Barnabas had now been assigned to shadow me in case the reaper who’d killed me came back for his amulet, and I’d gone back to living as normal a life as I could. Apparently just the fact that I had been able to claim it without blowing my soul to dust made it—and me—rather unique. But watching over me wasn’t Barnabas’s style, and I knew he couldn’t wait to get back to his soul-saving work. If I could just figure this thought-touching thing out, he could resume his regular duties, leaving me reasonably safe at home and able to contact him if the dark reaper showed up again. But it wasn’t happening.
“Barnabas,” I said, weary of it, “are you sure I can do this? I’m not a reaper. Maybe I can’t touch thoughts with you because I’m dead. Ever think of that?”
Silent, Barnabas dropped his gaze to the pine-rimmed lake. The worried lift to his shoulders told me he had. “Try again,” he said softly.
I tightened my grip until the silver wires pressed into my fingers, trying to imagine Barnabas in my thoughts, his easy grace that most high schoolers lacked, his attractive face, his riveting smile. Honest, I wasn’t crushing on him, but every angel of death I’d seen had been attractive. Especially the one who’d killed me.
Despite the long nights on my roof practicing with Barnabas, I hadn’t been able to do anything with the shimmery black stone. Barnabas had been hanging around so much that my dad thought he was my boyfriend, and my boss at the flower shop thought I should take out a restraining order.
I pushed myself away from the rock. “I’m sorry, Barnabas. You go on and do your thing. I’ll sit here and wait. I’ll be fine.” Maybe this was why he’d brought me. I’d be safer waiting for him here than several hundred miles away—alone. I wasn’t sure, but I think Barnabas had lied to his boss about my progress in order to get out and working again. An angel lying—yup, it happened, apparently.
Barnabas pressed his lips together. “No. This was a bad idea,” he said, crossing the path to take my arm. “Let’s go.”
I jerked out of his grip. “So what if I can’t push my thoughts into yours? If you don’t want to leave me here, then I’ll follow you and stay out of the way. Jeez, Barnabas. It’s a summer camp. How much trouble can I get into?”
“Plenty,” he said, his smooth, young-looking face twisting into a grimace.
Someone was coming up the path, and I rocked back a step. “I’ll stay out of the way. No one will even know I’m there,” I said, and Barnabas’s eyes crinkled in worry.
The people were getting closer, and I fidgeted. “Come on, Barnabas. Why did you fly us out here if you were just going to take me home again? You knew I couldn’t solidify in twenty minutes what I’ve been trying to do the past four months. You want this as much as I do. I’m already dead. What more can happen to me?”
He looked up the path at the noisy group. “If you knew, you wouldn’t be arguing with me. Hide your amulet. One of them might be the dark reaper.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said as I tucked it behind my shirt, but I was. It wasn’t fair, being dead and still having to deal with heart-pounding, breath-stealing tension when I was afraid. Barnabas said the sensations would fade the longer I was dead, but I was still waiting, and it was embarrassing.
Eyes down, I dropped back to let three girls and three guys go by. They were in flip-flops and shorts, the girls chattering as if they didn’t have a care in the world as they headed downhill to the dock. It all seemed normal—until a shadow passed over me and I looked up.
Black wing,I thought, stifling a shudder. They looked like crows to the living—when the living noticed them at all. The slimy black sheets were nearly invisible when viewed from the side but for an oddly bright, shimmering line. These scavengers fed on souls of the people taken by the dark reapers, and if it wasn’t for the protection of my stolen amulet, they’d be all over me. Light reapers stayed with a scythed soul, protecting the deceased until they could be escorted from the earth.
I glanced at Barnabas, not needing to hear his thoughts to know that someone in the group was targeted for an early death. To find out who it was would be a mix of the sketchy description from Barnabas’s boss, and Barnabas’s intuition and ability to see auras.
“Can you tell who the victim is?” I asked. From what Barnabas had told me, auras had a telltale shimmer as to a person’s age—which sort of gave Barnabas an excuse for why he had failed in protecting me. It had been my birthday, and he only worked with seventeen-year-olds. I’d been sixteen until right before the car flipped, and officially seventeen when I actually died.
Barnabas squinted, his eyes silvering for a moment as he drew on the divine. It totally creeped me out. “I can’t tell,” he said. “Everyone is seventeen but the girl in the red swimsuit and the short, dark-haired guy.”
“How about the reaper, then?” I asked. No one was wearing an amulet—but since the stones could shift to look like anything, it didn’t mean much. Just one more skill I didn’t have.
He shrugged, still watching them. “The reaper might not even be here yet. His or her aura will look seventeen, just like ours. I don’t know all the dark reapers by sight, and I won’t know for sure until he or she pulls their sword.”