“Hey!” Nakita said, eyes flashing a divine silver for an instant. “No passing notes.”

Josh closed his phone and looked up at us in question.

“Relax,” Barnabas said sourly as his fingers slipped from the top of my hand. “I was just making sure that it was possible.” He paused, then said, “See? She didn’t hear that.”

“Because I’m shielded,” I said, and Barnabas nodded, his gaze across the street and on the cars lining up. I figured his sudden sour mood wasn’t coming from Nakita’s mistrust but from his ability to talk to me silently at all. It meant he wasn’t a light reaper anymore. He was moving toward the dark side, toward me. That a light reaper had abandoned his millennium-long beliefs to follow me into the enemy camp was a sobering thought. If I could get Nakita and him to work together to save a marked person’s body and soul, then I might be able to convince the seraphs to do things my way, and the early scythings would stop for good. If, if, if. And if I couldn’t, then as soon as I found my body, hidden somewhere between the now and the next, I was giving up my amulet and going back to being normal, alive, and knowing nothing about reapers, timekeepers, and guardian angels.

But the thought lacked the thrill that it once had. I wanted this to work. Bad.

Josh got to his feet, his gym bag in hand, shifting awkwardly at the tension between Nakita and Barnabas. “Hey, um, I’m going to go behind the mausoleum and change, okay? I’ll be right back.” He turned and walked away to the small building nearby, gray with age and neglect. I watched him go, thinking he looked good. Confident.

Two kids passed him on their bikes, cutting through the cemetery as a shortcut. School was out, and I turned back to the buses, hearing kids yelling at each other. Beside me, Nakita fidgeted. I was starting to feel the tension, too, and I leaned back from the grave marker, brushing the bits of old stone off my shirt as I looked for black wings.