Darynda Jones: Death, Doom, and Detention

“Does my hair seem curlier to you?”

“Curlier than an ironing board, yes. Curlier than a French poodle, no. Now, concentrate.” She rubbed her hands together to emphasize her enthusiasm. “It’s vision time, baby. We need them now more than ever.”

Even at their height, my prophetic visions hadn’t been terribly useful. What on earth could I gain from looking into a mirror besides lower self-esteem?

“Are you even concentrating?” Brooke asked as I tripped on a pebble. This took coordination. An attribute I lacked in spades. But she believed with every fiber of her being that my visions were the key to everything. According to prophecy, I was supposed to stop an impending war between humans and demons before it ever started, but how I was supposed to manage that, nobody knew. Least of all me.

And why was I even participating in this ridiculous scheme of hers? She knew better than anyone that I either had to be touching the person I was prophesying about, or have touched him at some point in the recent past.

But she was bound and determined to expand my skills, to widen my periphery so I could have visions on the fly. So far, our attempts with the mirror thing had yielded exactly squat. Unless I was touching said fly, nothing happened.

Kind of like now.

After a solid twelve seconds, I gave up. “You know, it would help if I knew what to concentrate on.”

Brooke patted my arm absently, staring into her phone. “Concentrate on concentrating.”

For the love of Starbucks, what the heck did that mean?

I lifted the mirror again. Shook it a little to make sure it was working. Held it at arm’s length. Squinted.

Just as I was about to give up entirely, a vision, dark and alluring, materialized behind me. I sucked in a soft breath at the sight even though, admittedly, there was nothing prophetic about it.

Jared Kovach was standing against the wall of the building we’d just left. Watching me. At least he had been until he saw me notice him in the mirror. He turned away the moment our eyes made contact, and the pain that shot through me was quick and unforgiving.

I snapped the compact closed and handed it back to Brooke. “I think it’s broken.”

From my periphery, I noticed Jared start our way, and my stomach clenched in agony. I wanted to run.

Instead, I stopped and turned to him. Mostly because he could outrun me. He was wearing his requisite jeans that fit low on his hips and a gray T-shirt with a brown bomber jacket thrown over his shoulder. The cloudy day had splashed color across the sky behind him, and hints of oranges, pinks, and purples served as a backdrop to the powerful set of his shoulders, the lean hills and valleys of his arms. Somehow I didn’t think that a coincidence. But his exquisite form only drove home the fact that he was so far out of my league, it was unreal.

He’d come to Riley’s Switch a couple of months ago to do a job. That job was to pop in, take me a few minutes before I was slated to die anyway, then pop back out again. But he’d disobeyed his orders.

He’d saved me instead, thus breaking one of the three rules that celestial beings are bound by. Even the powerful Angel of Death. As a result, he was stuck on Earth. Stuck helping me.

The problem was, I fell in love with him. It was hard not to. And he really liked me, if his mouth pressed against mine every chance it got was any indication. But that made my grandparents nervous.

They went behind my back and asked him to keep his distance, so keep his distance he had. Out of respect for their wishes and because he couldn’t argue their point, he gave his word that he would act only in the capacity of protector and guardian where I was concerned. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces.

My grandparents and I had been so close. For ten years they, along with Brooke and Glitch, were my world. But now all the communication in our house was strained and full of hurtful innuendo and resentful glances.

“He’s the Angel of Death,” my grandmother would say. “The most powerful angel in the heavens.”

Then my grandfather would join in. “He’s not a teenaged boy, despite his appearance, pix. He’s dangerous beyond your wildest imagining.”

The fact that he’d saved my life—twice!—apparently didn’t matter.

As he got closer, I tried to subdue the adrenaline rush I felt every time I looked at him. His dark hair fell over his forehead, emphasizing the sparkling depths of his coffee-colored eyes. The wind molded the

T-shirt to the expanse of his chest, revealing the fact that he was cut to simple perfection. And he had this way of moving, this animalistic grace, that mesmerized even the stoutest minds.

“How was your last class?” he asked, stopping in front of me but avoiding my gaze. His voice, deep and smooth like warm caramel, caused a fluttering deep inside me, a flood of heat to my face. How could any being, supernatural or otherwise, be so perfect?

“Pretty boring,” I said, pretending to be as uninterested as he. I hoped and prayed he couldn’t feel the pain his presence caused. The humiliation would be too much.

He nodded and looked into the forest behind the school. I couldn’t help a quick glance at his arms. The bands of symbols that lined his biceps were visible underneath the edges of his sleeves. The designs were ancient and meaningful, symbols that stated his name, rank, and serial number in a celestial language. Or that was my impression. I loved looking at them. Thick dark lines that twisted into curves and angles. A single line of them wrapping around each arm. To me, they looked like a combination of Native American pictography and something alien, something otherworldly.

“Are you okay?” he asked, still looking toward the tree line.

“Me?” I pretended to be surprised. It was his job to check up on me. It didn’t mean anything. “I’m great.”

“We’re both great,” Brooklyn said. She put her phone away and draped an arm over my shoulders.

“And we have to get to class.”

She offered Jared a hard glare, and I felt bad for him. He was only obeying my grandparents’ wishes.

He watched us leave, his face expressionless, and it was hard to look away from the dark brown depths of his eyes shimmering beneath his thick black lashes, or the full mouth that had been pressed to mine on several of my more memorable occasions.

With a heavy sigh, I turned back toward the gym. Still, a person would have to be blind not to notice all the attention Jared drew every time he made an appearance. And I couldn’t help but notice that when he headed back to the main building, more than one girl at Riley High stopped to watch.

Sadly, PE was going to require effort. We were ordered to run the Path, which was a footpath in the forest behind the gym. Fun for some, life threatening for others. I was about as coordinated as overcooked spaghetti. This was not going to end well.

But even the pain and sweat of the Path couldn’t take my mind off the enigma that was Jared Kovach.

Ever since he arrived in Riley’s Switch, he’d been kind of undercover as a student. Partly because we didn’t really know what else to do with him without drawing unwanted attention, but mostly because he had to stay close to me, to keep me safe. My status as a supposed war stopper carried enough weight to warrant a guardianship by way of the most powerful angel from heaven.

But my arrival onto this plane also warranted a protector of another kind. The angels had created a nephilim—a part-human, part-angel boy named Cameron—sent to protect me long before Jared arrived.

And he was normally right on our heels. Part of that could be explained by his crush on Brooke. But he took his job very seriously and had hardly let me out of his sight. I scanned the area, wondering where he was. I hadn’t seen him in days, and after having him as a constant shadow every minute for the last two months, I found his absence a little disconcerting.