I thought, seeing the laughter in her mother’s face when they had all come back to the shopping cart with the same carton of ice cream. And this? I wondered, watching Tammy scuff the marvel of a blue-jay feather under her shoe as she walked home. The satisfaction in a poem she wrote but never shared had to have more weight than the sigh of disappointment from her mother because of a dishwasher left unemptied—but Tammy ignored it, any satisfaction rubbed out as if it never existed.

And this! I exclaimed, seeing Johnny’s smile of thanks when she put a bowl out for his breakfast. Was that worth nothing to her?

Tammy made a low moan, clutching her knees to her chest and rocking as if in pain. A flash of brilliance sparked through her aura, shifting the orange, and I knew that Tammy was seeing what I was, not hearing my thoughts perhaps, but seeing the good in her life as I recognized it myself. Excitement shivered through me as I realized her aura was shifting, the orange being muted, dulled, as I made her revaluate her life in small, subtle ways.

Encouraged, I focused on Johnny, and somehow, when everything else seemed to be blocked and useless, she remembered him, and her tears grew to include regret. It was the first step toward making a change, and I fastened on it like a lifeline. Rushing forward through her life, I found more memories of Johnny, forgotten. The sullen thank-you he gave her last Sunday when she gave him the remote control instead of lording over the TV. The gratitude she had felt two weeks ago when she overheard him stick up for her with his friends. And the time that he changed her bowling score so it would look like she won. He loved her, and she had all but forgotten.

I could feel Tammy crying, holding her knees to herself, utterly miserable. I could feel her sorrow, her heartache. It ran through me like it was my own, and I gave her some of my hope, wanting to leave her with the idea that things weren’t so bad. We were as much our past as our future, and hers was better than she knew. She just had to look at it in a new way.

A tear, hot and heavy, spilled down my cheek, and as I wiped it away, I pulled back from Tammy’s aura to see what I’d done.

The orange at its center was now rimmed with black.

My heart gave a thump, then stopped. My first thought was that I’d damaged her, made things worse, but then I decided it didn’t matter. Her aura had shifted, maybe just enough. Demus or Arariel wouldn’t find her. Pulling back farther, I memorized Tammy’s new resonance so I could find it again. I had no idea if the color shift was permanent or not. She was still a lost soul, but perhaps now she’d live long enough for me to get out of here and help her. I had to get her to do her own soul-searching. She had to make the choice herself.

Tammy’s aura melted into the glorious bright line of the present as I withdrew, and a feeling of satisfaction filled me. Smiling, I fingered my amulet, warm from having touched the divine. Take that, seraphs, I thought, feeling empowered for the first time in a long while.

Curious, I brought my own resonance before me, wondering if I had any black in my aura before I had died and taken on the dark timekeeper’s amulet. I felt a soft quiver in me as I ran my attention down my recent history, blurring over the snarl the time line had made when my soul had been cut out of it. It was where I had died, and it amazed me how the lives around me had bound together, supporting each other until a new weft and weave could mend the tear. And then the sudden burst of light when I had taken the amulet from Kairos, the timekeeper before me, using it to keep me connected to the present.

Nervous, I steadied myself and looked past the snarl. It wasn’t easy to look at one’s past, knowing it was fixed and one’s emotions were laid bare. But I felt myself smile as I saw that I really hadn’t changed since I’d died. Sure, my original aura of blue and yellow was vastly different from the deep violet that it now was, but my vision of the balance between good and bad was about the same.

It really was a pretty aura, I thought, sort of mentally running my fingers through it and feeling melancholy that it wasn’t mine anymore. Or was it? Maybe I could change my own aura, just for a moment, and be myself?

Shifting focus, I ran my attention back to the present until I found myself sitting alone in a cop’s office, waiting for them to find a battery for my phone. My aura was the dark of a timekeeper’s, not my own, but as I