“No,” Nakita said before I could tell her to shut up. “We’re dark reapers.” She hesitated, then added, “I think. Madison, if we’re trying to save lives, then are we technically light?”
“No,” I said, worried about Tammy’s expression. This was going sour fast. There were too many people mucking it up, and I couldn’t get to why I was here. “Tammy, two minutes,” I said. “That’s it. You listen for two minutes, and we’ll leave. I know this looks weird, but we’re trying to help. If you don’t listen to me, you’re going to die tonight. Johnny, too.”
Her expression blanched, and Barnabas leaned toward me. “Uh, that might not have been the best thing to say,” he whispered.
Tammy gestured violently. “Get out!” she shouted. “Get out, or I’m calling the cops!”
She was frantic, and I stumbled when Barnabas took my shoulder and drew me back.
“Tammy, there’s a fire!” I said loudly, not caring if I sounded crazy or not. The horror had been too real. “I watched you both die. You need to leave tonight. Just go somewhere else! Anywhere!”
“And you think me talking about souls makes us sound crazy,” Nakita said.
“Get out!”
Tammy was screaming, and Johnny had opened his door, staring at us with one eye through the crack.
“I told you this wouldn’t work,” Barnabas said, his grip on my elbow tightening as he pulled me back another step.
“Okay, okay!” I said, scrambling. We were backing up past the fridge, and I grabbed the little sticky note from it that had a grocery list on it. The little pencil tied to it swung, and I caught it. “I’m going to give you a number,” I said, writing it down. “Call this guy, okay? His name is Shoe. He’s in Iowa. I helped him last month. Well, I helped his buddy Ace, but Ace is in a mental institution right now, so you’re going to have to talk to Shoe.” You can shut up anytime now, Madison.
“You’re just like friggin’ Mary Poppins, huh?” Tammy said sarcastically, clearly feeling braver now that we were backing toward the door.
“Just call him,” I said. “He was going to be accused of killing three people when his friend dumped a computer virus he made into a hospital system and screwed it up. We managed to fix that. We’re trying to help, Tammy!”
She stood with her arms crossed, phone tucked against her. “You’re crazy.”
I bumped into Nakita, and the warmth of the hall soaked into me. “Just call him, okay? And here’s my cell number. Call me when you want to talk.”
“One way or another, she’s not going to be alive when the sun comes up,” Nakita said dryly, and I took a deep breath, feeling my heels scuff on the carpet in the hall.
“Call Shoe,” I said, throwing the pad of paper to the floor between us. “Find out I’m not crazy. Or don’t call him, I don’t care. Just don’t be here tonight. You or Johnny. I know he’s a pain, but take him with you when you go to the movies, or ice cream, or whatever. Just don’t be here! You’ve got to believe me, Tammy! There’s going to be a fire!”
She had come forward, more confident now that we were in the hall. Johnny was wide-eyed behind her, and the dog was wagging his tail, toy in his mouth. Tammy glared at us, but it was Johnny who picked up the piece of paper with the phone number. With a shove, she slammed the door shut in our faces. The thump echoed in the hallway. From inside, the music grew louder.
“That went well,” Barnabas said glumly, his hands in his pockets.
Chapter Five
Closing my phone, I tucked it away, having texted CUL8R, THX to Josh after his message that he was on his way to bed but wanted to give it another thirty minutes before trying to sneak out. I glanced at Barnabas sitting next to me between the outside wall of the Laundromat and the Dumpster. If it was nine here, it was eleven at home. I had an hour before my curfew. I didn’t know when the fire was going to start, but Tammy had been outside of the apartment in my first flash, so it was likely going to happen sometime between nine and midnight, local time. It’d be just my luck that the fire would start when I was convincing my dad I was going to bed.
Right now, Tammy and Johnny were out. Barnabas and I were watching to make sure it stayed that way.
Across the street, the apartment complex had come alive with lights and the sound of too many TVs. From the Laundromat, we had watched the cop car, which Tammy had called, leave about an hour ago. It had taken them almost three hours to show up and forty minutes to leave, both cops laughing at Tammy’s story as they got in their vehicle and drove away, which was really sad because three crazy people had been in her house uninvited, and they weren’t taking her seriously. Tammy and Johnny had left right after the cops, Johnny whining as she dragged him down the sidewalk as the sun went down, looking scared as she got into her friend Jennifer’s dented two-door. I should’ve felt relieved that she’d taken my advice and left, but the fear that they might come back had me tense and worried.
It was dark now, the lights from the cars between us and the apartment complex creating moving spots of clarity in an otherwise depressing night. Nakita was out doing a flyby of the area. My back was to the red bricks, and my knees were bent almost to my chin as I swung my amulet on its silver chain, idly concentrating on it to shift its form. It was a skill that Nakita had taught me.
I miss Josh. “Barnabas,” I said softly, feeling alone though he sat right next to me. “You have a soul. How can you not?”
He was silent, watching as I played with the glittery black stone safely encased in its wrapping of wire. I focused on it, modulating the light bending around it until it looked like a little silver cross with a black stone in the center.
“You are the best of us,” I said, looking at my amulet. I was pleased with the result, though it still felt like an oval, river-washed stone to my fingers. “Unflawed and beautiful. You have to have a soul.”
“Angels weren’t made for the earth,” he said. “Only those of the earth have souls.”
“Okay, but you abandoned heaven for earth,” I said, not believing that God would be so cruel. But then again, look what he’d fated for me. “Maybe that means you really belonged here. That you’ve had a soul all this time and you just didn’t know it. It’s not like angels all look or act the same. If it’s not a soul that makes us different, then what is it?”
In my hand, the cross melted into a pair of black angel wings. Barnabas was silent as he looked at them, and then he muttered, “I left heaven because I was forbidden to return, not because I was gifted with a soul.”
Gift, I thought. I doubted it had even bothered him that he might not have a soul until Nakita said she had a sliver of mine, with the memories the black wings stole from me, memories of being afraid of the dark, of dying, of an end of everything. “Nakita said you were kicked out because you loved a human girl.”
The back door to the Laundromat creaked open and an employee click-clacked out, checking to make sure the door was locked before heading for one of the nearby cars. Silent, we watched until her red Pinto roared to life and puttered away.
“Is that true?” I asked in the new silence. Barnabas didn’t say anything, his jaw clenched and his eyes looking black in the dark. Suddenly embarrassed, I let the angel wings shift back to the more familiar vision of a smooth rock. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll shut up now.”
God, what was I doing, prying into his past? He might look my age, but he was over three thousand years old to my seventeen. Like he really wanted to share anything with me.
“There were no timekeepers back then,” he said abruptly, and I jumped even though his words were very soft, almost unheard over the nearby traffic’s thrum. “Scythings were meted out by the seraphs, like they’re doing now until things are settled with you. I was told to end the life of a girl whose soul was going to die. Pride was going to prevent her from asking forgiveness.”
Barnabas shifted his weight, his hands clasped loosely over his drawn-up knees, but his eyes were not seeing the back of t
he Dumpster. The lost expression on his face was scary.
“The earth was so fresh back then,” he said, the lines in his face smoothing. “Not this cement, carbon-polluted ember of what it’s become. It was almost as if creation energy still rang in the rocks and echoed in the hum of the bees, or the breath of a child on the verge of becoming a woman, a woman so perfect that heaven was willing to cut her life short to bring her soul back to them unsullied.”
I stifled a shiver, scared as to what he might say next.
“She was asleep in a field. My Sarah,” he breathed, his shoulders easing as he spoke her name, giving it an odd accent. “Her name was Sarah, and I’d never seen anything more beautiful in all creation.” His head dropped. “They should have sent someone stronger.”
I wanted to touch his arm but didn’t. How could I even pretend to understand? He’d laugh at me.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said, head down. “I . . . chose not to. I chose.” Only now did he turn to look at me, frightening me with the intensity in his gaze. “Her soul was alive still, and beautiful. It seemed wrong to take it then. She woke, and I was standing over her with my scythe bared. She was so scared. I didn’t want her perfect beauty remembering ugliness as she left the earth, so I lied. I told her she was safe, and I touched her, feeling her tremble. She believed me. I shouldn’t have touched her. I might have been able to do it if I hadn’t felt her fear.”
He was smiling now, as if in a fond memory. “That she trusted me when I told her I’d do her no harm struck me to my core. I couldn’t betray that trust, and my lie became truth.” Barnabas’s eyes tightened at the corner, and his clasped hands separated and pressed into the dirty cement. “A second reaper came to end what I couldn’t, and I fought him, beat him, and sent him back broken to be made whole again in the forges of heaven.”
His expression went sad as he looked at the dirty streets, seeing the past. “Her fate shifted in a single day because I saved her life.” His eyes came to me as if I might deny it, but I could say nothing. “She realized she had worth when I saved her life, and her soul was renewed. Innocent, I left to tell the seraphs that fate could be swayed and to stop the scythings. They wouldn’t listen, sending a third reaper even as I pleaded with them. She would have died if not for the guardian angels that happened to be with her at the time. They flocked to her. Her entire life, they clustered around her soul.” His eyes went confused. “I never understood why. Now I wonder if it was so they would be there to save her life—after she saved her own soul.”
My lips parted, and I wondered if Sarah’s had been the first guardian angel. But what shook me was that he had changed a person’s fate before and yet was reluctant to believe that it could be done again. Maybe it was because it happened so seldom.
Head tilted, Barnabas looked at me, his eyes still holding his love for her. “I refused to leave her after that, even when her soul remained intact and black wings couldn’t find her when she died. So they kicked me out of heaven.” His face changed, becoming harder as he threw a pebble to skip and hop through the parking lot. “It was worth it.”
I sent my gaze to the busy road and the brightly lit apartment complex. “You stayed with her for her entire life?”
The faint sound of a siren came from the nearby interstate. Barnabas was smiling, a fond, soft smile that I didn’t think I’d ever seen on him before. He looked seventeen to me, and I wondered how he’d handled looking that young for Sarah’s entire life. But people hadn’t lived much past forty back then. “Yes. I did,” he said, seemingly embarrassed.
“And you say you have no soul,” I said dryly as I threw a chip of cement at the Dumpster to hear it ting. “Good grief, Barnabas, if a soul is what lets us love, then you’ve got one.”
He opened his mouth as if to protest, but then he stopped, his gaze going across the street as the sirens didn’t fade but grew louder.
My heart gave a thump and I looked at my watch. It was almost nine thirty, but if there was trouble, Nakita would have told us. “It looks okay to me,” I said, then sucked in my breath when the sound of breaking glass came loud over the traffic and a tongue of flame licked out of a third-story window, searching for the sky.
“Barnabas!” I exclaimed, scrambling up. My hand went around my amulet, and I looked at the street as the fire trucks and a cop car roared up. Puppy presents on the rug, it was happening. Where was Nakita?!
“Here we go,” Barnabas said tiredly, and we edged out from behind the Dumpster.
“Tammy didn’t come back, did she?” I asked, almost frantic. I couldn’t take it if it had all been for nothing. “Barnabas, is she in there?”
“No. She’s over there, but she’s not inside. Johnny, either,” he said, his eyes going silver for an instant as he touched on the divine, and my shoulders eased. “Your warning seemed to have changed her fate again—if not saved her soul.”
“I haven’t flashed forward to see it,” I said, and we started toward the busy street, made twice as dangerous now that it was dark. There was a crosswalk, and Barnabas angled us to it.
“Maybe her soul isn’t safe yet,” Barnabas said.
“Maybe.” That Tammy’s soul might still be at risk was not a good thought. Barnabas pushed the cross button, and I fidgeted, wanting him to fly me across, but that would be hard to explain. We had time. If Tammy and Johnny were out of the building, we had time. Maybe now she’d listen to me. If Johnny didn’t die, then she wouldn’t give up on life, would she?
My fingers gripped my amulet, and I tried to relax enough to reach Nakita—if the fire trucks weren’t enough of a clue. Nakita, I thought, closing my eyes against the don’t walk sign flashing across the six lanes of traffic, but Barnabas’s shout jerked my eyes open and my attention shattered. My mental call for Nakita hit the ceiling of the air and broke, unheard.
“Black wings!” Barnabas said, his eyes wide.
My fingers on my amulet clenched, and I followed his pointing hand across the street. My knees seemed to wobble, and I reached for the light pole. Black wings. Scavengers of lost souls. If they were here, then there was probably a dark reaper on the hunt nearby. And if there was a hunting dark reaper, a light reaper was not far behind. Damn it, did Ron flash and send someone?
“You think they’re here for someone else?” I whispered, and Barnabas shook his head as the slimy sheets of black glided like stingrays over the apartment complex. They looked like a shiny, silvery line from the side, and most people, when they saw them at all, thought they were crows. I wanted to believe it was coincidence, but the heartbreaking truth was more likely the seraphs had decided I’d mucked this up too far and had sent in the professionals. And here I was, stuck on the wrong side of the street.
Barnabas pushed the cross button again. The fire trucks were causing some confusion, and the light hadn’t changed. Tammy was over there in that crowd—with half a dozen black wings circling overhead.
“Barnabas, we have to get over there!” I said, desperate as people started fleeing the apartments, dogs, cats, stereos, and TVs in their arms. A fireman was at the door keeping people from going back in for more as part of his crew went in to get the stragglers. And still the cars zoomed between us.
A boom of sound made me cower, mouth open as a huge gout of flame took one corner of the complex. “She isn’t in there,” Barnabas said, grabbing my arm. “I know it. Her aura puts her outside. She’s outside, Madison!”
It was a small comfort. I looked up the road, then down. The smell of the burning building was thick, and the black smoke blocked out the stars. We didn’t have time for this. “Let’s go,” I said suddenly.
“Madison! The cars!” Barnabas said, but I was already wiggling out of his grip and stepping off the curb.
Nakita! I thought, trying to touch her mind, my hand holding my amulet in a death grip as the first car laid on the horn and screeched the tires, dinging the car next to it as it slid to a halt six feet in front of me.
> Scared, I kept moving forward. The driver was screaming at me, but three lanes of traffic had stopped in a frightening sound of horns, skids, and a crunch of plastic.
My pace bobbled as the double image of Josh’s house on a dark, deserted street overlaid itself on my reality of fire trucks and the three-story apartment complex. It was Nakita. I’d reached her. What was she doing at Josh’s house? Waiting for him?
He’s brushing his teeth, Madison, came Nakita’s bored thought into mine as I saw through her eyes and she saw through mine, our connection that tight. This might be a while.
The apartment is on fire! I thought back at her, but she was already wide awake, having glimpsed my reality of another car slamming on its brakes only to be rear-ended and shoved forward another three feet, almost hitting me. I felt Barnabas take my elbow, shifting my path to avoid another car.
Madison, don’t go in there! she shouted into my thoughts.
Scared, I wondered if I could enter a burning building and be okay. I was dead. I didn’t need to breathe. She’s not in there, but there are black wings. Nakita, I need you!