Kim Harrison - Something Deadly This Way Comes

But what tore at me was her understanding that the promises made in childhood were not true, that the lies our parents told us about being nice to others and others will be nice to you, that people were kind on the inside, and that love was more abundant than hurt . . . all of it was lies. No wonder her soul was lost. It wasn’t that she had a harder life than others, but that she was blinding herself to the joy, that the little things were being brushed aside, forgotten. Her perception of good and bad was off because she refused to put the good on the scale, too.

And as I looked over her life, it was all I could do not to cry along with her. What about this? I thought, seeing the laughter in her mother’s face when they had all come back to the shopping cart with the same carton of ice cream. And this? I wondered, watching Tammy scuff the marvel of a blue-jay feather under her shoe as she walked home. The satisfaction in a poem she wrote but never shared had to have more weight than the sigh of disappointment from her mother because of a dishwasher left unemptied—but Tammy ignored it, any satisfaction rubbed out as if it never existed.

And this! I exclaimed, seeing Johnny’s smile of thanks when she put a bowl out for his breakfast. Was that worth nothing to her?

Tammy made a low moan, clutching her knees to her chest and rocking as if in pain. A flash of brilliance sparked through her aura, shifting the orange, and I knew that Tammy was seeing what I was, not hearing my thoughts perhaps, but seeing the good in her life as I recognized it myself. Excitement shivered through me as I realized her aura was shifting, the orange being muted, dulled, as I made her revaluate her life in small, subtle ways.

Encouraged, I focused on Johnny, and somehow, when everything else seemed to be blocked and useless, she remembered him, and her tears grew to include regret. It was the first step toward making a change, and I fastened on it like a lifeline. Rushing forward through her life, I found more memories of Johnny, forgotten. The sullen thank-you he gave her last Sunday when she gave him the remote control instead of lording over the TV. The gratitude she had felt two weeks ago when she overheard him stick up for her with his friends. And the time that he changed her bowling score so it would look like she won. He loved her, and she had all but forgotten.

I could feel Tammy crying, holding her knees to herself, utterly miserable. I could feel her sorrow, her heartache. It ran through me like it was my own, and I gave her some of my hope, wanting to leave her with the idea that things weren’t so bad. We were as much our past as our future, and hers was better than she knew. She just had to look at it in a new way.

A tear, hot and heavy, spilled down my cheek, and as I wiped it away, I pulled back from Tammy’s aura to see what I’d done.

The orange at its center was now rimmed with black.

My heart gave a thump, then stopped. My first thought was that I’d damaged her, made things worse, but then I decided it didn’t matter. Her aura had shifted, maybe just enough. Demus or Arariel wouldn’t find her. Pulling back farther, I memorized Tammy’s new resonance so I could find it again. I had no idea if the color shift was permanent or not. She was still a lost soul, but perhaps now she’d live long enough for me to get out of here and help her. I had to get her to do her own soul-searching. She had to make the choice herself.

Tammy’s aura melted into the glorious bright line of the present as I withdrew, and a feeling of satisfaction filled me. Smiling, I fingered my amulet, warm from having touched the divine. Take that, seraphs, I thought, feeling empowered for the first time in a long while.

Curious, I brought my own resonance before me, wondering if I had any black in my aura before I had died and taken on the dark timekeeper’s amulet. I felt a soft quiver in me as I ran my attention down my recent history, blurring over the snarl the time line had made when my soul had been cut out of it. It was where I had died, and it amazed me how the lives around me had bound together, supporting each other until a new weft and weave could mend the tear. And then the sudden burst of light when I had taken the amulet from Kairos, the timekeeper before me, using it to keep me connected to the present.

Nervous, I steadied myself and looked past the snarl. It wasn’t easy to look at one’s past, knowing it was fixed and one’s emotions were laid bare. But I felt myself smile as I saw that I really hadn’t changed since I’d died. Sure, my original aura of blue and yellow was vastly different from the deep violet that it now was, but my vision of the balance between good and bad was about the same.

It really was a pretty aura, I thought, sort of mentally running my fingers through it and feeling melancholy that it wasn’t mine anymore. Or was it? Maybe I could change my own aura, just for a moment, and be myself?

Shifting focus, I ran my attention back to the present until I found myself sitting alone in a cop’s office, waiting for them to find a battery for my phone. My aura was the dark of a timekeeper’s, not my own, but as I compared it to the one in my memory, a faint glimmer of blue seemed to echo, not in my aura but in the hazy gray where the future became the now.

Between the now and the next? Oh, crap, I thought, excitement zinging down to my toes. Was that what the seraph had meant? Was that where my body was hidden? In the fraction of existence where time shifted from the past to the future? Time wouldn’t exist there, and my body would be pristine and perfect, hovering an instant into death until I could reclaim it.

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.