“There once was a girl timekeeper,” Grace sang cheerfully as she dropped down to me, bored with playing in the echoes at the ceiling, “who didn’t agree with her reaper. So she fought the good fight, thinking choice just might, get the bad guy to think a bit deeper.”

“Thanks, Grace,” I said wryly.

She brightened, her giggle sounding like falling water. Grace liked her new job of messenger, which she had gained when I first gave her a name. I’d granted her the promotion accidentally, not knowing that names had that much power in the angelic realm. I think the seraphs assigned her to me as punishment, but I’d have it no other way, limericks or not.

“What’s with the reapers?” she asked, going invisible when she landed on the top of the trash can beside me. When her wings stopped, she quit glowing.

“You make a dark reaper and a former light reaper work together and see if they don’t have issues,” I said, sighing as I leaned against the directory and waited. My hand went around my amulet and, in my mind, I reached out to the divine to warp the light around the black stone. Like magic—which it sort of was—the river-smooth stone vanished even though its weight was still heavy in my palm. Making my amulet disappear was one of the first things Nakita had taught me. Someday, I’d be able to make it look like something else, but for now, this was all I could manage.

Grace’s wings blurred into sight at my show of “skill,” then vanished. “At least they’re talking.”

“They aren’t talking; they’re arguing,” I said. This was going to be harder than I thought if they were going to “discuss” everything to death. We were here; it was time to start looking for the mark.