Barnabas braced for an impact that never came as Nakita broke her connection to her amulet and went invisible, diving through him as if he were water.
“Barnabas, look out!” I shouted, but it was too late. Nakita appeared behind the light reaper, spinning to put her sword against his neck. Her arms braced to pull.
“Nakita, no!” I shrieked, scrambling to stand before them. The dark reaper hesitated, her lips pulled back in a savage, victorious smile. They were posed, two angels of death locked together, one wild and crazed, the other beaten and shocked.
“W-where did you learn that?” Barnabas stammered, frozen at the feel of another reaper’s blade against his throat.
Nakita’s eyes never left mine as she leaned forward, whispering in Barnabas’s ear, “It’s amazing what you can do once you know nothing lasts forever unless you make it so.”
My mouth was dry. “Don’t kill him,” I pleaded. “Please, Nakita.”
“Silly girl,” Nakita said, her lips twisted into an ugly expression. “Why do you care? No one else does.
He failed to protect you, brought you to me. And now, you’re going to die.”
“I’ll go with you! Just don’t kill him. Take me to Kairos,” I demanded, shaking. “Let me talk to him.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Nakita said, and then she moved, drawing back.
“Nakita, don’t!” I screamed as she brought the butt of her sword against Barnabas’s skull. Silently the light reaper’s gray wings drooped and he fell forward, slumped against the mossy earth. His wings covered him, and he looked asleep, an angel resting on a forest floor.
My heart was beating again, and I started to back up. Nakita shook her wings and smiled. One soft feather slipped from her, the pure white drifting to land on the green, green moss.
I ran.
There was a whoosh of air, and she had me. That fast, and it was over. “Let me go!” I cried. I knew going invisible wouldn’t help if she could, too. “Why can’t you leave me alone?!”
“I want myself back,” Nakita snarled as she held me tight against her. “I don’t want to be afraid anymore. The black wings,” she said, her words clipped as her voice rose in pitch. “I’ve never known fear. I’ve seen it, thought you were all weak for it, but you aren’t. I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I want to be the way I was. Kairos can make me the way I was. But he needs his amulet to do it.”
My amulet,I thought defiantly, then shrieked as we were abruptly airborne, ducking when we exploded through the canopy and back into the light. Her arm was tight around me, and my legs flailed until my heels found her feet and I stood upon them. It was a show of cooperation, but at least my guts weren’t being shoved up into my lungs.
“Nakita, I’m sorry,” I said as we ascended. “I didn’t know the black wings would hurt you. You were trying to kill me!”
“It was my task, your fate,” she said, gripping me tightly. “I can’t exist the way I am now. I will be the way I was!”
The air was cold. Without warning, Nakita swooped into a dive, her wings folding around us, cocooning us in pillow-soft warmth. I fought her as my stomach dropped and vertigo told me we were falling.
“Be still,” Nakita snarled, and then the world turned inside out.
I screamed, my mind unable to take the absolute absence of everything. No sound, no touch, nothing. It was as if I were a black wing, never having existed but having the terror of knowing there was more and it was now lost to me. I was falling, and there was nothing within my experience to tell me it would ever end.
Suddenly Nakita’s wings were about me once more, infusing their warmth into me. I breathed her scent in, gasping in relief, feeling her presence bring me back to sanity. We weren’t moving, and when her arm about me fell away, my knees hit a hard floor. Struggling to rise with my shaking muscles, I scrambled backward, getting to my feet and trying to figure out what had happened. My back hit a thick pillar holding up a white canopy, and I froze, mouth gaping.
I was outside, standing on a veranda of black marble shot through with gold veins. There was no railing between it and the drop-off leading to a narrow beach down below. The sun was just above the horizon, but the cool, damp feel in the air was wrong for sunset. It wasrising over a flat ocean, not setting, and as I looked at the sparse vegetation with its small leaves and tough skin designed to survive drought, I realized I was somewhere on the other side of the earth.