Nakita understandably stared at me.

“I’m not good at it,” I explained, embarrassed. “I need to sit down.” Closing my eyes, I took three slow breaths—my way of inducing a feeling of calm. My shoulders eased, and I exhaled.

In my mind’s eye, I tried to imagine my aura. It wasn’t really my aura, since I was dead, but the amulet’s resonance acted the same way. Because I had the dark timekeeper amulet, my aura or resonance was a violet so dark as to be off the visible spectrum and basically black. Eyes shut, I reached up to hold the glittery black stone cradled in a silver wire and looped around my neck with a simple cord. As long as I had it within twenty feet of me, I had the illusion of a body. If I got too far from it, black wings would sense me and swarm to eat my soul—twenty measly feet between me and utter death. It looked a lot like a reaper amulet, but it was more powerful and yet—as Nakita had said—more flexible. Claiming it from my predecessor hadn’t blown my soul to dust like my trying to claim a reaper’s amulet would have. Most people didn’t even see it unless I pointed it out. I could take it off, but I was reluctant to do so.

The silver wires cradling the stone were warm, but the stone was warmer, as if holding the heat of the sun. All I had to do, in theory, was imagine my thoughts taking on the same color or wavelength as my aura so it could slip free of me. Then I had to hold my thoughts as I shifted the color to match Barnabas’s aura so my thoughts could slip through his aura and he could hear it. His resonance was green now. It shouldn’t be as hard as trying to shift all the way up the spectrum. Maybe I could do it. Maybe.

I brought Barnabas to mind, his smile, his dark humor, his odd way of looking at the world, the age behind his brown eyes, and how they flashed silver when he touched the divine. Barnabas, I thought, shifting my thoughts as “violet” as I could to get them past my aura. Nakita and I are kind of stuck here on the road.

A thrill lit through me as I felt my thoughts wing out from me to bounce against the inside of the sphere of air that surrounded the earth. But then, my entire thought seemed to explode in a bright light. Shocked, I opened my eyes and blinked.