Once Dead Twice Shy Page 0,63

darted behind me. "Madison! Drop!" he shouted, and I fell into a sloppy front fall, getting a faceful of earthy loam. The weight of a stone rolled across my back, and then was gone. I looked up, spitting my hair and dirt out of my mouth.

With wings so white they glowed in the dusk, Nakita came to earth, spinning so her feet barely touched the ground before her wings vanished like a memory.

"You're okay!" I shouted, thinking it was one of the stupidest things I'd ever said.

"The seraphs lie to me as well," the reaper snarled, fear and anger twisting her once beautiful features. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I stared blankly at her.

"Nakita, wait!" Barnabas shouted as he lunged to get between us. The light reaper darted back when a gleam of steel slashed down. Nakita's arms were extended and her back bowed as she struck again. I gasped as I reached out in a useless warning, but Barnabas's own blade met her sword, pulled from forever and nothing, and I shivered as the sound seemed to echo and made the trees tremble. Kairos must have given her a new amulet. She didn't need the one I wanted to return to her. Her sword had a black stone now, and the jewel on Barnabas's blade had shifted farther down the spectrum, blazing a glorious yellow. Nakita's looked dead, a flat black.

"Madison wants to parlay," Barnabas said as he held Nakita's weapon unmoving against his own. "Sheathe your blade in this holy spot."

Nakita smiled, the determination on her face frightening. She looked nothing like herself, dressed in white garb that was twin to Ron's robes. "I need her," she said, her voice musical as it rose and fell. "You brought her. She's mine."

Barnabas took a step back, and the humming in my ears ceased when their blades no longer touched. "She brought herself. She wants to apologize. To not listen would shame you."

With a flourish, Nakita stepped back, wild and extravagant as she gestured for me to speak. I didn't think she cared what I might say, but it was my only shot.

Scared, I faced her with Barnabas at my elbow. "Nakita, I'm sorry," I said, my words vanishing into the gloom of dusk. "I didn't know the black wings would stay in you. I was only trying to stop you from killing Josh. I brought your amulet back," I said, hand trembling as I extended it. "It's not a bribe, but please let Josh live."

Her face twisted in a frown, but she caught the amulet when I tossed it to her, shoving it into her belt. "Kairos gives me my amulet, not you," she said. "And I need your pity less than I need your apology. The seraphs say I am perfectly fine. I am perfect!" she screamed to the sky, then turned to me, panting and eyes wild. "But they lie."

Barnabas pulled me back a step. "We need to leave. She's broken. This isn't going to accomplish anything."

"I'm broken, too," I said, thinking of my interrupted life, and I jerked out of his grip. "Nakita, will you take a message to Kairos for me? He has my body. I want it back. I'll give him his amulet for it if he promises to leave me alone. I just want to be the way I was. Please. I'm tired of being afraid."

At the word afraid, she trembled, and a shimmer of air behind her shifted to show her wings arching over her, larger than seemed possible, the tips of the longest feathers shaking. They may have gotten the black wings out of her, but they left within her something a reaper was never created to understand. Fear. And it had come from me. My memories.

"I'm not your messenger angel," she said bitterly. "But we are going to Kairos. You're a thief. A liar. With your body and soul and my scythe, he can make me as I was. As everything was. He promised!"

Kairos still has my body. Thank you, God.

"You aren't taking her," Barnabas said, clueless that Nakita was now a hundred times more dangerous. She had the power of angels cleaved to the will of humanity. Fear and a knowledge of death had made her so. I had made her so.

"She's mine as she stands there." Dropping into a hunched position, Nakita dragged her new sword forward, the tip cutting into the ground to make the moss split like a wound.

I shook my