She blurred as my vision became flooded with wetness. This wasn’t possible. I’d just seen her the day before, and she was the picture of health. She was happy and vibrant. She fairly glowed. How could that change so fast? How could she become one of the transparent gray departed?

I turned from her and leaned against the checkout counter. Fought to breathe. Struggled for an explanation. After Erin’s baby. After the Vandenberg children. This? Now? Was life really so meaningless? So fragile? So easily lost?

She touched my arm. “Janey, I just stayed for him. For Lewis. Can you get a message to him?”

A tear pushed past my lashes when I looked at her again. Did death really target the innocent? Did it zero in on the purest, most radiant souls?

“Can you please tell him I’ve had the best two days of my life?”

“I don’t understand,” I said at last.

A few of the customers had turned toward me. Dixie stepped out from behind the prep station, wiping her hands on a towel, her expression curious. Cookie stopped what she was doing and stilled.

“I had asthma and severe allergies. It was no one’s fault. I ate a corn dog from Whips. I’ve eaten a hundred. They must’ve switched to peanut oil.”

A soft cry wrenched from my throat, and I sank onto my elbows. If not for the desk, I would’ve crumpled like the three men earlier today. This was not happening.

“I just want Lewis to know how wonderful a person he is. He really has no idea. He needs to know, Janey. And he needs to know how much I loved him.” She stepped closer.

I couldn’t look at her. In spite of all the bravado today, I was a coward after all.

“Promise me,” she said, her tone harder than before, probably to get me to focus.

It was one thing to see the departed as being other. As almost not being real. It was another thing to know on a visceral level that they were once alive and dynamic and worthy of all that life had to offer.

I nodded, agreeing at last, and she smiled. “Thank you.” Without another word, she slipped to the other side.

I clutched the counter, digging in my nails as her life flashed before my eyes. I saw the first time Lewis noticed her. Or kind of noticed her. She’d dropped her books in high school, and as a group of kids beside her laughed, he hurried over, picked them up, handed them to her, then kept jogging as he tried to catch up to his friends. It was the everydayness that captured her. He didn’t do it for accolades. He just did it. It was simply in his nature. She was invisible until that day. That day, that very minute, she decided to be seen.

I saw her watch him at a talent contest in middle school where his band played a Fall Out Boy song. He was lead guitar, and the entire event won him a trophy and a lot of female admirers. Yet there wasn’t a jealous bone in Shayla’s body, because she loved him even then. She was happy for him. Wanted only the best.

I saw her during an asthma attack at her fifth birthday party. It was so bad, she had to be rushed to the hospital. She wasn’t mad that she missed the party or the cake or the time with her friends from the hospital. She was mad because she spilled red Kool-Aid on the dress her mother stayed up all night making for her. It broke her heart, and she cried for hours, so her mother stayed up all night again and made her a shorts set out of what was left.

I saw her the day she was adopted. After she was tossed around a series of foster homes as an infant, her parents finally found her when she was three. She was thin and sickly and had an oxygen tube looped under her nose and around her ears, but they’d recognized her anyway. Said they’d been looking everywhere for her. Even though she was pale with blue eyes and freckles, and they were dark and tall and beautifully exotic, she recognized them, too.

I saw her in the neonatal ICU, shaking with the effects of the drugs, so weak she couldn’t breathe on her own, her heart couldn’t function on its own, so they connected her to a machine that lulled her to sleep with whirring sounds for ten days. The nurses told her to fight with everything she had, so she did.

I saw her come into the world on the filthy floor of a crack den. Her mother had OD’d and was already dead. No one noticed her at first. No one called the police. But it wasn’t their fault. She’d been born invisible. It was a miracle one of the dealers saw her. Not wanting anything to do with the cops, he wrapped her in a shirt stiff with dried blood on it and left her in front of an all-night liquor store.

She turned back to me, a Cheshire smile on her face. Only then did I notice the tattoo she had on the inside of her wrist. INVISIBLE GIRL, NOW SHOWING.

I stood in the present, still clutching the counter, shaking so hard with anger and indignation and outrage that it vibrated. Small clear drops landed on the Formica under my face. Tears had dripped off my chin. The fury inside me took on a life of its own.

“Charley.” Cookie walked slowly toward me, her hands up, her voice soft.

Reyes watched me from the kitchen entrance, his head bowed, his expression one of warning.

Too late.

I released the furious thing inside.

21

I see dead people.

No, wait. I take that back.

I see people I want dead.

—ECARD

It was like in those movies when the misunderstood girl gets so mad she suddenly develops superpowers and blows out the windows of her high school, showering all the kids who were awful to her with shattered glass without meaning to.

It was like that, only I’d meant it.

The world exploded. Everything from the plate-glass windows to the coffee cups that lined the tables splintered into a million sharp, lethal torpedoes. People flew back, their faces frozen in a variety of horrified stages when time slowed to a full stop. Cookie stood before me, reaching out, her face sad. Knowing.

Then I saw Reyes. The anger simmering beneath his steely surface went way beyond what I’d expected. He stood deathly still. His fire blazed around him, the flames reaching all the way to the ceiling and fanning out.

We both turned toward the front door. With fists clenched at my sides, I watched as the angelic being I’d seen before walked toward me. The slivers of glass that hung in the air parted slowly, moving out of his way, tinkling as they bounced off each other. It sounded like ice crackling on a winter’s day.

His wings spanned the entire width of the café before he folded them at his back.

Though Reyes was across the café, the angel addressed him first. “Rey’aziel.”

“Michael.”

The angel faced me, his movements stiff. Formal. “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia —”

I frowned and stepped back. “Is that my name?”

“— I am sent by the Father Jehovah, the one true God of this dimension, to end your mortal life so that you may ascend to your rightful place of omniscience and duty.”

My anger dissipated, and shock took its place. “I don’t understand.”

“You are Val-Eeth. You are too powerful for this world in this condition.”

I glanced at Reyes. His flames had died down a bit, and he studied Michael with a new curiosity.

“I don’t understand even more.”

Michael eyed me, assessing me with one quick sweep. “Can you imagine what would happen if the detonator for an armed nuclear device fell into the hands of a child?”

“I’m guessing that’s bad.”