Fallen Series 04 - Rapture (3 page)

Miles and Shelby were—were they holding
hands
?

But when she looked again, their hands disappeared under the table they were all sitting at. Miles tugged his baseball cap lower. Shelby cleared her throat and hunched over a book.

“Your book,” Luce said to Daniel as soon as she spotted the thick spine with the brown crumbling glue near the bottom. The faded cover read
The Watchers: Myth in
Medieval Europe by Daniel Grigori.

Her hand reached automatically for the pale gray cover. She closed her eyes, because it reminded her of Penn, who’d found the book on Luce’s last night as a student at Sword & Cross, and because the photograph pasted inside the front cover of the book was the first thing that had convinced her that what Daniel told her about their history might be possible.

It was a photograph taken from another life, one in Helston, England. And even though it shouldn’t have been possible, there was no doubt about it: The young woman in the photograph was her.

“Where did you find it?” Luce asked.

Her voice must have given something away, because Shelby said, “What is so major about this dusty old thing, anyway?”

“It’s precious. Our only key now,” Gabbe said. “Sophia tried to burn it once.”

“Sophia?” Luce’s hand shot to her heart. “Miss Sophia tried—the fire in the library? That was her?” The others nodded. “She killed Todd,” Luce said numbly.

So it
hadn’t
been Luce’s fault. Another life to lay at Sophia’s feet. It didn’t make Luce feel any better.

“And she almost died of shock the night you showed it to her,” Roland said. “We were all shocked, especially when you lived to talk about it.”

“We talked about Daniel kissing me,” Luce remembered, blushing. “And the fact that I survived it. Was that what surprised Miss Sophia?”

“Part of it,” Roland said. “But there’s plenty more in that book that Sophia wouldn’t have wanted you to know about.”

“Not much of an educator, was she?” Cam said, giving Luce a smirk that said,
Long time, no see.

“What wouldn’t she have wanted me to know?” All the angels turned to look at Daniel.

“Last night we told you that none of the angels remember where we landed when we fell,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, about that . . . How’s it possible?” Shelby said. “You’d think that kind of thing would leave an impression on the old memorizer.”

Cam’s face reddened. “You try falling for nine days through multiple dimensions and trillions of miles, landing on your face, breaking your wings, rolling around concussed for who knows how long, wandering the desert for decades looking for any clue as to who or what or where you are—and then talk to me about the old memorizer.”

“Okay, you’ve got acknowledgment issues,” Shelby said, putting on her shrink voice. “If
I
were going to di-agnose you—”

“Well, at least you remember there was a desert involved,” Miles said diplomatically, making Shelby laugh.

Daniel turned to Luce. “I wrote this book after I lost you in Tibet . . . but before I’d met you in Prussia. I know you visited that life in Tibet because I followed you there, so maybe you can see how losing you the way I did made me turn to years of research and study to find a way out of this curse.”

Luce looked away. Her death in Tibet had made Daniel run straight off a cliff. She feared its happening again.

“Cam is right,” Daniel said. “None of us recall where we landed. We wandered the desert until it was no longer desert; we wandered the plains and the valleys and the seas until they turned to desert again. It wasn’t until we slowly found one another and began to piece together the story that we remembered we’d once ever been angels at all.

“But there were relics created after our Fall, physical records of our history that mankind found and kept as treasures, gifts—they think—from a god they don’t understand. For a long time three of the relics were buried in a temple in Jerusalem, but during the Crusades, they were stolen, spirited away to various places. None of us knew where.

“When I did my research several hundred years ago, I focused on the medieval era, turning to as many resources as I could in a kind of theological scavenger hunt for the relics,” Daniel continued. “The gist of it is that if these three artifacts can be collected and gathered together at Mount Sinai—”

“Why Mount Sinai?” Shelby asked.

“The channels between the Throne and the Earth are closest there,” Gabbe explained with a flip of her hair.

“That’s where Moses received the Ten Commandments; that’s where the angels enter when they’re delivering messages from the Throne.”

“Think of it as God’s local dive,” Arriane added, sending a Hacky Sack too high into the air and into an overhead lamp.

“But before you ask,” Cam said, making it a point to single out Shelby with his eyes, “Mount Sinai is not the original site of the Fall.”

“That would be way too easy,” Annabelle said.

“If the relics are all gathered at Mount Sinai,” Daniel went on, “then, in theory, we’ll be able to decipher the location of the Fall.”

“In theory.” Cam sneered. “Must I be the one to say there is some question regarding the validity of Daniel’s research—”

Daniel clenched his jaw. “You have a better idea?”

“Don’t you think”—Cam raised his voice—“that your theory puts rather a lot of weight on the idea that these relics are anything more than rumor? Who knows if they can do what they’re supposed to do?” Luce studied the group of angels and demons—her only allies on this quest to save her and Daniel . . . and the world. “So that unknown location is where we have to be nine days from now.”

“
Fewer
than nine days from now,” Daniel said. “Nine days from now will be too late. Lucifer—and the host of angels cast out of Heaven—will have arrived.”

“But if we can beat Lucifer to the site of the Fall,” Luce said, “then what?”

Daniel shook his head. “We don’t really know. I never told anyone about this book because, Cam’s right, I didn’t know what it would add up to. I didn’t even know Gabbe had it published until years later, and by then, I’d lost interest in the research. You had died another time, and without you being there to play your part—”

“
My
part?” Luce asked.

“Which we don’t really yet understand—” Gabbe elbowed Daniel, cutting him off. “What he means is all will be revealed in the fullness of time.” Molly smacked her forehead. “Really? ‘All will be revealed’? Is that all you guys know? Is that what you’re going on?”

“That and
your
importance,” Cam said, turning to Luce. “You’re the chess piece that the forces of good and evil and everything in between are fighting over here.”

“What?” Luce whispered.

“Shut up.” Daniel fixed his attention on Luce. “Don’t listen to him.”

Cam snorted, but no one acknowledged it. It just sat in the room like an uninvited guest. The angels and demons were silent. No one was going to leak anything else about Luce’s role in stopping the Fall.

“So all of this information, this scavenger hunt,” she said, “it’s in that book?”

“More or less,” Daniel said. “I just have to spend some time with the text and refresh my memory. Hope-fully then I’ll know where we need to begin.” The others moved away to give Daniel space at the table. Luce felt Miles’s hand brush the back of her arm.

They’d barely spoken since she’d come back through the Announcer.

“Can I talk to you?” Miles asked very quietly. “Luce?” The look on his face—it was strained about something—made Luce think of those last few moments in her parents’ backyard when Miles had thrown her reflection.

They’d never really talked about the kiss they’d shared on the roof outside her Shoreline dorm room.

Surely Miles knew it had been a mistake—but why did Luce feel like she was leading him on every time she was nice to him?

“Luce.” It was Gabbe, appearing at Miles’ side. “I thought I’d mention”—she glanced at Miles—“if you wanted to go visit Penn for a moment, now would be the time.”

“Good idea.” Luce nodded. “Thanks.” She glanced apologetically at Miles but he just tugged his baseball cap over his eyes and turned to whisper something to Shelby.

“Ahem.” Shelby coughed indignantly. She was standing behind Daniel, trying to read the book over his shoulder. “What about me and Miles?”

“You’re going back to Shoreline,” Gabbe said, sounding more like Luce’s teachers at Shoreline than Luce had ever noticed before. “We need you to alert Steven and Francesca. We may need their help—and your help, too.

Tell them”—she took a deep breath—“tell them it’s happening. That an endgame has been initiated, though not as we’d expected. Tell them everything. They will know what to do.”

“Fine,” Shelby said, scowling. “You’re the boss.”

“Yodelayhee-hooooo.” Arriane cupped her palms around her mouth. “If, uh, Luce wants to get out, someone’s gonna have to help her down from the window.” She drummed her fingers on the table, looking sheepish.

“I made a library book barricade near the entrance in case any of the Sword & Cross-eyeds felt inclined to disrupt us.”

“Dibs.” Cam already had his arm slipped through the crook of Luce’s elbow. She started to argue, but none of the other angels seemed to think it was a bad idea. Daniel didn’t even notice.

Near the back exit, Shelby and Miles both mouthed,
Be careful,
to Luce with varying degrees of fierceness.

Cam walked her to the window, radiating warmth with his smile. He slid the glass pane up and together they looked out at the campus where they’d met, where they’d grown close, where he’d tricked her into kissing him. They weren’t all bad memories. . . .

He hopped through the window first, landing smoothly on the ledge, and he held out a hand for hers.

“Milady.”

His grip was strong and it made her feel tiny and weightless as Cam drifted down from the ledge, two stories in two seconds. His wings were concealed, but he still moved as gracefully as if he were flying. They landed softly on the dewy grass.

“I take it you don’t want my company,” he said. “At the cemetery—not, you know, in general.”

“Right. No, thanks.”

He looked away and reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny silver bell. It looked ancient, with Hebrew writing on it. He handed it to her. “Just ring when you want a lift back up.”

“Cam,” Luce said. “What is my role in all of this?” Cam reached out to touch her cheek, then seemed to think better of it. His hand hovered in the air. “Daniel’s right. It isn’t our place to tell you.” He didn’t wait for her response—just bent his knees and soared off the ground. He didn’t even look back.

Luce stared at the campus for a moment, letting the familiar Sword & Cross humidity stick to her skin. She couldn’t tell whether the dismal school with its huge, harsh neo-Gothic buildings and sad, defeated landscaping looked different or the same.

She strolled through the campus, through the flat still grass of the commons, past the depressing dormitory, to the wrought iron gate of the cemetery. There she paused, feeling goose bumps rise on her arms.

The cemetery still looked and smelled like a sinkhole in the middle of the campus. The dust from the angels’

battle had cleared. It was still early enough that most of the students were asleep, and anyway, none of them were likely to be prowling the cemetery, unless they were serving detention. She let herself in through the gate and ambled downward through the leaning headstones and the muddy graves.

In the far east corner lay Penn’s final resting place.

Luce sat down at the foot of her friend’s plot. She didn’t have flowers and she didn’t know any prayers, so she lay her hands on the cold, wet grass, closed her eyes, and sent her own kind of message to Penn, worrying that it might never reach her.

Luce got back to the library window feeling irritable.

She didn’t need Cam or his exotic bell. She could get up the ledge by herself.

It was easy enough to scale the lowest portion of the sloped roof, and from there she could climb up a few levels, until she was close to the long narrow ledge beneath the library windows. It was about two feet wide.

As she crept along it, Cam’s and Daniel’s bickering voices wafted to her.

“What if one of us were to be intercepted?” Cam’s voice was high and pleading. “You know we are stronger united, Daniel.”

“If we don’t make it there in time, our strength won’t matter. We’ll be
erased.
”

She could picture them on the other side of the wall.

Cam with fists clenched and green eyes flashing; Daniel stolid and immovable, his arms crossed over his chest.

“I don’t trust you not to act on your own behalf.” Cam’s tone was harsh. “Your weakness for her is stronger than your word.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.” Daniel didn’t change his pitch. “Splitting up is our only option.” The others were quiet, probably thinking the same thing Luce was. Cam and Daniel behaved far too much like brothers for anyone else to dare come between them.

She reached the window and saw that the two angels were facing each other. Her hands gripped the windowsill. She felt a small swell of pride—which she would never confess—at having made it back into the library without help. Probably none of the angels would even notice. She sighed and slid one leg inside. That was when the window began to shudder.

The glass pane rattled, and the sill vibrated in her hands with such force she was almost knocked off the ledge. She held on tighter, feeling vibrations inside her, as if her heart and her soul were trembling, too.

“Earthquake,” she whispered. Her foot skimmed the back of the ledge just as her grip on the windowsill loosened.

“Lucinda!”

Daniel rushed to the window. His hands found their way around hers. Cam was there, too, one hand on the base of Luce’s shoulders, another on the back of her head. The bookshelves rippled and the lights in the library flickered as the two angels pulled her through the rocking window just before the pane slipped from the window’s casing and shattered into a thousand shards of glass.