Something Deadly This Way Comes

so I lied to my dad. I didn’t feel that good about it, but he wasn’t going to believe I was somewhere in California, much less dead and trying to change heaven’s policy on culling lost souls.

The soft scent of feathers drew my attention, and I smiled as Barnabas strode across the graveyard, hands in his pockets and eyes roving.

“No light reapers, no black wings, and no Grace,” he said, running a hand over his frizzy, loosely curling hair and squinting at the buses. “You want me to go check Tammy’s apartment?”

No Grace? I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d brought Grace into question, but I nodded, glancing at Nakita as the snap on her purse clicked shut. She’d put her camera away, refusing to let Barnabas be involved in anything she wasn’t. “You remember the address?” I asked.

“Coral Way,” he said, then touched the top of my hand. I’ll come back and tell you if she’s there, echoed in my thoughts, and I jumped. Blinking, I stared at him. Nakita had been shielding my resonance since leaving Three Rivers so Ron wouldn’t know where we were if he checked up on us, and I hadn’t known it was possible to touch thoughts while shielded. But Barnabas had been touching me physically, so maybe that’s how he was able to bypass the shield.

“Hey!” Nakita said, eyes flashing a divine silver for an instant. “No passing notes.”

Josh closed his phone and looked up at us in question.

“Relax,” Barnabas said sourly as his fingers slipped from the top of my hand. “I was just making sure that it was possible.” He paused, then said, “See? She didn’t hear that.”

“Because I’m shielded,” I said, and Barnabas nodded, his gaze across the street and on the cars lining up. I figured his sudden sour mood wasn’t coming from Nakita’s mistrust but from his ability to talk to me silently at all. It meant he wasn’t a light reaper anymore. He was moving toward the dark side, toward me. That a light reaper had abandoned his millennium-long beliefs to follow me into the enemy camp was a sobering thought. If I could get Nakita and him to work together to save a marked person’s body and soul, then I might be able to convince the seraphs to do things my way, and the early scythings would stop for good. If, if, if. And if I couldn’t, then as soon as I found my body, hidden somewhere between the now and the next, I was giving up my amulet and going back to being normal, alive, and knowing nothing about reapers, timekeepers, and guardian angels.

But the thought lacked the thrill that it once had. I wanted this to work. Bad.

Josh got to his feet, his gym bag in hand, shifting awkwardly at the tension between Nakita and Barnabas. “Hey, um, I’m going to go behind the mausoleum and change, okay? I’ll be right back.” He turned and walked away to the small building nearby, gray with age and neglect. I watched him go, thinking he looked good. Confident.

Two kids passed him on their bikes, cutting through the cemetery as a shortcut. School was out, and I turned back to the buses, hearing kids yelling at each other. Beside me, Nakita fidgeted. I was starting to feel the tension, too, and I leaned back from the grave marker, brushing the bits of old stone off my shirt as I looked for black wings.

This felt like a real reap. I had flashed forward. I had found the place. I was trying to find the mark. If I wasted my head start, a light reaper would show up to stop me. It didn’t matter that our goals were the same—save the mark’s life—because if I couldn’t, Nakita would be there to kill Tammy. Sacrifice the body to save the soul. It was a sucky reason to die.

“Barnabas,” I said, still wondering about Grace. “Do you think I should call Grace?” I liked Grace, but she was my contact with the seraphs, and if she wasn’t here, it might mean they wanted to see if I could do this without her help. She was too close to the divine for me to see more than the glow of her wings most of the time. Nakita, Barnabas, and I could hear her chimelike voice, but no one else could. Grace thought she was a poet. Which might be why Josh seemed to be the only one glad when she was around.

“I wouldn’t,” Barnabas said, his expression closed and worrying me all the more. “I’ll go check the apartment.”

“Thanks,” I said softly, and he walked away to find a quiet place to find his wings, and then, the air.

“I thought he’d never leave,” Nakita said.

“Oh, come on,” I coaxed, walking backward to the high fence between us and the street. “Barnabas is okay. Admit that you’re mad he’s turning into a dark reaper, and get over it.”

“Him?” She laughed. “The day Barnabas becomes a dark reaper is the day that I’ll kiss his amulet.”

Silently we watched the kids pouring out of the school, each seeming to know exactly where they were going. Whether she knew it or not, Nakita’s own views of the world were changing. When we had first met, she had been a typical dark reaper, ready to scythe people at a moment’s notice to save their souls. To her, the body wasn’t important. Life wasn’t important. The soul was. It had taken me ages to get a grasp of that. Dark for heaven’s fate, unseen; light for human’s choice to glean.

Technically speaking, it was the light reapers who were the bad guys in heaven’s sight, having been kicked out and banding together to protect those the dark reapers targeted. They saved lives at the expense of the soul. So who was doing the most good? I didn’t know anymore.

Nakita was silent beside me, scanning faces. I wasn’t sure if Tammy was going to be picked up by her mother, or if she was going to ride the bus home. “Maybe trying to find her at the school isn’t such a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we need to get closer,” I added when Nakita said nothing.

“Why don’t you try to use the time lines to find her?” she finally said. “Kairos always showed me the mark’s aura in the time lines so I could recognize him or her by that.”

I winced. “Tammy’s aura, huh?” I offered. “That’s great. Except I can’t see auras.”

“I can,” Nakita said. “Kairos would show me the time line where he flashed, and the aura that mixed with his was the one we were looking for. We can do this, Madison.” Her brow furrowed. “We can find her before Barnabas does, I bet.”

A knot of tension eased in me, and I smiled. Barnabas. The rivalry was that bad, even now. “Worth a try,” I said cheerfully, then turned my back on the school and sat down. The bars of the fence pushed into my back, and the grass tickled my ankles. Dappled sun made a cool wash of light on me. Taking a breath I didn’t need other than to speak with, I exhaled, trying to settle myself using the technique that Barnabas had taught me. My hand crept up, and I grasped the stone that was at the center of my amulet. The silver wires cradling it were warm, and I closed my eyes. It was my amulet that let me see the time lines, and if I could use it to see auras, it would be a very good sign that I was becoming better at this.

Finding the time lines was easy, and with hardly any effort, I found the bright glow of the present, shifting off into infinity. Now all I had to do was find Tammy on it.

Everyone’s life had a different color or aura. I couldn’t see auras, but Barnabas had gone over them countless times as we sat on my roof and waited for the sun to rise. For most people the color was a reflection of their age and state of mind and could change with the seasons, but for reapers, it was a reflection of what side of the fate or free-will fence they were on. Light reapers tended to be a dark red in color, and dark reapers, violet, and those in the middle a neutral, greenish yellow. When I’d first met Barnabas, his amulet had been a respectable dark red. Now, though, it was clearly moving up the spectrum, showing more certainly than actions that he was starting to doubt his own beliefs. Doubt in an angel was a scary, unexpected thing, like finding out rocks were really made of water.

My original aura had been blue, or so Barnabas had once told me. Now it was violet, so dark it was basically black thanks to my timekeeper amulet. It was easy to find my aura in the bright time line, looking almost like a sinkhole. Beside me was Nakita’s cheerful violet glow, her thoughts weaving among mine. Barnabas was absent, but if I looked down the fabric of time into the past, I could see where he had been with us. Josh, too. As I settled myself, Josh’s aura jumped from somewhere else, joining mine and Nakita’s. He was back from the mausoleum, and I didn’t need to open my eyes to know it.

“Is she flashing forward again?” I heard him whisper.

“No,” Nakita said softly. “She’s searching the time lines for the mark’s, uh, Tammy’s aura.”

“Really?” Josh said, and I heard him drop his gym bag. “What color is my aura?”

“Blue,” she said tersely. “Shhh.”

As soon as she said it, my entire thinking realigned. Given a name, the resonance I was seeing from Josh suddenly made sense. Blue. Josh’s resonance was blue. I could see it in my mind so much clearer. Feeling more confident, I left the bright glow of Josh and Nakita to scan back a few hours earlier to the tangle of lines where I flashed forward at the track meet. I could feel Nakita’s presence beside me, and together we looked to where my