Once Dead, Twice Shy

  Once Dead, Twice Shy

  A Novel

  Kim Harrison

  For Andrew and Stuart

  Contents

  Prologue

  Everyone does it. Dies, I mean. I found this out…

  One

  I leaned my shoulder against a rough boulder and fumed.

  Two

  The air in the upper reaches had been frigidly cold,…

  Three

  “I hate it when he does that,” I muttered, jumping…

  Four

  Seeing as how it was about twenty years old, Josh’s…

  Five

  Josh sat uneasily at the rectangular table in the kitchen,…

  Six

  I’d only been to The Lowest Common Denominator, or the…

  Seven

  The sky was blue, the temperature was fabulous, and there…

  Eight

  The wind shifted the purple tips of my hair in…

  Nine

  The people around me turned from beautiful representations of life…

  Ten

  The smell of rubbing alcohol and adhesive drifted out from…

  Eleven

  I tensed my muscles and screwed my eyes shut when…

  Twelve

  “Perceptive,” Kairos said, his voice as hard as his expression.

  Thirteen

  It was noisy, the sound of first-day excitement punctuated by…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Everyone does it. Dies, I mean. I found this out for myself on my seventeenth birthday when I was killed in a freak car accident on my prom night. But it was no accident. It was a carefully planned scything, just a small moment in the battle between light reapers and dark, heaven and hell, choice and fate. Only I didn’t check out of my life like most dead people do. Thanks to a mistake, I’m stuck, dead on earth. The angel who failed to protect me and the amulet I stole from my killer are the only things keeping me from ending up where the dark reapers wanted me to be. Dead, that is.

  My name is Madison Avery, and I’m here to tell you that there’s more out there than you can see, hear, or touch. Because I’m seeing it, hearing it, touching it, living it.

  One

  I leaned my shoulder against a rough boulder and fumed. Dappled sunlight shifted upon my sneakers as the wind made my hair tickle my neck. The sound of kids swimming at the nearby lake was loud, but the happy shouts only tightened the knot in my gut. Leave it to Barnabas to try to turn around four months of failed practice in a mere twenty minutes.

  “No pressure,” I muttered, glancing across the dirt path to the reaper standing against a pine tree with his eyes shut. Barnabas was probably older than fire, but he blended in nicely, with his jeans, black T-shirt, and lanky physique. I couldn’t see his wings, which we’d flown in on, but they were there. He was an angel of death with frizzy hair and brown eyes, who wore a pair of holey sneakers. Would that make them holy holey sneakers? I wondered as I nervously rolled a pinecone back and forth under my foot.

  Feeling my attention on him, Barnabas opened his eyes. “Are you even trying, Madison?” he asked.

  “Duh. Yes,” I complained, though I knew this was a lost cause. My gaze dropped to my shoes. Yellow with purple laces, and skulls and crossbones on the toes, they matched the purple-dyed tips of my short blond hair, not that anyone else had ever made the connection. “It’s too hot to concentrate,” I protested.

  His eyebrows rose as he looked at my shorts and tank top. I actually wasn’t hot, but nerves had made me jittery. I hadn’t known that I was going to summer camp when I’d slipped out of the house this morning and rode my bike to the high school to meet Barnabas. But for all my complaining, it felt good to get out of Three Rivers. The college town my dad lived in was okay, but being the new girl sucked eggs.

  Barnabas frowned at me. “Temperature has nothing to do with it,” he said, and I rolled the bumpy pinecone under my foot even faster. “Feel for your aura. I’m right in front of you. Do it, or I’m taking you home.”

  Kicking the pinecone away, I sighed. If we went home, whoever we were here to save was going to die. “I’m trying.” I leaned against the boulder behind me, reaching up to hold the black stone cradled in silver wire that hung around my neck. At Barnabas’s impatient throat-clearing, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a hazy mist surrounding me. We were attempting to communicate silently with our thoughts. If I could give my thoughts the same color as the haze around Barnabas, my thoughts would slip through his aura and he would hear them. Not an easy thing to do when I couldn’t even see his aura. Four months of this odd student/teacher relationship, and I couldn’t even get to stage one.

  Barnabas was a light reaper. Dark reapers killed people when the probable future showed they were going to go contrary to the grand schemes of fate. Light reapers tried to stop them to ensure humanity’s right of choice. Having been assigned to prevent my death, Barnabas must have considered me one of his more spectacular failures.

  I hadn’t gone gentle into that good night, however. I had whined and protested my early death, and when I stole an amulet from my killer, I’d somehow saved myself. The amulet gave me the illusion of a body. I still didn’t know where my real body was. Which sort of bothered me. And I didn’t know why I’d been targeted, either.

  The amulet had felt like fire and ice when I’d claimed it, shifting from a dull flat gray to a space-deep black that seemed to take in light. But since then…nothing. The more I tried to use it, the more stonelike it was.

  Barnabas had now been assigned to shadow me in case the reaper who’d killed me came back for his amulet, and I’d gone back to living as normal a life as I could. Apparently just the fact that I had been able to claim it without blowing my soul to dust made it—and me—rather unique. But watching over me wasn’t Barnabas’s style, and I knew he couldn’t wait to get back to his soul-saving work. If I could just figure this thought-touching thing out, he could resume his regular duties, leaving me reasonably safe at home and able to contact him if the dark reaper showed up again. But it wasn’t happening.

  “Barnabas,” I said, weary of it, “are you sure I can do this? I’m not a reaper. Maybe I can’t touch thoughts with you because I’m dead. Ever think of that?”

  Silent, Barnabas dropped his gaze to the pine-rimmed lake. The worried lift to his shoulders told me he had. “Try again,” he said softly.

  I tightened my grip until the silver wires pressed into my fingers, trying to imagine Barnabas in my thoughts, his easy grace that most high schoolers lacked, his attractive face, his riveting smile. Honest, I wasn’t crushing on him, but every angel of death I’d seen had been attractive. Especially the one who’d killed me.

  Despite the long nights on my roof practicing with Barnabas, I hadn’t been able to do anything with the shimmery black stone. Barnabas had been hanging around so much that my dad thought he was my boyfriend, and my boss at the flower shop thought I should take out a restraining order.

  I pushed myself away from the rock. “I’m sorry, Barnabas. You go on and do your thing. I’ll sit here and wait. I’ll be fine.” Maybe this was why he’d brought me. I’d be safer waiting for him here than several hundred miles away—alone. I wasn’t sure, but I think Barnabas had lied to his boss about my progress in order to get out and working again. An angel lying—yup, it happened, apparently.

  Barnabas pressed his lips together. “No. This was a bad idea,” he said, crossing the path to take my arm. “Let’s go.”

  I jerked out of his grip. “So what if I can’t push my thoughts into yours? If you don’t want to leave m
e here, then I’ll follow you and stay out of the way. Jeez, Barnabas. It’s a summer camp. How much trouble can I get into?”

  “Plenty,” he said, his smooth, young-looking face twisting into a grimace.

  Someone was coming up the path, and I rocked back a step. “I’ll stay out of the way. No one will even know I’m there,” I said, and Barnabas’s eyes crinkled in worry.

  The people were getting closer, and I fidgeted. “Come on, Barnabas. Why did you fly us out here if you were just going to take me home again? You knew I couldn’t solidify in twenty minutes what I’ve been trying to do the past four months. You want this as much as I do. I’m already dead. What more can happen to me?”

  He looked up the path at the noisy group. “If you knew, you wouldn’t be arguing with me. Hide your amulet. One of them might be the dark reaper.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said as I tucked it behind my shirt, but I was. It wasn’t fair, being dead and still having to deal with heart-pounding, breath-stealing tension when I was afraid. Barnabas said the sensations would fade the longer I was dead, but I was still waiting, and it was embarrassing.

  Eyes down, I dropped back to let three girls and three guys go by. They were in flip-flops and shorts, the girls chattering as if they didn’t have a care in the world as they headed downhill to the dock. It all seemed normal—until a shadow passed over me and I looked up.

  Black wing, I thought, stifling a shudder. They looked like crows to the living—when the living noticed them at all. The slimy black sheets were nearly invisible when viewed from the side but for an oddly bright, shimmering line. These scavengers fed on souls of the people taken by the dark reapers, and if it wasn’t for the protection of my stolen amulet, they’d be all over me. Light reapers stayed with a scythed soul, protecting the deceased until they could be escorted from the earth.

  I glanced at Barnabas, not needing to hear his thoughts to know that someone in the group was targeted for an early death. To find out who it was would be a mix of the sketchy description from Barnabas’s boss, and Barnabas’s intuition and ability to see auras.

  “Can you tell who the victim is?” I asked. From what Barnabas had told me, auras had a telltale shimmer as to a person’s age—which sort of gave Barnabas an excuse for why he had failed in protecting me. It had been my birthday, and he only worked with seventeen-year-olds. I’d been sixteen until right before the car flipped, and officially seventeen when I actually died.

  Barnabas squinted, his eyes silvering for a moment as he drew on the divine. It totally creeped me out. “I can’t tell,” he said. “Everyone is seventeen but the girl in the red swimsuit and the short, dark-haired guy.”

  “How about the reaper, then?” I asked. No one was wearing an amulet—but since the stones could shift to look like anything, it didn’t mean much. Just one more skill I didn’t have.

  He shrugged, still watching them. “The reaper might not even be here yet. His or her aura will look seventeen, just like ours. I don’t know all the dark reapers by sight, and I won’t know for sure until he or she pulls their sword.”

  Pull sword, stick it in a person, reap accomplished. Nice. By the time you knew who the threat was, it was too late.

  I watched the black wings sport above the dock like gulls. Beside me, Barnabas fidgeted. “You want to follow them,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  It was too late to give the prevention to someone else. The memory of my heart seemed to pound harder—a shadowy remnant of being alive my mind couldn’t let go of yet—and I grabbed Barnabas’s arm. “Let’s do this.”

  “We’re leaving,” he protested, but his feet were moving, and I watched his sneakers meet the earth in perfect synchronization with mine as we headed downhill.

  “I’ll just sit quiet. What’s the big deal?” I asked.

  Our steps echoed hollowly on the dock, and he drew me to a stop. “Madison, I don’t want to make another mistake,” he said, turning me to face him. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  I looked past him, squinting in the brighter light and the fresh wind, shuddering when one of the slimy sheets of dripping black alighted on a pole—waiting. Oblivious, the group argued with the dockmaster. If we left, someone was going to die. I wasn’t leaving. I took a breath to convince Barnabas I could do this, but from the dockmaster’s hut a voice called, “Hey! You guys doing anything?”

  Barnabas jumped, and I turned, smiling. “What’s that?” I called back, tension hitting me.

  “Skiing,” the short, dark-haired guy said, holding a pair. “We can’t take two boats unless we have eight people. You two want to be the designated watchers?”

  A quiver rose through me. “Sure!” I said, sealing the deal. Barnabas wanted this. I wanted this. We were going to do this.

  “Madison,” he griped.

  But everyone was enthusiastically piling into the boats, and I dragged him closer, scanning the faces to see who didn’t fit. “Which boat has the victim on it? I’ll take the other.”

  Barnabas’s jaw was clenched. “It’s not that easy. This is an art, not a memo.”

  “Then guess!” I pleaded. “For criminy’s sakes, even if we’re on different boats, you’ll be like what…thirty feet away? What is the big deal? I’ll just shout for you, okay?”

  He hesitated, and I squinted at him, watching his thoughts play over his face. Bad idea or not, a life was on the line. Behind me, the black wing took flight.

  Barnabas took a breath to say something, pausing when a guy in gray trunks came over. He held a towrope and was smiling. “I’m Bill,” he said, extending his hand.

  I turned sideways to Barnabas and took it. “Madison,” I said shyly. I figured he wasn’t the reaper. He was too normal-looking.

  Barnabas muttered his name, and Bill looked him up and down. “Do either of you know how to drive?” Bill asked.

  “I do,” I said before Barnabas could think of an excuse to get us out of here. “But I’ve never pulled a skier. I’ll just watch.” I glanced at Barnabas. That last bit had been for him.

  “Great!” Bill smiled devilishly. “You want to ride in my boat? Watch me?”

  He was flirting, and I grinned. I’d been holed up with Barnabas for so long, working on this thought-touching stuff, that I’d forgotten how fun—and how normal—flirting was. And he was flirting with me, not the girl on the dock who’d stripped to a yellow bikini to show off her butt or the stunning girl with the long black hair, who was wearing shorts and a brilliantly patterned top.

  “Yeah, I’ll watch you,” I said, taking a step after him, only to jerk to a halt when Barnabas snagged my arm.

  “Hey,” he said loudly, his eyes silvering again and making me shiver. “Let’s do guys on one boat, girls on the other.”

  “Cool!” bikini girl said cheerfully, not seeming to notice his metallic-like irises, though she was looking right at him. “We get the blue boat.”

  I pulled out of Barnabas’s hold, uneasy that I could see something that the living clearly couldn’t. I didn’t think even Barnabas knew I could see it. The level of noise increased as they rearranged themselves, boats starting to chug and lines being cast off. Still on the dock, I pulled Barnabas down so I could whisper, “Bill isn’t the reaper, is he?”

  “No,” he whispered back. “But something’s hazing him. He might be the victim.”

  I nodded and Barnabas turned away to talk to a guy in a blue shirt standing possessively behind the wheel of the red boat. Saying hi to the girls, I landed at the bottom of the small blue speedboat. Barnabas’s plan must be to shadow the victim. I looked across the dock at Bill, wondering if I could see a dark haze about him, or if it was my imagination.

  All too soon, we were on the water, speeding over a small lake with the girl in the red one-piece skiing behind our boat, and Bill behind the other. The rhythmic thump and the hissing of the shattered waves was like a familiar, glorious song. Sunshine beat heavy on my shoulders, its warmth stolen by the force of the wind whipping m
y hair into my eyes. The black wings had risen up in confusion at the dock, but the biggest were already making their way after us. My unease grew as I dropped my gaze to the skiers.

  Bill looked like he knew what he was doing, as did the girl behind our boat. If they weren’t dark reapers, and the guy in the gray trunks driving wasn’t a reaper, then that left three possibilities, two of whom were with me. I resisted the urge to finger the black stone hiding behind my shirt, hoping that Barnabas hadn’t put me on the wrong boat. Bikini girl had on a necklace.

  “Are you a good skier?” I shouted to her, wanting to hear her talk.

  She turned and smiled, holding her long blond hair tightly. “Not bad,” she said, leaning in to be heard over the engine. “Think she’ll fall soon? I’m dying to get on the water.”

  My smile went stilted, and I hoped she wasn’t foretelling her future. “She might. The jump is coming up.”

  “Maybe then.” She glanced at the purple tips of my hair, dropping her gaze to my skull-and-crossbones earrings. Smiling, she said, “I’m Susan. Cabin Chippewa.”

  “Uh, Madison,” I said, holding tight to the boat with one hand as my balance shifted. It was too windy to really talk, and as Susan watched the skier behind us jump our wake, I assessed the driver.

  The petite girl behind the wheel had an enviable mane of black hair, long and thick. It streamed out behind her to show little ears, strong cheekbones, and a placid expression as she looked forward. Wide shoulders and a slim body made her seem as capable as she was attractive. Her Hawaiian top was glaring out here in the sun, making me wish I had worn sunglasses, too.

  My attention shifted across the water to the red boat thirty yards off our starboard and Barnabas talking to the guy in the blue shirt. The wind shifted as the boat turned to the jump, and Susan leaned in, her long hair smacking my face before she grabbed it. The black wings had caught up. All of them. “How long are you here for?” she asked.