Dappled sun shifted upon
my bare shoulder as I leaned against a rough boulder bigger than my
long-absent car. Frustrated, I unclenched my teeth before I gave
myself a headache. The sound of people swimming at the nearby lake
was loud, but the happy shrieks only tightened my gut. Leave it to
Barnabas to try to shift four months of practice into success in a
mere twenty minutes.
“No pressure,” I
muttered, glancing across the sneaker-flattened dirt path to the
reaper leaning against a pine tree with his eyes shut. Barnabas was
probably older than fire, but appearing the age of the person you’re
trying to save helped light reapers blend in. And Barnabas blended
in nicely with his jeans, black T-shirt, and his lanky physique. I
couldn’t see the wings we’d flown in on, but they were there, making
him an angel of death with frizzy hair, brown eyes, and in a pair of
holey sneakers. Would that make them holy holey-sneakers? I
wondered, as I nervously rolled the pinecone in my hand back and
forth.
Feeling my attention on
him, Barnabas opened his eyes. “What’s so funny, Madison?” he
asked, and I sighed.
“Nothing.” My gaze
dropped to my punky sneakers. Yellow with purple laces and sculls
and crossbones on the toes. They matched my hair, not that anyone
had ever made the connection between them and the purple dyed tips
of my blond bangs. “Maybe if I wasn’t so hot I could do this.”
His eyebrows rose as he
looked at my shorts and tank top. I wasn’t hot, but nerves had me
jittery. I hadn’t known that I was going to summer camp when I’d
slipped out of the house this morning and rode my bike to school to
meet Barnabas for my first scythe prevention. I wasn’t
complaining. It felt good to get out of New Covington. The college
town my dad lived in was okay, but spending the summer with a light
reaper lurking within twenty miles tended to put a damper on making
friends. Being the new girl sucked eggs.
Barnabas frowned across
the path at me. “You need to concentrate,” he said, and I spun the
prickly pinecone between my palms faster. “Feel for your aura, and
thin it. God help you, Madison. I’m right in front of you. Do it,
or I’m taking you home.”
Dropping the pinecone, I
scowled. If we went home, whoever we were here to save wouldn’t
have a chance. “I’m working on it.” The boulder behind me seemed
to press harder into my back, and I reached to hold the black amulet
around my neck, trying to think of a hazy mist around me thinning
until my thought could break free of the envelope of “self,” trying
to imagine the haze of color around Barnabas—listen for it,
maybe—and then give my thoughts that same color so it could slip
past his own aura and he could hear me. It was a two-stage
process. I’d been trying for months, and Barnabas bringing me here
to tempt me with the chance to help him on a scythe prevention
wasn’t making me work harder, it was ticking me off.
Irritated, I looked up at
Barnabas. Stuck babysitting me, he hadn’t been on a scythe
prevention in months, and it showed in his increasingly cross
expression and failing patience. Dark reapers killed people before
their allotted time when the probable future showed they were going
to make decisions that went contrary to black reaper’s grand schemes
of fate. Light reapers tried to stop them to ensure humanity’s
right of choice. I was one of Barnabas’s rare failures, but I
hadn’t gone gentle into that good night when a dark reaper had
killed me, but whined and protested the entire way, taking an out
when I found it—an out in the form of stealing the amulet of the
same black reaper who had scythed me. The stolen stone currently
warming in my tight grip gave me the solid illusion of a body when
my real one was somewhere over the rainbow. Not only was I dead,
but I didn’t even have a real body.
Having flubbed up my
scythe prevention—my prom night no less—Barnabas had been assigned
to shadow me in case the reaper who’d killed me came back for the
stone. Watching me had put a crimp in his real job of
Reconnaissance Error Acquisitions Personnel, Evaluation and
Recovery, and he was losing status. Even worse, I felt like it was
my fault. If I could just figure this thought-touching out, he
could resume his regular duties with me reasonably safe back home
and able to contact him if I had to. But it wasn’t happening.
“Barnabas,” I said, weary
of it. “Are you sure I can do this? I’m not a reaper.”
“Neither is Ron,” he
said, pulling his toe out of the hole he had wedged in the soft
earth.
Ron, short for Chronos,
was his boss—the only other human who had direct contact with the
divine plane. “I’m only seventeen, not seventeen hundred,” I
complained. “And maybe I can’t because I’m dead. Ever think of
that?”
Silent, Barnabas looked
out at the pine-rimmed lake. The worried lift to his shoulders told
me he had. His shoulders fell in a sigh. “Try again,” he said
softly.
I tightened my grip until
the silver wires holding the stone pressed into my fingers, trying
to imagine Barnabas in my thoughts, his easy grace that most high
schoolers lacked, his nice figure and attractive face, his riveting
smile. Sighing I rolled my eyes at myself. I wasn’t crushing on
him, but every angel of death I’d seen had been attractive.
Especially the bad one.
My thoughts drifted back
to my prom night, and my shoulders slumped. Being dead sucked, but
I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself. If I hadn’t been playing
queen bee, I could have swallowed my pride and stayed at the prom
after finding out I was Josh’s pity date. It wasn’t like Josh was a
dweeb, but if I’d ever had the chance to make it with the cool girls
at a new school, being a pity date had killed it. And when a sexy
senior had offered to drive me home, I’d said yes. Sexy senior
turned into psychopath Seth, a dark reaper bent on killing me.
Which he did, using a scythe when rolling his convertible down an
embankment hadn’t done it. I’d woken up in the morgue to Barnabas
arguing with another light reaper as to whose fault it was I was
dead. Even better, Seth showed up, shocking the b-juice out of
everyone. Apparently he wanted to throw my soul in front of someone
to “buy his way to a higher court,” whatever that meant. But only
Barnabas and I knew that last part.
Seth’s interest should
have ended when my life had, an oddity that was overlooked when I
snagged his amulet and claimed it in my effort to stay somewhat
alive. It hadn’t been a reaper’s stone I’d taken but something
else. Ron still didn’t know what it was exactly. So far, despite
all the long nights spent on my roof practicing with Barnabas, I
hadn’t been able to do anything with the shimmery black stone. I
couldn’t reach Barnabas’s thoughts, couldn’t make a sword from the
amulet’s energy, couldn’t even go an afternoon without a freaking
babysitter. Barnabas had been hanging around so much that my dad
thought he was my boyfriend and my boss at the flower shop thought I
should take out a restraining order.
My arms crossed over my
chest, and I pushed myself away from the rock. “I’m sorry,
Barnabas,” I said feeling stupid. “You go on and do your
prevention. I’ll just sit here and wait. I’ll be fine.” Maybe
this was why he brought me. I’d be safer here then several hundred
miles away. I knew it was killing him not being able to do his job.
Barnabas pressed his lips
together, clearly upset. “No. This was a bad idea,” he said,
coming forward to take my arm. “Let’s go. I’ll tell Ron to send
someone else.”
Affronted, I jerked out
of his grip, not liking that my inability was holding him back. “So
what if you can’t hear me. I can hear you!” I said. “If you don’t
want to leave me here, then I’ll just follow you and stay in the
shadows. Jeez, Barnabas. It’s a summer camp. How much trouble can
I get into just watching?”
“Plenty,” he said, his
smooth, young-looking face grimacing.
Someone was coming up the
path, and I rocked back a step. “I’ll just sit out of the way. No
one will even know I’m there,” I said, and Barnabas’s eyes crinkled
in worry. “Ron said the amulet will keep me hidden even if a reaper
touched me. What’s the problem, here!”
His brow furrowed. “Ron
would skin me alive if something went wrong.”
“Well it was his idea to
include me on your reap preventions, wasn’t it?” I countered.
Barnabas kicked softly at
the huge rock. “When you were properly trained. You aren’t.”
The people were getting
closer, and I fidgeted. “Come on, Barnabas. Why did you fly us out
here if you were just going to take me home again? You knew I
couldn’t solidify in twenty minutes what I’ve been trying to do the
past four months. You want to do this as much as I do. I’m already
dead. What more can they do to me?”
Lips pressed tight, he
looked up the path at the noisy group. “If you knew, you wouldn’t
be arguing with me. [. . .]
