“Madison!” she exclaimed, and I looked up at her, seeing my fear reflected in her silvered eyes. But it was the memory of Shoe’s haunted look that wouldn’t leave my mind.

A crash pulled my attention from her, and I realized that everything had taken all of an instant. Shoe was getting up off the floor, dazed but determined, holding his jaw. I’d seen this before. Lived it.

“Get up!” Ace was screaming at him. “I’m going to kill you!”

“Madison?” Nakita said, helping me sit up. “Are you okay? I’ve never seen anyone flash forward.”

“I’ll be fine.” Wobbling to my feet, I grasped for anything to steady me, latching onto the rolling gurney. Bad choice, and I stumbled until Nakita caught me. “It really takes a lot out of me.” Crap, I could hardly stand up.

“Get a grip, Ace,” Shoe breathed, staggering as he stood. “We’re talking about real people. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Wrong with me?” Ace shouted, and my eyes went to the angel above us, right where I remembered seeing her.

She was crying as it all played out again. I knew she’d seen everything I had seen during the flash forward. She had bathed in the divine and could live the past and the future all at once. And she was chained by a will not her own, but Ron’s.

Swallowing hard, I leaned heavily into Nakita. “You know what happens,” I said to the angel, and the angel turned to me, surprised. “I never wanted to end his life, and I’m not going to do it now. Fate or choice. They can be the same. As the dark timekeeper, I ask you to do as you would—without breaking the constraints of your previous charge.”

Ace had yanked the cord from the wall, and as Shoe tried to stop him from snapping the CD in half, Ace shoved him into the wall behind the desk, following it with a punch to Shoe’s gut. Exhaling in a puff of pained air, Shoe slid out of sight behind the desk.

And though I couldn’t see beyond the shimmering glow that surrounded the guardian angel, I knew she smiled at me, bathing me in the first feeling of peace I’d had since I stood on a Greek island on the other side of the world and agreed to try to change the world. “Is this the present?” she asked, adding a bewildered, “Sometimes I can’t tell.”

I nodded, and she darted closer, the glow of her seeming to warm my face. “I like you,” she chimed, the words tingling across me in waves. “You use your love to see the world. It makes everything harder for you, but if it were easy, then everyone could do it.”

I had no clue what she was talking about, but I watched her fly into the fray, shifting the phone cord up an inch.

As if choreographed to music, Ace stepped back, tripping on it. Shouting in surprise, he went down.