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.
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, as 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?”