Oh, God. Mom. I turned to the fire in a panic. I wanted to undo this, but I couldn’t. Johnny was dead. It should be me there, not him. Not him!

“Madison?” Nakita said, and I blinked at the man as his features melted into hers. “Are you all right?”

I had to run away, leave. Facing this was too awful, and the guilt made it hard to breathe. I should be dead, not Johnny. He was my brother, and now he is dead. Because of me. It should have been me. It should have been me!

“Madison!”

Barnabas was calling my name, and I gasped as the two realities—one real, one yet to be lived—clashed violently. The blue tint flashed red, and then the future vanished.

The echo of my heart pounded, and I stilled it as I stared up at Barnabas, Nakita, and . . . Josh. Above me, people cheered the last runner to cross the line. It was over. I had flashed into someone else, lived the foretold death-strike of her soul, and . . . survived.

I swayed, trying to shake the guilt and heartache over the girl’s brother’s death. Tammy. Her name was Tammy. Her belief that she caused her brother’s death still rang in me, a despair so heavy that it crushed all else and denied her soul the love it needed to survive. She would run, mentally if not physically, from those who would help her live again, and her soul . . . would wither and die long before her body did. Fate, the seraphs called it, but I didn’t believe in fate.

The old dark timekeeper, Kairos, would have sent Nakita to kill Tammy without a thought, taking her soul to save it at the expense of her life. Ron, the current light timekeeper, would, in turn, send a light reaper to stop the scything, saving her life at the cost of her soul, gambling that she would somehow learn to live again. But I wasn’t the old dark timekeeper, and I was going to use the opportunity to prove to the seraphs that fate could be sidestepped and we could save her life as well as her soul. All we needed to do was show Tammy a different choice.