Something Deadly This Way Comes

Oh, God. Mom. I turned to the fire in a panic. I wanted to undo this, but I couldn’t. Johnny was dead. It should be me there, not him. Not him!

“Madison?” Nakita said, and I blinked at the man as his features melted into hers. “Are you all right?”

I had to run away, leave. Facing this was too awful, and the guilt made it hard to breathe. I should be dead, not Johnny. He was my brother, and now he is dead. Because of me. It should have been me. It should have been me!

“Madison!”

Barnabas was calling my name, and I gasped as the two realities—one real, one yet to be lived—clashed violently. The blue tint flashed red, and then the future vanished.

The echo of my heart pounded, and I stilled it as I stared up at Barnabas, Nakita, and . . . Josh. Above me, people cheered the last runner to cross the line. It was over. I had flashed into someone else, lived the foretold death-strike of her soul, and . . . survived.

I swayed, trying to shake the guilt and heartache over the girl’s brother’s death. Tammy. Her name was Tammy. Her belief that she caused her brother’s death still rang in me, a despair so heavy that it crushed all else and denied her soul the love it needed to survive. She would run, mentally if not physically, from those who would help her live again, and her soul . . . would wither and die long before her body did. Fate, the seraphs called it, but I didn’t believe in fate.

The old dark timekeeper, Kairos, would have sent Nakita to kill Tammy without a thought, taking her soul to save it at the expense of her life. Ron, the current light timekeeper, would, in turn, send a light reaper to stop the scything, saving her life at the cost of her soul, gambling that she would somehow learn to live again. But I wasn’t the old dark timekeeper, and I was going to use the opportunity to prove to the seraphs that fate could be sidestepped and we could save her life as well as her soul. All we needed to do was show Tammy a different choice.

Smiling weakly, I extended my hand. Josh took it, pulling me to my feet. I brushed off my butt and shivered in the shade. I gazed across the track, remembering the vision of billowing smoke and fire leaping as if it was a living thing. Silent, they waited.

I looked at them, seeing Barnabas’s knowing resignation that this was not going to be as easy as I wanted it to be, Nakita’s fear that I was going to ask her to do something she didn’t understand, and Josh’s eagerness to do something, anything, different.

“You guys up for a field trip?” I asked.

As one, they all exhaled, Josh grinning widely. “And how!”

Chapter Two

The gravestone I was standing behind came up to my chest, and I rested my arms across the top. The dry, hot breeze shifted the purple tips of my short hair in and out of my eyes as I waited for Barnabas to come back from his on-foot reconnaissance. Nakita was taking shots of the tombstones with her camera, always ready in her little red purse. And Josh was trying to keep from throwing up after his first angel- assisted flight.

Nakita insisted she’d chosen to land in this graveyard because the school was directly across the busy street, but I thought that it might be a dry sense of humor developing in the otherwise humor-deficient and deadly dark reaper. I’d admit the graveyard was probably a better choice than the fast-food place next door—especially with Josh still hyperventilating.

I glanced at Josh’s hunched, shaky outline as he leaned against a nearby grave marker, his gym bag at his feet and his back to me as he recovered. It probably hadn’t helped that we hadn’t just been flying, but flinging, as well. The awful nothingness of traveling between space was frightening at best, and the first time Nakita had wrapped her wings around me and flung us from Indiana to a Greek island on the other side of the earth had been awful. I suppose Kairos’s island was mine now, since I had his job and he was dead.

But whether we were there to give Josh a chance to catch his breath, or because of Nakita’s idea of a joke, the graveyard was quiet and out of the way, with a good view of the buses lining up on the far right—car pickup on the left. We’d crossed a couple of state lines to get here, and it was only three in the afternoon. School was just now letting out.

Smelling lightly of sweat and tennis shoes, Josh wobbled his way over to me. I gave him a smile and shifted down to make room, and together we leaned on the stone, our elbows touching. I was glad he was here.

“Do you see her?” he asked, his blue eyes finally starting to show his excitement.

“No,” I said, mentally thanking Beatrice, whose stone we were leaning on. “I never saw Tammy’s face. I figured I was lucky to see the name of the town and her street and that the fireman knew her name. But I’m sure she’s in there.”

I indicated the school with my chin, and he eyed me. “Your timekeeper-sense tingling, eh?” he kidded me, and I gave him an embarrassed look.

“Uh, yeah, actually,” I said, not wanting to admit that I’d felt an odd sort of shiver through my aura when we had flown over the school. The same thing had happened on my last prevention, and I was going to trust it this time.

“So how are we going to find her?” Josh asked, watching the kids just now starting to file out in threes and sixes.

Nakita, who was taking sideways pictures of a pollution-stained statue, dark with smoke and mold, said, without looking at me, “I could find her with a street address and a description of her aura, but if you flashed forward, then Ron probably has, too. We need to move fast before he puts a guardian angel on her and we can’t do anything.”

“We have at least a day,” I said, and Nakita looked at me from around her camera. “The flash forward was fuzzy around the edges,” I explained. “You only get the clear visions when it’s just hours ahead.” Grimacing, I looked from her to the school. “I think the seraphs sent this one to me early, knowing I’m not good at this yet.”

Though why they wanted to help me was a mystery. Maybe they didn’t like Ron, my timekeeper opposite. I knew I didn’t. Or maybe they hoped that once I got better at this that I’d start to believe in fate, not free will. Whatever the reason, I was sure that we were at least a day ahead of Ron’s natural, seraph-unassisted flash forward, and I wasn’t going to squander it.

Nakita glanced at Barnabas, and when he shrugged, she looked at the school through the lens, snapping a few shots. “The school is still the best place to look,” she said. “Standard reap stuff. Go where the humans are.” The shutter clicked, and she straightened, frowning at the back of the camera. One of her pictures in our school’s expo at the mall had won top honors, and Nakita had been taking shots ever since.

Ron, I thought, scuffing my yellow sneakers against the stone and wishing the annoying man would ignore me like most adults did. Ron worked for the light instead of the dark, and though we both believed in the same thing—that choice was stronger than heaven’s fate—he’d rather slap a guardian angel on someone than try to get to the root of the problem and change their life. Which was exactly why I was causing trouble with the seraphs, God’s muckety-muck high angels, and trying to change things. Even after having already saved one person’s life and soul, I knew no one but Barnabas believed I really had a chance. And most times, I wondered about Barnabas.

“If we can’t find her here, we’ll just go to her apartment and wait,” I said, scanning the skies past the shifting leaves for black wings. The mindless, dripping sheets of black always seemed to congregate when a scything was about to occur in the hopes of snitching a bit of unattended soul—which sometimes made me wonder if the creepy things could read the time lines as well as a timekeeper. Dark reapers on the hunt brought them in faster than crows on carrion. That they weren’t here was a good omen. I hadn’t seen one in months, partly because Nakita hid her resonance much of the time, and partly because she wasn’t hunting.

Josh turned to sit with his back to the stone. Digging in his gym bag, he brought out his phone. “I’m going to text my mom. Tell her I’ll be home later. If anyone asks, I’m with you.”

I looked at my watch and added two hours. “Good idea. Where are we supposed to be? The Low D?” Okay,