Unforgiven Read online

  ALSO BY LAUREN KATE

  THE FALLEN SERIES

  Fallen

  Torment

  Passion

  Rapture

  Fallen in Love

  THE TEARDROP SERIES

  Teardrop

  Waterfall

  The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright (c) 2015 by Tinderbox Books, LLC, and Lauren Kate

  Jacket photograph copyright (c) 2015 by Carrie Schechter

  Epigraph copyright (c) 2012 Country Ahers Music (BMI) administered by Songs in the House of Hassle (BMI).

  All songs (c) 2015 Amandavid (ASCAP). All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780385742634 (hc) -- ISBN 9780375990687 (lib. bdg.) -- eBook ISBN 9780307976307 -- ISBN 9781101931271 (intl. tr. pbk.)

  Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lauren Kate

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Never Tear Us Apart

  Chapter One: Wasteland

  Chapter Two: Dead Souls

  Chapter Three: Atmosphere

  Chapter Four: Holding Out

  Interlude: Sparks

  Chapter Five: Marked

  Chapter Six: Going Under

  Chapter Seven: Love Will Tear Us Apart

  Interlude: Isolation

  Chapter Eight: The Weeping Song

  Chapter Nine: Love More

  Chapter Ten: Slow Dive

  Interlude: Disintegration

  Chapter Eleven: Break Me

  Chapter Twelve: Spellbound

  Chapter Thirteen: My Immortal

  Interlude: Stranger

  Chapter Fourteen: The New Zero

  Chapter Fifteen: Queen of Hearts

  Chapter Sixteen: Dangerous Days

  Interlude: Sacrifice

  Chapter Seventeen: A Forest

  Chapter Eighteen: Love's Secret Domain

  Chapter Nineteen: End of the Dream

  Chapter Twenty: Heaven Is Waiting

  Acknowledgments

  FOR DREAMERS

  Serpents in my mind

  Trying to forgive your crimes

  Everyone changes in time

  I hope he changes this time

  --SHARON VAN ETTEN, "Serpents"

  Cam's boots touched down on the eaves of the old church beneath a cold and starry sky. He drew his wings close and gazed out at the landscape. Spanish moss, white in the moonlight, hung like icicles from antebellum trees. Cinder-block buildings framed a weedy field and a pair of splintery bleachers. Wind rustled in from the sea.

  Winter break at Sword & Cross Reform School. Not a soul on campus. What was he doing here?

  It was minutes after midnight, and he'd just flown in from Troy. He'd made the journey in a haze, an unknown force guiding his wings. He found himself humming a tune he hadn't let himself remember for several thousand years. Maybe he'd come back here because this was where the fallen angels had met Luce in her last, cursed life. It had been her three hundred and twenty-fourth incarnation--and the three hundred and twenty-fourth time the fallen angels had flocked together to see how the curse would play out.

  The curse was broken now. Luce and Daniel were free.

  And dammit if Cam wasn't jealous.

  His gaze swept across the cemetery. He would never have guessed he'd feel nostalgic for this junkyard, but there had been something thrilling about those early days at Sword & Cross. Lucinda's spark had been brighter, keeping the angels guessing when they'd once believed they knew what to expect.

  For six millennia, each time she turned seventeen, they'd staged a variation of the same performance: the demons--Cam, Roland, and Molly--tried everything to sway Luce's alliances to Lucifer, while the angels--Arriane and Gabbe and sometimes Annabelle--worked to usher Luce back into Heaven's fold. Neither side had ever come close to winning her over.

  For every time Luce met Daniel--and she always met Daniel--nothing mattered as much as their love. Time and again, they fell for each other, and time and again, Luce died in a blaze of fire.

  Then, one night at Sword & Cross, everything changed. Daniel kissed Lucinda, and she lived. They all knew it then. Luce was finally going to be allowed to choose.

  A few weeks later they all flew to the site of their original fall, to Troy, where Lucinda chose her destiny. She and Daniel again refused to side with Heaven or with Hell. Instead, they chose each other. They gave up their immortality to spend one mortal lifetime together.

  Luce and Daniel were gone now, but they were still on Cam's mind. Their triumphant love made him yearn for something he dared not put into words.

  He was humming again. That song. Even after all this time, he remembered it....

  He closed his eyes and saw its singer: the back of her red hair woven loosely in a braid, her long fingers caressing the strings of a lyre as she leaned against a tree.

  He hadn't let himself think of her in thousands of years. Why now?

  "This can's busted," a familiar voice said. "Toss me another?"

  Cam spun around. No one was there.

  He noticed a flicker of movement through the shattered stained-glass window on the roof. He edged forward and peered down through it, into the chapel Sophia Bliss had used as her office when she was the Sword & Cross librarian.

  Inside the chapel, Arriane's iridescent wings flexed as she shook a can of spray paint and rose off the ground, aiming the nozzle at the wall.

  Her mural featured a girl in a glowing blue forest. She wore a tiered black dress and looked up at a blond boy who held out a white peony. Luce and Daniel 4ever Arriane sprayed in gothic silver letters over the bell of the girl's skirt.

  Behind Arriane, a dark-skinned demon with dreadlocks was lighting a tall glass candle showing Santa Muerte, the goddess of death. Roland was making a shrine at the site where Sophia had murdered Luce's friend Penn.

  Fallen angels couldn't enter sanctuaries of God. As soon as they crossed the threshold, the whole place would go up in flames, incinerating every mortal inside. But this chapel had been desanctified when Miss Sophia had moved in.

  Cam spread his wings and dropped through the broken window, landing behind Arriane.

  "Cam." Roland embraced his friend.

  "Take it easy," Cam said, but he didn't pull away.

  Roland tilted his head. "Quite a coincidence, finding you here."

  "Is it?" Cam asked.

  "Not if you like carnitas," Arriane said, tossing Cam a small foil-wrapped package. "Remember the taco truck on Lovington? I've been craving these ever since we fled this swamp." She opened her own foil package and devoured her taco in two bites. "Delish."

  "What are you doing here?" Roland asked Cam.

  Cam leaned against a cold marble pillar and shrugged. "I left my Les Paul in the dorm."

  "All this way for a guitar?" Roland nodded. "I suppose we've all got to find new ways to fill
our endless days, now that Luce and Daniel are gone."

  Cam had always hated the force that pulled the fallen angels to the cursed lovers every seventeen years. He'd left battlefields and coronations. He'd left the arms of exquisite girls. Once he'd walked off a movie set. He'd dropped everything for Luce and Daniel. But now that the irresistible pull was gone, he missed it.

  His eternity was open wide. What was he going to do with it?

  "Did what happened in Troy give you, I don't know..." Roland trailed off.

  "Hope?" Arriane grabbed Cam's uneaten taco and downed it. "If, after all these thousands of years, Luce and Daniel can stand up to the Throne and seize a happy ending, why can't anyone? Why can't we?"

  Cam gazed through the shattered window. "Maybe I'm not that kind of guy."

  "We all carry pieces of our journeys within us," Roland said. "We all learn from our mistakes. Who's to say we don't deserve happiness?"

  "Listen to us." Arriane touched the scars on her neck. "What do we three jaded birds of prey know about love?" She looked from Cam to Roland. "Right?"

  "Love's not the exclusive property of Luce and Daniel," Roland said. "We've all tasted it. Maybe we will again."

  Roland's optimism struck a dissonant chord with Cam. "Not me," he said.

  Arriane sighed, arching her back to spread her wings and rise a few feet off the ground. A fluttering sound filled the empty church. With deft slashes of her can of white spray paint, she added the subtlest hint of wings above Lucinda's shoulders.

  Before the Fall, angels' wings were made of empyreal light, all of them perfect, one pair indistinguishable from the next. In the era since, their wings had become expressive of their personalities, their mistakes and impulses. The fallen angels who had given their allegiance to Lucifer bore golden wings. Those who had returned to the fold of Heaven bore the Throne's hint of silver throughout their fibers.

  Lucinda's wings had been special. They had been purely, stunningly white. Unspoiled. Innocent of the choices the rest of them had made. The only other fallen angel who had preserved his white wings was Daniel.

  Arriane crumpled the second taco wrapper. "Sometimes I wonder..."

  "What?" Roland asked.

  "If you guys could go back and not screw up so epically in the love department, would you?"

  "What's the point of wondering?" Cam asked. "Rosaline is dead." He saw Roland wince at the mention of his lost beloved. "Tess will never forgive you," he added, looking at Arriane. "And Lilith--"

  There. He'd said her name.

  Lilith was the only girl Cam had ever loved. He'd asked her to marry him.

  It hadn't worked out.

  He heard her song again, throbbing in his soul, blinding him with regret.

  "Are you humming?" Arriane narrowed her eyes at Cam. "Since when do you hum?"

  "What about Lilith?" Roland said.

  Lilith was dead, too. Though Cam had never known how she had lived out her days on earth after they parted, he knew she would have left this world and ascended to Heaven long ago. If Cam were a different kind of guy, it might have brought him peace to imagine her enfolded in joy and light. But Heaven was so painfully distant, he found it best not to think of her at all.

  Roland seemed to be reading his mind. "You could do it your own way."

  "I do everything my own way," Cam said. His wings pulsed silently behind him.

  "It's one of your best traits," Roland said, looking up at the stars through the ruined ceiling, then back at Cam again.

  "What?" Cam asked.

  Roland laughed softly. "I didn't say anything."

  "Allow me," Arriane said. "Cam, this is totally when everyone expects you to make one of your dramatic exits into that pocket in the clouds." She pointed to a rope of fog dangling from Orion's Belt.

  "Cam." Roland stared at Cam, alarmed. "Your wings."

  Near the tip of Cam's left wing was a single, tiny white filament.

  Arriane gaped. "What does it mean?"

  It was one white fleck amid a field of gold, but it forced Cam to remember the moment his wings had changed from white to gold. He had long ago accepted his destiny, but now, for the first time in millennia, he imagined something else.

  Thanks to Luce and Daniel, Cam had a fresh start. And only one regret.

  "I have to go." He fully extended his wings, and brilliant golden light flooded the chapel as Roland and Arriane leaped out of the way. The candle tipped and shattered, its flame dwindling on the cold stone floor.

  Cam shot into the sky, piercing the night, and headed toward the darkness that had been awaiting him since the moment he'd flown away from Lilith's love.

  Lilith woke up coughing.

  It was wildfire season--it was always wildfire season--and her lungs were thick with smoke and ash from the red blaze in the hills.

  Her bedside clock flashed midnight, but her thin white curtains glowed gray with dawn. The power must be out again. She thought of the biology test awaiting her in fourth period, followed immediately by the sucky fact that last night she'd brought home her American history book by mistake. Whose idea of a cruel joke was it to assign her two textbooks with precisely the same color spine? She was going to have to wing the test and pray for a C.

  She slid out of bed and stepped in something warm and soft. She drew her foot up, and the smell assaulted her.

  "Alastor!"

  The little blond mutt trotted into her bedroom, thinking Lilith wanted to play. Her mom called the dog a genius because of the tricks Lilith's brother, Bruce, had taught him, but Alastor was four years old and refused to learn the only trick that mattered: being housebroken.

  "This is seriously uncivilized," she scolded the dog, and hopped on one foot into the bathroom. She turned on the shower.

  Nothing.

  Water off till 3 p.m. her mom's note proclaimed on a sheet of loose-leaf taped to the bathroom mirror. The tree roots outside were curling through their pipes, and her mom was supposed to have money to pay the plumber this afternoon, after she got a paycheck from one of her many part-time jobs.

  Lilith groped for toilet paper, hoping at least to wipe her foot clean. She found only a brown cardboard tube. Just another Tuesday. The details varied, but every day of Lilith's life was more or less the same degree of awful.

  She tore her mom's note from the mirror and used it to wipe her foot, then dressed in black jeans and a thin black T-shirt, not looking at her reflection. She tried to remember a single shred of what her biology teacher had said might be on the test.

  By the time she got downstairs, Bruce was tilting the remains of the cereal box into his mouth. Lilith knew those stale flakes were the last morsels of food in the house.

  "We're out of milk," Bruce said.

  "And cereal?" Lilith said.

  "And cereal. And everything." Bruce was eleven and nearly as tall as Lilith, but much slighter. He was sick. He had always been sick. He was born too soon, with a heart that couldn't keep up with his soul, Lilith's mother liked to say. Bruce's eyes were sunken and his skin had a bluish tint because his lungs could never get enough air. When the hills were on fire, like they were every day, he wheezed at the smallest exertion. He stayed home in bed more often than he went to school.

  Lilith knew Bruce needed breakfast more than she did, but her stomach still growled in protest. Food, water, basic hygiene products--everything was scarce in the dilapidated dump they called home.

  She glanced through the grimy kitchen window and saw her bus pulling away from the stop. She groaned, grabbing her guitar case and her backpack, making sure her black journal was inside.

  "Later, Bruce," she called, and took off.

  Horns blared and tires squealed as Lilith sprinted across the street without looking, like she always told Bruce not to do. Despite her terrible luck, she never worried about dying. Death would mean freedom from the panicked hamster wheel of her life, and Lilith knew she wasn't that lucky. The universe or God or something wanted to keep her miserable.<
br />
  She watched the bus rumble off, and then started walking the three miles to school with her guitar case bouncing against her back. She hurried across her street, past the strip mall with the dollar store and the drive-through Chinese place that was always going in and out of business. Once she got a few blocks beyond her own gritty neighborhood, known around town as the Slump, the sidewalks smoothed out and the roads had fewer potholes. The people who stepped outside to get their papers were wearing business suits, not the ratty bathrobes Lilith's neighbors often wore. A well-coiffed woman walking her Great Dane waved good morning, but Lilith didn't have time for pleasantries. She ducked through the concrete pedestrian tunnel that ran beneath the highway.

  Trumbull Preparatory School sat at the corner of High Meadow Road and Highway 2--which Lilith mostly associated with stressful trips to the emergency room when Bruce got really sick. Speeding down the pavement in her mother's purple minivan, her brother wheezing faintly against her shoulder, Lilith always gazed out the window at the green signs on the side of the highway, marking the miles to other cities. Even though she hadn't seen much--anything--outside of Crossroads, Lilith liked to imagine the great, wide world beyond it. She liked to think that someday, if she ever graduated, she'd escape to a better place.

  The late bell was ringing when she emerged from the tunnel near the edge of campus. She was coughing, her eyes burning. The smoldering wildfires in the hills that encircled her town wreathed the school in smoke. The brown stucco building was ugly, and made even uglier by its papering of student-made banners. One advertised tomorrow's basketball game, another spelled out the details for the after-school science fair meeting, but most of them featured blown-up yearbook photos of some jock named Dean who was trying to win votes for prom king.

  At Trumbull's main entrance stood Principal Tarkenton. He was barely over five feet tall and wore a burgundy polyester suit.

  "Late again, Ms. Foscor," he said, studying her with distaste. "Didn't I see your name on yesterday's detention list for tardiness?"