Smiling weakly, I extended my hand. Josh took it, pulling me to my feet. I brushed off my butt and shivered in the shade. I gazed across the track, remembering the vision of billowing smoke and fire leaping as if it was a living thing. Silent, they waited.
I looked at them, seeing Barnabas’s knowing resignation that this was not going to be as easy as I wanted it to be, Nakita’s fear that I was going to ask her to do something she didn’t understand, and Josh’s eagerness to do something, anything, different.
“You guys up for a field trip?” I asked.
As one, they all exhaled, Josh grinning widely. “And how!”
Chapter Two
The gravestone I was standing behind came up to my chest, and I rested my arms across the top. The dry, hot breeze shifted the purple tips of my short hair in and out of my eyes as I waited for Barnabas to come back from his on-foot reconnaissance. Nakita was taking shots of the tombstones with her camera, always ready in her little red purse. And Josh was trying to keep from throwing up after his first angel-assisted flight.
Nakita insisted she’d chosen to land in this graveyard because the school was directly across the busy street, but I thought that it might be a dry sense of humor developing in the otherwise humor-deficient and deadly dark reaper. I’d admit the graveyard was probably a better choice than the fast-food place next door—especially with Josh still hyperventilating.
I glanced at Josh’s hunched, shaky outline as he leaned against a nearby grave marker, his gym bag at his feet and his back to me as he recovered. It probably hadn’t helped that we hadn’t just been flying, but flinging, as well. The awful nothingness of traveling between space was frightening at best, and the first time Nakita had wrapped her wings around me and flung us from Indiana to a Greek island on the other side of the earth had been awful. I suppose Kairos’s island was mine now, since I had his job and he was dead.