Authors: Lauren Kate
She and Miles had bickered several times over which way to go and how to get there—and Shelby hated fighting with Miles. It was like arguing with a puppy. The truth was, neither of them really knew what they were doing.
But in Jerusalem, there had been one good thing: The three of them—Shelby, Miles, and Daniel—had actually, for once, gotten along. Now, with Daniel’s blessing (some might call it a command), Shelby and Miles were finally headed back home. Part of Shelby worried
about abandoning Luce, but another part—the part that trusted Daniel—was eager to get back to where she was supposed to be. Her proper era and place.
It felt like they had been traveling for a very long time, but who knew how time worked inside the Announcers? Would they come back and find they’d been gone just seconds, Shelby had wondered, a bit nervously, or would
years
have passed?
“As soon as we get back to Shoreline,” Miles said, “I’m running straight into a long, hot shower.”
“Yeah, good call.” Shelby grabbed a chunk of her thick blond ponytail and sniffed. “Wash this Announcer funk out of my hair. If that’s even possible.”
“You know what?” Miles leaned in, lowering his voice, even though there was no one else around. Weird that the Announcer had planted them so far off the grounds of the school. “Maybe tonight we should sneak into the mess hall and snag some of those flaky biscuits—”
“The buttery ones? From the tube?” Shelby’s eyes widened. Another genius idea from Miles. The guy was good to have around. “Man, I’ve missed Shoreline. It’s good to be—”
They crossed beyond the line of trees. A meadow opened up before them. And then it hit Shelby: She wasn’t seeing any of the familiar Shoreline buildings, because they weren’t there.
She and Miles were … somewhere else.
She paused and glanced at the hillside surrounding them. Snow sat on the boughs of trees that Shelby suddenly realized were definitely
not
California redwoods. And the slushy mud road ahead of them was no Pacific Coast Highway. It wound downward over the hillside for several miles toward a stunningly old-looking city protected by a massive black stone wall.
It reminded her of one of those faded old tapestries where unicorns frolicked in front of medieval towns, which some ex-boyfriend of her mom had once dragged her to see at the Getty.
“I thought we were home!” Shelby cried, her voice landing somewhere between a bark and a whine. Where
were
they?
She stopped just short of the crude road and looked around at the muddy desolation before her. There was
no one
around. Scary.
“I thought we were, too.” Miles scratched his cap glumly. “I guess we’re not quite back at Shoreline.”
“
Not quite?
Look at this excuse for a road. Look at that fortress thing down there.” She gasped. “And are those little moving dots
knights
? Unless we’re in some kind of theme park, we’re stuck in the freaking Middle Ages!” She covered her mouth. “We’d better not get the plague. Whose Announcer did you open up in Jerusalem, anyway?”
“I don’t know, I just—”
“We’re never going to get home!”
“Yes, we are, Shel. I read about this … I think. We got backwards in time by leapfrogging through other angels’ Announcers, so maybe we have to get home that way, too.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? Open another one!”
“It’s not like that.” Miles jerked his baseball cap lower over his eyes. Shelby could barely see his face. “I think we have to find one of the angels, and just sort of borrow another shadow—”
“You make it sound like borrowing a sleeping bag for a camping trip.”
“Listen: If we find a shadow that casts across the century where we actually exist, we can make it home.”
“How do we do
that
?”
Miles shook his head. “I thought I’d done it when we were with Daniel in Jerusalem.”
“I’m scared.” Shelby crossed her arms over her chest and shivered in the wind. “Just do
something
!”
“I can’t just—especially not with you screaming at me—”
“Miles!” Shelby’s body seized up. What was that rumbling sound behind them? Something was coming up the road.
“What?”
A horse-drawn cart creaked toward them. The clop of horses’ hooves was growing louder. In a second, whoever was driving that cart would crest the hill and see them.
“Hide!” Shelby screamed.
The silhouette of a stout man holding the reins of two brown-and-white-spotted horses rose into view on the sloping road. Shelby grabbed Miles by his collar. He’d been fussing nervously with his hat, and as she yanked him behind the wide trunk of an oak tree, the bright blue cap flew off his head.
Shelby watched the cap—the cap that had been part of Miles’s daily wardrobe for years—sail through the air like a blue jay. Then it plummeted downward, into a wide pale-brown puddle of mud in the road.
“My hat,” Miles whispered.
They were huddled very close together, their backs against the rough bark of the oak. Shelby glanced over at him and was amazed to see his face in its entirety. His eyes seemed magnified. His hair messy. He looked … handsome, like a guy she’d never met before. Miles tugged on his hat-hair, self-conscious.
Shelby cleared her throat and her thoughts. “We’ll get it as soon as the cart goes by. Just stay out of sight until this dude is out of the way.”
She could feel Miles’s warm breath on her neck and the jut of his hipbone pushing against her side. How was
Miles so skinny? The guy ate like a horse, but he was all meat and no potatoes. At least, that was what Shelby’s mother would say if she ever met him—which she never would if Miles couldn’t find an Announcer that would take them back to the present.
Miles fidgeted, straining to see his cap.
“Stay still,” Shelby said. “This guy could be some sort of barbarian.”
Miles held up a finger and tilted his head. “Listen. He’s
singing
.”
A patch of snow crunched under Shelby’s feet as she craned her neck around the tree to watch the cart approach. The driver was a ruddy-cheeked man with a dirty shirt collar, daggy trousers that were obviously handmade, and a colossal fur vest he wore cinched at the waist with a leather belt. His small blue felt cap looked like a ridiculous little polka dot in the center of his broad, bald forehead.
His song had the jolly, raucous ring of a pub tune—and boy, was he belting it out. The clopping of his horses’ hooves sounded almost like a drumming accompaniment to his loud, brassy voice:
“Riding to town t’ fetch a maid, a busty maid, a lusty maid. Riding to town to take a bride, in eventide, a Valentine!”
“Classy.” Shelby rolled her eyes. But at least she recognized the man’s accent, a clue. “So, I guess we’re in jolly old England.”
“And I guess it’s Valentine’s Day,” Miles said.
“Thrilling. Twenty-four hours of feeling especially single and pathetic …
medieval-style
.”
She’d done jazz hands on that last bit for effect, but Miles was too busy watching the crude board cart drive by to notice.
The horses were tacked in unmatched blue and white bridles and harnesses. Their ribs were showing. The man rode alone, sitting atop a rotting wooden bench at the head of the cart, which was about the size of a truck bed and covered with a sturdy white tarp. Shelby couldn’t see what the man was hauling to town, but whatever it was, it was heavy. The horses were sweating despite the frigid weather, and the planks of wood at the cart’s base strained and shuddered as it drove toward the walled city.
“We should follow him,” Miles said.
“What for?” Shelby’s mouth twitched. “Want to fetch yourself a busty, lusty maid?”
“I’d like to ‘fetch’ someone we know, whose Announcer we can use to get us home. Remember? Your lip balm?” He parted her lips with his thumb. His touch left Shelby momentarily speechless. “We’ll have a better shot coming across one of the angels in town.”
The cart’s wheels groaned in and out of ruts in the muddy road, rocking the driver from side to side. Soon he was close enough that Shelby could see the coarseness of his beard, which was as thick and black as his bearskin
vest. His pitch faltered on the extended last syllable of
Valentine
, and he took a great gulp of air before beginning again. Then his song broke off abruptly.
“What’s this?” he grunted.
Shelby could see that his hands were chapped and red from the cold as they tugged roughly on the horses’ reins to slow them. The rail-thin animals neighed, coming to a stop just short of Miles’s bright blue baseball cap.
“No, no, no,” Shelby muttered under her breath. Miles’s face had gone pale.
The man shimmied fatly off the bench, his boots landing in the thick mud. He walked toward Miles’s hat, bent down with another grunt, and swooped it up in the blink of an eye.
Shelby heard Miles swallow hard.
A quick swipe against the man’s already filthy trousers and the cap was halfway clean. Without a word, he turned and mounted the cart’s bench again, tucking the hat inside the tarp behind him.
Shelby looked down at herself and her green hoodie. She tried to imagine this man’s reaction if she were to pop out from behind a tree wearing weird clothes from the future and try to take back his prize. It was not a calming idea.
In the time it had taken Shelby to chicken out, the man had tugged on the reins; the cart started rolling to
town again, and his song entered its twelfth off-key round.
Another thing Shelby had screwed up. “Oh, Miles. I’m sorry.”
“Now we definitely have to follow him,” Miles said, a little desperate.
“Really?” Shelby asked. “It’s just a hat.”
But then she looked at Miles. She still wasn’t used to seeing his face. The cheeks Shelby used to think of as babyish seemed stronger, more angular, and his irises were speckled with a new intensity. She could tell by his crestfallen expression that it definitely wasn’t “just a hat” to him. Whether it held special memories or was simply a good-luck talisman, she didn’t know. But she would do anything to get that look off his face.
“Okay,” she blurted out. “Let’s go get it.”
Before Shelby knew what was happening, Miles had slipped his hand through hers. It felt strong and assured and a little impulsive—and then he tugged her toward the road. “Come on!” She resisted for an instant, but then her eyes accidentally locked with Miles’s, and they were super-crazy blue, and Shelby felt a wave of exhilaration kick in.
Then they were running down a snow-dotted medieval road, moving past crop fields that were dead for the winter, covered in a sleek sheet of white that draped the trees and spotted the dirt road. They were heading
toward a walled city with towering black spires and a narrow, moated entry. Hand in hand, pink-cheeked, chapped-lipped, laughing for no reason Shelby could ever have put into words—laughing so hard she nearly forgot what they were about to do. But then, when Miles called out, “Jump!”—something snapped into place and she did.
For a moment, it almost felt like she was flying.
A knotty log formed the back ledge of the cart, barely wide enough to balance on. Their feet skimmed it, landing there by sheer, graceless luck—
For a moment. Then the cart hit a rut and rattled fiercely, and Miles’s foot slipped and Shelby lost her grip on the canvas tarp. Her fingers slipped and her body flailed and she and Miles were flung backward, sailing downward, into the mud.
Splash
.
Shelby grunted. Her rib cage throbbed. She wiped the cold mud from her eyes and spat out a mouthful of the dingy stuff. She looked up at the cart growing smaller in the distance. Miles’s hat was gone.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
He wiped his face with the hem of his T-shirt. “Yeah. You?” When she nodded, he grinned. “Do Francesca’s face if she found out where we were right now.” Miles’s command sounded cheerful, but Shelby knew that inside he was gutted.
Still, she would play along. Shelby loved to impersonate their stately Shoreline teacher. She rolled out of the puddle, propped herself on her elbows, stuck out her chest, and pinched up her nose. “And I suppose you’re going to deny that you were purposely attempting to disgrace Shoreline’s legacy? I’m absolutely
loath
to imagine what the faaancypants board of directors will say. And have I mentioned that I broke a nail on an Announcer’s edge trying to track you two down—”
“Now, now, Frankie.” Miles helped Shelby up from the mud as he deepened his voice to do his best impersonation of Steven, Francesca’s slightly more relaxed demon husband. “Let’s not be too hard on the Nephilim. A single semester of scrubbing toilets really should teach them their lesson. After all, their mistake began with noble intentions.”
Noble intentions. Finding Luce.
Shelby swallowed, feeling a somberness settle over her. They’d been a team, the three of them. Teams stuck together.
“We
didn’t
give up on her,” Miles said softly. “You heard what Daniel said. He is the only one who can find her.”
“You think he’s found her yet?”
“I hope so. He said he would. But—”
“But what?” Shelby asked.
Miles paused. “Luce was pretty mad when she left
everyone in the backyard. I hope that whenever Daniel finds her, she forgives him.”
Shelby stared at mud-slicked Miles, knowing how much he had—at one point—truly cared about Luce. Admittedly, Shelby hadn’t ever felt
that
way about anyone. In fact, she was legendary for choosing the absolute worst guys to date.
Phil?
Come on! If she hadn’t fallen for him, the Outcasts wouldn’t have tracked Luce down and she wouldn’t have had to jump through the Announcer, and Miles and Shelby wouldn’t be stuck here right now. Covered in mud.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was: Shelby was amazed that Miles wasn’t more bitter about seeing Luce in mega-love with someone else. But he wasn’t. That was Miles.
“She’ll forgive him,” Shelby finally said. “If someone loved me enough to dive through multiple millennia just to find me, I’d get over myself.”
“Oh, that’s all it would take?” Miles elbowed her.