With a flourish, Nakita stepped back, wild and extravagant as she gestured for me to speak. I didn’t think she cared what I might say, but it was my only shot.
Scared, I faced her with Barnabas at my elbow. “Nakita, I’m sorry,” I said, my words vanishing into the gloom of dusk. “I didn’t know the black wings would stay in you. I was only trying to stop you from killing Josh. I brought your amulet back,” I said, hand trembling as I extended it. “It’s not a bribe, but please let Josh live.”
Her face twisted in a frown, but she caught the amulet when I tossed it to her, shoving it into her belt.
“Kairos gives me my amulet, not you,” she said. “And I need your pity less than I need your apology.
The seraphs say I am perfectly fine. I am perfect!” she screamed to the sky, then turned to me, panting and eyes wild. “But they lie.”
Barnabas pulled me back a step. “We need to leave. She’s broken. This isn’t going to accomplish anything.”
“I’m broken, too,” I said, thinking of my interrupted life, and I jerked out of his grip. “Nakita, will you take a message to Kairos for me? He has my body. I want it back. I’ll give him his amulet for it if he promises to leave me alone. I just want to be the way I was. Please. I’m tired of being afraid.”
At the wordafraid , she trembled, and a shimmer of air behind her shifted to show her wings arching over her, larger than seemed possible, the tips of the longest feathers shaking. They may have gotten the black wings out of her, but they left within her something a reaper was never created to understand. Fear. And it had come from me. My memories.
“I’m not your messenger angel,” she said bitterly. “But weare going to Kairos. You’re a thief. A liar.
With your body and soul and my scythe, he can make me as I was. As everything was. He promised!”
Kairos still has my body. Thank you, God.
“You aren’t taking her,” Barnabas said, clueless that Nakita was now a hundred times more dangerous.
She had the power of angels cleaved to the will of humanity. Fear and a knowledge of death had made her so.I had made her so.
“She’s mine as she stands there.” Dropping into a hunched position, Nakita dragged her new sword forward, the tip cutting into the ground to make the moss split like a wound.
I shook my head, backing up. “Nakita, listen to me. I just want my body back, alive and unharmed. He doesn’t have to destroy my soul for the amulet. I can dissociate from it.”
She straightened as a laugh, cruel and horrible to hear, burst from her. Barnabas shifted closer to me in support. “Kairos needs you dead to make me whole again,” she said. “Barnabas, get out of my way, or you’ll go down first.”
“You wouldn’t.” Barnabas pushed me behind him as Nakita pulled her sword from the earth and casually wiped the dirt from it upon her leg. “A seraph will come. You won’t risk it.”
“Why not?!” Nakita shouted, then fell back a step, wide-eyed. “I have nothing, Barnabas!” she screamed. “Do you know what it is like to fear? I willlaugh if a seraph should slay me for violating one of their places on earth. It would at least be over and I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore!”
Barnabas didn’t understand, and his brow furrowed. “Afraid?”
An ugly noise came from Nakita, low, almost a growl. It sifted through my brain and paralyzed me. And then she moved.
I stifled a shriek as she lunged at Barnabas, white wings unfurling behind her. Barnabas dropped to a knee, his own gray wings wide as he darted back, airborne. I retreated, scrambling for cover. A great wind churned the leaves from the forest floor. A clang of steel hurt my ears. They were locked, arms straining, Barnabas standing, his wings beating to find the force to push Nakita back.
“Iwill haveher !” Nakita screamed as her wings beat wildly, and she tried to press Barnabas into the ground with her will alone. “I will not be this way! I cannot!”
Barnabas kicked out to shove her off. Gray and white wings struck the trees. Silver flashed in the gloom as Barnabas dove forward, his disadvantage clear. He didn’t want to spill blood. Nakita didn’t care, and she struck wildly at Barnabas, the light reaper countering each blow more slowly than the last. The dark reaper was fighting with a savage desperation that only humans possess, and it was starting to tell upon Barnabas.
A heavy feeling about my neck shocked me, and I grasped my amulet, feeling as if the earth had vanished under my feet. Someone…someone was trying to use it! And when Nakita screamed, I knew it was her attempting to duplicate what I’d done to go invisible. She was too far away for my amulet to hold her solid, but Barnabas’s wasn’t.
With a wild scream, Nakita smashed her sword into Barnabas’s blade, knocking it from him. The amulet about his neck flared and went still. He was helpless. Mouth open in a howl, Nakita jumped right at him.