Kim Harrison - Something Deadly This Way Comes

“Yup.”

I need to figure out how to change her resonance. I was a timekeeper, damn it. I should be able to do this. “Maybe if I talked to her a little more.”

“Madison. Don’t you get it? You are a timekeeper. You can’t change fate. And you can’t cause change. You see the future. You send out dark reapers to cull souls. If they are successful, the light reaper who failed escorts them to heaven’s gate so the black wings don’t eat their still-bright soul, severed early from their body. You know this. It’s how you met Barnabas. Andif the light reaper wins, a guardian angel keeps the mark safe in the hope that their soul will remember how to live. That’s all you do!”

Screw it. I knew I could do more. “I see the future, huh?” I said, starting to get angry. “Then I want to see her future. Ask the seraphs to show me. I can still fix this!”

“They are angry at you! First you fix it so that they both die in grace, which is what they wanted, and then you go muck it up by talking to Tammy and getting her to leave the apartment. You may have saved both their lives, but you damned her soul doing it!” Grace said, glowing so brightly that she started to cast shadows. “I’m not going to ask them to do a far search on her!”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not too happy with them. Butting in like that.” Sullenly I stood, pacing to the high window and back. That cop was going to come back. I had to get out of here. I had to find Tammy before Demus did. Jeez, what kind of timekeeper was I if I couldn’t even elude a building of cops?

“I bet I can find her future by myself,” I said, hands on my hips and glaring at her.

“See the future before the seraphs do?” Grace snorted. “There once was a girl with no brain, whose theories were kind of insane.”

“Thanks, Grace. You’re a font of wisdom,” I muttered.

She rose up in a haze of glowing light, adding, “To outfly immortals, caused many to chortle. Because what the girl was, was vain.”

“I’m not vain,” I said as she hovered before the closed door. “I’m trying to get things done and no one is helping.”

Grace bobbed up and down impatiently. “I gotta go. They found another phone battery.”

“Go, go! And thank you,” I said, waving at her as she flew through the glass and vanished. I didn’t want to explain to my dad why I was on the West Coast and accused of arson. But even if Grace could keep them from contacting my dad, there was no way that I could hide that I wasn’t at home. Never would I have imagined I could get things this messed up. Maybe Grace was right. Maybe they were all right.

Arms wrapped around myself, I glanced at the door and sank down in my squeaky chair. Maybe. But it didn’t feel right. Barnabas had once said to trust my gut. My gut said this wasn’t done. My gut said I could make this better. My gut said . . . I could make a difference.

I looked at the ceiling again, closing my eyes against the water stains that looked like swirling clouds or angels. And I’m disgraced, I thought, feeling a welling of self-pity. The seraphs were angry with me. Worse, I failed Tammy.

Ticked, I kicked out at the cop’s desk. My toe met the thick steel with a dull thump, but I hadn’t put any force behind it and nothing happened, not even a twinge in my toes.

I know Tammy’s aura resonance. I can find her future by myself, I thought defiantly, but it was quickly followed by the realization that I probably couldn’t. I wasn’t being a self-defeatist—I was being a realist. Still . . . maybe I could change her resonance so Demus and Arariel couldn’t find her. Buy me some time.

Resolving to try it, I looked at the ceiling again, exhaling everything out of my lungs. My eyes closed, and I pulled into my awareness the shimmering silver sheet of time that stretched to infinity in either direction. It glowed from the auras that comprised it, people that existed this very second. Falling from it like water or a drape, was the past. It still glowed, but not nearly as bright as the present. It was the light of collective memory. Go back too far, and the canvas grew black except for people that humanity had chosen to remember, silver triumphs and disasters that transcended time itself. But here, so close to the present, it was alight with color as lives intertwined, connected, and parted.

Going forward from the ribbon was vastly different. A black so intense as to almost not be there made a hazy patch of what-might-be. It was conscious thought, and it was what pulled us from the present into the future. It stretched wide in some places, and narrow at others, almost as if some people were living a tiny bit into the future by pushing their thoughts into it. Artists, mostly. Teachers. Children. The movers and shakers.

But it was the glowing ribbon of “now” that I was interested in, and I searched it, looking for Tammy. I knew Demus was likely looking for her, too, and a spike of fear almost broke me from my concentration. “Steady,” I whispered, hearing a commotion down the hall. An argument about me, probably.

My mental sight grew clearer, and it was as if I hovered over the glowing blanket of light, searching for a particular note among an entire concert. Down one way, then retracing my steps and going farther down the other, searching among the thousands of souls near me. And then, like the small sound a vibrating glass makes when you run your finger across the rim, I felt her.

Tammy, I thought, elated. It had to be. She was alone by the looks of it, and not too far away. I focused on her, trying to put myself in her thoughts, but I only got the impression of wet hair, aching knees, and a sense of fear and hopelessness—of giving up and abandonment. The vibrating-glass sound grew louder, almost sour, and I wondered if it was this off-key sound/taste that the seraphs used to find souls in danger of becoming lost. It grated on me.

She wasn’t thinking of the future at all, her thoughts pulling her into the next moment hardly stretching past her existence. I tried to slip my awareness into that dull gray haze that existed between everyone’s present and future to try to reach her mind like I could Nakita or Barnabas, but it was like trying to thread a needle when you can’t see the eye or feel the thread. I didn’t think it was even possible. But changing the sound her aura was making . . . I might be able to change that.

A sliding thump in the distance jolted my eyes open, and I looked at the clock. Not even a minute had passed. Okay, I’d found her. Now to see if I could make a change. I shifted on the thin padding of the chair, trying to settle myself.

I willed my thoughts to slow and my focus to sharpen on my mindscape, making her aura my entire world and surrounding myself in her green and orange. I changed the color of my thoughts when I talked silently to Barnabas and Nakita. I really didn’t know how I did it, apart from focusing on them and bringing them clearly into my thoughts: Nakita’s willingness and desire to understand, Barnabas’s deep-set melancholy for the human tragedy. But thinking of Tammy would only strengthen her existing aura, which was not what I wanted.

Frowning, I wondered if the answer might be in her past, and I looked down its length, seeing one sorrow layered over the next until it looked like that was all that existed for her: the birthday party her dad promised he’d come to, and then the argument he got in with her mother, which in turn took all the joy from the present he’d given her—and the purse he lovingly picked out for her was never used, forever stained with the memory of it.

There was the shame from a failed test, and another failed test, and another, until it was easier to pretend it didn’t matter than to try, and to fail again. Deeper went the ugly words her friends spoke about another girl, but it was the knowledge that if they said such lies about one person, they probably spoke that way about her, too, which ruined any joy she might find with them.