Fallen Series 04 - Rapture (17 page)

She broke off, because when she opened her eyes, the others were staring at her, incredulous. No one, least of all Luce, had expected
her
to be the one to remember where they would find the desiderata.

Daniel recovered first. He flashed her a funny smile Luce knew was full of pride. But Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle continued to gape at her as if they’d suddenly learned she spoke Chinese. Which, come to think of it, she did.

Arriane wiggled a finger around inside her ear. “Do I need to ease up on the psychedelics, or did LP just recall one of her past lives unprompted at the most crucial juncture ever?”

“You’re a genius,” Daniel said, leaning forward and kissing her deeply.

Luce blushed and leaned in to extend the kiss a little longer, but then heard a cough.

“Seriously, you two,” Annabelle said. “There will be time enough for snogs if we pull this off.”

“I’d say ‘get a room’ but I’m afraid we’d never see you again,” Arriane added, which caused them all to laugh.

When Luce opened her eyes, Daniel had spread his wings wide. The tips brushed away broken bits of plaster and blocked the Scale angels from view. Slung over his shoulder was the black leather satchel with the halo.

The Outcasts gathered the scattered starshots back into their silver sheaths. “Wingspeed, Daniel Grigori.”

“To you as well.” Daniel nodded at Phil. He spun Luce around so her back was pressed to his chest and his arms fit snugly around her waist. They clasped hands over her heart.

“The Foundation Library,” Daniel said to the other angels. “Follow me, I know exactly where it is.” 

Fog engulfed the angels. They flew back over the river, four pairs of wings making a tremendous
throosh
each time they beat. They stayed low enough to the ground that the muted orange glow of sodium lampposts looked like airport runway lights. But this flight did not land.

Daniel was tense. Luce could feel it running all through his body: in both his arms around her waist, in his shoulders aligned with hers, even in the manner his broad wings beat above them. She knew how he felt; she was as anxious to get to the Foundation Library as Daniel’s grip suggested he was.

Only a few landmarks cut through the fog. There was the towering spire of the massive Gothic church, and there the darkened Ferris wheel, its empty red cabins swaying in the night. There was the green copper dome of the palace where they’d landed when they first arrived in Vienna.

But wait—they’d passed the palace already. Maybe half an hour earlier. Luce had tried to look for Olianna, who the Scale angel had knocked unconscious. She hadn’t seen her on the roof then, and she didn’t see her now.

Why were they circling? Were they lost?

“Daniel?”

He didn’t answer.

Church bells rang in the distance. It was their fourth ringing since Luce, Daniel, and the others had taken off through the shattered skylight at the museum. They’d been flying for a long time. Could it really be three o’clock in the morning?

“Where
is
it?” Daniel muttered under his breath, banking to the left, following the groove of the river, then breaking from it to trace a broad avenue lined with darkened department stores. Luce had seen this street already, too. They were flying in circles.

“I thought you said you knew exactly where it was!”

Arriane dipped out of the formation they’d been flying in—Daniel and Luce at the front, with Roland, Arriane, and Annabelle forming a tight triangle behind them—

and swooped down about ten feet below Daniel and Luce, close enough to talk. Her hair was wild and frizzy and her iridescent wings flickered in and out of the fog.

“I
do
know where it is,” Daniel said. “At least, I know where it
was.
”

“You’ve got an circuitous sense of direction, Daniel.”

“Arriane.” Roland used the warning tone he reserved for those too frequent occasions when Arriane went too far. “Let him concentrate.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.” Arriane rolled her eyes. “Better return to ‘formation.’” Arriane beat her wings the way some girls batted their eyelashes, flashed a peace sign with her fingers, and fell back.

“Okay, so where
was
the library?” Luce asked.

Daniel sighed, drew in his wings slightly, and dropped fifty feet straight down. Cold wind blasted Luce in the face. Her stomach surged up as they plummeted, then settled when Daniel stopped abruptly, as if he’d landed on an invisible tightrope, over a residential street.

It was quiet and empty and dark, just two long stretches of stone townhouses spanning either side. Shut-ters were drawn for the night. Tiny cars rested in narrow angled spaces on the street. Young urban oak trees punctuated the cobbled sidewalk that ran along the small well-maintained front yards.

The other angels hovered on either side of Daniel and Luce, about twenty feet above street level.

“This is where it was,” Daniel said. “It was
here.
Six blocks from the river, just west of Türkenschanzpark. I swear it was. None of this”—he waved his hand at the stretch of indistinguishable stone townhouses below—

“was here.”

Annabelle frowned and hugged her knees to her chest, her silver wings beating softly to keep her aloft.

Her crossed ankles revealed hot-pink striped socks peeking out from her jeans. “Do you think it was destroyed?”

“If it was,” Daniel said, “I have no idea how to recover it.”

“We’re screwed,” Arriane said, kicking a cloud in frustration. She glared at its wispy tendrils, which ambled eastward, unaffected. “That’s never as satisfying as I think it’s going to be.”

“Maybe we go to Avalon,” Roland suggested. “See if Cam’s group has had any more luck.”

“We need all three relics,” Daniel said.

Luce pivoted slightly in Daniel’s arms to face him.

“It’s just a hitch. Think about what we had to go through in Venice. But we got the halo. We’ll get the desiderata, too. That’s all that matters. When was the last time any of us were at this library, two hundred years ago? Of course things are going to change. It doesn’t mean we give up. We’ll just have to . . . just have to—” Everyone was looking at her. But Luce didn’t know what to do. She only knew that they couldn’t give up.

“The kid’s right,” Arriane said. “We don’t give up.

We—”

Arriane broke off when her wings began to rattle.

Then Annabelle yelped. Her body tossed in the air as her wings shuddered, too. Daniel’s hands shook against Luce as the foggy night sky morphed into that peculiar gray—the color of a rainstorm on the horizon—that Luce now recognized as the color of a timequake.

Lucifer.

She could almost hear the hiss of his voice, feel his breath against her neck.

Luce’s teeth chattered, but she felt it deeper, too, in her core, raw and turbulent, as if everything inside her were being wound up like a chain.

The buildings below shimmered. Lampposts doubled. The very atoms of the air seemed to fracture. Luce wondered what the quake was doing to the townspeople below, dreaming in their beds. Could they feel this? If not, she envied them.

She tried to call Daniel’s name but the sound of her voice was warped, as if she were underwater. She closed her eyes but that made her feel nauseated. She opened them and tried to focus on the solid white buildings, quaking in their foundations until they became abstract blurs of white.

Then Luce saw that one structure stayed still, as if it were invulnerable to the fluctuations of the cosmos. It was a small brown building, a house, in the center of the shuddering white street.

It hadn’t been there a second before. It appeared as though through a waterfall and was visible only for a moment, before it doubled and shimmered and disappeared back into the expansive row of modern, monochrome townhouses.

But for a moment, the house had been there, one fixed thing in all-consuming chaos, both apart from and a part of the Viennese street.

The timequake shuddered to a stop and the world around Luce and the angels stilled. It was never quieter than in those moments right after a quake in time.

“Did you see that?” Roland shouted, gleeful.

Annabelle shook out her wings, smoothing the tips with her fingers. “I’m still recovering from that latest violation. I
hate
those things.”

“Me too.” Luce shuddered. “I saw something, Roland. A brown house. Was that it? The Foundation Library?”

“Yes.” Daniel flew in a tight circle over the place where Luce had seen the house, zeroing in.

“Maybe those booty-quakes
are
good for something,” Arriane said.

“Where did the house go?” Luce asked.

“It’s still there. It’s just not here,” Daniel said.

“I’ve heard legends about these things.” Roland ran fingers through his thick gold-black dreads. “But I never really thought they were possible.”

“What things?” Luce squinted to try to see the brown building again. But the row of modern townhouses stayed put. The only movement on the street was bare tree branches leaning in the wind.

“It’s called a Patina,” Daniel said. “It’s a way of bending reality around a unit of time and space—”

“It’s a rearrangement of reality in order to secret something away,” Roland added, flying to Daniel’s side and peering down as if he could still see the house.

“So while this street exists in a continuous line through one reality”—Annabelle waved at the townhouses—“beneath it lays another, independent realm, where this road leads to our Foundation Library.”

“Patinas are the boundary between realities,” Arriane said, thumbs tucked into her overall suspenders. “A laser light show only
special
folks can see.”

“You guys seem to know a lot about these things,” Luce said.

“Yeah,” Arriane scoffed, looking as if she’d like to kick another cloud. “’Cept how to get through one.” 

Daniel nodded. “Very few entities are powerful enough to create Patinas, and those that can guard them closely. The library is here. But Arriane’s right. We’ll need to figure out the way in.”

“I heard you need an Announcer to get through one,” Arriane said.

“Cosmic legend.” Annabelle shook her head. “Every Patina is different. Access is entirely up to the creator.

They program the code.”

“I once heard Cam tell a story at a party about how he accessed a Patina,” Roland said. “Or was that a story about a party that he threw in a Patina?”

“Luce!” Daniel said suddenly, making all of them startle in midair. “It’s you. It was always you.” Luce shrugged. “Always me what?”

“You’re the one who always rang the bell. You’re the one who had entry to the library. You just need to ring the bell.”

Luce looked at the empty street, the fog tinting everything around them brown. “What are you talking about? What bell?”

“Close your eyes,” Daniel said. “Remember it. Pass into the past and find the bellpull—”

Luce was already there, back at the library the last time she’d been in Vienna with Daniel. Her feet were firmly on the ground. It was raining and her hair splayed all across her face. Her crimson hair ribbons were soaked, but she didn’t care. She was looking for something.

There was a short path up the courtyard, then a dark alcove outside the library. It had been cold outside, and a fire blazed within. There, in the musty corner near the door, was a woven cord embroidered with white peonies hanging from a substantial silver bell.

She reached into the air and pulled.

The angels gasped. Luce opened her eyes.

There, in the center of the north side of the street, the row of contemporary townhouses was interrupted at its midpoint by a single small brown house. A curl of smoke rose from its chimney. The only light—aside from the angels’ wings—was the dim yellow glow of a lamp on the sill of the house’s front window.

The angels landed softly on the empty street and Daniel’s grip around Luce softened. He kissed her hand.

“You remembered. Well done.”

The brown house was only one story high, and the surrounding townhouses had three levels, so you could see behind the house to parallel streets, more modern white stone townhouses. The house was an anomaly: Luce studied its thatched roof, the gabled gate at the edge of a weed-ridden lawn, the arched wooden asym-metrical front door, all of which made the house look as if it belonged in the Middle Ages.

Luce took a step toward the house and found herself on a sidewalk. Her eyes fell on the large bronze placard pressed into the packed-mud walls. It was a historical marker, which read in big carved letters THE FOUNDATION

LIBRARY, EXT. 1233.

Luce looked around at the otherwise mundane street.

There were recycling bins filled with plastic water bottles, tiny European cars parallel parked so closely that their bumpers were touching, shallow potholes in the road. “So we’re on a real street in Vienna—”

“Exactly,” Daniel said. “If it were daytime, you would see the neighbors, but they wouldn’t see you.”

“Are Patinas common?” Luce asked. “Was there one over the cabin I slept in on the island back in Georgia?”

“They are highly uncommon. Precious, really.” Daniel shook his head. “That cabin was just the most se-cluded safe haven we could find on such short notice.”

“A poor man’s Patina,” Arriane said.

“I.e., Mr. Cole’s summerhouse,” Roland added. Mr. Cole was a teacher at Sword & Cross. He was mortal, but he’d been a friend to the angels since they’d arrived at the school, and was covering for Luce now that she’d left. It was thanks to Mr. Cole that her parents weren’t more worried than usual about her.

“How are they made?” Luce asked.

Daniel shook his head. “No one knows that except the Patina’s artist. And there are very few of those. You remember my friend Dr. Otto?”

She nodded. The doctor’s name had been on the tip of her tongue.

“He lived here for several hundred years—and even he didn’t know how this Patina got here.” Daniel studied the building. “I don’t know who the librarian is now.”