Once Dead, Twice Shy Read online

  Susan was flipping the bumpers out over the side, and Barnabas moved into the bow to throw the front dock line when I cut the engine to drift in. The ambulance crew was waiting with a stretcher, and they seemed relieved when Bill shouted that he was okay. There was an air of efficient excitement, and when I saw the bright polo shirt that said camp counselor more than a laminated tag would have, I cringed. We had to get out of there.

  The boat emptied out amid loud chatter and requests for information that Susan was delighted to supply at the top of her voice. I stood, wanting to go home, but Barnabas couldn’t simply pop us out in front of everyone. He stepped onto the dock, and I followed, nervous in the crush.

  “Keep an eye on the girl,” he said as I fidgeted. “I need to find some quiet so the guardian angel can locate me. It’s not likely they’ll try for her again, but it’s possible. Especially if they know you’re here. Don’t do anything if a reaper shows, okay? Just yell for me. Can you do that?”

  Subdued, I nodded, and he wove through the people on the dock. I slowly followed to find a place out of the way near the ambulance. My heart had stopped again. Finally. Barnabas thought it was funny, which only made it more embarrassing. I was always taking in air I didn’t need, too. Susan was within earshot with a cluster of girls and a camp counselor. It was an odd feeling, wanting to be close but afraid to be included.

  Susan’s story was bringing gasps from the surrounding people, but I was glad to hear nothing about sword fights or girls in Hawaiian tops disappearing under the waves. At night, when she was asleep, it might be a different story. I’d seen too many haunted looks on my dad’s face that made me wonder if he remembered the morgue. While I was busy stealing an amulet from my killer, my dad had gotten the phone call telling him I was dead. Finding him alone in my room, sifting through my things before he knew I was alive, had been heartbreaking. And his joy when he saw me breathing? I’d never been hugged so hard. Though his memories had been shifted…sometimes, I thought he remembered.

  Barnabas had settled himself atop a red picnic table under the pine trees. A vaporous softball-sized light hovered before him, looking everything like the imperfections you see in pictures from time to time. Some people thought the glows were ghosts, but what if they were guardian angels, only seen when the light was right and they were caught on film?

  “And then he fell back in the water,” Susan said, words slowing when something didn’t jive with her memory, and I turned away lest she see me and ask me to back her up. She had mentioned that she worked at a newspaper—maybe a planned journalism career was why she’d been targeted. Perhaps she was supposed to do something later in life, something that would work contrary to the dark reapers’ great plan. That’s what the whole game was about. That’s why I’d been killed. I didn’t know what great thing I was supposed to have done, and now that I was dead, it was likely I never would.

  Arms crossed, I leaned against the prickly solidness of a tall pine tree, and vowed I wouldn’t ever feel bad about saving Susan’s life.

  Barnabas stood, and I watched him weave his way through the crowd with that ball of light trailing behind him. Susan’s friends noticed him, and, giggling, they hushed themselves. Pretending ignorance, Barnabas smiled and shook Susan’s hand. As if it was a signal, the hazy light shifted from him to her. She had her guardian angel; she would be safe. A knot of worry eased in me.

  “Thanks for keeping him talking out there,” Barnabas said, brushing his wet hair aside in a casual show that made someone in the back sigh. “You should go to the hospital with him. He’s going to have to stay awake all night in case he has a concussion.”

  Susan flushed. “Sure. Yes. You think they’d let me?” She turned to the counselor. “Can I go?”

  At the chorus of catcalls and a yes, Susan flashed a smile and jogged to the ambulance. The haze of light entered the ambulance before Susan, and Barnabas’s faint tension vanished, telling me that he, too, had been worried about her. It just seemed like he hadn’t cared.

  Feeling better, I looked at him and smiled, glad it was over. The reaper’s face went blank and my smile faded. He turned on a heel and walked off, expecting me to follow.

  Head down, I wove through the diminishing crowd after him, my satisfaction at having saved Susan stilling to a gray ash. If I had had another way home, I’d have taken it. Barnabas looked ticked.

  Two

  The air in the upper reaches had been frigidly cold, and my wet hair felt frozen when Barnabas landed us right where we’d started this morning: New Covington High’s rear parking lot. As usual, his wings had vanished in a swirl of back wind before I got a good look at them, replaced with dry jeans, a casual black T-shirt, and a gray duster totally inappropriate for the hot weather but totally suitable for making him look good. The soft color reminded me of his wings as it draped over his shoulders and fell to his heels.

  Unsure, I wove through a few cars to get to the bike rack. The vehicles hadn’t been here this morning, and I wondered what was up. It took me two tries to get the combination right, and I slowly wheeled my green ten-speed back to the shade and Barnabas, propping it against the waist-high wall between the steep hillside and the main road before I slumped against it to wait for Ron, Barnabas’s boss.

  I missed my car, still back in Florida with my mom, but the lack of a vehicle had been more than made up for by the chance to get to know my dad again. Mom had sent me up here because she’d had it with teacher/principal/parent chats and worrying when the phone rang after dark that it would be a cop. Okay, so maybe I had been a little enthusiastic in “exerting my freethinking tendencies,” as the school counselor had told my mom, right before he privately told me to quit acting out for attention and grow up, but it had all been innocent stuff.

  A cicada whined from somewhere, and I scrambled up onto the wall beside Barnabas and crossed my arms over my chest. Immediately I put them down, not wanting to look pensive. Barnabas looked pensive enough for both of us. His grip on me on the flight back had been uncomfortable. He’d been quiet too. Not that he ever talked much, but there was a stiffness now, almost a brooding. Maybe he was annoyed that he got wet jumping into the lake. My entire backside was damp now, thanks to him.

  Uneasy, I pretended to fix my shoelaces so I could shift an inch or so away from him. I could’ve asked him to drop me off at home, but my bike was here. Not to mention I hadn’t wanted nosy Mrs. Walsh to catch sight of Barnabas sprouting wings and flying away. I swear, the woman had binoculars on her windowsill. School had been the only place that I’d thought no one would see us. Why there were cars here now was beyond me.

  I dug my phone out of a pocket, turned it on, checked for missed calls, and tucked it away. Glancing at Barnabas, I said, “I’m sorry I got you identified on your reap.”

  “It wasn’t a reap. It was a scythe prevention.”

  His voice was tight, and I thought that for someone who’d been around for so long, he could sure act childishly. Maybe that was why he was assigned to seventeen-year-olds.

  “I’m still sorry,” I said as I picked at the top of the cement wall.

  Leaning against the wall, Barnabas put his squinting gaze on the sky and sighed. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I drummed my nails on the hard cement as again the silence descended. “It figures the beautiful one would be the dark reaper.”

  Barnabas brought his gaze back to me, affronted. “Beautiful? Nakita is a dark reaper.”

  My shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “You guys are all gorgeous. I could pick one of you out in a crowd just by that.” His face showed surprise—as if he’d never noticed how perfect they all were. When he looked away, I added, “You know her?”

  “I’ve heard her sing before, yes,” he said softly. “So when she used her amulet to make her scythe, I could put a name to a face. She’s been a dark reaper for a long time to have a stone so deep a shade of violet. They slowly shift color with experience, light reapers going down through the spectrum
from green, to yellow, to orange, and finally a red so deep it’s almost black. Dark reapers go the other way, up through the blues and purples to violet. The color of your stone is reflected in your aura when you use your amulet. But you can’t see auras yet, can you?”

  That had been positively catty, and if I hadn’t been thinking about my own stone, black as space, I would have told him to shut up.

  “So she’s been at this longer than you,” I said, and he turned to me in wonder.

  “How do you figure that?” he asked, sounding insulted.

  I glanced at his amulet, a flat black now that he wasn’t using it. “It’s like a rainbow. She’s violet, and you’re orange, a step away from red, way on the other side of the rainbow. You’re not red yet. You get red, and you’ll be as experienced as her.”

  He looked me up and down, his stance going stiff. “My amulet is not orange. It’s red!”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “It is so! It has been since the pyramids.”

  I waved a hand dismissively. “Whatever…I still don’t get how hearing her sing comes into it.”

  With a huff, he turned to the parking lot and away from me. “Amulets make it possible to communicate beyond earth’s sphere, and I’ve heard her. The color of the stone and the sound of her singing match. Sort of like hearing an aura instead of seeing it. From there, it’s not hard to guess who’s singing because there are so few of us within the earth’s sphere to begin with. And although I can hear dark reapers, I can’t make out what they are saying. Nakita would have to shift the color of her thoughts to match my aura for that, and we are so far apart in the spectrum that it would be almost impossible. Besides, why would I want her thoughts in mine?”

  My eyebrows rose. That bit of information might have been helpful as I spent the last four freaking months trying to learn how to use my amulet. “Huh. I thought you just…popped up to heaven or something when you wanted to talk.”

  His head drooped. “It’s been aeons since I took up an amulet and became earthbound.”

  He’s earthbound? “Whoa,” I said, gravel grinding under my shoes as I shifted to face him. “Reapers are earthbound?”

  “No, only light reapers are earthbound,” he said, flushing in what looked like embarrassment. “Nakita is free to come and go. She touches the earth only long enough to kill; then she leaves.”

  That had sounded rather bitter. “I thought all angels lived in heaven.”

  “No,” he said shortly. “Not all of us.”

  Making a face, he ran a hand over his frizzy hair, turning it even more untidy, in a charmingly attractive way. “Few angels transgress, but those who have often take a reaper path to make amends. And when they absolve themselves, they return to their other duties.”

  Amends? Absolution? Barnabas was a reaper because he’d gotten in trouble? And here I was, getting him in more of it. I suppose saving lives would look good on any angel’s résumé. “What did you do?” I asked.

  Barnabas crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “I’m a light reaper out of a sense of moral responsibility, not because I displeased the seraphs. I don’t care what they think.”

  I’d heard Barnabas swear by—or at—seraphs before as we sat on my roof and pitched stones at the bats. I knew all too well he didn’t think much of the high muckety-mucks in the angel realm, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the seraphs did. I suppose it took a lot to run a universe.

  Still not looking at me, Barnabas pushed off the wall and moved to stand at the edge of the light. He wasn’t telling me something, a feeling that grew when he put his hands on his hips and stared out at the hot parking lot. “She’s right, though. Something smells worse than a black wing in the sun,” he said, almost to himself. “Nakita said you have Kairos’s stone. That’s not possible. He’s…” Barnabas turned, chilling me with his expression. “Madison, I’ve been thinking. When Ron comes, I’m going to ask him to give your instruction to someone else.”

  My lips parted, and I felt like I’d been socked in the gut. Suddenly it made a lot more sense. He’s giving up on me. God, I must be more stupid than I thought. Hurt and not knowing what else to do, I slid off the wall, scraping the back of my legs when I didn’t push out far enough. Tears pricked at my eyes, and, grabbing my bike, I started for the distant entryway. I was going home. Ron could find me there.

  “Where are you going?” Barnabas said as I swung my leg over my bike.

  “Home.” Being dead sucked. I couldn’t tell anyone, and now I was going to be passed around like a Christmas fruitcake no one wanted. If Barnabas didn’t want me around, that was fine with me. But to stand there while he told Ron was humiliating.

  “Madison, it’s not that you’re failing me. I can’t teach you,” Barnabas said, his brown eyes holding both worry and sympathy.

  “Because I’m dead and stupid. I got that part,” I said miserably.

  “You’re not stupid. I can’t teach you because of whose amulet you’ve got.”

  His words held a scary amount of concern, and I stopped, suddenly frightened. In all this time, Ron had never been able to figure out what kind of amulet I’d taken. “Kairos’s amulet?” I whispered, then stiffened at the sudden tickling between my shoulder blades. I froze, my gaze darting to the shadows, wondering if they hadn’t just jumped forward. Barnabas’s gaze went behind me, and his expression turned to an odd mix of relief and caution.

  “I’ve only got a moment. Let’s see your amulets,” came the timekeeper’s distinctively crisp voice.

  I spun to see a small man squinting in the sun. “Ron,” I said softly as he strode forward, his loose gray robes just as bad as Barnabas’s duster in terms of being totally wrong for the heat. I glanced at the school, hoping no one saw me with them. I had a bad enough reputation already for being weird. Six months, and I was still the new girl. Maybe I should start dressing down. No one else had purple hair.

  Chronos—Ron for short—looked like a cross between a wizard and Gandhi, having a martial arts–like robe and brown eyes that gave me the impression he could see around corners. His eyebrows were blond from the sun but his skin and tightly curling hair were dark. Shorter than me, he nevertheless had a huge presence about him. It might have been his voice, which was deeper than one would expect. He had a pleasant, crisp accent, as if he had a lot to say and not a lot of time to say it.

  He moved fast, too, and had an amulet that allowed him to tap into the time stream and kept him from aging, since unlike the reapers, timekeepers were human for some reason. Which begged the question of how old he really was. He used his ability to manipulate and read time to help the light reapers. It was through him that Barnabas got his scythe-prevention assignments.

  Glancing sourly at the sky, Ron held out his hand, fingers wiggling. “Madison?”

  “Ron, about my amulet,” I started, holding it before the timekeeper, still on its leather lanyard around my neck.

  “Yes, I know. I’m going to fix that,” he muttered as his fingers blurred out of existence for a moment, encircling my amulet. I felt a tingling across my scalp, and then it was done. “When did you dye your hair?” he said lightly, his sharp gaze not meeting mine.

  “After prom. Ron—”

  But he was already standing before the light reaper, his hand held out in a possessive fashion. Barnabas looked positively ill as he towered over the small man. “Barnabas…” the man intoned with warning, or recrimination maybe. I think Barnabas heard it too, since he took his amulet from around his neck and handed it over instead of coming closer. Without his amulet, Barnabas couldn’t make a scythe, losing much of his abilities. Without mine, I’d be a ghost, more or less.

  “Sir,” Barnabas said, looking uncomfortable as his amulet took on the same hue it had when his sword was bared; then it returned to a matte black. “About Madison’s amulet…”

  “It’s fixed,” Ron said smartly as he handed Barnabas’s back.

  Barnabas looped the simple cord back over
his neck and tucked his amulet behind his T-shirt. “The dark reaper at the scything recognized it.”

  “I know! That’s why I’m here! You were identified,” Ron barked, fists on his hips as he peered up at him, and I dropped my eyes, chagrined. “Both of you. On her first scythe prevention. What happened?”

  Great, I’d gotten Barnabas in trouble again. “I’m sorry,” I said contritely, and Barnabas’s head came up. “It was all my idea,” I gushed, thinking that if I took the blame, Barnabas might give me another chance. My knowing that auras had sounds might make all the difference in our practice, and maybe then we’d be able to accomplish thought-touching. “Barnabas didn’t want to take me until we could thought-touch, but I convinced him it wasn’t that big of a deal. And then I met Susan. I couldn’t let that reaper kill her. It happened so fast.”

  “Stop!” Ron barked, and I jumped. The man’s eyes were wide, and he was staring at Barnabas—who was…cringing? “You told me she could thought-touch!” the small man accused, and my mouth dropped open. “You lied? One of my own reapers lied to me?”

  “Uh,” Barnabas stammered, backing up when Ron stepped forward to get in his face. “I didn’t lie!” he yelped. “You assumed she could when I said she was ready. And she is.”

  He thinks I’m ready? Even when we can’t thought-touch?

  Ron’s eyes narrowed. “You knew I wouldn’t allow her on a prevention until she could touch thoughts. Because of it, five memories had to be shifted. Five!”

  My brief elation that Barnabas had thought I was ready evaporated, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Puppy presents on the rug, this sucked.

  “It doesn’t matter how much we practice, Madison will not be able to touch thoughts with me,” Barnabas protested, his face going red. “It’s her amulet, not her!”