Fallen Series 04 - Rapture Read online

  He seemed to feel only joy at being reunited with an old friend, a joy that was augmented by the introduction to the love of that friend’s life.

  He escorted them into his office, which was also a study of varying degrees of decay. His bookshelves dipped at the centers; his desk was piled with yellowing paper; the rug was worn to threads and splashed with coffee stains. Mazotta set immediately to making each of them a cup of dense hot chocolate—an old man’s old bad habit, he rasped to Luce with a nudge. But Daniel barely took a sip before thrusting his book into Mazotta’s hands and opening it to the description of the first relic.

  Mazotta slipped on thin wire-framed glasses and squinted at the page, mumbling to himself in Italian. He stood up, walked to the bookshelf, scratched his head, turned back to the desk, paced the office, sipped his chocolate, then returned to the bookshelf to pull out a fat leather-bound tome. Luce stifled a yawn. Her eyelids felt like they were working hard to hold up something heavy. She was trying not to drift, pinching the inside of her palm to keep herself awake. But Daniel’s and Professor Mazotta’s voices met each other like distant clouds of fog as they argued over the impossibility of everything the other was saying.

  “It’s absolutely not a windowpane from the church of Saint Ignatius.” Mazotta wrung his hands. “Those are slightly hexagonal, and this illustration is resoundingly oblong.”

  “What are we doing here?” Daniel suddenly shouted, rattling an amateur painting of a blue sailboat on the wall. “We clearly need to be at the library at Bologna. Do you still have keys to get in? In your office you must have had—”

  “I became emeritus thirteen years ago, Daniel. And we’re not traveling two hundred kilometers in the middle of the night to look at . . .” He paused. “Look at Lucinda, she’s sleeping standing up, like a horse!” Luce grimaced groggily. She was afraid to start down the path of a dream for fear she might meet Bill. He had a tendency to turn up when she closed her eyes these days. She wanted to stay awake, to stay away from him, to be a part of the conversation about the relic she and Daniel would need to find the next day. But sleep was insistent and would not be denied.

  Seconds or hours later, Daniel’s arms lifted her from the ground and carried her up a dark and narrow flight of stairs.

  “I’m sorry, Luce,” she thought he said. She was too deep asleep to respond. “I should have let you rest sooner. I’m just so scared,” he whispered. “Scared we’re going to run out of time.”

  Luce blinked and shifted backward, surprised to find herself in a bed, further surprised by the single white peony in a short glass vase drooping onto the pillow next to her head.

  She plucked the flower from its vase and twirled it in her palm, causing drops of water to bead on the brocaded rose duvet. The bed creaked as she propped the pillow up against the brass headboard to look around the room.

  For a moment, she felt disoriented by finding herself in an unfamiliar place, dreamed memories of traveling through the Announcers slowly fading as she fully awoke.

  She no longer had Bill to give her clues about where she’d ended up. He was only there in her dreams, and the previous night he’d been Lucifer, a monster, laughing at the idea that she and Daniel could change or stop a thing.

  A white envelope was propped against the vase on the nightstand.

  Daniel.

  She remembered only a single soft sweet kiss and his arms pulling away as he’d tucked her into bed the previous night and shut the door.

  Where had he gone after that?

  She ripped open the envelope and slid out the stiff white card it held. On the card were three words: On the balcony.

  Smiling, Luce threw back the covers and heaved her legs over the side of the bed. She padded across the giant woven rug, the white peony scissored between her fingers. The windows in the bedroom were tall and narrow and rose nearly twenty feet to the cathedral ceiling. Behind one of the rich brown curtains was a glass door leading out to a terrace. She turned the metal latch and stepped outside, expecting to find Daniel and sink into his arms.

  But the crescent-moon-shaped terrace was empty.

  Just a short stone railing and a one-story drop to the green waters of the canal, and a small glass-topped table with a red canvas folding chair beside it. The morning was beautiful. The air smelled murky but crisp. On the river shiny narrow black gondolas glided past one another as elegantly as swans. A pair of speckled thrushes chirped from a clothesline one floor up, and on the other side of the canal was a row of cramped pastel apart-ments. It was charming, sure, the Venice of most people’s dreams, but Luce wasn’t here to be a tourist. She and Daniel were here to save their history, and the world’s.

  And the clock was ticking. And Daniel was gone.

  Then she noticed a second white envelope on the balcony table, propped up against a tiny white to-go cup and a small paper bag. Again, she tore open the card, and again found only three words:

  Please wait here.

  “Annoying yet romantic,” she said aloud. She sat down on the folding chair and peered inside the paper bag. A handful of tiny jam-filled donuts dusted with cinnamon and sugar sent up an intoxicating scent.

  The bag was warm in her hands, flecked with little bits of oil seeping through. Luce popped one into her mouth and took a sip from the tiny white cup, which contained the richest, most delightful espresso Luce had ever tasted.

  “Enjoying the bombolini?” Daniel called from below.

  Luce shot to her feet and leaned over the railing to find him standing at the back of a gondola painted with images of angels. He wore a flat straw hat bound with a thick red ribbon, and used a broad wooden paddle to steer the boat slowly toward her.

  Her heart surged the way it did each time she first saw Daniel in another life. But he was here. He was hers.

  This was happening now.

  “Dip them in the espresso, then tell me what it’s like to be in Heaven,” Daniel said, smiling up at her.

  “How do I get down to you?” she called.

  He pointed to the narrowest spiral staircase Luce had ever seen, just to the right of the railing. She grabbed the coffee and bag of donuts, slipped the peony stem behind her ear, and made for the steps.

  She could feel Daniel’s eyes on her as she climbed over the railing and slinked down the stairs. Every time she made a full rotation on the staircase, she caught a teasing flash of his violet eyes. By the time she made it to the bottom, he had extended his hand to help her onto the boat.

  There was the electricity she’d been yearning for since she awoke. The spark that passed between them every time they touched. Daniel wrapped his arms around her waist and drew her in so that there wasn’t any space between their bodies. He kissed her, long and deep, until she was dizzy.

  “Now that’s the way to start a morning.” Daniel’s fingers traced the petals of the peony behind her ear.

  A slight weight suddenly tugged at her neck and when she reached up, her hands found a fine chain, which her fingers traced down to a silver locket. She held it out and looked at the red rose engraved on its face.

  Her locket! It was the one Daniel had given to her on her last night at Sword & Cross. She had kept it tucked in the front cover of The Book of the Watchers during the short time she’d spent alone in the cabin, but everything about those days was blurry. The next thing she remembered was Mr. Cole rushing her to the airport to catch her flight to California. She hadn’t remembered the locket or the book until she’d arrived at Shoreline, and by then she was certain she’d lost them.

  Daniel must have slipped it around her neck when she was sleeping. Her eyes teared again, this time with happiness. “Where did you—”

  “Open it.” Daniel smiled.

  The last time she’d held the locket, the image of a former Luce and Daniel had baffled her. Daniel said he’d tell her when the photograph had been taken the next time he saw her. That hadn’t happened. Their stolen time together in California had been mostly stressful and too
brief, filled with silly arguments she couldn’t imagine having with Daniel anymore.

  Luce was glad to have waited, because when she opened the locket this time and saw the tiny photograph behind its glass plate—Daniel in a bowtie and Luce with coiffed short hair—she instantly recognized what it was.

  “Lucia,” she whispered. It was the young nurse Luce had encountered when she stepped through into World War I Milan. The girl had been much younger when Luce met her, sweet and a little sassy, but so genuine Luce had admired her right away.

  She smiled now, remembering the way Lucia kept staring at Luce’s shorter modern haircut, and the way Lucia joked that all the soldiers had a crush on Luce. She remembered mostly that if Luce had stayed at the Italian hospital a little longer and if the circumstances had been . . . well, entirely different, the two of them could have been great friends.

  She looked up at Daniel, beaming, but her expression quickly darkened. He was staring at her as if he’d been punched.

  “What’s wrong?” She let go of the locket and stepped into him, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  He shook his head, stunned. “I’m just not used to being able to share this with you. The look on your face when you recognized that picture? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Luce blushed and smiled and felt speechless and wanted to cry all at once. She understood Daniel completely.

  “I’m sorry I left you alone like that,” he said. “I had to go and check something in one of Mazotta’s books in Bologna. I figured you’d need every bit of rest you could get, and you looked so beautiful asleep, I couldn’t bear to wake you up.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Luce asked.

  “Possibly. Mazotta gave me a clue about one of the piazzas here in town. He’s mostly an art historian, but he knows his divinity better than any mortal I’ve ever met.” Luce slid down to the gondola’s low red velvet bench, which was like a love seat, with a padded black leather cushion and a high, sculpted back.

  Daniel sank the oar into the water and the boat slid forward. The water was a bright pastel green, and as they glided, Luce could see the whole city reflected in the glassy wobble of its surface.

  “The good news,” Daniel said, looking down at her from under the brim of his hat, “is that Mazotta thinks he knows where the artifact is located. I kept him up bickering until sunrise, but we finally matched my sketch to an interesting old photograph.”

  “And?”

  “As it turns out”—Daniel flicked his wrist and the gondola curved gracefully around a tight corner, then dipped under the low slant of a footbridge—“the serving tray is a halo.”

  “A halo? I thought only angels on greeting cards had halos.” She cocked her head at Daniel. “Do you have a halo?”

  Daniel smiled as if he found the question charming.

  “Not in the golden-ring fashion, I don’t think. As far as we can tell, halos are representations of our light, in a way that mortals can comprehend. The violet light you saw around me at Sword & Cross, for example. I’m guessing Gabbe never told you stories about posing for da Vinci?”

  “She did what?” Luce almost choked on her bombolini.

  “He didn’t know she was an angel, of course, but according to her, Leonardo talked about the light that seemed to radiate from within her. That’s why he painted her with a halo circling her head.”

  “Whoa.” Luce shook her head, astonished, as they glided past a pair of lovers in matching felt fedoras kissing in a balcony corner.

  “It’s not just him. Artists have been depicting angels that way since we first fell to Earth.”

  “And the halo we need to find today?”

  “Another artist’s depiction.” Daniel’s face grew somber. The brass of a scratchy jazz record drifted out an open window and seemed to fill the space around the gondola, scoring Daniel’s narration. “This one is a sculpture of an angel, and much older, from the pre-classical era. So old, the artist’s identity is unknown. It’s from Anatolia and, like the rest of these artifacts, was stolen during the Second Crusade.”

  “So we just go find the sculpture in a church or museum or whatever, lift the halo off the angel’s head, and sprint to Mount Sinai?” Luce asked.

  Daniel’s eyes darkened for a split second. “For now, yes, that’s the plan.”

  “That sounds too simple,” Luce said, noting the intri-cacies of the buildings around her—the high onion-domed windows in one, the verdant herb garden creeping out the window of another. Everything seemed to be sinking into the bright green water with a kind of serene surrender.

  Daniel stared past her, the sunlit water reflecting in his eyes. “We’ll see how simple it is.” He squinted at a wooden sign farther down the block, then steered them out of the center of the canal. The gondola rocked as Daniel guided it to a stop against a brick wall crawling with vines. He grabbed hold of one of the mooring poles and knotting the gondola’s rope around it. The boat groaned and strained against its bindings.

  “This is the address Mazotta gave me.” Daniel gestured at an ancient curved stone bridge that spanned between romantic and decrepit. “We’ll head up these stairs and head to the palazzo. It shouldn’t be far.” He hopped out of the gondola and onto the sidewalk, holding out his hand for Luce. She followed his lead, and together they crossed the bridge, hand in hand.

  As they walked past bakery stand after bakery stand and vendors selling VENICE T-shirts, Luce couldn’t help looking around at all the other happy couples: Everyone here seemed to be kissing, laughing. She tugged the peony out from behind her ear and slipped it inside her purse. She and Daniel were on a mission, not a honeymoon, and there would never be another romantic encounter if they failed.

  Their pace quickened as they turned left onto a narrow street, then right into a broad open piazza.

  Daniel stopped abruptly.

  “It is supposed to be here. In the square.” He looked down at the address, shaking his head in weary disbelief.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The address Mazotta gave me is that church. He didn’t tell me that.” He pointed at the tall, spired Fran-ciscan building, with its triangle of stained-glass roseate windows. It was a massive, commanding chapel with a pale orange exterior and bright white trim around its windows and its large dome. “The sculpture—the halo—must be inside.”

  “Okay.” Luce took a step toward the church, giving Daniel a bewildered shrug. “Let’s go in and check it out.” Daniel shifted his weight. His face suddenly looked pale. “I can’t, Luce.”

  “Why not?”

  Daniel’s body had stiffened with a palpable nervous-ness. His arms seemed nailed to his sides and his jaw was clenched so tightly it could have been wired. She wasn’t used to Daniel’s being anything other than confident.

  This was strange behavior.

  “Then you don’t know?” he asked.

  Luce shook her head and Daniel sighed.

  “I thought maybe at Shoreline, they might have taught you . . . the thing is, actually, if a fallen angel enters a sanctuary of God, the structure and all those inside it burst into flames.”

  He finished his sentence quickly, just as a group of plaid-skirted German schoolgirls on a tour passed them in the piazza, filing toward the entrance of the church.

  Luce watched as a few of them turned to look at Daniel, whispering and giggling to each other, smoothing their braids in case he happened to glance their way.

  He fixed on Luce. He still seemed nervous. “It’s one of the many lesser-known details of our punishment. If a fallen angel desires to reenter the jurisdiction of the grace of God, we must approach the Throne directly.

  There are no shortcuts.”

  “You’re saying you’ve never set foot in a church? Not once in the thousands of years you’ve been here?” Daniel shook his head. “Or a temple, or a synagogue, or a mosque. Never. The closest I’ve come is the natato-rium at Sword & Cross. When it was desanctified a
nd repurposed as a gym, the taboo was lifted.” He closed his eyes. “Arriane did once, very early on before she’d reallied herself with Heaven. She didn’t know any better.

  The way she describes it—”

  “Is that where she got the scars on her neck?” Luce touched her own neck instinctively, thinking back to her first hour at Sword & Cross: Arriane handing over a stolen Swiss Army knife, demanding that Luce give her a haircut. She hadn’t been able to take her eyes off the angel’s strange marbled scars.

  “No.” Daniel looked away, uncomfortable. “That was something else.”

  A group of tourists were posing with their guide in front of the entrance. In the time they had been talking, ten people had drifted into and out of the church without seeming to appreciate the building’s beauty or its import—and yet Daniel, Arriane, and a whole legion of angels could never step inside.

  But Luce could.

  “I’ll go. I know what the halo looks like from your sketch. If it’s in there, I’ll find it and—”

  “You can enter, it’s true.” Daniel nodded curtly.

  “There is no other way.”

  “No problem.” Luce tried nonchalance.

  “I’ll wait right here.” Daniel looked reluctant and relieved at the same time. He squeezed her hand and sat down on the raised rim of a fountain in the center of the square and explained what the halo should look like and how to remove it. “But be careful! It’s more than a thousand years old and delicate!” Behind him, a cherub spat out an unending stream of water. “If you have any trou-ble, Luce, if anything looks even remotely suspicious, run back out here and find me.”

  The church was dark and cool, a cross-shaped structure with low rafters and the heavy scent of incense cloaking the air. Luce picked up an English pamphlet from the entryway, then realized she didn’t know what the name of the sculpture was. Annoyed with herself for not asking—Daniel would have known—she walked up the narrow nave, past row after row of empty pews, her eyes tracing the stained-glass Stations of the Cross lining the high windows.