Kim Harrison: Something Deadly This Way Comes

Nakita glanced at Barnabas, and when he shrugged, she looked at the school through the lens, snapping a few shots. “The school is still the best place to look,” she said. “Standard reap stuff. Go where the humans are.” The shutter clicked, and she straightened, frowning at the back of the camera. One of her pictures in our school’s expo at the mall had won top honors, and Nakita had been taking shots ever since.

Ron, I thought, scuffing my yellow sneakers against the stone and wishing the annoying man would ignore me like most adults did. Ron worked for the light instead of the dark, and though we both believed in the same thing—that choice was stronger than heaven’s fate—he’d rather slap a guardian angel on someone than try to get to the root of the problem and change their life. Which was exactly why I was causing trouble with the seraphs, God’s muckety-muck high angels, and trying to change things. Even after having already saved one person’s life and soul, I knew no one but Barnabas believed I really had a chance. And most times, I wondered about Barnabas.

“If we can’t find her here, we’ll just go to her apartment and wait,” I said, scanning the skies past the shifting leaves for black wings. The mindless, dripping sheets of black always seemed to congregate when a scything was about to occur in the hopes of snitching a bit of unattended soul—which sometimes made me wonder if the creepy things could read the time lines as well as a timekeeper. Dark reapers on the hunt brought them in faster than crows on carrion. That they weren’t here was a good omen. I hadn’t seen one in months, partly because Nakita hid her resonance much of the time, and partly because she wasn’t hunting.

Josh turned to sit with his back to the stone. Digging in his gym bag, he brought out his phone. “I’m going to text my mom. Tell her I’ll be home later. If anyone asks, I’m with you.”

I looked at my watch and added two hours. “Good idea. Where are we supposed to be? The Low D?” Okay, so I lied to my dad. I didn’t feel that good about it, but he wasn’t going to believe I was somewhere in California, much less dead and trying to change heaven’s policy on culling lost souls.

The soft scent of feathers drew my attention, and I smiled as Barnabas strode across the graveyard, hands in his pockets and eyes roving.

“No light reapers, no black wings, and no Grace,” he said, running a hand over his frizzy, loosely curling hair and squinting at the buses. “You want me to go check Tammy’s apartment?”

No Grace? I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d brought Grace into question, but I nodded, glancing at Nakita as the snap on her purse clicked shut. She’d put her camera away, refusing to let Barnabas be involved in anything she wasn’t. “You remember the address?” I asked.

“Coral Way,” he said, then touched the top of my hand. I’ll come back and tell you if she’s there, echoed in my thoughts, and I jumped. Blinking, I stared at him. Nakita had been shielding my resonance since leaving Three Rivers so Ron wouldn’t know where we were if he checked up on us, and I hadn’t known it was possible to touch thoughts while shielded. But Barnabas had been touching me physically, so maybe that’s how he was able to bypass the shield.

“Hey!” Nakita said, eyes flashing a divine silver for an instant. “No passing notes.”

Josh closed his phone and looked up at us in question.

“Relax,” Barnabas said sourly as his fingers slipped from the top of my hand. “I was just making sure that it was possible.” He paused, then said, “See? She didn’t hear that .”

“Because I’m shielded,” I said, and Barnabas nodded, his gaze across the street and on the cars lining up. I figured his sudden sour mood wasn’t coming from Nakita’s mistrust but from his ability to talk to me silently at all. It meant he wasn’t a light reaper anymore. He was moving toward the dark side, toward me. That a light reaper had abandoned his millennium-long beliefs to follow me into the enemy camp was a sobering thought. If I could get Nakita and him to work together to save a marked person’s body and soul, then I might be able to convince the seraphs to do things my way, and the early scythings would stop for good. If, if, if. And if I couldn’t, then as soon as I found my body, hidden somewhere between the now and the next, I was giving up my amulet and going back to being normal, alive, and knowing nothing about reapers, timekeepers, and guardian angels.

But the thought lacked the thrill that it once had. I wanted this to work. Bad.

Josh got to his feet, his gym bag in hand, shifting awkwardly at the tension between Nakita and Barnabas. “Hey, um, I’m going to go behind the mausoleum and change, okay? I’ll be right back.” He turned and walked away to the small building nearby, gray with age and neglect. I watched him go, thinking he looked good. Confident.

Two kids passed him on their bikes, cutting through the cemetery as a shortcut. School was out, and I turned back to the buses, hearing kids yelling at each other. Beside me, Nakita fidgeted. I was starting to feel the tension, too, and I leaned back from the grave marker, brushing the bits of old stone off my shirt as I looked for black wings.

This felt like a real reap. I had flashed forward. I had found the place. I was trying to find the mark. If I wasted my head start, a light reaper would show up to stop me. It didn’t matter that our goals were the same—save the mark’s life—because if I couldn’t, Nakita would be there to kill Tammy. Sacrifice the body to save the soul. It was a sucky reason to die.

“Barnabas,” I said, still wondering about Grace. “Do you think I should call Grace?” I liked Grace, but she was my contact with the seraphs, and if she wasn’t here, it might mean they wanted to see if I could do this without her help. She was too close to the divine for me to see more than the glow of her wings most of the time. Nakita, Barnabas, and I could hear her chimelike voice, but no one else could. Grace thought she was a poet. Which might be why Josh seemed to be the only one glad when she was around.

“I wouldn’t,” Barnabas said, his expression closed and worrying me all the more. “I’ll go check the apartment.”

“Thanks,” I said softly, and he walked away to find a quiet place to find his wings, and then, the air.

“I thought he’d never leave,” Nakita said.

“Oh, come on,” I coaxed, walking backward to the high fence between us and the street. “Barnabas is okay. Admit that you’re mad he’s turning into a dark reaper, and get over it.”

“Him?” She laughed. “The day Barnabas becomes a dark reaper is the day that I’ll kiss his amulet.”

Silently we watched the kids pouring out of the school, each seeming to know exactly where they were going. Whether she knew it or not, Nakita’s own views of the world were changing. When we had first met, she had been a typical dark reaper, ready to scythe people at a moment’s notice to save their souls. To her, the body wasn’t important. Life wasn’t important. The soul was. It had taken me ages to get a grasp of that. Dark for heaven’s fate, unseen; light for human’s choice to glean.

Technically speaking, it was the light reapers who were the bad guys in heaven’s sight, having been kicked out and banding together to protect those the dark reapers targeted. They saved lives at the expense of the soul. So who was doing the most good? I didn’t know anymore.

Nakita was silent beside me, scanning faces. I wasn’t sure if Tammy was going to be picked up by her mother, or if she was going to ride the bus home. “Maybe trying to find her at the school isn’t such a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we need to get closer,” I added when Nakita said nothing.