Fallen Series 04 - Rapture Read online

  “Are you all right?” His voice cocooned her, making her feel as if anything in the world that wasn’t all right could be made so by love’s concern.

  She tilted her head to the left to look at him. His face was calm, lips softly smiling. His eyes poured out a violet light so rich it alone could have kept her aloft.

  “You’re freezing,” he murmured into her ear, strok-ing her fingers to warm them up, sending licks of heat through Luce’s body.

  “Better now,” she said.

  They broke through the blanket of clouds: It was like that moment on an airplane when the view out the blurry oval window goes from monochrome gray to an infinite palate of color. The difference was that the window and the plane had fallen away, leaving nothing between her skin and the seashell pinks of evening-reaching clouds in the east, the garish indigo of high-altitude sky.

  The cloudscape presented itself, foreign and arrest-ing. As ever, it found Luce unprepared. This was another world she and Daniel alone inhabited, a high world, the tips of the tallest minarets of love.

  What mortal hadn’t dreamed of this? How many times had Luce yearned to be on the other side of an airplane window? To meander through the strange, pale gold of a sun-kissed rain cloud underfoot? Now she was here and overcome with the beauty of a distant world she could feel on her skin.

  But Luce and Daniel could not stop. They could not stop once for the next nine days—or everything would stop.

  “How long will it take to get to Venice?” she asked.

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer,” Daniel almost whispered into her ear.

  “You sound like a pilot who’s been in a holding pattern for an hour, telling his passengers ‘just another ten minutes’ for the fifth time,” Luce teased.

  When Daniel didn’t respond, she looked up at him.

  He was frowning in confusion. The metaphor was lost on him.

  “You’ve never been on a plane,” she said. “Why should you when you can do this?” She gestured at his gorgeous beating wings. “All the waiting and taxiing would probably drive you crazy.”

  “I’d like to go on a plane with you. Maybe we’ll take a trip to the Bahamas. People fly there, right?”

  “Yes.” Luce swallowed. “Let’s.” She couldn’t help thinking how many impossible things had to happen in precisely the right way for the two of them to be able to travel like a normal couple. It was too hard to think about the future right now, when so much was at stake.

  The future was as blurry and distant as the ground below—and Luce hoped it would be as beautiful.

  “How long will it really take?”

  “Four, maybe five hours at this speed.”

  “But won’t you need to rest? Refuel?” Luce shrugged, still embarrassingly unsure of how Daniel’s body worked.

  “Won’t your arms get tired?”

  He chuckled.

  “What?”

  “I just flew in from Heaven, and boy, are my arms tired.” Daniel squeezed her waist, teasing. “The idea of my arms ever tiring of holding you is absurd.” As if to prove it, Daniel arched his back, drawing his wings high above his shoulders and beating them once, lightly. As their bodies swept elegantly upward, skirting a cloud, he released one arm from around her waist, illustrating that he could hold her deftly with a single hand. His free arm curved forward and Daniel brushed his fingers across her lips, waiting for her kiss. When she delivered it, he returned the arm around her waist and swept his other hand free, banking to the left dramatically. She kissed that hand, too. Then Daniel’s shoulders flexed around hers, hugging them in an embrace tight enough that he could release both arms from around her waist, and somehow, still, she stayed aloft. The feeling was so delicious, so joyful and unbounded, that Luce began to laugh. He made a great loop in the air. Her hair splashed all over her face. She was not afraid. She was flying.

  She took Daniel’s hands as they found their way around her waist again. “It’s kinda like we were made do this,” she said.

  “Yes. Kinda.”

  He flew on, never flagging. They shot through clouds and open air, through brief, beautiful rainstorms, drying off in the wind an instant later. They passed transatlantic planes at such tremendous speeds that Luce imagined the passengers inside not noticing anything but a brilliant, unexpected flash of silver and perhaps a gentle nudge of turbulence, making little waves run through their drinks.

  The clouds thinned as they soared over the ocean.

  Luce could smell the briny weight of its depths all the way up here, and it smelled like an ocean from another planet, not chalky like Shoreline, and not brackish like home. Daniel’s wings threw a glorious shadow on its hammered surface below that was somehow comforting, though it was hard to believe that she was a part of the vision she saw in the roiling sea.

  “Luce?” Daniel asked.

  “Yes?”

  “What was it like to be around your parents this morning?”

  Her eyes traced the outline of a lonely pair of islands in the dark watery plain below. She wondered distantly where they were, how far away from home.

  “Hard,” she admitted. “I guess I felt the way you must have felt a million times. At a distance from someone I love because I can’t be honest with them.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “In some ways, it’s easier to be around you and the other angels than it is to be around my own parents and my own best friend.”

  Daniel thought for a moment. “I don’t want that for you. It shouldn’t have to be like that. All I ever wanted was to love you.”

  “Me too. That’s all I want.” But even as she said it, looking out across the faded eastern sky, Luce couldn’t stop replaying those last minutes at home, wishing she’d done things differently. She should have hugged her dad a little tighter. She should have listened, really listened, to her mom’s advice as she walked out the door. She should have spent more time asking her best friend about her life back at Dover. She shouldn’t have been so selfish or so rushed. Now every second took her farther away from Thunderbolt and her parents and Callie, and every second Luce grappled with the growing feeling that she might not see any of them again.

  With all her heart Luce believed in what she and Daniel and the other angels were doing. But this was not the first time she’d abandoned the people she cared about for Daniel. She thought about the funeral she’d witnessed in Prussia, the dark wool coats and damp red eyes of her loved ones, bleary with grief at her early, sudden death. She thought about her beautiful mother in medieval England, where she’d spent Valentine’s Day; her sister, Helen; and her good friends Laura and Elea-nor. That was the one life she’d visited where she hadn’t experienced her own death, but she’d seen enough to know that there were good people who would be shattered by Lucinda’s inevitable demise. It made her stomach cramp to imagine. And then Luce thought of Lucia, the girl she’d been in Italy, who’d lost her family in the war, who didn’t have anyone but Daniel, whose life—however short it was—had been worthwhile because of his love.

  When she pressed deeper into his chest, Daniel slid his hands up the sleeves of her sweater and ran his fingers in circles around her arms, as if he were drawing little halos on her skin. “Tell me the best part of all your lives.”

  She wanted to say when I found you, every time. But it wasn’t as simple as that. It was hard even to think of them discretely. Her past lives began to swirl together and hiccup like the panels of a kaleidoscope. There was that beautiful moment in Tahiti when Lulu had tattooed Daniel’s chest. And the way they’d abandoned a battle in ancient China because their love was more important than fighting any war. She could have listed a dozen sexy stolen moments, a dozen gorgeous, bittersweet kisses.

  Luce knew those weren’t the best parts.

  The best part was now. That was what she would take with her from her journeys through the ages: He was worth everything to her and she was worth everything to him. The only way to experience that deep level of th
eir love was to enter each new moment together, as if time were made of clouds. And if it came down to it these next nine days, Luce knew that she and Daniel would risk everything for their love.

  “It’s been an education,” she finally said. “The first time I stepped through on my own, I was already determined to break the curse. But I was overwhelmed and confused, until I started to realize that every life I visited, I learned something important about myself.”

  “Like what?” They were so high that the suggestion of the Earth’s curve was visible at the edge of the darkening sky.

  “I learned that just kissing you didn’t kill me, that it had more to do with what I was aware of in the moment, how much of myself and my history I could take in.” She felt Daniel nod behind her. “That has always been the greatest enigma to me.”

  “I learned that my past selves weren’t always very nice people, but you loved the soul inside of them anyway. And from your example, I learned how to recognize your soul. You have . . . a specific glow, a brightness, and even when you stopped looking like your physical self, I could step into a new lifetime and recognize you. I would see your soul almost overlying whatever face you wore in each life. You would be your foreign Egyptian self and the Daniel I craved and loved.”

  Daniel turned his head to kiss her temple. “You probably don’t realize this, but the power to recognize my soul has always been in you.”

  “No, I couldn’t—I didn’t used to be able to—”

  “You did, you just didn’t know it. You thought you were crazy. You saw the Announcers and called them shadows. You thought they were haunting you all your life. And when you first met me at Sword & Cross, or maybe when you first realized you cared for me, you probably saw something else you couldn’t explain, something you tried to deny?”

  Luce clamped her eyes shut, remembering. “You used to leave a violet haze in the air when you passed by. But I’d blink and it would be gone.”

  Daniel smiled. “I didn’t know that.”

  “What do you mean? You just said—”

  “I imagined you saw something, but I didn’t know what it was. Whatever attraction you recognized in me, in my soul, it would manifest differently depending on how you needed to see it.” He smiled at her. “That’s how your soul is in collaboration with mine. A violet glow is nice. I’m glad that’s what it was.”

  “What does my soul look like to you?”

  “I couldn’t reduce it to words if I tried, but its beauty is unsurpassed.”

  That was a good way of describing this flight across the world with Daniel. The stars twinkled in vast galaxies all around them. The moon was huge and dense with craters, half shrouded by pale gray cloud. Luce was warm and safe in the arms of the angel she loved, a luxury she’d missed so much on her quest through the Announcers. She sighed and closed her eyes—

  And saw Bill.

  The vision was aggressive, invading her mind, though it was not the vile, seething beast Bill had become when she last saw him. He was just Bill, her flinty gargoyle, holding her hand to fly her down from the ship-wrecked mast where she’d stepped through in Tahiti.

  Why that memory found her in Daniel’s arms, she didn’t know. But she could still feel the shape of his small stone hand in hers. She remembered how his strength and grace had astonished her. She remembered feeling safe with him.

  Now her skin crawled and she writhed against Daniel uncomfortably.

  “What is it?”

  “Bill.” The word tasted sour.

  “Lucifer.”

  “I know he’s Lucifer. I know that. But for a while there, he was something else to me. Somehow I thought of him as a friend. It haunts me, how close I let him get.

  I’m ashamed.”

  “Don’t be.” Daniel hugged her close. “There’s a reason he was called the Morning Star. Lucifer was beautiful. Some say he was the most beautiful.” Luce thought she detected a hint of jealousy in Daniel’s tone. “He was the most beloved, too, not just by the Throne, but by many of the angels. Think of the sway he holds over mortals. That power flows from the same source.” His voice wobbled, then grew very tight. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of falling for him, Luce—” Daniel broke off suddenly, though it sounded like he had more to say.

  “Things were getting tense between us,” she admitted, “but I never imagined that he could turn into such a monster.”

  “There is no darkness as dark as a great light cor-rupted. Look.” Daniel shifted the angle of his wings and they flew back in a wide arc, spinning around the outside of a towering cloud. One side was golden pink, lit by the last ray of evening sun. The other side, Luce noticed as they circled, was dark and pregnant with rain. “Bright and dark rolled up together, both necessary for this to be what it is. It is like that for Lucifer.”

  “And Cam, too?” Luce asked as Daniel completed the circle to resume their flight over the ocean.

  “I know you don’t trust him, but you can. I do. Cam’s darkness is legendary, but it is only a sliver of his personality.”

  “But then why would he side with Lucifer? Why would any of the angels?”

  “Cam didn’t,” Daniel said. “Not at first, anyway. It was a very unstable time. Unprecedented. Unimaginable.

  At the time of the Fall, there were some angels who sided with Lucifer right away, but there were others, like Cam, who were cast out by the Throne for not choosing quickly enough. The rest of history has been a slow choosing of sides, with angels returning to the fold of Heaven or the ranks of Hell until there are only a few unallied fallen left.”

  “That’s where we are now?” Luce asked, even though she knew that Daniel didn’t like to talk about how he still had not chosen a side.

  “You used to really like Cam,” Daniel said, sliding the subject away from himself. “For a handful of lifetimes on Earth the three of us were very close. It was only much later, after Cam had suffered a broken heart, that he crossed over to Lucifer’s side.”

  “What? Who was she?”

  “None of us like to talk about her. You must never let on that you know,” Daniel said. “I resented his choice, but I can’t say I didn’t understand it. If I ever truly lost you, I don’t know what I would do. My whole world would dim.”

  “That isn’t going to happen,” Luce said too quickly.

  She knew this lifetime was her last chance. If she died now, she would not come back.

  She had a thousand questions, about the woman Cam had lost, about the strange quake in Daniel’s voice when he talked about Lucifer’s appeal, about where she’d been when he was falling. But her eyelids felt heavy, her body slack with fatigue.

  “Rest,” Daniel cooed in her ear. “I’ll wake you up when we’re landing in Venice.”

  It was all the permission she needed to let herself drift off. She closed her eyes against the phosphorescent waves crashing thousands of feet below and flew into a world of dreams where nine days had no significance, where she could dip and soar and linger in the glory of the clouds, where she could fly freely, into infinity, without the slightest chance of falling.

  THREE

  THE SUNKEN SANCTUARY

  Daniel had been knocking on the weathered wooden door in the middle of the night for what felt to Luce like half an hour. The three-story Venetian townhouse belonged to a colleague, a professor, and Daniel was certain this man would let them crash, because they had been great friends ‘years ago,’ which, with Daniel, could encompass quite a span of time.

  “He must be a heavy sleeper.” Luce yawned, half lulled back into sleep herself by the steady pounding of Daniel’s fists. Either that, she thought blearily, or the professor was sitting in some bohemian all-night café, sipping wine over a book crammed with incomprehen-sible terms.

  It was three in the morning—their touchdown amid the silvery web of Venice’s canals had been accompanied by the chiming of a clock tower somewhere in the darkened distance of the city—and Luce was overcome with fatigue. She leaned miserably ag
ainst the cold tin mail-box, causing it to wobble loose from one of the nails holding it upright. This sent the whole box slanting, making Luce stumble backward and nearly hurtle into the murky black-green canal, whose water lapped over the lip of the mossy stoop like an inky tongue.

  The whole exterior of the house seemed to be rotting in layers: from the painted blue wood peeling off the windowsills in slimy sheets, to red bricks crawling with dark green mold, to the damp cement of the stoop, which crumbled under their feet. For a moment, Luce thought she could actually feel the city sinking.

  “He’s got to be here,” Daniel muttered, still pounding.

  When they’d landed on the canal-side ledge usually accessed only by gondola, Daniel had promised Luce a bed inside, a hot drink, a reprise from the damp and bracing wind they’d been flying through for hours.

  At last, the slow shuffling of feet thumping down stairs inside perked a shivering Luce to attention. Daniel exhaled and closed his eyes, relieved, as the brass knob turned. Hinges moaned as the door swung open.

  “Who the devil—” The older Italian man’s wiry tufts of white hair stood out at all angles from his head. He had sensationally bushy white eyebrows, and a mustache to match, and thick white chest hair protruding from the V-neck of his dark gray robe.

  Luce watched Daniel blink in surprise, as if he was second-guessing their address. Then the old man’s pale brown eyes lit up. He lurched forward, pulling Daniel into a tight embrace.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to visit before I kicked the inevitable bucket,” the man whispered hoarsely. His eyes traveled to Luce, and he smiled as if they hadn’t woken him, as if he’d been expecting them for months. “After all these years, you finally brought over Lucinda. What a treat.”

  His name was Professor Mazotta. He and Daniel had studied history together at the University of Bologna in the thirties. He was not appalled or bewildered by Daniel’s lack of aging: Mazotta understood what Daniel was.