by Kim Harrison
I took a deep breath, letting it all out to try to calm myself. If that was my original aura, then it had to be coming from my body, stuck in stasis where the old timekeeper had left it. I could reclaim my body, and with that, I didn’t need the timekeeper amulet to keep me alive and the black wings off me!
It was all I wanted at this point, and I slowly centered myself, trying to focus on the small space. All around me were my thoughts reaching out to pull me into the future. And a tiny, almost-not-there glow of blue.
I snatched at it, wanting it so bad I could feel it. Vertigo came from everywhere, and I gasped, clenching the arms of the chair but refusing to open my eyes and lose what progress I’d made. “This is mine!” I whispered, feeling my lips move and the last bit of breath I had in my lungs escape.
There was the faintest taste of salt on my lips, and I licked them, curious. A faint breeze sifted my hair, tickling my cheek. But there was no air vent in the cop’s office. The tickling grew more intense, and a faint, uncomfortable feeling of . . . of . . .
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, eyes still closed and mystified. Since I had died, the only time I’d run for the bathroom was to evade a question from my dad.
An uncomfortable feeling slid through me, and my hands clenched on the arms of the chair. But they weren’t gripping the hard plastic and metal. It was soft, like velvet.
My eyes flew open. Bright light stabbed into me, and I gasped. I was still sitting in a hot office smelling like cigarettes and stale sugar. But I was also in a breezy room, white curtains drifting in over the sills and thresholds. I could hear surf. And birds. The ceiling was marble, and the floor was black tile. I’d been here before. My island?
I looked down, seeing the grass-stained, torn remains of my prom dress overlaying the reality of my jeans and black lacy top covered in ash. My God! It was my body! I had found my body between the now and the next right where the seraph had said it was. I wasn’t in it yet, since I could still see the reality of my blue jeans and black top, but I had found it. And the best part? My body looked okay. It had been stuck frozen in time, and it was normal. Now all I had to do was let go of the body I was in and . . . take it.
“Madison!”
Someone grabbed my shoulder from behind. I jerked, and with a cry, I felt a gut-wrenching pull. Pain vibrated through me, and I doubled over, eyes closed against the pain. The sound of the wind and the taste of the salt were gone. I had almost had it, but now it was gone!
“Madison! Are you okay? You looked like a ghost! See-through!”
“Stop!” I croaked out, almost vomiting as I bent over my knees. My eyes opened, and sadness rose up. I was staring at the ugly green and white tiles of the police station. Where in the hell was the beach?
“I almost had it!” I cried, standing up and nearly hitting Barnabas in the chin.
He backed up in confusion, and I spun, looking at the chair as if I might still see myself sitting in it, torn prom dress and all. But all that I saw was the empty chair.
“Barnabas, I was there!” I pointed down, feeling my heart thump, but I knew it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real—and the heartache of that almost brought me to tears. “I found my body. Between the now and the next! It was at the island, stuck in a time bubble or something! Barnabas, damn it! Why couldn’t you have waited just a few minutes more! I almost had it! I was in it. I was almost alive!”
Barnabas’s shocked expression went empty. “You—”
“Found my body! Yes!” I looked at the ugly room, torn between crying and screaming at someone.
There were footsteps in the hall, and Barnabas took my elbow. “Let’s go. The sooner we get out of here, the fewer memories I’m going to have to fix.”
He started pulling me to the door, and I dug my heels in. Memories? He’s worried about memories? “I found my body, and you don’t care!”
“I do care, but we have to get out of here!” His grip on me tightening, he jerked me into the hallway as someone skidded around the bend in the hallway.
“Where do you think you’re going?!” the cop said, and then his eyes widened as he looked at Barnabas. “Hey, weren’t you at the fire?” Falling into a crouch, he reached for his gun.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Barnabas said, pushing me toward the end of the hallway.
“I found my friggin’ body, and you don’t care!” I insisted, resisting.
“Stop!” the cop exclaimed, and Barnabas’s eyes, inches from my own, glinted silver. As sweet as syrup, the man fell down.
I looked over my shoulder to see, but Barnabas’s grip on my arm tightened, and he started pushing me to the end of the hallway again. “I’m thrilled you found your body, but we’re trying to get out of here,” he muttered. “You can claim your body later.” His gaze went over my shoulder, and his eyes widened. “Run!”
He shoved me, and I staggered, almost cracking my nose as I went down on all fours. My palms stung, and my knees throbbed. I looked up in time to see Barnabas make a gesture, his eyes silvering for a moment.
The second man bending over the first fell, but I could hear more people coming. Ticked, I pulled myself up off the floor. My palms were sticky, and I didn’t know what to wipe them on. “Later?” I shouted. “I want it now!”
My last words were a veritable shout, and a wave of angry force pulsed from me.
Swearing, Barnabas ducked, his face white as he rose from his crouch and looked at me.
I staggered as the dizziness that had risen up and lapped about my head slowly ebbed to my feet. My hand went to the wall, and I swear, it felt spongy. I yanked it back, then blinked. My stone had gone ice cold and silvery.
“Uh, Madison?” Barnabas whispered, and I realized it was quiet.
You know . . . too quiet.
The men sprawled on the floor weren’t moving. Fear trickled through me as I remembered that burst of anger that had exploded from me. Had I killed them?
“Whoo-hoo!” came Nakita’s excited whoop from somewhere in the building, and a sudden pounding of feet echoed in the hallway. I spun as she leapt over the downed men, skidding to a breathless halt, her sword bared and her amulet gleaming. “Madison, when did you learn to stop time?”
Stop time?
“I, uh,” I stammered, then looked at my amulet. It was still silver, like Barnabas’s eyes when he touched the divine. A thread of sound was running through me, and when I chanced a look at the time line, it burst into existence so brilliantly that I almost fell.
“I don’t know,” I said, instinct making me cover my eyes, though the brightness was in me. Blinking, I dropped my inner sight, and looked up. Barnabas was holding me upright. Seeing me okay, he let go and stepped back. “Uh, how do I undo it?” I asked them.
“Not yet!” Nakita exclaimed, her color high. “Wait until we get out.” She darted past us to the back door, sending her whoops of excitement to echo in the absolute stillness. The clock in the cop’s office wasn’t ticking when we passed it. The lights from the cars outside weren’t moving. The only sound in the entire world was coming from us. It was as creepy as all get-out. And I did it?
“Let’s go,” Barnabas said, clearly subdued.
I followed him down the hall to where Nakita was pushing open the automatic door. Outside was even creepier, with no wind, no noise. It was as if we had walked into a painting. Everything felt flat. Nakita almost danced down the cement steps and to the shadowed parking lot. “Madison, you’re getting good at this. I think we should try teaching you how to make a sword from your thoughts when this is done, okay?”
I cringed. All I wanted to do was go home. I wanted to get my body and go home and forget everything that had happened. But if I did, nothing would change. Not in heaven, not in earth, not in me. Nothing.
“How do I start time?” I whispered, confusion so thick in me it made me ill.
“I don’t know.” Barnabas scuffed to a halt beside a cop car, turning to look as a ball of light burst out the still-o
pen doors.
“Madison!” Grace exclaimed, darting circles around me. “You stopped time? That’s wonderful! And how clever of you to exempt the divine!”
I had been wondering about that, but it wasn’t as if I knew what I was doing.
“It would be if she knew how she did it,” Barnabas said, echoing my thoughts. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching Nakita doing her impression of a professional football player after a touchdown.
“What is your problem, Barney?” Nakita said, giving him a little shove as she finished. “Madison is finally getting the hang of this. You look like you just swallowed a scarab.”
Barnabas furrowed his brow, the skin tight around his eyes. “She found her body.”
Nakita’s smile hesitated, her eyes becoming confused even as her delight lingered in her expression. “What?”
“She found her body, between the now and the next,” he said again, and even Grace’s glow dimmed.
It was if the deadness of the world around us seeped into Nakita. She froze, unspoken thoughts turning her elation into ash. “Nakita,” I said, reaching out, and she took a step back, the sword in her hand dissolving into nothing. Her amulet went dark as the energy was reabsorbed, and her gaze fell from mine.
“I’m happy for you,” she said, not looking at me. “I know it’s what you wanted.”
“Nakita . . .” Why was I feeling bad about this? If the seraphs weren’t going to give me a real chance to make this work, then why should I stick around and be a part of a system that I didn’t agree with? I could be with Josh then, and be normal. But she had turned away, and guilt hit me hard.
“Nakita!” I said more firmly, and she stopped. Feeling like a heel, I caught up with her and tried to get her to look at me. “I don’t want to give this up, but what choice do I have?”
“You say you believe in choice,” she said, turning away. “But you don’t really. Or you’d stay.”
Again she turned away, and this time I let her go. Grace came to hover over my shoulder, and Barnabas eased up on my other side. “Why does everyone think I should stick around when no one believes I can change things?”
“I believe you can change things,” Barnabas said, but I wasn’t listening, and I stomped off. Nakita had found the street and was walking in front of cars that had been going fifty miles per hour, her pace stiff and her arms swinging. “I do,” he insisted as he caught up to me. “That’s why I left Ron. I still think you can if you’d stick with it.”
He probably did, which made it all the harder.
“Madison,” he said as he drew me to a stop. We were at the curb, and the lights from the oncoming traffic lit his face, showing his pinched brow and his eyes, pleading with me. “You keep saying that no one is giving you a chance to see if your theories work, but they are. You’re trying to change a system that has been in place since people looked up at the stars and wondered how they got there. It works for a reason, and you might make more progress if you’d take the time to see why a system is in place before trying to change it to yours. The seraphs are singing. I can hear them even down here. Change is happening; you simply don’t see it. You might have to do something you don’t want to for a while before you find the way to make your change happen.”
I couldn’t say anything back, I was too depressed. Seeing me silent, he inclined his head, then turned to follow Nakita, walking fast as he tried to catch up.
“Nakita!” he called out, and I stared at him, my hand wrapped around my amulet. I think it was the longest thing he’d ever said to me, and it left me feeling even worse.
“I’m such an idiot,” I whispered to Grace.
“But you’re our idiot,” she chimed out, and I winced.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked as I started to follow them, my sneakers barely lifting from the asphalt.
“First, you need to let go of the time line and start things moving,” she said, “before Ron comes to see what’s going on.”
“Yeah.” Okay, let go of the time line. How does one do that?
“And I think you ought to go home and check in with your dad before he realizes I set his clocks back two hours,” Grace added. “He thinks it’s . . . like, ten thirty. Same as here.”
“Oh, wow. Thanks, Grace.” The first inkling of hope started to seep back in, and I mentally added talk to Nakita to my list of things to do. She looked positively melancholy as she walked beside Barnabas, her head down as he talked to her.
“Well, once a guardian angel, always a guardian angel,” she said wryly, if a glowing ball of light could be wry. “And after that, you can meet us back in the graveyard to figure out how to fix this mess you made with Tammy. The seraphs are ticked. When did you learn how to change a person’s aura?”
“Right before I learned how to stop time,” I said, thinking it wasn’t right that my learning something had gotten me in trouble with the seraphs. Again.
“Great,” Grace said pointedly. “How about starting it back up? This is getting old. Any tighter of a grip, and you would have stopped your reapers, too.”
I nodded, bringing up the image of the time line in my imagination. It was brighter than usual, and it was starting to give me a headache. Relax, I thought, dropping my shoulders. My eyes flashed open when, just that easy, the noise and color rushed back into the world.
“Good job!” Grace said, dipping up and down as car lights flickered over us and a cry of outrage rose up from the cop shop. “Let’s get out of here.”
I ran after Barnabas and Nakita, glad time was going again, but that lingering feeling of doubt wouldn’t leave me. Yes, I had found my body, but no one seemed to care. Or rather, they wished I hadn’t. What did it say about my life when the thing I wanted most of all was the very thing that would cause me to lose the things I loved?
Chapter Seven
It was almost too dark to see when Barnabas back-winged and landed me gently on the roof of my house, the threat of rain making it darker than it typically would be. The muffling black was like a blanket, smothering. It seemed to spill out my darkened bedroom window to fill the entire world and make one big nothing. It was sort of how I felt inside.
My short hair flew up as Barnabas settled his wings, and I reached to smooth it, catching a glimpse of his wings before they vanished. Head down, he stood before me as if wanting to say something.
It had been a very quiet flight back—my thoughts on Nakita, his on who-knew-what. Leaving her had been hard, with her stalking to the graveyard to wait for me, probably thinking I was going to abandon her once I got my body back. Demus was somewhere this side of heaven, but since he was looking for the wrong resonance, I had a space of time to regroup. I was going to spend at least five minutes of it convincing my dad that nothing was going on and that I was going to bed.
There was that word again. Nothing. Nothing was exactly how I felt. Empty inside. After having been in my body for even that instant, I remembered what it was like to see, feel . . . to really be a part of existence. Now the shell that my amulet gave me felt like the nothing that it was.
“You sure you want me to leave?” Barnabas finally said, seeing as neither of us was moving from the roof.
I nodded, arms wrapped around myself, the slight chill seeping into me after the steamy warmth of Baxter. “It should only take an hour,” I said, wondering why he’d landed here instead of the front yard. “And I want to see if Josh can slip away. It’d be great if he could come back with us.” He, at least, would be glad I had found my body. And that it wasn’t a mass of decayed yuck.
“An hour.” Looking uncomfortable, Barnabas flicked a dark gaze to me, then back to the cloudy skies. “I’ve got time to go back and get your phone, then. There’s no reason to leave it there to trigger memories.”
“Thank you,” I said earnestly. I hoped he’d get it. There was no way to explain to my dad why it was in California.
“Unless you’re sure you don’t want me to wait for you?” Barnabas aske
d.
I shook my head. Nakita was there alone. Moving to the edge of the roof, I sat down to make the jump to the ground. Lucy, the neighbor’s golden retriever, wasn’t in the yard. I hesitated at the scrape of Barnabas’s sneakers beside me, and I looked up to his shadowed face.
“What do you want me to say to Nakita?” Barnabas asked, his eyes catching the glow from the streetlamp. “She thinks you’re leaving. Are you? You want me to lie to her?”
My depression thickened, frosted with guilt. I didn’t know. I wanted to stay, but I couldn’t do this if all I was doing was killing people. “Tell her that I’m thinking,” I said, unable to look at him anymore. “Tell her that I’m proud of her, and you, and that I want it to work. I want to stay. I will stay if . . .”
Barnabas didn’t move, but somehow, he became darker. “What if the seraphs don’t allow you to do things your way? They did send Demus.”
It was exactly what I was worried about, but I gave him a fake smile, my feet dangling into the black between heaven and earth. “Hey! I’m the dark timekeeper. What are they going to do? Kill me? They already did that.” I looked away, fear making me drop my eyes. They could take my amulet away and let black wings destroy me. A soul without an aura was fair game, and mine came from my amulet right now. But I wasn’t going to take the job of dark timekeeper and send reapers out to kill people to save their souls if the reason I was doing it was because I was afraid. Even if I was.
“I’ll talk to her,” he finally said, clearly seeing my fear.
“Thanks, Barnabas.” I pushed myself off the roof, my knees bending to absorb the impact of the fall. I looked up to try and see him wing out, but there was nothing except the barely moving black branches between me and the heavy clouds. Head down, I walked to the front door, looking at my shoelaces. Skulls and hearts. Maybe I should grow up.
