Something Deadly This Way Comes

“Madison!” Grace exclaimed, darting circles around me. “You stopped time? That’s wonderful! And how clever of you to exempt the divine!”

I had been wondering about that, but it wasn’t as if I knew what I was doing.

“It would be if she knew how she did it,” Barnabas said, echoing my thoughts. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching Nakita doing her impression of a professional football player after a touchdown.

“What is your problem, Barney?” Nakita said, giving him a little shove as she finished. “Madison is finally getting the hang of this. You look like you just swallowed a scarab.”

Barnabas furrowed his brow, the skin tight around his eyes. “She found her body.”

Nakita’s smile hesitated, her eyes becoming confused even as her delight lingered in her expression. “What?”

“She found her body, between the now and the next,” he said again, and even Grace’s glow dimmed.

It was if the deadness of the world around us seeped into Nakita. She froze, unspoken thoughts turning her elation into ash. “Nakita,” I said, reaching out, and she took a step back, the sword in her hand dissolving into nothing. Her amulet went dark as the energy was reabsorbed, and her gaze fell from mine.

“I’m happy for you,” she said, not looking at me. “I know it’s what you wanted.”

“Nakita . . .” Why was I feeling bad about this? If the seraphs weren’t going to give me a real chance to make this work, then why should I stick around and be a part of a system that I didn’t agree with? I could be with Josh then, and be normal. But she had turned away, and guilt hit me hard.

“Nakita!” I said more firmly, and she stopped. Feeling like a heel, I caught up with her and tried to get her to look at me. “I don’t want to give this up, but what choice do I have?”

“You say you believe in choice,” she said, turning away. “But you don’t really. Or you’d stay.”

Again she turned away, and this time I let her go. Grace came to hover over my shoulder, and Barnabas eased up on my other side. “Why does everyone think I should stick around when no one believes I can change things?”

“I believe you can change things,” Barnabas said, but I wasn’t listening, and I stomped off. Nakita had found the street and was walking in front of cars that had been going fifty miles per hour, her pace stiff and her arms swinging. “I do,” he insisted as he caught up to me. “That’s why I left Ron. I still think you can if you’d stick with it.”

He probably did, which made it all the harder.

“Madison,” he said as he drew me to a stop. We were at the curb, and the lights from the oncoming traffic lit his face, showing his pinched brow and his eyes, pleading with me. “You keep saying that no one is giving you a chance to see if your theories work, but they are. You’re trying to change a system that has been in place since people looked up at the stars and wondered how they got there. It works for a reason, and you might make more progress if you’d take the time to see why a system is in place before trying to change it to yours. The seraphs are singing. I can hear them even down here. Change is happening; you simply don’t see it. You might have to do something you don’t want to for a while before you find the way to make your change happen.”

I couldn’t say anything back, I was too depressed. Seeing me silent, he inclined his head, then turned to follow Nakita, walking fast as he tried to catch up.

“Nakita!” he called out, and I stared at him, my hand wrapped around my amulet. I think it was the longest thing he’d ever said to me, and it left me feeling even worse.

“I’m such an idiot,” I whispered to Grace.

“But you’re our idiot,” she chimed out, and I winced.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked as I started to follow them, my sneakers barely lifting from the asphalt.

“First, you need to let go of the time line and start things moving,” she said, “before Ron comes to see what’s going on.”

“Yeah.” Okay, let go of the time line. How does one do that?

“And I think you ought to go home and check in with your dad before he realizes I set his clocks back two hours,” Grace added. “He thinks it’s . . . like, ten thirty. Same as here.”

“Oh, wow. Thanks, Grace.” The first inkling of hope started to seep back in, and I mentally added talk to Nakita to my list of things to do. She looked positively melancholy as she walked beside Barnabas, her head down as he talked to her.

“Well, once a guardian angel, always a guardian angel,” she said wryly, if a glowing ball of light could be wry. “And after that, you can meet us back in the graveyard to figure out how to fix this mess you made with Tammy. The seraphs are ticked. When did you learn how to change a person’s aura?”

“Right before I learned how to stop time,” I said, thinking it wasn’t right that my learning something had gotten me in trouble with the seraphs. Again.

“Great,” Grace said pointedly. “How about starting it back up? This is getting old. Any tighter of a grip, and you would have stopped your reapers, too.”

I nodded, bringing up the image of the time line in my imagination. It was brighter than usual, and it was starting to give me a headache. Relax, I thought, dropping my shoulders. My eyes flashed open when, just that easy, the noise and color rushed back into the world.

“Good job!” Grace said, dipping up and down as car lights flickered over us and a cry of outrage rose up from the cop shop. “Let’s get out of here.”

I ran after Barnabas and Nakita, glad time was going again, but that lingering feeling of doubt wouldn’t leave me. Yes, I had found my body, but no one seemed to care. Or rather, they wished I hadn’t. What did it say about my life when the thing I wanted most of all was the very thing that would cause me to lose the things I loved?

Chapter Seven

It was almost too dark to see when Barnabas back-winged and landed me gently on the roof of my house, the threat of rain making it darker than it typically would be. The muffling black was like a blanket, smothering. It seemed to spill out my darkened bedroom window to fill the entire world and make one big nothing. It was sort of how I felt inside.

My short hair flew up as Barnabas settled his wings, and I reached to smooth it, catching a glimpse of his wings before they vanished. Head down, he stood before me as if wanting to say something.

It had been a very quiet flight back—my thoughts on Nakita, his on who-knew-what. Leaving her had been hard, with her stalking to the graveyard to wait for me, probably thinking I was going to abandon her once I got my body back. Demus was somewhere this side of heaven, but since he was looking for the wrong resonance, I had a space of time to regroup. I was going to spend at least five minutes of it convincing my dad that nothing was going on and that I was going to bed.

There was that word again. Nothing. Nothing was exactly how I felt. Empty inside. After having been in my body for even that instant, I remembered what it was like to see, feel . . . to really be a part of existence. Now the shell that my amulet gave me felt like the nothing that it was.

“You sure you want me to leave?” Barnabas finally said, seeing as neither of us was moving from the roof.

I nodded, arms wrapped around myself, the slight chill seeping into me after the steamy warmth of Baxter. “It should only take an hour,” I said, wondering why he’d landed here instead of the front yard. “And I want to see if Josh can slip away. It’d be great if he could come back with us.” He, at least, would be glad I had found my body. And that it wasn’t a mass of decayed yuck.

“An hour.” Looking uncomfortable, Barnabas flicked a dark gaze to me, then back to the cloudy skies. “I’ve got time to go back and get your phone, then. There’s no reason to leave it there to trigger memories.”

“Thank you,” I said earnestly. I hoped he’d get it. There was no way to explain to my dad why it was in California.

“Unless you’re sure you don’t want me to wait for you?” Barnabas asked.

I shook my head. Nakita was there alone. Moving to the edge of the roof, I sat down to make the jump to the ground. Lucy, the neighbor’s golden retriever, wasn’t in the yard. I hesitated at the scrape of Barnabas’s sneakers