I brought Barnabas to mind, his smile, his dark humor, his odd way of looking at the world, the age behind his brown eyes, and how they flashed silver when he touched the divine. Barnabas, I thought, shifting my thoughts as “violet” as I could to get them past my aura. Nakita and I are kind of stuck here on the road.

A thrill lit through me as I felt my thoughts wing out from me to bounce against the inside of the sphere of air that surrounded the earth. But then, my entire thought seemed to explode in a bright light. Shocked, I opened my eyes and blinked.

“I felt them leave you,” Nakita said, smiling. “But they scattered when they diffracted against the sun. You need to modify your thoughts to his aura before they bounce off the atmosphere, not after.”

She felt it, I thought, stifling a quiver of anticipation. Barnabas had never said that when we practiced. I shifted awkwardly on the pavement to disguise my shiver, thinking this would look stupid to anyone driving by. Not that we’d seen anyone on the road yet. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to making this work. Nakita had been able to teach me how to bend light around my amulet to hide it, too. Maybe Nakita, for all her awkward inabilities among people, was the better teacher. And wouldn’t Barnabas be happy about that?

“Let me try again,” I whispered, closing my eyes and calming my thoughts to get them past my aura resonance, and then thinking with a precise narrowness, Barnabas, we’re stuck on the road. Can you find us?

“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 a road. Maybe he’ll simply send a reaper to check it out.” But it was more than that, and we both knew it. Once Ron knew what we were up to, he’d simply slap a guardian angel on Shoe and I’d lose.

I looked up when the light was eclipsed for an instant, only to blind myself when a pair of white wings blinked out the sun. In a gust of air, Barnabas landed before us, his brown eyes shining with delight. “Madison, you did it!” he said, his wings arching up, the tips crossing an instant before they vanished. Striding forward, he exclaimed, “I knew you could. When your thought slipped into mine…I am so proud of you!” But then he jerked to a halt upon noticing Nakita’s and my worry. “What’s wrong?”

Nakita took a firm stance, eyes on the sky again. “Her message echoed into Chronos’s mind as well as yours.”

“He’s probably coming,” I said miserably.

“How?” Barnabas said, looking confused. “His resonance isn’t anywhere near mine.”

Nakita’s eyes were darting everywhere. “They are both timekeepers,” she said. “You don’t think the seraphs created them such that they could talk if they wanted to?”

“I saw through his eyes,” I added.

“Sweet updrafts!” Barnabas cursed. “Are you shielding her?”

“Of course I’m shielding her, you broken feather!” Nakita snapped. “But I’m sure he got a glimpse of where we are before I got my shield in place. You did, didn’t you?”

Barnabas grimaced. Taking my elbow, he pulled us off the road, almost into the hissing cornstalks. “Fine. We leave,” he said to Nakita. “Let’s get out of here before he does show up.”

Nakita nodded and her amulet blazed as she shrugged her shoulders and her wings appeared. In an instant, I was between two angels, one with light wings, one with dark, both worried. “Why can’t I ever do anything right?” I asked, not expecting an answer, but when I got scared, I talked.

Barnabas stretched his wings again—they ran from one edge of the road to the other. “It’s not right or wrong,” he said, gathering me close to carry me into the air. “You did it, and now you need to learn how to focus. Why do you expect yourself to be perfect the first time? I’d have you try it again right now, but we have to stay shielded from here on out, and a shielded mind is a closed one.”