Eleven
I tensed my musclesand screwed my eyes shut when the green tops of the forest grew close. I didn’t want to watch as Barnabas closed his wings about us and dove into a small opening in the canopy. My stomach dipped and fell. There was a brief rush of wind in the leaves, and the air cooled. I opened my eyes as he swooped to dodge a tree and landed with a sharp pull-up on a mossy log. It started to fall apart, and I jumped off as it crumbled with a soft hush.
My tangled hair covered my face when Barnabas pushed backward once with his wings to stop his momentum. By the time I turned, he was standing behind the log, his wings gone and his coat covering his narrow shoulders. Worry tightened his features, clear even in the gloom, and I gazed up at the canopy.
The trees were big and the underbrush almost nonexistent. Soft loam cushioned my feet, and I clasped my arms around myself, feeling the damp. Mounds dotted the space with no pattern I could see. They looked like…graves.
“Where are we?” I said as I took an awkward step over the log to be closer to Barnabas.
“A spot of ground,” he said softly. “The earth would shake to feel the touch of a seraph, but there are a few places where the ground is strong enough, and in the past, immortals have used them to conduct business on earth. The circles across the sea have huge stones marking them, but here, where people lived harmoniously with nature until driven out, they’re marked with mounds that shelter bribes to the angels to leave them and their children in peace.” He turned to me, and I shivered at his suddenly alien look. “It’s a neutral place. If blood is spilled here, a seraph will come. Nakita won’t want that.”
I scanned the open wood, feeling my skin prickle. “It feels funny.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
There was nothing to hear but the wind in the highest leaves. “How do I tell Nakita I want to talk?”
Barnabas silently stepped from me, moving a good twenty feet away so that his amulet signature wouldn’t mix with mine. Eyes on the darkening trees, he said, “I imagine she’s looking for you. You’d better be sure of this.”
“I am,” I said confidently, but inside I was worried. I was exposed, my soul singing to those who could hear it, chiming like a bell, making a spot of light that Nakita could follow. My jaw clenched when a black wing flew silently across the space between the ground and the trees, but then I decided it was really a crow. I looked up, my attention drawn by something unseen.
Barnabas shifted his feet, and a twig snapped. “I feel it too,” he whispered.
I swallowed hard. “What is it?”
His eyes slowly moved back and forth. “I don’t know. It feels like a reaper, but afraid. Like a human.”
Barnabas’s gaze darted behind me. “Madison! Drop!” he shouted, and I fell into a sloppy front fall, getting a faceful of earthy loam. The weight of a stone rolled across my back, and then was gone. I looked up, spitting my hair and dirt out of my mouth.
With wings so white they glowed in the dusk, Nakita came to earth, spinning so her feet barely touched the ground before her wings vanished like a memory.
“You’re okay!” I shouted, thinking it was one of the stupidest things I’d ever said.
“The seraphs lie to me as well,” the reaper snarled, fear and anger twisting her once beautiful features. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I stared blankly at her.
“Nakita, wait!” Barnabas shouted as he lunged to get between us. The light reaper darted back when a gleam of steel slashed down. Nakita’s arms were extended and her back bowed as she struck again. I gasped as I reached out in a useless warning, but Barnabas’s own blade met her sword, pulled from forever and nothing, and I shivered as the sound seemed to echo and made the trees tremble. Kairos must have given her a new amulet. She didn’t need the one I wanted to return to her. Her sword had a black stone now, and the jewel on Barnabas’s blade had shifted farther down the spectrum, blazing a glorious yellow. Nakita’s looked dead, a flat black.
“Madison wants to parlay,” Barnabas said as he held Nakita’s weapon unmoving against his own.
“Sheathe your blade in this holy spot.”
Nakita smiled, the determination on her face frightening. She looked nothing like herself, dressed in white garb that was twin to Ron’s robes. “I need her,” she said, her voice musical as it rose and fell. “You brought her. She’s mine.”
Barnabas took a step back, and the humming in my ears ceased when their blades no longer touched.
“She brought herself. She wants to apologize. To not listen would shame you.”