Until now.
When Luce opened her eyes, night had fallen. The air was so cool her arms were trembling. The others huddled around her, so quietly she could hear crickets whistling in the grass. She didn’t want to look at anyone.
“It was because of me,” she said. “All this time I thought they were punishing you, Daniel, but the punishment was for me.” She paused. “Am I the reason Lucifer revolted?”
“No, Luce.” Cam gave her a sad smile. “Maybe you were the inspiration, but inspiration is an excuse for doing something you already want to do. Lucifer was looking for an entrance into evil. He would have found another way.”
“But I betrayed him.”
“No,” Daniel said. “He betrayed you. He betrayed all of us.”
“Without his rebellion, would we have fallen in love?”
Daniel smiled. “I like to think we would have found a way. Now, finally, we have a chance to put all of this behind us. We have a chance to stop Lucifer, to break the curse and love each other the way we always wanted. We can make all these years of suffering worthwhile.”
“Look,” Steven said, pointing at the sky.
The stars were out in droves. One, far in the distance, was particularly bright. It flickered, then seemed to go out altogether before returning even brighter than before.
“That’s them, isn’t it?” she said. “The Fall?”
“Yes,” Francesca said. “That’s it. It looks just like the old texts say it would.”
“It was just”—Luce furrowed her brow, squinting—
“I can only see it when I—”
“Concentrate,” Cam ordered.
“What’s happening to it?” Luce asked.
“It is coming into being in this world,” Daniel said.
“It wasn’t the physical transit from Heaven to Earth that took nine days. It was the shift from a Heavenly realm to an Earthly one. When we landed here, our bodies were . . . different. We became different. That took time.”
“Now time is taking us,” Roland said, looking at the golden pocket watch that Dee must have given him before she died.
“Then it is time for us to go,” Daniel said to Luce.
“Up there?”
“Yes, we must soar up to meet them. We will fly right up to the limits of the Fall, and then you—”
“I have to stop him?”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes, thought back to the way Lucifer had looked at her in the Meadow. He looked like he wanted to crush every speck of tenderness there was. “I think I know how.”
“I told you she would say that!” Arriane whooped.
Daniel pulled her close. “Are you sure?” She kissed him, never surer. “I just got my wings back, Daniel. I’m not going to let Lucifer take them away.”
So Luce and Daniel said goodbye to their friends, reached for each other’s hands, and took off into the night. They flew upward forever, through the thinnest outer skin of the atmosphere, through a film of light at the edge of space.
The moon became enormous, shone like a noontime sun. They passed through hazy clouded galaxies and by other moons with other crater-shadowed faces and strange planets glowing with red gas and striped rings of light.
No amount of flying tired Luce. She began to understand how Daniel could go for days without rest; she was not hungry or thirsty. She was not cold in the frozen night.
At last, at the edge of nothing, in the darkest pocket of the universe, they reached the perimeter. They saw the black web of Lucifer’s Announcer, wobbling between dimensions. Inside it was the Fall.
Daniel hovered at her side, his wings brushing hers, transmitting strength. “You will have to pass through the Announcer first. Don’t get hung up there. Move through until you find him in the Fall.”
“I have to go in alone, don’t I?”
“I would follow you to the ends of the Earth and beyond. But you’re the only one who can do this,” Daniel said. He took her hand and kissed her fingers, her palm. He was shaking. “I’ll be here.”
Their lips met one last time.
“I love you, Luce,” Daniel said. “I will love you always, whether or not Lucifer succeeds—”
“No, don’t say that,” Luce said. “He won’t—”
“But if he does,” Daniel continued, “I want you to know that I would do it all again. I will choose you every time.”
A calmness came over Luce. She would not fail him.
She would not fail herself.
“I won’t be long.”
She squeezed his hand and turned away and plunged through darkness, into Lucifer’s Announcer.
EIGHTEEN
CATCH A FALLING STAR
The darkness was total.
Luce had only ever traveled through her own Announcers, which were cool and damp, even peaceful.
The entrance to Lucifer’s was stale, hot, filled with acrid smoke—and deafening. Phlegmy pleas for mercy and jagged radiating sobs permeated its inner wall.
Luce’s wings bristled—a sensation she’d never experienced—as she realized that the devil’s Announcers were outposts of Hell.
It’s just a passage, she told herself. It’s like any other Announcer, a portal to pass through to another place and time.
She pushed forward, gagging on smoke. The ground was spiked with something she didn’t recognize until she stumbled to her knees and felt the excruciation of glass shards in the hands Daniel had just released.
Don’t get hung up there, he had told her. Move through until you find him.
She took a deep breath, righted herself, remembered what she was. She spread her wings and the Announcer flooded with light. Now Luce could see how horrible it was—every smoldering surface covered by protruding shards of glass of different colors, semi-human forms dead or dying in sticky pools on the floor, and, worst of all, an overwhelming sense of loss.
Luce looked down at her bleeding hands, vicious little triangles of brown glass sticking out of her palms. In an instant they were healed. She gritted her teeth and flew, her body penetrating the Announcer’s inner wall, deep into the belly of Lucifer’s stolen Fall.
It was vast. That was the first thing. Vast enough to be its own universe, and eerily silent. The Fall was so bright with the light of falling angels that Luce could hardly see. Somehow, she could feel them—all around, her sisters and her brothers, more than a hundred million of Heaven’s host, decorating the sky like paintings.
They hung suspended, frozen in space and time, each one entombed in a different orb of light.
That was how she’d fallen, too. She remembered it now, painfully. Those nine days had contained nine hundred eternities. And yet still as the falling angels were, Luce saw now that they were changing all the time. Their forms took on a strange, inchoate translucence. Here and there light flashed on the underside of a pair of wings. An arm hazily flickered into being, then became indistinct again. This was what Daniel meant about the shift that occurred within the Fall—souls metamorphosing from the way they had been in the Heavenly realm to the way they would be in the Earthly realm.
The angels were shedding their angelic purity, entering the incarnations they would wear on Earth.
Luce drew near the nearest angel. She recognized him: Tzadkiel, the angel of Divine Justice, her brother and her friend. She had not seen his soul in ages. He didn’t see her now, and he couldn’t have responded if he had.
The light within him warbled, causing Tzadkiel’s essence to shimmer like a gem in muddy water. It coalesced into a blurry face Luce didn’t recognize. It looked gro-tesque—crudely formed eyes, half-realized lips. It wasn’t him, but as soon as the angels hit the unforgiving soil of Earth, it would be.
The farther she waded into the suspended sea of souls, the heavier she felt. Luce recognized all of them—
Saraquel, Alat, Muriel, Chayo. She realized with horror that when her wings drew near enough, she could hear each angel’s falling thoughts.
Who will take care of us? Whom will we adore?
I can’t feel my wings.
I miss my orchards. Will there be orchards in Hell?
I am sorry. I am so sorry.
It was too painful to remain near any of them for longer than a single thought. Luce pushed on, direction-less, overwhelmed, until a bright, familiar light attracted her.
Gabbe.
Even in unformed transition, Gabbe was gorgeous.
Her white wings folded like rose petals around her focusing features; the dark drape of her eyelashes made her look peaceful and steady.
Luce pressed up against Gabbe’s silvery orb of light.
For a moment, she considered that there might be a bright side to Lucifer’s Fall: Gabbe would return.
Then the light within Gabbe flickered and Luce heard the falling angel think.
Move on. Lucinda. Please move on. Dream what you already know.
Luce thought of Daniel, waiting on the other side.
She thought of Lu Xin, the girl she’d been during the ancient Shang dynasty in China. She had killed a king, dressed in his general’s clothes, and readied herself for a war that wasn’t hers to fight—all because of her love for Daniel.
Luce had recognized her soul inside Lu Xin from the moment she saw her. She could find herself here, too, even with bright souls shining all around her like city lights flung up in the air. She would find herself within the Fall.
That, she knew suddenly, was where she would find Lucifer.
She closed her eyes, beat her wings lightly, asked her soul to guide her to herself. She moved through millions, sliding over glowing tidal waves of angels. It took a small eternity. For nine days she and her friends had been racing time, thinking only of how to find the Fall. Now that they had found it, how long would it take Luce to locate the soul she needed, the needle in this haystack made of angels changing forms? How much time was left?
Then, in a galaxy of frozen angels, Luce froze.
Someone was singing.
It was a love song so beautiful it made her wings quiver.
She came to rest behind the fixed white orb of a falling angel called Ezekiel, and listened:
“My sea has found a shore . . . My burning has found a flame . . .”
Her soul swelled with a long-forgotten memory. She peered around Ezekeel, the Angel of the Clouds, to see who was singing in the clearing.
It was a boy, cradling a girl in his arms, his serenading voice soft and sweet as honey.
The slow rocking of his arms was the only motion in the entire frozen Fall.
Then Luce realized that girl was not simply a girl. She was a half-formed orb of light surrounding an angel in metamorphosis. She was the soul that used to be Lucinda.
The boy looked up, sensing a presence. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, and eyes the color of ice, radiant with dumb love.
But he was not a boy. He was an angel so devastat-ingly beautiful that Luce’s body clenched with a loneliness she didn’t want to remember.
He was Lucifer.
This was how he used to look in Heaven. But he was mobile, fully formed, unlike the millions of angels surrounding him—which assured Luce he was the demon of the present, the one who had cast his Announcer around the Fall to incite its second link with Earth. His own falling soul could be anywhere in here, just as paralyzed as the rest of them had been when the Throne cast them out of Heaven.
