Josh’s eyes met mine squarely, and I slumped. “I think you’re trying too hard,” he said.
Slowly I let go of my amulet. “We’ve only got a few hours left. It’s not like this thing came with an instruction manual.” Depressed, I ran my fingers over my wax-and-paper cup to wipe the condensation off. Barnabas had been less than helpful the time I’d asked him about it after a particularly frustrating night. He’d only said he “thought slippery thoughts” and that I’d better spend my time learning how to contact him if I needed help. Slippery thoughts. Yeah, and if I thought happy thoughts, I’d sprout wings and fly.
“You’ve only been at it for an hour. Don’t be so hard on yourself. We’ve got a little time yet,” Josh said, but his eyes were squinting in worry.
Time,I thought as I wadded my straw wrapper into a ball and dropped it. Maybe I should have tried to learn how to slow time, but that sounded way harder than going invisible.
“Don’t worry about it,” Josh said, but I could tell he was getting nervous. Meeting death was not something you could easily shake off, and the memory of Kairos standing in the moonlight with his scythe bared as I sat helpless in a smashed-up convertible drifted through me.
My hand went back to my amulet, and I held the stone, seeking assurance that even if it was a dark timekeeper’s amulet, I was here and sort of alive. Waking up in the morgue and seeing myself on the table had been the single most frightening thing in my life. Even worse, I knew it was my fault for having gotten into his car to begin with, mega-cuteness aside. Kairos wasn’t so cute anymore. I couldn’t believe I’d kissed him.
I gripped the amulet harder. It had been with me for months now, the weight of it familiar and comforting. Without it, I wouldn’t only be invisible, but insubstantial, able to pass through walls and closed doors. Black wing bait. Ghostlike. Maybe that was the key to it all. Not thinking slippery thoughts, but sort of finding a way to block the stone’s influence.
Staring at the table, I sifted through my thoughts for the memory of that awful moment in the morgue. I’d been able to feel my heartbeat and the air move in my lungs as I breathed from reflex, but my body had been in the black body bag, unable to sense the coldness of the granite or the smoothness of the plastic surrounding it. I’d been divorced from it. The tie to my body had been broken. It just hadn’t been there.
And, scared, I’d run.
When I’d fled, the air had grown thin in me, like I was becoming as insubstantial as it was—almost equalizing. My knees had gone wobbly. The touch of real objects had hurt, as if grating upon my bone. It was only after Barnabas had come after me that I’d felt normal again. Only then had I been in a position to understand and recognize what I’d lost. With the lack of a body, the universe hadn’t recognized me.
That is, until Barnabas’s amulet got close enough and it had something to grab on to again and bring me back in line with everything else.
Perhaps with the separation from my body, I’d lost what time and the universe used to pull me forward.
Maybe the amulets were like artificial points that time and the universe could fasten onto and use to keep mind and soul in sync with the present. And if I could break those ties…
Anxious, I squirmed on the hard seat, believing I was on the right track. Eyes still closed, I fell deep into my thoughts and tried to see myself as a singular identity, tied to the present by the threads of the past. I could hear the noise around me: Josh slurping his drink, the jingle of the store’s phone—and after months of learning how to concentrate, something finally went my way.
Excitement shot through me as I suddenly could see the line my life had made. Tense, I saw how I grew from a possibility to a presence, marveling at how my life wove in and out of other people’s lives, and then the ugly snarl where I’d died, almost as if time or space were making a knot to hold itself together when a soul was cut out of it. It was as if the memory of others bound the darkness here where I’d left it, giving it shape by what was lacking, a ghost of a presence that burst suddenly back into existence when I had obtained an amulet. But now, time wasn’t using my body to find my soul and carry it forward; it was using the amulet I had swiped from Kairos. The color, or maybe the sound, was different. It had been a dark blue up to the point when I had died, and then, an abrupt shift to a purple so black it had a tinge of ultraviolet in it. Like Nakita’s.