Fallen Series 04 - Rapture Read online

  “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.

  She looked to Daniel for a clue. He was still gripping her wrists, but his eyes traveled past her, outside. He was watching the sky, which had turned angry and gray.

  Worse than all that was the lingering vibration inside Luce that made her feel as if she’d been electrocuted.

  The quaking felt like an eternity, but it lasted for five, maybe ten seconds—enough time for Luce, Cam, and Daniel to fall to the dusty wooden floor of the library with a thud.

  Then the trembling stopped and the world grew deathly quiet.

  “What the hell?” Arriane picked herself up off the ground. “Did we step through to California without my knowledge? No one told me there were fault lines in Georgia!”

  Cam pulled a long shard of glass from his forearm.

  Luce gasped as bright red blood trailed down his elbow, but his face showed no signs that he was in pain. “That wasn’t an earthquake. That was a seismic shift in time.”

  “A what?” Luce asked.

  “The first of many.” Daniel looked out the jagged window, watching a white cumulus cloud roll across the now blue sky. “The closer Lucifer gets, the stronger they’ll become.” He glanced at Cam, who nodded.

  “Ticktock, people,” Cam said. “Time is running out.

  We need to fly.”

  TWO

  PARTING WAYS

  Gabbe stepped forward. “Cam’s right. I’ve heard the Scale speak of these shifts.” She was tugging on the sleeves of her pale yellow cashmere cardigan as if she would never get warm. “They’re called timequakes.

  They are ripples in our reality.”

  “And the closer he gets,” Roland added, ever under-statedly wise, “the closer we are to the terminus of his Fall, and more frequent and the more severe the timequakes will become. Time is faltering in preparation for rewriting itself.”

  “Like the way your computer freezes up more and more frequently before the hard drive crashes and erases your twenty-page term paper?” Miles said. Everyone looked at him in befuddlement. “What?” he said. “Angels and demons don’t do homework?”

  Luce sank into one of the wooden chairs at an empty table. She felt hollow, a
s if the timequake had shaken loose something significant inside her and she’d lost it for good. The angels’ bickering voices crisscrossed in her mind but didn’t spell out anything useful. They had to stop Lucifer, and she could see that none of them knew exactly how to do it.

  “Venice. Vienna. And Avalon.” Daniel’s clear voice broke through the noise. He sat down next to Luce and draped an arm around the back of her chair. His fingertips brushed her shoulder. When he held out The Book of the Watchers so all of them could see, the others quieted.

  Everybody focused.

  Daniel pointed to a dense paragraph of text. Luce hadn’t realized until then that the book was written in Latin. She recognized a few words from the years of Latin class she’d taken at Dover. Daniel had underlined and circled several words and made some notes in the margins, but time and wear had made the pages almost illegible.

  Arriane hovered over him. “That’s some serious chicken scratch.”

  Daniel didn’t seem deterred. As he jotted new notes, his handwriting was dark and elegant, and it gave Luce a warm, familiar feeling when she realized she’d seen it before. She basked in every reminder of how long and deep her and Daniel’s love affair had been, even if the reminder was something small, like the cursive script that flowed along for centuries, spelling out Daniel as hers.

  “A record of those early days after the Fall was created by the Heavenly host, by the unallied angels who’d been cast out of Heaven,” he said slowly. “But it’s a completely scattered history.”

  “A history?” Miles repeated. “So we just find some books and read them and they, like, tell us where to go?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Daniel said. “There weren’t books in any sense that would mean anything to you now; these were the beginning days. So our history and our stories were recorded via other means.” Arriane smiled. “This is where it’s going to get tricky, isn’t it?”

  “The story was bound up in relics—many relics, over millennia. But there are three especially that seem relevant to our search, three that may hold the answer as to where the angels fell to Earth.

  “We don’t know what these relics are, but we know where they were last mentioned: Venice, Vienna, and Avalon. They were in these three locations as of the time of the research and writing of this book. But that was a while ago, and even then, it was anyone’s guess whether the items—whatever they are—were still there.”

  “So this may end up as a divine wild-goose chase,” Cam said with a sigh. “Excellent. We’ll squander our time searching for mystery items that may or may not tell us what we need to know in places where they may or may not have rested for centuries.” Daniel shrugged. “In short, yes.”

  “Three relics. Nine days.” Annabelle’s eyes fluttered up. “That’s not a lot of time.”

  “Daniel was right.” Gabbe’s gaze flashed back and forth between the angels. “We need to split up.” This was what Cam and Daniel had been arguing about before the room started quaking. Whether they’d have a better chance of finding all the relics in time if they split up.

  Gabbe waited for Cam’s reluctant nod before she said, “Then it’s settled. Daniel and Luce—you take the first city.” She looked down at Daniel’s notes, then gave Luce a brave smile. “Venice. You head to Venice and find the first relic.”

  “But what is the first relic? Do we even know?” Luce leaned over the book and saw a drawing sketched in pen in the margin.

  Daniel studied it now, too, shaking his head slightly at the image he’d drawn hundreds of years ago. It looked almost like a serving tray, the kind her mom was always looking for at antique shops. “This was what I was able to glean from my study of the pseudepigrapha—the dismissed scriptural writings of the early church.” It was egg-shaped with a glass bottom, which Daniel cleverly had depicted by sketching the ground on the other side of the clear base. The tray, or whatever the relic was, had what looked like small chipped handles on either side. Daniel had even drawn a scale below it, and according to his sketch, the artifact was big—about eighty by one hundred centimeters.

  “I barely remember drawing this.” Daniel sounded disappointed in himself. “I don’t know what it is any more than you do.”

  “I’m sure that once you get there, you’ll be able to figure it out,” Gabbe said, trying hard to be encouraging.

  “We will,” Luce said. “I’m sure we will.” Gabbe blinked, smiled, and went on. “Roland, Annabelle, and Arriane—you three will go to Vienna. That leaves—” Her mouth twitched as she realized what she was about to say, but she put on a brave face anyway.

  “Molly, Cam, and I will take Avalon.”

  Cam rolled back his shoulders and let out his as-toundingly golden wings with a great rush, slamming into Molly’s face with his right wing tip and sending her lunging back five feet.

  “Do that again and I will wreck you,” Molly spat, glaring at a carpet burn on her elbow. “In fact—” She started to go for Cam with her fist raised but Gabbe in-tervened.

  She wrenched Cam and Molly apart with a put-upon sigh. “Speaking of wrecking, I would really rather not have to wreck the next one of you who provokes the other”—she smiled sweetly at her two demon companions—“but I will. This is going to be a very long nine days.”

  “Let’s hope it’s long,” Daniel muttered under his breath.

  Luce turned to him. The Venice in her mind was out of a guidebook: postcard pictures of boats jostling down canals, sunsets over tall cathedral spires, and dark-haired girls licking gelato. That wasn’t the trip they were about to take. Not with the end of the world reaching out for them with razor claws.

  “And once we find all three of the relics?” Luce said.

  “We’ll meet at Mount Sinai,” Daniel said, “unite the relics—”

  “And say a little prayer that they shed any light what-soever on where we landed when we fell,” Cam muttered darkly, rubbing his forehead. “At which point, all that’s left is somehow coaxing the psychopathic hell-hound holding our entire existence in his jaw that he should just abandon his silly scheme for universal domination. What could be simpler? I think we have every reason to feel optimistic.”

  Daniel glanced out the open window. The sun was passing over the dormitory now; Luce had to squint to look outside. “We need to leave as soon as possible.”

  “Okay,” Luce said. “I have to go home, then, pack, get my passport. . . .” Her mind whirled in a hundred directions as she started making a mental to-do list. Her parents would be at the mall for at least another couple of hours, enough time for her to dash in and get her things together. . . .

  “Oh, cute.” Annabelle laughed, flitting over to them, her feet inches off the ground. Her wings were muscular and dark silver like a thundercloud, protruding through the invisible slits in her hot-pink T-shirt. “Sorry to butt in but . . . you’ve never traveled with an angel before, have you?”

  Sure she had. The feeling of Daniel’s wings soaring her body through the air was as natural as anything.

  Maybe her flights had been brief, but they’d been unfor-gettable. They were when Luce felt closest to him: his arms threaded around her waist, his heart beating close to hers, his white wings protecting them, making Luce feel unconditionally and impossibly loved.

  She had flown with Daniel dozens of times in dreams, but only three times in her waking hours: once over the hidden lake behind Sword & Cross, another time along the coast at Shoreline, and down from the clouds to the cabin just the previous night.

  “I guess we’ve never flown that far together,” she said at last.

  “Just getting to first base seems to be a problem for you two,” Cam couldn’t resist saying.

  Daniel ignored him. “Under normal circumstances, I think you’d enjoy the trip.” His expression turned stormy. “But we don’t have room for normal for the next nine days.”

  Luce felt his hands on the back of her shoulders, gathering her hair and lifting it off her neck. He kissed her along the neck
line of her sweater as he wrapped his arms around her waist. Luce closed her eyes. She knew what was coming next. The most beautiful sound there was—that elegant whoosh of the love of her life letting out his driven-snow-white wings.

  The world on the other side of Luce’s eyelids darkened slightly under the shadow of his wings, and warmth welled in her heart. When she opened her eyes, there they were, as magnificent as ever. She leaned back a little, cozying into the wall of Daniel’s chest as he pivoted toward the window.

  “This is only a temporary separation,” Daniel announced to the others. “Good luck and wingspeed.” With each long beat of Daniel’s wings they gained a thousand feet. The air, once cool and thick with Georgia humidity, turned cold and brittle in Luce’s lungs as they climbed. Wind tore at her ears. Her eyes began to tear.

  The ground below grew distant, and the world that it contained blended and shrank into a staggering canvas of green. Sword & Cross was the size of a thumbprint.

  Then it was gone.

  A first glimpse of the ocean made Luce dizzy, delighted as they flew away from the sun, toward the darkness on the horizon.

  Flying with Daniel was more thrilling, more intense than her memory could ever do justice to. And yet something had shifted: Luce had the hang of it by now. She felt at ease, in sync with Daniel, relaxed into the shape of his arms. Her legs were crossed lightly at the ankles, the toes of her boots kissing the toes of his. Their bodies swayed in unison, responding to the motion of his wings, which arched over their heads and blocked out the sun, then throttled backward to complete another mighty stroke.

  They passed the cloud line and vanished into the mist. There was nothing all around them but wispy white and the nebulous caress of moisture. Another beat of wings. Another surge into the sky. Luce didn’t pause to wonder how she would breathe up here at the limits of the atmosphere. She was with Daniel. She was fine. They were off to save the world.

  Soon Daniel leveled off, flying less like a rocket and more like an unfathomably powerful bird. They did not slow—if anything, their velocity increased—but with their bodies parallel to the ground, the wind’s roar smoothed, and the world seemed bright white and startlingly quiet, as peaceful as if it had just come into existence and no one had yet experimented with sound.