He didn’t say anything, and feeling Nakita’s eyes on me, I rolled the window down. Jeez, it was a crank, and it was stiff, like it hadn’t been down in a year. Slowly the still air was replaced by new as we headed for the exit, pulling out to go the same way Shoe had. There had been a small town east of here when we’d flown in, right in the middle of cornfields.

Ace bobbed his head in time with the music, glancing at Nakita to see how she liked it.

My attention dropped to the CD I was holding, and I put it on the dash, fingering another one decorated with similar artwork. It was all swirls and stark, bright colors, making me think of Celtic knot work.

“This is good,” I said as I looked at the handful of discs within my easy reach. “The artwork, I mean. You should talk to your art teacher. I bet she knows of a scholarship.”

“People like them don’t help people like me,” Ace said, his mood tarnishing. “Besides, college…that’s not for me.”

My eyebrows rose. People like him?

“That’s mine, too,” he said, and I followed his pointing finger to the overpass we were going under. It was covered in graffiti with the same swirls and angles. Archetype symbols were worked into it everywhere, making it look like sort of a mix between a tattoo and a stained-glass window.

“Wow,” I said, turning in the seat to find that the other side of the overpass was decorated as well. “That’s beautiful.”

Ace smiled a bad-boy smile and tapped his fingers in time with the drums. “Almost got caught the last night I worked on it. They were waiting for me. Look at the water tower.” Nakita made a strangled sound, and I followed her gaze to the bulbous thing rising high over the cornfields. My mouth dropped open, and I stared.

“You like it?” Ace asked, and I nodded, too shocked to do more.

“It looks like a black wing!” Nakita whispered, and I nodded again. Wrapped around the water tower was a black-and-white crow, looking as if it were melting into a dripping puddle of goo. It looked exactly like a black wing might look to the living, sort of a mix of sophisticated graffiti and Native American petroglyphs. Black wings were unintelligent scavengers of the soul world, showing up at a reaping in hopes of snitching a bit of unattended soul. I hated them, and they gave me the creeps. Both light and dark reapers used them to help zero in on a target, even as loathsome as they were.

“I’ve made that my trademark,” Ace was saying, and I dragged my attention back to him.

“The crows?” I said, stifling a shiver. “Where did you get the idea to make them melt like that?” His jaw clenched. “Shoe.”

Back to Shoe. It looked like Barnabas was right: Shoe was our target, not Ace.