Early to Death, Early to Rise ma-2 Page 3

  “So now everything I want to do today, I do tomorrow,” Ace said, shrugging.

  I jerked myself back from my thoughts. “You said you have school tomorrow.”

  “I said school starts tomorrow. I didn’t say I was going to be there.”

  Ooh, a little rebel, are we? I took a straw, tearing it open and jamming it into the shake. “You ditching your first day of school?” I asked, pretending to take a sip of my shake.

  “Something like that,” he said, smiling right back. “I got more important stuff to do.”

  “Like what?” I said, smiling like the cool girls at my old school had taught me before I ditched them.

  Ace laughed, flattered on some level. “Music. Shoe and me, we get music.”

  He tossed his attention briefly to the black-haired guy in the back, and I felt a drop of disappointment. “You’re in a band?” I asked. Crap, it had been nothing after all.

  “No, not make it. We get it. Before it’s released.”

  The stress he’d put on his words pulled me back. “You lift it?” I asked, eyes widening. If he could hack a music site, a hospital computer would be nothing.

  Excited, I edged forward. The move was not lost on Ace, and he leaned across the counter, hitting the sale button and closing the drawer almost before it had opened. “Last week,” he whispered, his eyes glinting, “Shoe got into a major record label’s site and lifted a track of Coldplay’s music not out until next spring.”

  I shivered, my aura seeming to chime. He could break into secure sites. “Really? Can I hear it?”

  Ace drew back, slyly standing behind the counter as if he were king of the world. “Shoe and I don’t let anyone listen. Not until we’re done. I gotta put the cover art on the disc. Then you can buy it.”

  My breath huffed out of me. Feigning disbelief, I cocked my hip. “Okay, I get it,” I said in a bored tone. “Whatever.”

  But Ace laughed. “You don’t believe me?” Turning to the back, he shouted, “Shoe! Tell her the name of Coldplay’s newest album.”

  The boy in the back pulled himself out of the oven he had been cleaning. There was grease smudged on his shoulder and he looked mad. “What the hell is wrong with you, Ace?” he exclaimed. “You’re going to get us caught!”

  “Dude!” Ace said, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “Cool your stick, man. She’s not going to say anything.”

  Shoe threw the rag he’d been using at Ace, but it fell far short. “You don’t even know who she is!” he yelled, and a side door to the kitchen banged open and a short man wearing a shirt a size too small for him came out. Manager. I could tell even before I saw his lame brown shoes with the tiny brown laces.

  “Mitch, we got a problem here?” he asked, and Shoe turned to him, still ticked.

  “No!” he shouted. Taking the oven cleaner, he sprayed it wildly on the front of the next oven.

  “Chill, dude!” Ace said. “It’s not a big deal!” He was almost laughing, and it only made Shoe angrier, his motions becoming fast and erratic.

  The manager saw it, too, and he came closer. “Relax,” the man said, trying to look as if he were in charge. “I’ve put up with your temper all summer.”

  Shoe turned. “Yeah? Well, I quit!” he shouted, slamming the oven cleaner down. “I don’t need this crap!”

  “No, you’re fired!” the man said, and Ace started to laugh, looking at the food court to see who was watching. “Clock out, and don’t come back. I’ll mail you your last check! And don’t bother asking for a reference.”

  “You can keep your lousy money,” Shoe muttered, and I watched in alarm as Shoe took off his apron and threw it down in disgust. Turning to Ace, who clearly thought it was all a big joke, Shoe said, “You’re a freaking loser, Ace. You know that? You’re so stupid you can’t even keep your mouth shut. We’re done. Got it? You’re on your own.”

  Ace’s face colored, anger etching his features in an instant. “Yeah?” he said loudly. “Well, you can go screw a rat, asshole!” Ace’s sudden shift to anger felt wrong, and I gripped my shake tighter, trying to figure it out.

  My mouth fell open, and I dropped back a step. The entire food court was watching now.

  “Out!” the manager shouted, his round face turning red. “Both of you!”

  “I didn’t even want to come in today, you tub of lard,” Ace said under his breath, but I knew the manager heard him, because he started to huff as if he were out of breath.

  Shaking with anger, the manager pointed at the mall’s doors. “Get out!”

  I scrambled back when Ace put a hand on the counter and vaulted over it. From the rear of the kitchen came the slamming of a heavy door as Shoe stormed off. Snatching his hat from his head, Ace dropped it on the tiled floor. “This job sucks,” he said, and he walked away, taking his apron off as he went and letting it fall.

  The manager was fuming, and I hesitantly said, “Uh, how much do I owe you?”

  He looked up as if noticing me for the first time, his thoughts clearly on Ace and Shoe. “Nothing. It’s free,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see that. He’s been smart-mouthing me all summer. I should have fired him the third day he was here.”

  “Sorry,” I said, not knowing why I was apologizing. Feeling weird, I turned and went back to Nakita and Barnabas. Eyes down, I slid into my seat and took a sip of shake.

  Barnabas cleared his throat. “What was all that about?”

  The ugliness washed from me, and I looked up, smiling at Nakita, then Barnabas. “I found our mark. It’s Ace.”

  Nakita fingered her amulet as if she wanted to follow him out and scythe him in the parking lot. I was starting to understand why the seraphs believed light and dark reapers couldn’t work together. Getting Nakita to hold off until we’d given Ace a chance to change his ways wasn’t going to be easy. “Are you sure?” she asked, eyes alight and eager.

  I nodded, sharing her enthusiasm if not the reason behind it. I could do this. I’d just relaxed as Barnabas had said, and let my intuition tell me. “Pretty sure,” I said. “Ace is good with computers and doesn’t mind breaking the law. He says school starts tomorrow, but that he’s ditching it. His mom works at the hospital and has such a tight leash on him that he’s probably ready to do anything to make her mad.” I watched Ace walk through the parking lot, all the while thinking about my dad and how closely he watched me. No longer in his apron, Ace looked kind of rough in a pair of faded jeans and a black T-shirt.

  “Let’s go,” I said when Ace angrily smacked a car at random. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

  We stood up as one, but Barnabas was hesitant. “I don’t know,” he said as we started after him. “It sounded like Shoe was the computer guy.”

  I turned to him, the shake cold in my grip. “You heard that?”

  “Everyone heard that,” Nakita said, tossing her hair. Her purse slung over her shoulder, she walked to the doors as if she were a runway model.

  Doubt hit me, and my fast pace slowed.

  “Shoe lost his temper first,” Barnabas said. “And if he’s the one who hacked the system, then he’s the one who can make the virus, not the guy who does the cover art.”

  I frowned as we hit the doors and came out into the early afternoon sun. Past the yellow line in the employee parking area, Ace was standing next to a sporty car and arguing with Shoe. Biting my lip, I thought of Barnabas’s thousand-year-plus experience at this compared to my intuition. It was probably Shoe, but I didn’t want to lose sight of Ace. The memory of how quickly his mood shifted wouldn’t leave me. Something was wrong there.

  “Okay,” I said hesitantly as we started to move forward again. “Barnabas, if you think it’s Shoe, you should follow him. Nakita and I will stick with Ace and learn what we can.” And it will keep you and Nakita apart, too.

  Nakita made a pleased sound, clearly glad to be taking action. “I should be the one to follow Shoe, not Barnabas,” she said firmly. “That way, if he tries to put the virus in a comp
uter, I’ll be there to kill him.”

  I stopped short, and she went two steps before halting. My gaze went to Barnabas, and he made a helpless expression. “Um, Nakita, I thought you’d come with me.”

  The reaper was clueless about many things, but she wasn’t stupid. A soft blush marred her face, and she went stiff, her black toenails shining in the sun. “You’re trying to keep me away from Shoe.”

  I was trying to keep her away from Barnabas, too. I took a breath to protest, then let it out. “Yeah, but come with me anyway. Ace likes pretty girls. He’ll tell you anything.” Nakita squinted at me, and I added, “Come on. Help me out here. Ron can’t possibly know we’re out of Three Rivers yet, so we’ve got tons of time.”

  “She is your boss,” Barnabas muttered, and Nakita frowned.

  “Okay,” she said, capitulating, “but if Shoe does anything, promise you’ll call me, Barnabas.”

  “You want me to call you?” Barnabas said, thumbs in his jeans pockets and the wind shifting his T-shirt. “How? You’re a dark reaper, and I’m light. Our resonances are too far apart for our amulets to allow it.”

  Nakita smiled, changing her amulet from the Gothic cross back to its normal flat stone cradled in a basket of silver wire. “You’re not as light as you think, reaper. Looked at your aura lately? You’ve gone neutral. I bet we can talk through our amulets if we try. You’re going dark. Dude.”

  Barnabas’s expression became horrified, and he looked down at his own amulet. Taking Nakita’s arm, I pushed her into motion before Ace drove away. I knew Barnabas wasn’t happy about losing his light-reaper status, but she didn’t have to torment him about it. Since leaving Ron and the light reapers, he was considered a grim reaper, a group of vigilante angels scorned by light and dark reapers alike for their wont to kill without reason. If there was a plague, grim reapers were there. A disaster had them wading into the bodies like they were surf. War was their play yard. It wouldn’t be until Barnabas’s amulet color shifted closer to mine that he might be considered respectable again, but since he’d then be a dark reaper who didn’t believe in fate, he wasn’t truly going to fit in. Heaven probably wouldn’t let him back, either.

  “I’ll get you guys some phones next time I’m in the mall,” I said sourly. But if I knew how to use my friggin’ amulet to talk silently with them, then I wouldn’t need to.

  Three

  “Ace!” I shouted, the hard pavement under my feet sending jolts through me as I ran for his truck. “Wait up!”

  Nakita, apparently, saw no reason to run, and she sedately followed somewhere behind me, handbag at her side and matching sandals clicking away. Barnabas was heading off in the opposite direction, probably seeking a quiet place to wait and take wing to follow Shoe. Shoe’s back was hunched as he stomped to a lonely sports car parked by itself in a spot of shade.

  Hearing my voice, Ace leaned against his truck and put his thumbs in his pockets. I slowed, not even breathing heavily. Okay, so maybe there were some benefits to this whole being-dead thing. Nakita caught up with me, and I slowed even more. “He’s angry,” she said simply as we matched paces. “Are you sure he’ll tell us anything?”

  “Yeah, well, you can be mad at your friends,” I said, remembering how I’d been angry with Wendy, my best friend in Florida, where I’d lived before I moved to Three Rivers. Most of our arguments had stemmed from my trying to get us into the cool crowd, but Wendy was too independent. Even when we fought, though, we remained friends.

  “How can you be angry and like someone at the same time?” Nakita asked.

  I watched Shoe get in his car and start it up, revving the engine hard. “You just do. You like Barnabas, don’t you? Even when you argue?”

  “No,” she said immediately, then hesitated. “He’s smarter than I thought he was. Thinking that he might be right and I might be wrong makes me angry.”

  “Same thing here,” I said, indicating Ace, who was now pushing up from the truck and brushing a hand across his wrinkled T-shirt.

  She fingered her amulet and asked, “Who’s right?”

  I smiled at Ace and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

  She sighed. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a friendship thing.” Shifting my smile brighter, I scuffed to a halt, turning the popular-girl charm on full. It usually got me my way with strangers, so the time I’d spent trying to get in with the cool girls hadn’t been a total loss. I guess.

  But my smile faded when Ace almost barked, “What do you want?”

  Nakita reached for her amulet, and I “accidentally” came down on her foot. “Uh, nothing,” I said as she shoved me off her, but I was already rocking back. “I wanted to say I’m sorry I got you fired. It was kind of my fault.”

  I gave him a sad, big-eyed look, and sure enough, he shifted from P.O.’ed to accommodating. Ah, the power of a pretty face. Too bad he was looking at Nakita’s and not mine. But she was an angel. Why was I even trying to compete?

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice softening. “Shoe’s an ass.” A flash of anger reddened his face, and he shouted after Shoe’s car, “Dumb ass!”

  “Can I scythe him, too? Just for the fun of it?” Nakita asked, and Ace turned, shocked.

  “Stop it,” I muttered, but he’d heard.

  “What did you say?”

  I licked my lips, scrambling for words. “So you like music?” I blurted, and he turned back to me.

  As he glanced from me to Nakita, I could almost see his thoughts realign, wondering if he had a chance with her. Sure, that was likely. Not.

  “Yep,” he said, still looking at her, and she suddenly smiled back and giggled like Amy, my earthly nemesis at school in designer sandals. Hearing that noise come out of her shocked the b-juice out of me, and I wasn’t surprised when Ace added, “I don’t have anything to do now. You want to hear some?”

  “Absolutely!” I said enthusiastically, and he shifted away from the front door, hitting his shoulder on the side mirror and trying not to lose his cool.

  “Get in,” he said, opening the door. “I live twenty minutes from here. You can hear the new stuff.”

  For a moment, I looked in at the long bench seat, remembering the last time I got into a stranger’s car. I’d ended up at the bottom of a ravine, dead. Well, you can’t kill someone twice, I thought. Besides, Nakita was with me. Stepping carefully to avoid the CDs tossed everywhere, I got in, sliding to the far door. The truck was old, with cracked vinyl seats and a dusty, sun-faded dash. The CD cases made bright flashes when the light caught them, and I snatched one out from under Nakita before she sat right on it. It was clearly home-burned, with an art decal on one side. Josh had an old truck, too, but he at least kept his clean. I had a thought to text him and see how he was doing, but texting a guy in front of Ace probably wasn’t the best way to convince him to show me his illegal downloads.

  “Is this your work?” I asked as Ace got in, slamming his door twice to make it latch. Just from looking at their cars, I could tell there was a big discrepancy between Ace and Shoe, and I wondered if that was where some of the anger was coming from. Jealousy, maybe.

  “Shoe’s,” he said tersely.

  “No, I mean the artwork,” I added, and his tight jaw relaxed as he cranked the key and the engine started. “I like it.”

  Music blared, heavy on the percussion, and the singer screaming so you couldn’t understand what he was saying. “Thanks,” he said as he turned the music down so we could hear him. “My mom thinks I could get a scholarship, but what’s the point? It’s not like I can make a living with squiggles.”

  I thought of my own dream of making a living with my photography, and a sigh of understanding slipped from me. “Maybe,” I said hesitantly. “But it’s easier to find a way to make money at something you love than to learn to love a job that you can make money at.”

  He didn’t say anything, and feeling Nakita’s eyes on me, I rolled the window down. Jeez, it was a crank, and it was
stiff, like it hadn’t been down in a year. Slowly the still air was replaced by new as we headed for the exit, pulling out to go the same way Shoe had. There had been a small town east of here when we’d flown in, right in the middle of cornfields.

  Ace bobbed his head in time with the music, glancing at Nakita to see how she liked it.

  My attention dropped to the CD I was holding, and I put it on the dash, fingering another one decorated with similar artwork. It was all swirls and stark, bright colors, making me think of Celtic knot work.

  “This is good,” I said as I looked at the handful of discs within my easy reach. “The artwork, I mean. You should talk to your art teacher. I bet she knows of a scholarship.”

  “People like them don’t help people like me,” Ace said, his mood tarnishing. “Besides, college…that’s not for me.”

  My eyebrows rose. People like him?

  “That’s mine, too,” he said, and I followed his pointing finger to the overpass we were going under. It was covered in graffiti with the same swirls and angles. Archetype symbols were worked into it everywhere, making it look like sort of a mix between a tattoo and a stained-glass window.

  “Wow,” I said, turning in the seat to find that the other side of the overpass was decorated as well. “That’s beautiful.”

  Ace smiled a bad-boy smile and tapped his fingers in time with the drums. “Almost got caught the last night I worked on it. They were waiting for me. Look at the water tower.”

  Nakita made a strangled sound, and I followed her gaze to the bulbous thing rising high over the cornfields. My mouth dropped open, and I stared.

  “You like it?” Ace asked, and I nodded, too shocked to do more.

  “It looks like a black wing!” Nakita whispered, and I nodded again. Wrapped around the water tower was a black-and-white crow, looking as if it were melting into a dripping puddle of goo. It looked exactly like a black wing might look to the living, sort of a mix of sophisticated graffiti and Native American petroglyphs. Black wings were unintelligent scavengers of the soul world, showing up at a reaping in hopes of snitching a bit of unattended soul. I hated them, and they gave me the creeps. Both light and dark reapers used them to help zero in on a target, even as loathsome as they were.