by Kim Harrison
My heart pounded as I stood in the corner, holding the pendant so tight my fingers hurt. Ron glanced disparagingly between us. “That isn’t a black reaper’s stone any more than a black reaper would be strong enough to leave corporal evidence of its existence behind, or…,” he continued, raising a hand to keep Barnabas from interrupting, “have a reason to come back for the soul of someone they culled. She’s got something more powerful than a reaper stone, and they’ll be back for it. You can count on it.”
Oh great. Just swell.
Barnabas seemed to draw himself back together, looking worried and scared. “He said he wasn’t a reaper, but I thought he was trying to cow us. What is he if he isn’t a reaper?”
“I don’t know yet. But I have a few ideas.”
Ron’s admission of ignorance was worse than anything he could have said, and a ribbon of fear pulled through me. I shuddered, and Ron sighed when he saw it. “I should been watching for this,” he murmured. Then looking at the heavens, he bellowed, “A memo would have been nice!”
His voice echoed, accentuating the muffled nothing that gripped the world. Remembering these two people weren’t really people, I looked at my dad, as frozen and unmoving as a mannequin. They wouldn’t hurt him, would they? To cover up their mistake with me?
“Dust to stars,” Ron said softly. “We’ll simply adapt the best we can.”
The older man stood with a heavy sigh. Seeing him moving, I pushed from the corner to get between him and my dad. Ron looked at my raised hand as if I were a kitten holding off a dog who stopped only because he wasn’t interested.
“I’m not leaving,” I said, standing in front of my dad as if I could actually do something. “And you aren’t going to touch my dad. I have a stone. I’m solid. I’m alive!”
Ron looked me in the eye. “You have a stone, but you don’t know how to use it. And you aren’t alive. This delusion of pretending to be is a bad idea. However, seeing as you have a stone, and they have your body—”
My gaze darted to Barnabas, seeing by his uncomfortable expression that it was true. “Seth? He has my body?” I said, suddenly afraid. “Why?”
Ron reached out, and I jumped as his hand landed on my shoulder. It was warm, and I could feel his support—not that I thought he could really do anything to help me. “To keep you from crossing over and thereby able to give us the stone permanently?” he guessed, his dark eyes filled with pity. “As long as they have your body, you’re stuck here. That stone you took is clearly an important one. It shifted to adapt to your mortal abilities. Very few stones can do that. Usually when a human claims a stone, it simply atomizes them in a surge of overload.”
My mouth dropped open, and Ron nodded sagely. “Claiming the divine when one is not is a sure way to blow your soul to dust.”
I closed my mouth, stifling a shiver.
“If we have it,” Ron continued, “they’re potentially at a disadvantage. It’s in limbo right now, like you—a coin spinning on edge.”
His hand slipped away. I felt all the more alone and small, though I stood taller than him.
“As long as you remain on the corporal side of things, they have a hope of finding you,” he said, moving to look out my window at a world that had slowed to almost no movement.
“But Seth knows where I am,” I said, confused, and Ron spun slowly around.
“Physically, yes, but he left here rather abruptly with your body. He crossed without a stone to make a memory of exactly where you are in time. It will be hard to find you again. Especially if you don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.”
Miss Anonymity. Yeah, I can do that. Ri-i-i-i-ight. My head hurt, and I held one arm to me with the other and tried to make sense of what he was telling me.
“He will find you, though. Find you and take you and that stone back with him. What happens then?” Shaking his head, he turned to the window again, the light spilling in to outline him in gold. “They do terrible things, without thought, to further themselves.”
Seth had my body. I felt myself go pale. Barnabas saw it, then cleared his throat to get Ron’s attention. The old man’s eyes landed on me, and he blinked as if realizing what he had said. “Ah, I could be wrong,” he said, not helping. “I am, sometimes.”
My pulse quickened, and I felt a jolt of panic. Before the accident Seth had said I was his ticket to a higher court. He didn’t just want me dead. He wanted me. Not the stone I stole from him. Me. I opened my mouth to tell Ron, then, frightened, changed my mind. Barnabas saw in my sudden fear that I was withholding something, but Ron was moving, crossing my room with sharp steps and shooing him out. Barnabas silently retreated to the hall, his mouth shut and his head down in thought, probably afraid that whatever I wasn’t saying would get him in more trouble, not less. Alarm trickled through me. They weren’t leaving, were they?
“The only thing we can do now,” Ron said, “is keep you intact until we find out how to break the hold the stone has on you without breaking your soul.”
“But you just said I can’t die,” I said. Just where did he think he was going? Seth was going to be back!
Ron stopped at the threshold. Barnabas stood behind him, a worry too deep for a mere seventeen years showing heavy on him. “You can’t die because you’re already dead,” the old man said. “But there are worse things.”
Great, I thought, warming when I recalled dancing with Seth, that kiss he took, the feel of his nose breaking against my knee, and the look of hatred he had given me. Way to go, Madison. Not only did I screw up my reputation at a new school, but I managed to insult the angel of death, too. Put myself at the top of his wish list.
“Barnabas?” Ron said, making me jump. Barnabas, too, looked surprised.
“Sir?”
“Congratulations, you’ve been promoted to guardian angel.”
Barnabas froze, then looked aghast at me. “That’s not a promotion. It’s a punishment!”
“Some of this is your fault,” Ron said, his voice harsh in comparison to the sly smile he gave me, but Barnabas couldn’t see it. “Most, probably.” His face went serious. “Deal with it. And don’t take it out on her.”
“But Lucy. It was her responsibility!” he protested, looking young as he whined.
“Madison is seventeen,” Ron said, his tone brooking no argument. “You handle seventeen. Should be a snap.” He turned, hands on his hips. “In addition to your regular white-reaper prevention detail, you will be Madison’s guardian angel. I’d think we could get this sorted out in a year.” His gaze went distant. “One way or another.”
“But sir!” he exclaimed, stumbling into the hall’s wall when Ron pushed past him to the stairs. I followed, not believing this. I have a guardian angel?
“Sir, I can’t!” Barnabas said, making me feel like an unwelcome burden. “I can’t do my job and watch her! If I get too far away, they’ll take her!”
“Then keep her with you when you work.” Ron went several steps down. “She needs to learn how to use that thing. Teach her something in your copious spare time. Besides, it’s not like you have to keep her alive. Just keep her coin spinning. Try to do a better job of it this time,” he almost growled.
Barnabas sputtered, and Ron turned to smile worriedly at me. “Madison,” he said in farewell. “Keep the pendant with you. It will protect you somewhat. If you take it off, black wings can find you, and the dark reapers are never far from them.”
Black wings. There was that phrase again. Just the name invoked a nasty image in my thoughts. “Black wings?” I asked, the two words sounding completely foul on my lips.
Ron paused on the first step. “Filthy vultures left over from creation. They smell wrong deaths before they happen and try to snitch a bit of forgotten soul. Don’t let them touch you. Because you’re dead, they can sense you, but with that stone they will think you’re a reaper and leave you alone.”
My head bobbed up and down. Stay away from the black wings. Check.
“Cronus!” Barnabas begged, as Ron started downstairs again. “Please. Don’t do this to me!”
“Find some wind and make the best of it,” Ron muttered when he reached the downstairs landing and headed for the door. “It’s only for a year.”
He crossed the threshold into the sun. The light hit him, and he vanished, not all at once, but from the feet up as he moved into the light. The sun streaming into the house seemed to glitter, and then the distant mower roared to life.
I took a breath as the world began to turn again with the sound of birds, wind, and someone’s radio. Bewildered, I stood beside Barnabas. “What does he mean, for a year?” I whispered. “Is that all I get?”
Barnabas looked me up and down, clearly peeved. “How should I know?”
From in my room came a startled “Madison? Is that you?”
“Dad!” I said, running into him as he came out. He turned it into a happy hug, his arms around me and smiling as he looked at Barnabas. “You must be the boy who brought Madison home last night. Seth, was it?”
Huh? I thought, shocked. He had already met Barnabas. And how had my dad gone from protective anger to congenial dad so fast? What about the accident? Or the hospital? The crashed car? Me being dead?
Barnabas shifted from foot to foot in what seemed like embarrassment, shooting my gaping-mouth expression a look to shut up. “No, sir. I’m Barnabas. One of Madison’s friends. I was with her last night, too, after Josh left. It’s good to meet you, sir. I just came over to see if Madison, uh, wanted to do anything today.”
My dad looked proud that I had managed to make a friend without his help, but I was majorly confused. Clearing his throat as if trying to decide how to treat the first boyfriend of mine he’d had the chance to meet, he took Barnabas’s extended hand. I stood and watched in wonder as they shook. Barnabas gave me a slight shrug, and I started to relax. It seemed everything had been wiped from my dad’s thoughts and a fake memory of an uneventful evening put in its place—a teenager’s dream of CYA to the max. Now all I had to do was figure out how Ron had done it. Just for future reference.
“Hey, do you have anything to eat around here?” Barnabas said, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in years.”
Like magic, my dad fell into jovial-parent mode, talking about waffles as he stomped downstairs. Barnabas started after him, hesitating when I took his elbow and drew him to a stop.
“So the story is Seth brought me home and I watched TV the rest of the night?” I asked, wanting to know how much damage control I’d have to manage on my own. “I never went off that embankment?” I added when he nodded. “Who’s going to remember last night? Anyone?”
“No one living,” he said. “Ron takes time to be thorough. He must like you a lot.” His gaze dropped to the stone about my neck. “Or maybe he simply likes your pretty new stone.”
Feeling nervous all over again, I let go of his shirt and Barnabas schlumped after my dad—who was now yelling at us from the kitchen to find out if Barnabas could stay for breakfast. I straightened my dress, ran a hand over my mussed hair, and took slow, careful steps down after him. I felt really weird. A year. I had at least a year. I might not be alive, but by God I wasn’t going to die all the way. I’d figure out how to use the stone I took and stay right where I was. Where I belonged. Here with my dad.
Watch me.
4
RESTLESS, I SAT ON the roof in the dark, flicking stones into the night as I tried to realign my thinking. I wasn’t alive, but I wasn’t altogether dead, either. As I’d suspected, a careful questioning of my dad spanning the entire day confirmed that not only did he not have a clue I had been dead at the hospital, but he didn’t even remember the accident. He thought I’d ditched Josh when I found out I was a pity date, got a ride home with Seth and Barnabas, and watched TV all night, pouting in my costume.
He wasn’t pleased I had ruined the rental, either. I didn’t appreciate him taking the cost of it out of my allowance, but I wasn’t going to complain. I was here, sort of alive, and that was all that mattered. My dad seemed surprised at my meek acceptance of my punishment, telling me I was growing up. Oh, if he only knew.
I watched my dad closely all day as I unpacked and put my stuff in drawers and on shelves. It was clear he knew something wasn’t right, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. He hardly let me out of his sight, coming upstairs to bring me snacks and pop until I could have screamed. More than once I caught him watching me with a frightened expression, hiding it when he saw me return his gaze. Dinner was a forced conversation over pork chops, and after picking at my food for a good twenty minutes, I excused myself, claiming I was tired after last night’s prom.
Yeah. I ought to be tired, but I wasn’t. No, it was two in the morning, and here I was out on the roof, pitching stones, pretending to be asleep as the world turned in a chilly darkness. Maybe I didn’t need to sleep anymore.
Shoulders slumping, I picked another bit of tar off the shingles and flicked it at the chimney. It hit the metallic cap with a ting, ricocheting into the black. I scooted up the shallow pitch of the roof, then tugged my jeans back up where they ought to be.
A faint feeling of unease crept through me, starting from the tops of my hands in a soft prickling, slipping inward with an increasingly jagged spike. The sensation of being watched exploded into existence, and I spun, gasping, when Barnabas fell out of the tree arching overhead.
“Hey!” I shouted, heart thumping while he landed in a crouch like a cat. “How about some warning?”
He rose to stand in the moonlit darkness with his hands on his hips. There was a faint shimmer on him visible right along with his disgust. “If I had been a black reaper, you’d be dead.”
“Yeah, well, I’m already dead, aren’t I?” I said, flicking a stone at him. He didn’t move as it arched over his shoulder. “What do you want?” I asked sullenly.
Instead of answering, he shrugged his narrow shoulders and looked east. “I want to know what you didn’t tell Ron.”
“Excuse me?”
He stood still as a rock, arms crossed over his chest and staring. “Seth said something to you in that car. It was the only time you were out of my sight. I want to know what it was. It might be the difference between you getting to play out this lie of being alive, or you getting carted off to a black court.” Now he moved, his motion rough and angry. “I’m not going to fail again, and not because of you. You were important to Seth before you stole that stone. That’s why he came to get you at the morgue. I want to know why.”
I looked down at the stone, glittering in the moonlight, then shifted my gaze to my feet. The awkward angle of the roof made my ankles hurt. “He said my name had come up too many times in the affairs of men, and he was going to cull my soul.”
Barnabas moved, coming to sit beside me with a lot of space between us. “He’s done that. You’re not a threat now that you’re dead. Why did he come back for you?”
Reassured by his more relaxed posture, I looked at him, thinking his eyes seemed silver in the moonlight. “You won’t tell?” I asked, wanting to trust him. I needed to talk to someone, and it wasn’t like I could call up my old friends and vent about being dead—as entertaining as that might be.
Barnabas hesitated. “No, but I might try to persuade you to tell him yourself.”
That I could deal with, and I took a slow breath. “He said that his ending my pathetic life was his ticket into a higher court. He came back to prove he had…culled me.”
I waited for a reaction, but there was none. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I lifted my head to meet his eyes. Barnabas was looking at me as if trying to figure out what it meant. Clearly not having an answer, he slowly said, “I think you should keep this to yourself for a while. He probably didn’t mean anything by it. Forget it. Spend your time learning how to fit in.”
“Yeah,” I said with a sarcastic bark of laughter. “A new school is tons of fun.”
“I meant fit in with the living.”
“Oh.” Okay. I was going to have to learn how to fit in, not at a new school, but with the living. Swell. Remembering the disastrous dinner with my dad, I bit my lip. “Uh, Barnabas, am I supposed to eat?”
“Sure. If you want to. I don’t. Not much, anyway,” he said, sounding almost wistful. “But if you’re like me, you’ll never be hungry.”
I tucked my short hair behind my ear. “How about sleep?”
At that, he smiled. “You can try. I can’t manage it unless I am bored out of my mind.”
I picked a bit of tar off the shingles and flicked it at the chimney again. “How come I don’t have to eat?” I asked.
Barnabas turned to face me. “That stone of yours is giving off energy, and you’re taking it in. Basking in it. Watch out for psychics. They’ll think you’re possessed.”
“Mmmm,” I murmured, wondering if I could get any useful information about what was really going on from a church, but they were wrong about grim reapers, so maybe they didn’t know as much as they thought.
I sighed, sitting in the dark on my roof with a white reaper—my guardian angel. Nice going, Madison, I thought, wondering if my life—or death, rather—could get any more screwed up. I slowly fingered the stone that kept me somewhat alive, wondering what I was supposed to do now. Go to school. Do my homework. Be with my dad. Try to make sense of who I was and what I was supposed to do. Nothing much had changed, really, apart from the no-eating-no-sleeping thing. So I had something worse than a black reaper gunning for me. I also had a guardian angel. And life, apparently, goes on, even if you aren’t a participating part of it anymore.
Barnabas surprised me when he suddenly stood, and I leaned to look up at his height measured against the stars. “Let’s go,” he said, extending his hand. “I don’t have anything to do tonight, and I’m bored. You’re not a screamer, are you?”
My first thought was screamer? And then, go where? But what came out of my mouth was a lame, “I can’t. I’ve been grounded. I can’t set a foot outside the house apart from school until I pay for that costume.” But I smiled, taking his hand and letting him help me rise. If Ron could make my dad forget I had died, I’d be willing to bet Barnabas could cover for me sneaking out a couple of hours.