Immediately their argument switched to who was ticking me off the most, and I heard them start to follow. Grace was favoring them with one of her limericks about “the reapers did fight, with all of their might, till their keeper did leave them behind.” Honestly, I was about to. They weren’t helping at all.

Finding a table that was sort of clean, I dragged out a chair to sit with my back to the doors. Silent at last, the two reapers took their places on either side of me. Nakita set her empty purse on her lap, nervously fingering her amulet as she watched the girls at the earring kiosk. Her expression was worried—not because of my mood, but because the girls were Gothed to the max in black and lace and she was wearing a red shirt. Barnabas was sullen as he slouched in his faded tee, looking good anyway with his curly hair all over the place.

“Grace,” I asked, wondering how I’d become the cool head in this circle. “What exactly did the seraphs tell you?”

This time the reapers stayed quiet, and the messenger angel dropped down to the table, her haze vanishing as she came to a rest.

“Not much,” Grace said, her ethereal voice seeming to insert itself in my mind. “Seraphs aren’t very good at giving physical descriptions. Apart from the town’s location, I know he’s good with computers.”

Leaning back in the plastic chair, I mentally crossed off the guy at the magazine kiosk reading Guns & Ammo.

“The seraphs never said he was a computer geek,” Barnabas said dryly.

Nakita bristled. Her hand dropped from her amulet, and my eyebrows rose as I saw that the gray stone had shifted to a Gothic cross. “The seraphs foretold a computer virus being released into a school as a prank,” she said to me as she glared at him. “I’d say that would make him good with computers. It’s when it gets into the local teaching hospital that people start to die. The seraphs say he finds so much pleasure in the anonymous notoriety that he goes on to do more of the same, intentionally harming people the rest of his life. So you can see why it is in everyone’s best interests, Barney, to take his soul early, before it’s so sullied and turned that he won’t ask for redemption.”