Once Dead, Twice Shy - Kim Harrison [70]
“She has taken her place,” Nakita said. “I present her to you and ask a boon. I want to be as I was. I’m damaged.” She looked up, tears marring her beautiful face. “I fear, seraph.”
“That is not damage, Nakita,” the seraph said gently. “That is a gift. Rejoice in your fear.”
The seraph turned to me, and my mouth went dry. “I’m not the dark timekeeper,” I babbled, shoving Nakita’s sword back at her until she took it. “I can’t be! I don’t know anything!”
“You will. In time,” the seraph said, wry amusement in its voice. “Until then, I will keep everything running smoothly. Don’t be long. My voice is already missed from the chorus.”
“But I don’t believe in fate!” I exclaimed. My gaze shot to Ron; I was thinking I was having doubts about choice, too.
“To believe in fate is not a requirement,” the musical voice said, the seraph seeming to take up the entire world, though it wasn’t much bigger than I was. “Kairos didn’t. Apparently.” I took a quick breath when it looked away from me and fixed on Ron. “You do, though. For all that you say otherwise.”
Ron didn’t move until the seraph looked away; then he sagged in relief.
“But I don’t want the job!” I said, frantic that what I wanted didn’t seem to matter.
“Please, can’t I just have my body and go back to the way things were?”
The seraph blinked, looking shocked—if such an emotion could be applied to the divine.
“You don’t want this?” it asked, and Ron took a step forward as if to protest.
“No!” I said, hope filling me. “I just want to be me.” In a rush, I pulled the stone from around my neck. Gathering my courage, I darted forward, pushing the amulet into the seraph’s hands. My heart was pounding again, and, embarrassed that I couldn’t control it, I backed up, wondering if I’d broken a rule by getting that close. I couldn’t look up at its face. It hurt.
The seraph looked at the amulet in its luminescent fingers as if holding a great treasure. The stone was blazing an infinite black, the silver wires now a hot gold. “You already are you.”
“Please,” I begged, darting a glance at Kairos, dead on the tiles and forgotten. “Can you just make me as I was? Put me back in my body?”
Hope buoyed me up when the seraph smiled so brightly that I squinted. “If you choose so,” it said, an unexpected humor in its voice. “Where is it?”
My ecstatic shout died in dismay. “Kairos had it,” I said, feeling ill when my gaze landed on Nakita, then Ron, quiet in the background. He was no help, and I turned to the seraph.
“It’s got to be in the house,” I said, turning to it and feeling naked without the amulet around my neck.
“It would have rotted by now,” said Ron.
Horror lifted through me, and then fear. Had Kairos let my body rot? Had all of this been for nothing?
“He’s right,” the seraph said. “Your corporeal self is not here on earth.”
I staggered to the table, sitting down heavily, my legs unable to hold me upright anymore. My elbows went onto the tiled table, and I knocked Kairos’s cup over. Scrambling, I righted it, wondering why. No one is going to drink it. It’s a dead man’s drink.
“He said it was close,” I whispered, numb. Where was my body if it wasn’t on earth?
The sun was eclipsed, and I looked up to see the seraph sit before me, a situation both shocking and mind-numbing. “Your body is most certainly somewhere between now and the next.”
My heart felt like ash, and I blinked, trying to see the angel’s features. But there had been hope in its words. “Between now and the next? What does that mean?” I’m sitting at a table with an angel on the other side of the world. How freaky is that?
“It means that your body is lost, but the lost can be found,” the seraph said. “Kairos would have put your body in the only place it would remain hidden yet be immediately accessible. Between now and the next.”
Licking my lips, I snuck