Fort Banks Mall was a wave of air-conditioned coolness. I could actually feel the heat of the sun leave me as I waited by the information stand for Barnabas and Nakita, who were currently having a hushed argument just inside the double glass doors. Grace, my onetime guardian angel now turned messenger, was humming somewhere above me. The softball-size glowing ball of light had joined us almost as soon as we’d gotten airborne, and it was with her seraph-based help that we’d found this small town in the middle of the cornfields.

I’d only actually seen Grace the few times I’d dissociated from my amulet—and almost killed myself for good, incidentally. Though tiny, she’d been beautiful, with a face too bright to look at. Most times, she appeared as a haze of glowing light, sort of like the spots you sometimes get in photographs. That was exactly how she showed up on film, and it was the only way a normal human would know she was around. I could hear her. My reapers could, too, but humans could not. Lucky them.

“There once was a girl timekeeper,” Grace sang cheerfully as she dropped down to me, bored with playing in the echoes at the ceiling, “who didn’t agree with her reaper. So she fought the good fight, thinking choice just might, get the bad guy to think a bit deeper.”

“Thanks, Grace,” I said wryly.

She brightened, her giggle sounding like falling water. Grace liked her new job of messenger, which she had gained when I first gave her a name. I’d granted her the promotion accidentally, not knowing that names had that much power in the angelic realm. I think the seraphs assigned her to me as punishment, but I’d have it no other way, limericks or not.

“What’s with the reapers?” she asked, going invisible when she landed on the top of the trash can beside me.

When her wings stopped, she quit glowing.

“You make a dark reaper and a former light reaper work together and see if they don’t have issues,” I said, sighing as I leaned against the directory and waited. My hand went around my amulet and, in my mind, I reached out to the divine to warp the light around the black stone. Like magic—which it sort of was—the river-smooth stone vanished even though its weight was still heavy in my palm. Making my amulet disappear was one of the first things Nakita had taught me. Someday, I’d be able to make it look like something else, but for now, this was all I could manage.

Grace’s wings blurred into sight at my show of “skill,” then vanished. “At least they’re talking.”

“They aren’t talking; they’re arguing,” I said. This was going to be harder than I thought if they were going to