don’t forget being the dark timekeeper, stealing every free moment of my day and night. One might think that not needing to sleep would give you tons of time, but it didn’t.
Already guessing my answer, Barnabas sighed from under his hat. It was likely going to be after sundown before I practiced shielding my amulet’s resonance. But a quiver went through me, and my heart, or at least the memory of it, gave a hard thump and went still. “Sure,” I said, smiling. Small word, heavy in significance.
Josh stuck his fingers through the mesh, and I touched them. Josh and I had been through a lot together, especially considering our rocky start when I was his pity date at prom. We were doing good now, even with the dark timekeeper stuff butting in. Smiling with half his face and looking charmingly beguiling, Josh pulled back, finally turning to face his friends as he walked away. Nakita was scowling when I turned around.
“You promised Barnabas you’d practice,” she said, surprising me.
“It’s okay to put off practice to watch Josh run, but it’s not okay if I want to socialize a little?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
It was reaper logic, and I knew I couldn’t win. Sad thing was, she was probably right. Turning away, I sat on the bleachers to wait for Josh. Barnabas was behind me smelling of feathers and the back of clouds—and yes, the back of clouds do have a smell. Ignoring me, Nakita went to stand at the fence, watching the stragglers come in. I wondered if she ought to go out for cross-country, then squashed the idea. She was here to protect me from myself, not learn how to run the two-mile.
But all thoughts of practice and The Low D left me when, without warning, a blue ink seemed to pour from the sun, hitting the earth and boiling up like smoke. It bled across the ground, washing over people oblivious to it, turning me cold. In the time it took to pull my head up, the blue had risen to encompass everything.
My heart gave a pound and stopped as a quick wash of fear slid into me. The last time I’d flashed forward to see the future, I had cried at the stars and felt like I was going to die. Then I fell into someone else’s mind and lived out the ugly moment when they began to kill their own soul. That had been almost a month ago, and I didn’t know what scared me more: that I might have to live through that hell again, or that the seraphs were giving me another chance to prove that killing a person wasn’t necessary to save their soul—and I might screw it up?
According to Grace—my annoying, often missing guardian angel and heavenly liaison—although the seraphs didn’t cause my flash forwards, they could stop them or make them come early, sort of screen them to make my transition to a fully functioning dark timekeeper easier. It wasn’t like I had a real teacher, having been dumped into the position. You’d think that the seraphs themselves would take on the job of assigning reaps permanently, but apparently angels had a hard time figuring out what was now, what was then, and what was to be, and it took a human to understand time. I happened to be in charge of the bad guys, the ones who killed people before they killed their souls. I’d rather be in charge of the light, who tried to stop the killing, but that’s not what had happened.
Voices faded in and out through the blue mist as I waited for the future to take me. “Madison, you can practice at The Low D,” Nakita said, kicking the fence to make it shudder. “The distraction will be good. Barnabas, it’s no wonder she never learns anything with you, teaching her at midnight on her roof.”
I clutched at my knees, terrified that if I moved, I’d find myself convulsing on the ground. The moment when a soul begins to die is traumatic, and it rings through the time lines and into the future, causing the flash forwards. The deeper into the future, the hazier the vision is, ranging from a crystal clarity to a murky nothing that only voices could penetrate. Which meant that if I was the first timekeeper to flash forward I didn’t necessarily have the advantage. Ron, the light timekeeper, might flash later, but clearer, and pull the reap right out from under me.
“Guys?” I whispered, and then gasped when the entire track with its runners, coaches, and blue lawn chairs was suddenly superimposed with a scene that was possibly a hundred miles distant and probably days into the future. And though I clutched at the ribbed heat of the aluminum bench, I also stood on a chalk-decorated sidewalk, staring at a three-story apartment building with old cars out front and a busy road behind me, traffic at a standstill. There was fuzzy blue haze at the edges of my vision and around every person, like a second aura.
The night was an awful mix of orange and black as the building burned, flames leaping high to show clusters of neighbors huddled together, dogs barking, and people screaming. Fire trucks spewed air scented with diesel fuel to the curb, which billowed up and warmed my ankles. Roaring. Everything was roaring. And then I realized it was the blood in my head as heartache gripped me.
The thought echoed in our shared mind. Terror that belonged to the girl whose body I was in filled me, and I felt myself stand, wobbling on the bleachers. I was flashing forward, living someone else’s nightmare. This was when her soul started to die, when something so bad happened that she forgot how to live. I was the only one who might be able to save her.
“Johnny!” I shouted, and Nakita turned to me. I could see her shock, and the image of a burning building grew behind her and melted into the reality of the track meet.
“She’s flashing,” I heard Barnabas say, and his hand clamped over my arm, keeping me from running forward as the girl whose mind I was in bolted.
In my vision, I ran through the cars, dodging firefighters trying to stop me, the blue haze rising from people like a fog. In reality, I felt my heart pound as I locked my knees and swayed so I wouldn’t run as well.
“Johnny!” I whispered as the girl screamed, then jumped when a heavy hand clamped onto my arm, and both the girl and I turned.
I blinked, wavering when I saw Barnabas behind the frightening image of a fireman in full gear, his breath hissing as he tried to keep me from going in. The crowd in the bleachers was standing, cheering on the last of the runners fighting it out. In my vision, the fire screamed, a surreal counterpoint to the terror filling me. Barnabas’s hand was on my arm, and he peered at me in sympathy.
“Johnny is in there!” I said, and the fireman stared, his expression hidden behind the face mask. “Let me go. Let me go! I have to get in there!”
As one, the girl and I twisted in Barnabas’s/the fireman’s grip, and as one, we were hoisted into their arms. I tried not to fight, knowing it wasn’t real, but the girl’s terror was mine.
I had no heart to beat in my solid, make-believe body, but memory is a funny thing, and I felt the echo of a pulse as Barnabas carried me, taking the jarring steps down the bleachers and to the cooler shade below. The night bathed my heated cheeks, scorched by sun and fire as Barnabas set me on the ground, and the blue haze that clouded the image of the distant future billowed from the fireman, but not the angel. “I’m sorry,” both Barnabas and the fireman said, for two different reasons.
Behind the fireman, I could see an ambulance. The lights were off and I felt my life end when they put a small, covered body into it. The sheet was pulled over it all the way. For an instant, she didn’t know what that meant, but I’d been in a body bag before, and somehow, when nothing I was thinking could reach her, this did.
“Oh, Johnny!” we sobbed as the reality hit her. In my vision, I started to cry as I watched the flames eat the roof of my room, but my tears were for Johnny. He was gone, and I cried for both Johnny and his sister as I had a vision of his round face and Transformer pajamas. He’d had fish sticks for dinner. I had been so mean, eating the last one when I knew he wanted it.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” I sobbed, my throat tight as I hunched against the bleacher support/side of the fire truck. Nearby was a fireman, giving me half his attention so I wouldn’t run away. Nakita was superimposed on him, making sure no one came close enough to know what was going on. Behind her, the blue sun shone down on the track meet. They were preparing to set up the next race amid the blaring of loudspeakers and the honking of trucks as a new water tanker came in. My brother was dead. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have left him alone.
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.
