Fallen (17 page)

Luce couldn’t imagine what Sword & Cross would possibly need with all of these boxes. She lifted one lid and pulled out a thick file labeled
REMEDIAL MEASURES
. She swallowed dryly. Maybe she was better off not knowing.

“It’s alphabetical by student,” Penn called. Her voice sounded muffled and far away. “E, F, G … here we are, Grigori.”

Luce followed the sound of rustling paperwork down a narrow aisle and soon found Penn with a box propped in her arms, struggling under its weight. Daniel’s file was tucked under her chin.

“It’s so thin,” she said, lifting her chin slightly so Luce could take it. “Normally, they’re so much more, um …” She looked up at Luce and bit her lip. “Okay, now
I
sound like the crazy stalker girl. Let’s just see what’s inside.”

There was only a single page in Daniel’s file. A black-and-white scan of what must have been his student ID picture was pasted onto the upper right-hand corner. He was looking straight at the camera, at Luce, a faint smile on his lips. She couldn’t help smiling back. He looked just the same as he had that night when—well, she couldn’t quite think of when. The image of his expression was so sharp in her mind, but she couldn’t pin down where she would have seen it.

“God, doesn’t he look exactly the same?” Penn interrupted Luce’s thoughts. “And look at the date. This picture was taken three years ago when he first came to Sword & Cross.”

That must have been what Luce had been thinking … that Daniel looked the same then as he did now. But she felt like she’d been thinking—or been about to think—something different, only now she couldn’t remember what it was.

“‘Parents: unknown,’” Penn read, with Luce leaning over her shoulder. “‘Guardian: Los Angeles County Orphanage.’”

“Orphanage?” Luce asked, pressing her hand to her heart.

“That’s all there is. Everything else listed here is his—”

“Criminal history,” Luce finished, reading along. “‘Loitering on public beach after hours … vandalism of a shopping cart … jaywalking.’”

Penn widened her eyes at Luce and swallowed a laugh. “Loverboy Grigori got arrested for
jaywalking?
Admit it, that’s funny.”

Luce didn’t like picturing Daniel getting arrested for anything. She liked it even less that, according to Sword & Cross, his whole life added up to little more than a list of petty crimes. All these boxes of paperwork down here, and this was all there was on Daniel.

“There has to be more,” she said.

Footsteps overhead. Luce’s and Penn’s eyes shot to the ceiling.

“The main office,” Penn whispered, pulling a tissue from inside her sleeve to blow her nose. “It could be anyone. But no one’s going to come down here, trust me.”

A second later, a door deep within the room creaked open, and light from a hall illuminated a stairway. A clopping of shoes started down. Luce felt Penn’s grip on the back of her shirt, pulling her against the wall behind a bookshelf. They waited, holding their breath and clutching Daniel’s poached file in their hands. They were so, so busted.

Luce had her eyes closed, expecting the worst, when a haunting, melodious hum filled the room. Someone was singing.

“Doooo da da da dooo,” a female voice crooned softly. Luce craned her neck between two boxes of files and could see a thin older woman with a small flashlight
strapped to her forehead like a coal miner. Miss Sophia. She was carrying two large boxes, one stacked on top of the other so the only part of her that was visible was her glowing forehead. Her airy steps made it look as if the boxes were full of feathers instead of heavy files.

Penn gripped Luce’s hand as they watched Miss Sophia place the file boxes on an empty shelf. She took out a pen to write down something in her notebook.

“Just a couple more,” she said, then something under her breath that Luce couldn’t hear. A second later, Miss Sophia was gliding back up the stairs, gone as quickly as she’d appeared. Her hum lingered for just a moment in her wake.

When the door clicked shut, Penn let out a huge gulp of air. “She said there were more. She’ll probably come back.”

“What do we do?” Luce asked.

“You sneak back up the stairs,” Penn said, pointing. “Hang a left at the top and you’ll be right back at the main office. If anyone sees you, you can say you were looking for a bathroom.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll put Daniel’s file away and meet you by the bleachers. Miss Sophia won’t get suspicious if she sees just me. I’m down here so much it’s like a second dorm room.”

Luce glanced at Daniel’s file with a small pang of
regret. She wasn’t ready to leave yet. Right around the time she’d resigned herself to checking out Daniel’s file, she’d also started thinking about Cam’s. Daniel was so cryptic—and unfortunately, so was his file. Cam, on the other hand, seemed so open and easy to read that it made her curious. Luce wondered what else she might be able to find out about him that he might not otherwise share. But one look at Penn’s face told Luce that they were short enough on time as it was.

“If there’s more to find on Daniel, we’ll find it,” Penn assured her. “We’ll keep looking.” She gave Luce a little shove toward the door. “Now, go.”

Luce moved quickly down the rank corridor, then pushed open the door to the stairs. The air at the base of the stairs was still humid, but she could feel it clear a little with each step she took. When she finally rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, she had to blink and rub her eyes to readjust to the bright sunlight flooding the hallway. She stumbled around the corner and through the whitewashed doors to the main lobby. There she froze.

Two black stiletto boots, crossed at the ankles, were propped up and sticking out of the phone booth, looking very Wicked Witch of the South. Luce was hurrying toward the front door, hoping not to be spotted, when she realized that the stiletto boots were attached to a pair of snakeskin leggings, which was attached to an unsmiling
Molly. The tiny silver camera was resting in her hand. She raised her eyes to Luce, hung up the phone at her ear, and kicked her feet to the floor.

“Why do you look so guilty, Meat Loaf?” she asked, standing up with her hands on her hips. “Let me guess. You’re still planning on ignoring my suggestion to stay away from Daniel.”

This whole evil monster thing had to be an act. Molly had no way of knowing where Luce had just been. She didn’t know anything about Luce. She had no cause to be so nasty. Since the first day of school, Luce had never done a thing to Molly—except try to stay away from her.

“Are you forgetting what a hellish disaster it was the
last
time you tried to force yourself on a guy who wasn’t interested?” Molly’s voice was as sharp as a knife. “What was his name again? Taylor? Truman?”

Trevor
. How could Molly know about Trevor? This was it, her deepest, darkest secret. The one thing Luce wanted—
needed
—to keep under wraps at Sword & Cross. Now, not only did Evil Incarnate know all about it, she felt no shame bringing it up, cruelly, cavalierly—in the middle of the school’s main office.

Was it possible that Penn had been lying, that Luce
wasn’t
the only person she shared her office secrets with? Was there any other logical explanation? Luce gripped her arms over her chest, feeling as sick and exposed … and inexplicably guilty as she’d felt the night of the fire.

Molly cocked her head. “Finally,” she said, sounding relieved.
“Something
got through to you.” She turned her back on Luce and shoved open the front door. Then, just before she sauntered outside, she twisted her neck around and looked down her nose at Luce. “So don’t do to dear old Daniel what you did to what’s-his-name.
Capiche?”

Luce started after her, but only got a few steps out the door before she realized she would probably crack if she tried to take on Molly now. The girl was just too vicious. Then, rubbing salt in Luce’s wound, Gabbe trotted down from the bleachers to meet Molly in the middle of the field. They were far enough away that Luce couldn’t make out their expressions when they both turned back to look at her. The ponytailed blond head craned toward the black pixie cut—the vilest tête-à-tête Luce had ever seen.

She balled her sweating fists together, imagining Molly spilling everything she knew about Trevor to Gabbe, who would immediately run off to relay the news to Daniel. At the thought of this, a sick ache spread from Luce’s fingertips, up her arms, and into her chest. Daniel might have been caught jaywalking, but so what? It was nothing compared to what Luce was in here for.

“Heads up!” a voice called out. That had always been Luce’s least favorite thing to hear. Sporting equipment of all sorts had a funny way of careening right at her. She winced, looking up directly into the sun. She couldn’t
see anything and didn’t even have time to cover her face before she felt a smack against the side of her head and heard a loud
thwunk
ringing in her ears.
Ouch
.

Roland’s soccer ball.

“
Nice
one!” Roland called out as the ball sailed directly back to him. Like she’d intended to do that. She rubbed her forehead and took a few wobbly steps.

A hand around her wrist. A spark of heat that made her gasp. She looked down to see tan fingers around her arm, then up into Daniel’s deep gray eyes.

“You okay?” he asked.

When she nodded, he raised an eyebrow. “If you wanted to play soccer, you could have said so,” he said. “I’d have been happy to explain some of the finer points of the game, like how most people use less delicate body parts of their body to return a kick.”

He let go of her wrist, and Luce thought he was reaching toward her, to stroke the stinging side of her face. For a second, she hung there, holding her breath. Then her chest collapsed when Daniel’s hand swept back to brush his own hair from his eyes.

That was when Luce realized Daniel was making fun of her.

And why shouldn’t he? There was probably an imprint of a soccer ball on the side of her face.

Molly and Gabbe were still staring—and now Daniel—with their arms crossed over their chests.

“I think your girlfriend’s getting jealous,” Luce said, gesturing at the pair.

“Which one?” he asked.

“I didn’t realize they were both your girlfriends.”

“Neither one is my girlfriend,” he said simply. “I don’t have a girlfriend. I meant, which one did you think was my girlfriend?”

Luce was stunned. What about that whole whispered conversation with Gabbe? What about the way the girls were looking at them right now? Was Daniel lying?

He was looking at her funny. “Maybe you hit your head harder than I thought,” he said. “Come on, let’s take a walk, get you some air.”

Luce tried to locate the snide joke in Daniel’s latest suggestion. Was he saying she was an airhead who needed more air? No, that didn’t even make sense. She glanced at him. How could he look so simply sincere? And just when she was getting so used to the Grigori brush-off.

“Where?” Luce asked cautiously. Because it would be too easy to feel gleeful right now about the fact that Daniel didn’t have a girlfriend, about him wanting to go somewhere with her. There had to be a catch.

Daniel merely squinted at the girls across the field. “Someplace where we won’t be watched.”

Luce had told Penn she’d meet her at the bleachers, but there’d be time to explain later, and of course Penn
would understand. Luce let Daniel lead her past the scrutinizing gaze of the girls and the little grove of half-rotted peach trees, around the back of the old church-gym. They were coming up on a forest of gorgeously twisted live oak trees, which Luce never would have guessed were tucked away there. Daniel looked back to make sure she was keeping up. She smiled as though following him were no big deal, but as she picked her way among the gnarled old roots, she couldn’t help thinking about the shadows.

Now she was going into the bosky woods, the dark under the thick foliage pierced every so often by a small shaft of sunlight from above. The stench of rich, dank mud filled the air, and Luce suddenly knew there was water nearby.

If she were the kind of person who prayed, this would be when she would pray for the shadows to stay away, just for this sliver of time she had with Daniel, so he wouldn’t have to see how crazy she sometimes got. But Luce had never prayed. Didn’t know how. Instead, she just crossed her fingers.

“The forest opens right up here,” Daniel said. They’d reached a clearing, and Luce gasped in wonder.

Something had changed while she and Daniel had been walking through the forest, something more than just the mere distance from phlegm-colored Sword & Cross. Because when they came out of the trees and
stood on this high red rock, it was like they were standing in the middle of a postcard, the kind that spun around a metal rack in a small-town drugstore, a dreamy image of an idyllic South that didn’t exist anymore. Every color Luce’s eyes fell on was brilliant, brighter than it had seemed just a moment before. From the crystal blue lake just below them to the dense emerald forest surrounding it. Two seagulls banked in the clear sky overhead. When she stood on her toes, she could see the beginnings of a tawny-colored salt marsh, one she knew gave way to the white foam of the ocean somewhere on the invisible horizon.

She glanced up at Daniel. He looked brilliant, too. His skin was golden in this light, his eyes almost like rain. The feel of them on her face was a heavy, remarkable thing.

“What do you think?” he asked. He seemed so much more relaxed now that they were away from everyone else.

“I’ve never seen anything so wonderful,” she said, scanning the pristine surface of the lake, feeling the urge to dive in. About fifty feet out on the water was a large, flat, moss-covered rock. “What’s that?”

“I’ll show you,” Daniel said, kicking off his shoes. Luce tried unsuccessfully not to stare when he tugged his T-shirt over his head, exposing his muscled torso. “Come on,” he said, making her realize how rooted to
the spot she must have looked. “You can swim in that,” he added, pointing at her gray tank top and cutoffs. “I’ll even let you win this time.”