“Let that reaper cut her down just so I wouldn’t get recognized? Call Ron. He can change my amulet’s resonance. He has before.”
Arms crossed over his chest, Barnabas frowned. I was right, though, and he knew it. “I’m going to have to, aren’t I?” he said, sounding like the seventeen-year-old he was masquerading as. “I haven’t been pinged in three hundred years. Apart from your reap, that is. I need to get my resonance changed, now, too.” Sullen, he stared ahead. A sullen angel. How sweet.
But the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. It seemed that ever since I’d made his acquaintance, I’d been screwing up his life. My special talent. Now he had to call on his boss to fix things, and I knew he hated looking bad. “Sorry,” I said softly, but I knew he heard me.
“Until we get the resonance of our amulets changed, we’re as vulnerable as ducks sitting on the water,”
he muttered.
Chilled, I looked for black wings, but they were gone. The water reflected the trees close to the dock, flat in the lee of the wind, and I shifted the engine into neutral. “I said I’m sorry,” I said, and Barnabas looked up from the flashing ambulance lights.
His brown eyes were black in the shade, and it was as if I was seeing them for the first time, finding something different in their depths. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” he said as I swung the boat around to dock beside the first. “Maybe you should start acting like it.”
Susan was flipping the bumpers out over the side, and Barnabas moved into the bow to throw the front dock line when I cut the engine to drift in. The ambulance crew was waiting with a stretcher, and they seemed relieved when Bill shouted that he was okay. There was an air of efficient excitement, and when I saw the bright polo shirt that said camp counselor more than a laminated tag would have, I cringed. We had to get out of there.
The boat emptied out amid loud chatter and requests for information that Susan was delighted to supply at the top of her voice. I stood, wanting to go home, but Barnabas couldn’t simply pop us out in front of everyone. He stepped onto the dock, and I followed, nervous in the crush.
“Keep an eye on the girl,” he said as I fidgeted. “I need to find some quiet so the guardian angel can locate me. It’s not likely they’ll try for her again, but it’s possible. Especially if they know you’re here.
Don’t do anything if a reaper shows, okay? Just yell for me. Can you do that?”
Subdued, I nodded, and he wove through the people on the dock. I slowly followed to find a place out of the way near the ambulance. My heart had stopped again. Finally. Barnabas thought it was funny, which only made it more embarrassing. I was always taking in air I didn’t need, too. Susan was within earshot with a cluster of girls and a camp counselor. It was an odd feeling, wanting to be close but afraid to be included.
Susan’s story was bringing gasps from the surrounding people, but I was glad to hear nothing about sword fights or girls in Hawaiian tops disappearing under the waves. At night, when she was asleep, it might be a different story. I’d seen too many haunted looks on my dad’s face that made me wonder if he remembered the morgue. While I was busy stealing an amulet from my killer, my dad had gotten the phone call telling him I was dead. Finding him alone in my room, sifting through my things before he knew I was alive, had been heartbreaking. And his joy when he saw me breathing? I’d never been hugged so hard. Though his memories had been shifted…sometimes, I thought he remembered.
Barnabas had settled himself atop a red picnic table under the pine trees. A vaporous softball-sized light hovered before him, looking everything like the imperfections you see in pictures from time to time. Some people thought the glows were ghosts, but what if they were guardian angels, only seen when the light was right and they were caught on film?
“And then he fell back in the water,” Susan said, words slowing when something didn’t jive with her memory, and I turned away lest she see me and ask me to back her up. She had mentioned that she worked at a newspaper—maybe a planned journalism career was why she’d been targeted. Perhaps she was supposed to do something later in life, something that would work contrary to the dark reapers’
great plan. That’s what the whole game was about. That’s why I’d been killed. I didn’t know what great thing I was supposed to have done, and now that I was dead, it was likely I never would.
Arms crossed, I leaned against the prickly solidness of a tall pine tree, and vowed I wouldn’tever feel bad about saving Susan’s life.