Early to Death, Early to Rise - Kim Harrison [16]
“Now!” Nakita exclaimed, and I twisted my thought, making the wave wider, more green, perhaps. It hit the curve of the atmosphere and bounced back, being drawn into something as if it belonged. Barnabas, maybe?
Stiffening, I gasped when I got a flash of feeling, like a memory belonging to someone else. It was as if I were seeing from Barnabas’s eyes as he sat in some bushes across the street from a nice house, and he jumped as my thought popped into his mind. Then he was gone, and I was surrounded by sand and squinting from the sun. I was wearing a white shirt billowing in the oppressively dry wind. A young man with black eyes sat across from me working on a laptop, his clothes as white and billowy as mine. Someone swore as my thought echoed in his, and I opened my eyes, finding myself back on the road in the middle of the cornfields.
Ohhhh, this can’t be good.
Nakita was crouched before me, a hand on my shoulder, concern in her eyes, and her black hair falling about her face. “Madison? Are you all right?”
Squinting, I held out my hand and she took it, backing up to help me stand. I looked down at my sneakers and brushed off my tights. A bad feeling was growing in me, and when she saw my expression, I sensed Nakita’s worry shift to alarm.
“How fast can you fly?” I asked, and she stared at me as if I were nuts.
“Why?” she asked, and I looked at the sky, wincing.
“Because I think I just told Ron we’re up to something.”
Four
Nakita stood beside me in her designer jeans and trendy sandals, her black toenails catching a glint of sun. Her eyes darted from the sky to the rustling fields on both sides of us. Her amulet was blazing a violet that sent purple flashes of light against the darker shadows in the corn. Hair swinging, she spun in a circle, scanning the sky.
“Barnabas, where are you?” she said, and I shivered. Gone was the hesitancy, the awkwardness. She was an avenging angel, and nothing would get past her. “Perhaps we should leave without him. I’m hiding your amulet signature, but if Barnabas can follow the echo of your thought here, then Chronos can, too.”
I didn’t move, listening to the wind rattle the papery leaves and scanning the heavens and my aura for any prickling of energy. Damn it, if Ron knew we were here, it would make everything more difficult.
“Barnabas,” Nakita breathed as she fixed on something I couldn’t see, and I had a thought that it was probably the first time she’d been glad to see him.
My own shoulders eased, but I still felt queasy as I remembered being in Ron’s head. It had to have been him. If I could reach his thoughts, then he could reach mine. And who was the guy with him? His replacement? My future adversary?
Ron—or Chronos, as he was formally called—was slime. Yes, he believed in choice over fate, as I did. Yes, he sent light reapers out to stop dark reapers from culling souls from bodies too soon, as I would have liked to. If things were different, we’d be working toward the same thing. But he had lied to me about who I was when I’d been killed. He kept from me that I was a timekeeper until it was too late and my body had been hidden away by Kairos, forcing me to accept my dark-timekeeper status in order to stay alive. He had betrayed me and Barnabas both and lied to heaven in his attempt to shift the balance of heavenly power on earth to his favor. And he was supposed to be the good guy.
Nakita’s sandals scraped against the pavement, worry etched deep into her brow. “Soon as Barnabas gets here, we leave. Neither of us can stand up to Chronos,” she said, visibly upset. “He can stop time.”
I edged closer to her, wishing Barnabas had landed already. He was just a spot of white in the otherwise blue sky. “It’s okay,” I said, as if trying to convince myself. “Even if Ron does freeze time, he can’t kill me.”
She turned to me, her eyes shifting silver for an instant as she touched on the divine. “But what if he takes you where I can’t follow?”
Swallowing hard, I shrugged. “Why would he? We’re just out here standing on