He rose to stand in the moonlit darkness with his hands on his hips. There was a faint shimmer on him visible right along with his disgust. "If I had been a black reaper, you'd be dead."
"Yeah, well, I'm already dead, aren't I?" I said, flicking a stone at him. He didn't move as it arched over his shoulder. "What do you want?" I asked sullenly.
Instead of answering, he shrugged his narrow shoulders and looked east. "I want to know what you didn't tell Ron."
"Excuse me?"
He stood still as a rock, arms crossed over his chest and staring. "Seth said something to you in that car. It was the only time you were out of my sight. I want to know what it was. It might be the difference between you getting to play out this lie of being alive, or you getting carted off to a black court." Now he moved, his motion rough and angry. "I'm not going to fail again, and not because of you. You were important to Seth before you stole that stone. That's why he came to get you at the morgue. I want to know why."
I looked down at the stone, glittering in the moonlight, then shifted my gaze to my feet. The awkward angle of the roof made my ankles hurt. "He said my name had come up too many times in the affairs of men, and he was going to cull my soul."
Barnabas moved, coming to sit beside me with a lot of space between us. "He's done that. You're not a threat now that you're dead. Why did he come back for you?"
Reassured by his more relaxed posture, I looked at him, thinking his eyes seemed silver in the moonlight. "You won't tell?" I asked, wanting to trust him. I needed to talk to someone, and it wasn't like I could call up my old friends and vent about being dead-as entertaining as that might be.
Barnabas hesitated. "No, but I might try to persuade you to tell him yourself."
That I could deal with, and I took a slow breath. "He said that his ending my pathetic life was his ticket into a higher court. He came back to prove he had… culled me."
I waited for a reaction, but there was none. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and I lifted my head to meet his eyes. Barnabas was looking at me as if trying to figure out what it meant. Clearly not having an answer, he slowly said, "I think you should keep this to yourself for a while. He probably didn't mean anything by it. Forget it. Spend your time learning how to fit in."
"Yeah," I said with a sarcastic bark of laughter. "A new school is tons of fun."
"I meant fit in with the living."
"Oh." Okay. I was going to have to learn how to fit in, not at a new school, but with the living. Swell. Remembering the disastrous dinner with my dad, I bit my lip. "Uh, Barnabas, am I supposed to eat?"
"Sure. If you want to. I don't. Not much, anyway," he said, sounding almost wistful. "But if you're like me, you'll never be hungry."
I tucked my short hair behind my ear. "How about sleep?"
At that, he smiled. "You can try. I can't manage it unless I am bored out of my mind."
I picked a bit of tar off the shingles and flicked it at the chimney again. "How come I don't have to eat?" I asked.
Barnabas turned to face me. "That stone of yours is giving off energy, and you're taking it in. Basking in it. Watch out for psychics. They'll think you're possessed."
"Mmmm," I murmured, wondering if I could get any useful information about what was really going on from a church, but they were wrong about grim reapers, so maybe they didn't know as much as they thought.
I sighed, sitting in the dark on my roof with a white reaper-my guardian angel. Nice going, Madison, I thought, wondering if my life-or death, rather-could get any more screwed up. I slowly fingered the stone that kept me somewhat alive, wondering what I was supposed to do now. Go to school. Do my homework. Be with my dad. Try to make sense of who I was and what I was supposed to do. Nothing much had changed, really, apart from the no-eating-no-sleeping thing. So I had something worse than a black reaper gunning for me. I also had a guardian angel. And life, apparently, goes on, even if you aren't a participating part of it anymore.
Barnabas surprised me when he suddenly stood, and I leaned to look up at his height measured against the stars. "Let's go," he said, extending his hand. "I don't have anything to do tonight, and I'm bored. You're not a screamer, are you?"
My first thought was screamer? And then, go where? But what came out of my mouth was a lame, "I can't. I've been grounded. I can't set a foot outside the house apart from school until I pay for that costume." But I smiled, taking his hand and letting him help me rise. If Ron could make my dad forget I had died, I'd be willing to bet Barnabas could cover for me sneaking out a couple of hours.
"Yeah, well, I can't do anything about you being grounded," he said, "but where we're going, you won't be setting a foot anywhere."
"Huh?" I stammered, then stiffened when he moved behind me, taller because of the roof's pitch. "Hey!" I yelped when his arm went around me. But my protest vanished in shock at the gray shadow suddenly curving around us. It was real, smelling like my mom's feather pillow, and I gasped when his grip tightened and my feet left the roof in a downward drop of gravity.
"Holy crap!" I exclaimed as the world spread out beneath us, silver and black in the moonlight. "You have wings?"
Barnabas laughed, and with my stomach dropping in a tingling surge, we went higher.
Maybe… maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.
Kiss and Tell
Michele Jaffe
Chapter One
"Sorry this wasn't more of a storybook ending," the man with his hands around her throat said, smiling, holding her eyes with his own as he choked her.
"If you're going to kill me, can't you just get on with it? This is kind of uncomfortable."
"What, my hands? Or the feeling that you're a failure-"
"I'm not a failure."
"— again."
She spit in his face.
"Still got some fire. I really admire that about you. I think you and I could have gotten along nicely. Unfortunately, there just isn't time."
She gave one last fight, clawing at his hands around her throat, his forearms, anything, but he didn't even flinch. Her fists fell hopelessly to her sides.
He leaned in so close to her face that she could feel him exhale. "Any last words?"
"Three: Listerine breath strips. You really need them."
He laughed and tightened the hands around her neck until they overlapped. "Good-bye."
For a second, his eyes burned into hers. Then she heard a sharp crack and felt herself fall to the floor as everything went black.
Chapter Two
EIGHT HOURS EARLIER…
"Foxy girls know that silence may be golden-but only for four seconds. Anything longer and you re heading for Awkward Avenue," Miranda read, then frowned at the book. "If you feel the countdown creeping, make him an offer! A simple 'Would you like some nuts? said with a smile can break the silence stagnation in a snap. Remember, foxy is as foxy does."
Miranda was starting to deeply distrust How to Get-And Kiss! — Your Guy.
Leaning against the side of the black Town Car parked in the loading zone at the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport that June evening, she thought of how totally thrilled she'd been when she'd found it at the bookstore. It looked like an and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after dream come true in book form-who wouldn't want to learn "The Five Facial Expressions That Will Change Your Life" or "The Secrets of the Tongue Tantra Only Da Pros Know"? — but having done all the exercises, she wasn't convinced of the transformative powers of the Winsome Smile or spending half an hour a day sucking on a grape. It wasn't the first time a self-help book had let her down-Procrastinate No More and Make Friends with YOU had both been total disasters-but it was depressing because she'd had such high hopes this time. And because, as her best friend, Kenzi, recently pointed out, any senior in high school who acted like Miranda did around her crush really, really needed help.