Rapture

SIXTEEN APOCALYPSE

Somewhere along the way it started raining.

Raindrops pattered on Daniel’s wings. Thunder rolled in the sky before them. Lightning ripped through the night. Luce had been sleeping, or in a heavy state of something similar to sleep, because when the storm came, she stirred to a dreamy half-awareness.

The headwind was brutal and incessant, flattening Luce against Daniel’s body. The angels flew through it at a tremendous speed, every wingbeat thrusting them across whole cities, mountain ranges. They flew over clouds that looked like giant icebergs, passing them in the blink of an eye.

Luce didn’t know where they were or how long they’d been traveling. She didn’t feel like asking.

It was dark again. How much time remained? She couldn’t remember. Counting seemed impossible, though Luce had once loved to solve complex calculus proofs. She almost laughed at the thought of sitting at a wooden desk in calculus, chewing on an eraser next to twenty mortal kids. Had that ever really happened to her?

The temperature dropped. The rain intensified as the angels flew into a gale that stretched farther than her eye could see. Now the raindrops pelting Daniel’s wings sounded like hail hitting icy snow.

The weather came sideways and upward. Luce’s clothes were drenched. She felt hot one moment, frozen the next. Daniel’s hands, encircling her body, rubbed goose bumps from her arms. She watched water streaming off the toes of her black boots toward the ground, thousands of feet below.

Visions appeared in the darkness through the storm.

She saw Dee letting down red hair that swirled around her body. The old lady was whispering, Break the curse.

Her hair became bloody tendrils, enclosing her like mummy wrap, then like a caterpillar’s cocoon . . . until the body became a massive column of thick and dripping blood.

Through the mist, a golden light grew brighter. Cam’s wings sharpened in the space between Luce’s feet and the speck of land she had been watching.

“Is this it?” Cam shouted through the wind.

“I don’t know,” Daniel said.

“How will we know?”

“We just will.”

“Daniel. The time—”

“Don’t rush me. We have to get her to the right place.”

“Is she asleep?”

“She’s feverish. I don’t know. Shhh.”

A grunt of frustration accompanied the fading of Cam’s glow back into the mist.

Luce’s eyelids flickered. Was she asleep? The sky did seem to be raining nightmares. Now she saw Miss Sophia, her black eyes gleaming in the light reflected from the raindrops. She raised her dagger, and her pearl bracelets rattled as she brought the knife into Luce’s heart.

Her words— Trust is a careless pursuit—echoed again and again in Luce’s mind until she wanted to scream.

Then the vision of Miss Sophia flickered and swirled, darkening into the gargoyle who Luce had trusted, so carelessly.

Little Bill, who’d posed as a friend, all the while hiding something vast and terrifying. Maybe that was what friendship was to the devil: love always tinged with evil.

The gargoyle’s body was a husk for forces darkly powerful inside.

In her vision, Bill bared rotten black fangs and exhaled clouds of rust. He roared, but silently, a silence that was worse than anything he ever could have said, because her imagination filled the void. He consumed her plane of vision as Lucifer, as Evil, as the End.

She snapped open her eyes. She clasped her hands over Daniel’s arms around her as they flew through the endless storm.

You’re not afraid, she vowed silently in the rain. It was the hardest of the things she’d had to convince herself of on this journey.

When you face him again, you will not be afraid.

“Guys,” Arriane said, appearing on the right side of Daniel’s wings. “Look.”

The clouds thinned as they drove onward. Below them was a valley, a broad stretch of rocky farmland that met a narrow strait of sea on its west side. A huge wooden horse stood absurdly in the barren landscape, a monument to a shadowed past. Luce could make out stony ruins near the horse, a Roman theater, a contemporary parking lot.

The angels flew on. The valley spread out below, dark but for a single light in the distance: an electric lamp that shone through the window of a tiny hut in the center of the slope.

“Fly toward the house,” Daniel called to the others.

Luce had been watching a line of goats drift across the sodden fields, gathering in a grove of apricot trees.

Her stomach lurched as Daniel swooped suddenly down.

When they touched the ground, Luce and the angels were about a quarter of a mile from the white hut.

“Let’s go inside.” Daniel took her hand. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

Luce walked next to Daniel through the rain, her dark hair splayed across her face, her borrowed coat drenched with what felt like a thousand pounds of raindrops.

They were trudging up a winding muddy path when a large drop of water clung to Luce’s eyelashes and dripped inside her eye. When she rubbed it away and blinked, the Earth had utterly changed.

An image flashed before her eyes, a long-forgotten memory returning to life:

The wet ground beneath her feet had gone from green to singed black in one place, ashen gray in another.

The valley surrounding them was pocked with deep, smoking craters. Luce smelled carnage, roasted flesh and rot so thick and sharp it burned her nostrils and clung to the roof of her mouth. Craters sizzled, sounding like rattlesnakes, as she walked past. Dust—angel dust—was everywhere. It floated through the air, coated the ground and rocks, fell like snowflakes on her face.

Something silver was in her peripheral vision. It looked like broken pieces of a mirror, except that it was phosphorescent—shimmering, almost alive. Luce dropped Daniel’s hand, fell to her knees, and crawled along the muddy ground toward the broken silver glass.

She didn’t know why she did this. She only knew she had to touch it.

She reached for a large piece, groaning with the effort. She had her hand firmly around it—

And then she blinked and came up with nothing but a fistful of soft mud.

She looked up at Daniel, her eyes filled with tears.

“What’s happening?”

He glanced at Arriane. “Get Luce inside.” She felt her arms being lifted. “You’ll be okay, kiddo,” Arriane said. “Promise.”

The dark wood door of the hut opened and a warm light poured out from within. Peering out at the wet angels was the calm, collected face of Steven Filmore, Lu-ce’s favorite teacher from Shoreline.

“Glad you could make it,” Daniel said.

“Same to you.” Steven’s voice was steady and professorial, just as Luce remembered. Somehow it was reassuring.

“Is she all right?” Steven asked.

No. She was losing it.

“Yes.” Daniel’s confidence took Luce by surprise.

“What happened to her neck?”

“We ran into some Scale in Vienna.”

Luce was hallucinating. She was not all right. Trembling, she met Steven’s eyes. They were steady, comforting.

You are all right. You have to be. For Daniel.

Steven held open the door and led them inside. The small hut had a dirt floor and straw roof, a heap of blankets and rugs in one corner, a crude cooking stove near the fire, and a square of four rocking chairs in the center of the room.

Standing in front of the chairs was Francesca—

Steven’s wife and the other Nephilim teacher at Shoreline. Phil and the other three Outcasts stood alert along the opposite wall of the hut. Annabelle, Roland, Arriane, Daniel, and Luce all crammed into the firelit warmth of the house.

“What now, Daniel?” Francesca asked, all business.

“Nothing,” Daniel said quickly. “Nothing yet.” Why not? Here they were on the fields of Troy, near the place where Lucifer was expected to land. They’d raced here to stop him. Why go through everything they’d gone through this week just to sit around a cabin and wait?

“Daniel,” Luce said. “I could use some explanation.” But Daniel only looked to Steven.

“Please have a seat.” Steven steered Luce to one of the rocking chairs. She sank into it, and nodded thanks when he handed her a metal cup of spicy Turkish apple tea. He gestured around at the hut. “It isn’t much, but it keeps the rain and most of the wind out, and you know what they say—”

“Location, location, location,” Roland finished, leaning on the arm of the rocking chair where Arriane had curled up across from Luce.

Annabelle looked around at the rain wailing on the window, at the cramped room. “So this is the Fall site? I mean, I can kind of feel it, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m trying so hard. This is weird. ” Steven was polishing his glasses on his fisherman’s sweater. He slipped them back onto his nose, resuming his professorial tone. “The Fall site is very large, Annabelle. Think of the space required for one hundred and fifty million, eight hundred and twenty-seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one—”

“You mean one hundred and fifty million, eight hundred and twenty-seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-six—” Francesca interrupted.

“Of course, there are discrepancies.” Steven always humored his beautiful, combative wife. “The point is many angels fell, so the impact site is vast.” He glanced, very quickly, at Luce. “But yes, you are sitting in a portion of the place where the angels fell to Earth.”

“We followed the old broad’s map,” Cam said, poking at the fire in the stove. It had burned down to cin-ders, but his touch brought it roaring back to life. “But I still wonder how we know for sure that this is it. There’s not much time left. How do we know?” Because I’m seeing visions of it, Luce’s mind suddenly screamed. Because somehow, I was there.

“I’m glad you asked.” Francesca spread a scroll of parchment on the floor between the rocking chairs. “The Nephilim library at Shoreline has one map of the Fall site. The map was drawn at so close a range that until someone could determine a geographical location, it could have been anywhere.”

“It might as well have been an ant farm,” Steven added. “We’ve been awaiting Daniel’s signal since Luce came back through the Announcers, tracking your progress, trying to stay within reach for when you needed us.”

“The Outcasts found us at our winter home in Cairo just after midnight.” Francesca drew her shoulders together, as if warding off a shudder. “Luckily, this one had your pennon or we might have—”

“His name is Phillip. The Outcasts are with us now,” Daniel said.

It was strange that Phil had posed as a student at Shoreline for months and Francesca didn’t recognize him. Then again, the snobbish angel teacher paid attention only to the “gifted” students at the school.

“I’d hoped you would be able to make it in time,” Daniel said. “How were things at Shoreline when you left?”

“Not good,” Francesca said. “Worse for you, I’m sure, but still, not good for us. The Scale came through Shoreline on Monday.”

Daniel’s jaw clenched. “No.”

“Miles and Shelby,” Luce gasped. “Are they okay?”

“Your friends are all fine. They couldn’t find anything to charge us with—”

“That’s right,” Steven said proudly. “My wife runs a tight ship. Above reproach.”

“Still,” Francesca said. “The students were very alarmed. Some of our biggest donors pulled their children from the school.” She paused. “I hope this is worth it.”

Arriane shot to her feet. “You bet your bangles it will be worth it.”

Roland stood up quickly and tugged Arriane back to her seat. Steven took Francesca’s arm and pulled her over to the window. Soon everyone was whispering and Luce didn’t have enough strength to hear more than Arriane’s loud “I got her big donation right here.” Out the window, the slenderest band of russet light hugged the mountains. Luce stared at it, her stomach knotted, knowing it marked the sunrise of the eighth day, the last full day before—

Daniel’s hand was on her shoulder, warm and strong.

“How are you doing, there?”

“I’m fine.” She sat up straighter, feigning alertness.

“What do we need to do next?”

“Sleep.”

She straightened her shoulders. “No, I’m not tired.

The sun’s rising, and Lucifer—”

Daniel leaned over the rocking chair and kissed her forehead. “It will go better if you’re rested.” Francesca looked up from her conversation with Steven. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“If she’s tired, she needs to sleep. A few hours won’t hurt. We’re already here.”

“But I’m not tired.” She protested, but it was obvious she was lying.

Francesca swallowed. “I guess you’re right. It’s either going to happen or it’s not.”

“What does she mean?” Luce asked Daniel.

“Nothing,” he said softly. Then, turning to Fran cesca, he said very quietly, “It’s going to happen.” He lifted Luce enough so he could slide into the rocking chair beside her. He wrapped his arms around her waist. The last things she felt were his kiss on her temple and his whisper in her ear. “Let her have one last sleep.”

“Are you ready?”

Luce stood beside Daniel in a fallow plot of farmland outside the white hut. Mist rose from the soil, and the sky was the sharp blue color of a heavy storm’s wake.

There was snow in the hills to the east, but the sloping plains of the valley exuded springlike warmth. Flowers bloomed on the fringes of the field. Butterflies were everywhere, white and pink and gold.

“Yes.”

Luce had been awake only an instant when she felt Daniel’s hand lift her from the rocking chair and out the door of the quiet hut. He must have held her in his arms all night.

“Wait,” she said. “Ready for what?”

The others were watching her, gathered in a circle as if they had been waiting, the angels and Outcasts all with their wings extended.

A cloud of storks crossed the sky, their black-tipped wings spread wide as palm fronds. Their flight darkened the sun for a moment, casting shadows on the angels’

wings, before the birds moved on.

“Tell me who I am,” Daniel said plainly.

He was the only angel with his wings concealed inside his clothes. He stepped away from her, rolled back his shoulders, closed his eyes, and released his wings.

They unfurled swiftly, with supreme elegance, blooming out on either side of him and sending back a gust of wind that swayed the boughs of the apricot trees.

Daniel’s wings towered over his body, radiant and wondrous, making him look unfathomably beautiful. He shone like a sun—not only his wings, his whole body—

and even more than that. What the angels called their glory radiated from Daniel. Luce couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“You’re an angel.”

He opened his violet eyes.

“Tell me more.”

“You’re—you’re Daniel Grigori,” Luce continued.

“You’re the angel who has loved me for thousands of years. You’re the boy I’ve loved back from the moment—

no, from every moment I first saw you.” She watched the sun play off the whiteness of his wings, yearned to feel them wrap around her. “You are the soul that fits into mine.”

“Good,” Daniel said. “Now, tell me who you are.”

“Well . . . I’m Lucinda Price. I’m the girl you fall in love with.”

There was a tense stillness all around them. All the angels seemed to hold their breath.

Daniel’s violet eyes filled with tears. He whispered:

“More.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

He shook his head.

“Daniel?”

“Lucinda.”

The way he said her name—so gravely—made her stomach ache. What did he want from her?

She blinked, and it sounded like a thunderbolt—and then the Trojan plain went black like it had the night before. The earth was marred by crooked fissures. Smoking craters stood where the field had been. Dust and ash and death were everywhere. The trees were on fire along the horizon, and a foul belch of rot rolled in on the wind.

It was as if her soul had hurled her millennia back in time. There was no snow in the mountains, no tidy white hut before her, no circle of angels’ worried faces.

But there was Daniel.

His wings shone through the dusty air. His bare skin was perfect, dewy, pink. His eyes glowed with the same intoxicating violet, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the sky. He didn’t seem to know that Luce was next to him.

Before she could follow his gaze upward, the world began to swirl. The scent on the air changed from rot to arid dust. She was back in Egypt, in the dark tomb where she’d been locked away and almost lost her soul. That scene played out before her eyes: the starshot warm inside her dress, the panic clear on her past face, the kiss that brought her back—and Bill flitting around the pha-raoh’s sarcophagus, already forming his most ambitious scheme. Her ears rang with his craggy laughter.

And then the laughter was gone. The vision of Egypt morphed into another: A Lucinda from an even more distant past lay prone in a field of high flowers. She wore a deerskin dress and held a dandelion over her face, picking off the petals one by one. The last one wobbled in the wind and she thought, He loves me. The sun was blinding until something crossed before it. Daniel’s face, his eyes brimming violet love, his blond hair sculpting a halo from the rays of the sun.

He smiled.

Then his face disappeared. A new vision, another life: the heat of a bonfire on her skin, desire burning in her chest. There were strange, loud music; people laughing; friends and family all around. Luce saw herself with Daniel, dancing wildly around the flames. She could feel the rhythms of the movements deep within her, even as the music faded and the flames licking the sky shifted from hot red to silvery softness—

A waterfall. A long lush drop of icy water down a limestone cliff. Luce was underneath it, parting a cloud of water lilies with her strokes. Her long wet hair gathered around her shoulders as she rose above the water, then dipped below. She came up on the other side of the waterfall’s torrent, in a humid stone lagoon. And there was Daniel, waiting as if he’d been waiting for her all his life.

He dove from a rock, splashing her when his body struck the water. He swam toward her, drawing her to him, one arm around her back and the other cradled under her knees. She laced her hands around his neck and let him kiss her. She closed her eyes—

Boom.

The thunderbolt again. Luce was back on the smoking Trojan plain. But this time, she was trapped in one of the craters, her body pinned beneath a boulder. She couldn’t move her left arm or leg. She struggled, crying out, seeing spots of red and shards of something that looked like a broken mirror. Her head swirled with the most intense pain she had ever felt.

“Help!”

And then: Daniel hovering over her, his violet eyes roving her body in unblinking horror. “What happened to you?”

Luce didn’t know the answer—didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. The Lucinda of her memory didn’t even recognize Daniel. But she did.

Suddenly, she realized that this was the very first time she and Daniel had met on Earth. This was the moment she’d been begging for, the moment Daniel would never talk about.

Neither recognized the other. They were already, instantly in love.

How could this be the place of their first meeting?

This plagued dark landscape reeked of filth and death.

Her past self looked beaten, bloodied—like she had been shattered into a thousand pieces.

Like she had fallen from an unfathomable height.

Luce glanced at the sky. Something was there—a mass of infinitesimal sparks, as though Heaven had been electrocuted and shock waves would ripple from it for the rest of time.

Except the sparks were drawing nearer. Dark forms limned with light tumbled from an infinity above. There must have been a million of them gathered in a chaotic, amorphous band across the sky, dark and light, suspended and falling simultaneously, as if beyond the reach of gravity.

Had Luce been up there? She felt almost as if she had.

Then she realized something: Those were the angels.

This was the Fall.

The memory of witnessing their fall to Earth ago-nized Luce. It was like watching all the stars fall out of the night sky.

The farther they fell, the looser their aimless formation became. Single entities became visible, autonomous.

She couldn’t imagine any of her angels, her friends, ever looking like this. More lost and out of control than the most destitute mortal on the worst day of his life. Was Arriane among them? Was Cam?

Her gaze traced one orb of light directly overhead. It grew larger and brighter as it approached.

Daniel looked up, too. Luce realized he didn’t recognize the falling forms, either. His impact on Earth had shuddered through him so thoroughly that it had erased his memory of who he was, where he’d come from, how magnificent he used to be. He watched the sky with raw terror in his eyes.

A smattering of falling angels were hundreds of feet above their heads one second . . . then close enough that Luce could make out the strange, dark bodies within their vessels of light. The bodies did not move but seemed undeniably alive.

Closer they fell, bearing down on Luce until she screamed—and the great mass of dark and light crashed into the field beside her.

An explosion of fire and black smoke knocked Daniel out of Luce’s sight. More were coming. Over a million more were coming. They would pummel the Earth and every living thing on it to a pulp. Luce ducked and shielded her eyes and opened her mouth to scream again.

But the sound that came out was no scream—

Because the memory had shifted into something even further back. Further back than the Fall?

Luce was no longer in the field of smoking craters and meteoric angels.

She was standing in a landscape of pure light. Any terror in her voice did not belong here, could not have existed in this place, which she knew and did not know.

She had a sense of where she was, but it couldn’t possibly be real.

Streaming from her soul was a strong, rich chord of music so beautiful that it turned everything around her white. The crater was gone. The Earth was gone. Her body was—

She didn’t know. She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything but this fantastic silver-tinged white glow. The brightness unfolded like a package until Luce could make out a vast white meadow spread out before her. Splendid groves of white trees lined either side of the field.

In the distance was a rippling silver ledge. Luce sensed it was important. Then she saw that there were seven more of them, forming a grand arch in the air around something so bright Luce couldn’t stand to look at it.

She focused on the ledge, the third one from the left.

She could not wrest her gaze from it. Why?

Because . . . Her memory reeled back. . . . Because—

This ledge belonged to her.

Long before, she used to sit here, next to . . . who? It seemed to matter.

Her vision swirled and faded and the silver ledge dis-solved. The remaining whiteness focused, separating into shapes, into—

Faces. Bodies. Wings. A backdrop of blue sky.

This was not a memory. She was back in the present, her real and final life. Around her stood her teachers Francesca and Steven; her allies the Outcasts; her friends Roland, Arriane, Annabelle, and Cam. And her love, Daniel. She stared at each one of them and she found them so beautiful. They were watching her with dumb joy on their faces. They were also crying.

The gift of self-knowledge, Dee had told her. You must remember how to dream what you already know.

All this had been within her the whole time, in every instant of her every life. Yet only now did Luce feel awake beyond her capacity to imagine what it meant to be awake. A light wind blew across her skin and she could feel the distant sea carried on it from the Mediter-ranean, telling her she was still in Troy. Her vision, too, was clearer than it had ever been before. She saw brilliant dots of pigment making up the wings of a passing golden butterfly. She breathed in the cold air, filling her lungs, smelling the zinc in the loamy soil that would make it fertile in the spring.

“I was there,” she whispered. “I was in—” Heaven.

But she couldn’t say it. She knew too much to deny it—and yet not enough to speak the words. Daniel. He would help her.

Go on, his eyes were pleading.

Where did she begin? She touched the locket with the picture taken when she and Daniel had lived in Milan.

“When I visited my past life in Helston,” she began,

“I learned that our love ran deeper than who we were in any single lifetime—”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “Our love transcends everything.”

“And . . . when I visited Tibet, I learned that a single touch or kiss was not the trigger to my curse.”

“Not touch.” Roland’s voice. He was smiling, standing next to Daniel with his hands clasped behind his back. “Not touch but self-awareness. A level you weren’t ready for—until now.”

“Yes.” Luce touched her forehead. There was more, so much more. “Versailles.” She began to speak more quickly. “I was condemned to marry a man I didn’t love.

And your kiss released me, and my death was glorious because we would always find each other again. Forever.”

“Together forever, whatever the weather,” Arriane chimed in, swiping damp eyes on Roland’s shirtsleeve.

By now Luce’s throat felt so tight it was difficult to speak. But it was no longer sore. “I didn’t realize until London that your curse was so much worse than mine,” she said to Daniel. “What you had to go through, losing me—”

“It never mattered,” Annabelle murmured, her wings buzzing so much that her feet were inches off the ground.

“He would always wait for you.”

“Chichén Itzá.” Luce closed her eyes. “I learned that an angel’s glory could be deadly to mortals.”

“Yes,” Steven said. “But you’re still here.”

“Keep going, Luce.” Francesca’s voice was more encouraging than it had ever been at Shoreline.

“Ancient China.” She paused. This one’s significance was different from the others. “You showed me that our love was more important than any arbitrary war.” No one spoke. Daniel gave the faintest nod.

And that was when Luce understood, not just who she was—but what it all added up to. There was another lifetime from her voyage through the Announcers that Luce felt she had to mention. She took a breath.

Don’t think of Bill, she told herself. You are not afraid.

“When I was locked in the tomb in Egypt, I knew once and for all that I would always choose your love.” That was when the angels dropped to one knee, gazing up at her expectantly—all of them except Daniel.

His eyes glowed the most potent shade of violet she had ever seen. He reached for her, but before his hands met hers:

“Auugh!” Luce cried out as a sharp pain sliced through her back. Her body convulsed with a foreign, piercing sensation. Her eyes teared. Her ears rang. She thought she might be sick from the pain. But slowly, it localized, from an acute agony all over her back, into two small sections at the tops of her shoulder blades.

Was she bleeding? She reached back, over her shoulder. The wound felt tender and raw, and also as if something were being drawn out from within her. It didn’t hurt, but it was bewildering. Panicked, she whirled her head around but she could see nothing, could only hear the sound of skin sliding and being stretched, the thrrrrrp that sounded like new muscles were being generated.

Then came a sudden feeling of heaviness, as if weights had been strapped around her shoulders.

And then—in her peripheral vision, vast billowing whiteness on either side of her as a collective gasp rose from the angels’ lips.

“Oh, Lucinda,” Daniel whispered, his hand covering his mouth.

It was this easy: She spread her wings.

They were luminous, buoyant, impossibly light, made of the finest, most reflective empyrean matter. From tip to tip, her wingspan was maybe thirty feet, but they felt vast, endless. She felt no more pain. When her fingers curled around the base of them behind her shoulders, they were several inches thick and plush. They were silver, yet not silver, like the surface of a mirror. They were inconceivable; they were inevitable.

They were her wings.

They contained every ounce of strength and empow-erment she had amassed over the millennia she had lived.

And at the slightest whim of a thought, her wings began to beat.

Her first thought: I can do anything now.

Wordlessly, she and Daniel reached for one another’s hands. Their wing tips arched forward in a kind of kiss, like the angels’ wings on the Qayom Malak. They were crying and laughing, and soon, they were kissing.

“So?” he asked.

She was stunned and amazed—and happier than she’d ever been before. It couldn’t possibly be real, she thought—unless she spoke the truth aloud, with Daniel and the rest of the fallen angels there to witness.

“I’m Lucinda,” she said. “I’m your angel.”