Early to Death, Early to Rise - Kim Harrison [20]
“God help you, Nakita,” Barnabas said as he strode out to the middle of the road. “Why didn’t you just draw him a picture of who we’re trying to save?”
Nakita spun on her heel. “You’re still laboring under the assumption that I’m trying to save Shoe,” she said, pointing her purse at him as if it were a weapon. “If I so much as see a black wing, light reaper, or guardian angel other than Grace, I will kill him. I will not have that cretin of a timekeeper put a guardian angel on such as Shoe!”
“Ron is not a cretin!” Barnabas shouted, still feeling a smidgen of loyalty, apparently.
“Yes, he is!”
I sighed, sitting down in the middle of the warm road with my back to them, waiting for them to finish yelling at each other. At least Ron had left thinking we didn’t know who was marked.
“You are not going to kill Shoe!” Barnabas said. “I won’t let you!”
“Careful, Barnabas,” she mocked. “Your grim is showing.”
That was low, and I turned to see her with a hand on a hip, standing inches from him. He was scowling, feeling the shame of the derogatory term. Barnabas wasn’t grim. Sure, he had left Ron, but he wasn’t a vigilante who existed only for the thrill of killing someone.
“I won’t allow a guardian angel to be gifted to Shoe,” she said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the unseen town. “From the moment he chooses to kill, he will cause only pain to the world. There is no grace in a life lived like that!”
“Funny, isn’t that what you do? Kill people?” he shot back at her, and she made a muffled scream of frustration.
“Shut your singing hole,” she hissed at Barnabas. “All this arguing is going to get Madison in trouble. The seraphs are watching.”
“Then you shut up,” he huffed, but I felt a new worry mix with the old. I’d forgotten that. The seraphs were watching, and if I couldn’t get a light and a dark reaper to work together, then this would never work.
“Barnabas,” I interrupted, not looking up from my view of the cornfield. “Does Ron’s knowing what we’re doing make this impossible, or just harder?”
Finally they stopped arguing. Barnabas’s steps were silent in his faded sneakers as he came to stand in front of me. His wings were gone, and he looked haunted. Clearly Ron had shaken him. “Until Ron can identify who the mark is, I think nothing has changed,” Barnabas said, and Nakita snorted. “We’ll need to be more circumspect to keep him from following us. One of us needs to stay with you and hide your amulet’s resonance.” His gaze went behind me to Nakita. “It’d be easier if you’d simply agree not to kill Shoe.”
“I have not killed him!” she protested, stalking forward. “But I will before I let Chronos or one of his reapers put an angel on him to protect him from his fate. An angel is forever, and with heaven’s mindless protection, he could do untold damage.”
I wondered how many of history’s recent dictators had been the result of Ron’s sending a light reaper to uphold a soul’s right to choice. Getting to my feet, I sighed. “This is really weird,” I said as I brushed my black tights off. “I like both of you, and I don’t know why.”
Nakita blinked, her attention diverted from Barnabas. “Because you’re the dark timekeeper,” she said, as if it were obvious.
Sighing, I looked up and down the road, wanting to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. “What do you think he’s going to do?” I asked Barnabas. “Ron, I mean. You know him best.”
Barnabas looked to the spot of pavement where Ron had last stood. “Probably search the local time lines until he finds out where we’ve been, then try to identify the people we’ve come in contact with. But he won’t be able to actually act until he flashes forward and sees the future. That’s when he would send a reaper out. Sometimes the dark timekeeper flashes first, sometimes the light. It’s the person who flashes last who has the clearer picture of the mark, so it evens things out, I suppose.”
I nodded, thinking it made sense. The closer in time the flash was from the turning point happening, the clearer the timekeeper’s perceptions would be. Grimacing, I