Rapture

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?”

“The story was bound up in relics—many relics, over millennia. But there are three especially that seem relevant to our search, three that may hold the answer as to where the angels fell to Earth.

“We don’t know what these relics are, but we know where they were last mentioned: Venice, Vienna, and Avalon. They were in these three locations as of the time of the research and writing of this book. But that was a while ago, and even then, it was anyone’s guess whether the items—whatever they are—were still there.”

“So this may end up as a divine wild-goose chase,” Cam said with a sigh. “Excellent. We’ll squander our time searching for mystery items that may or may not tell us what we need to know in places where they may or may not have rested for centuries.” Daniel shrugged. “In short, yes.”

“Three relics. Nine days.” Annabelle’s eyes fluttered up. “That’s not a lot of time.”

“Daniel was right.” Gabbe’s gaze flashed back and forth between the angels. “We need to split up.” This was what Cam and Daniel had been arguing about before the room started quaking. Whether they’d have a better chance of finding all the relics in time if they split up.

Gabbe waited for Cam’s reluctant nod before she said, “Then it’s settled. Daniel and Luce—you take the first city.” She looked down at Daniel’s notes, then gave Luce a brave smile. “Venice. You head to Venice and find the first relic.”

“But what is the first relic? Do we even know?” Luce leaned over the book and saw a drawing sketched in pen in the margin.

Daniel studied it now, too, shaking his head slightly at the image he’d drawn hundreds of years ago. It looked almost like a serving tray, the kind her mom was always looking for at antique shops. “This was what I was able to glean from my study of the pseudepigrapha—the dismissed scriptural writings of the early church.” It was egg-shaped with a glass bottom, which Daniel cleverly had depicted by sketching the ground on the other side of the clear base. The tray, or whatever the relic was, had what looked like small chipped handles on either side. Daniel had even drawn a scale below it, and according to his sketch, the artifact was big—about eighty by one hundred centimeters.

“I barely remember drawing this.” Daniel sounded disappointed in himself. “I don’t know what it is any more than you do.”

“I’m sure that once you get there, you’ll be able to figure it out,” Gabbe said, trying hard to be encouraging.

“We will,” Luce said. “I’m sure we will.” Gabbe blinked, smiled, and went on. “Roland, Annabelle, and Arriane—you three will go to Vienna. That leaves—” Her mouth twitched as she realized what she was about to say, but she put on a brave face anyway.

“Molly, Cam, and I will take Avalon.”

Cam rolled back his shoulders and let out his as-toundingly golden wings with a great rush, slamming into Molly’s face with his right wing tip and sending her lunging back five feet.

“Do that again and I will wreck you,” Molly spat, glaring at a carpet burn on her elbow. “In fact—” She started to go for Cam with her fist raised but Gabbe in-tervened.

She wrenched Cam and Molly apart with a put-upon sigh. “Speaking of wrecking, I would really rather not have to wreck the next one of you who provokes the other”—she smiled sweetly at her two demon companions—“but I will. This is going to be a very long nine days.”

“Let’s hope it’s long,” Daniel muttered under his breath.

Luce turned to him. The Venice in her mind was out of a guidebook: postcard pictures of boats jostling down canals, sunsets over tall cathedral spires, and dark-haired girls licking gelato. That wasn’t the trip they were about to take. Not with the end of the world reaching out for them with razor claws.

“And once we find all three of the relics?” Luce said.

“We’ll meet at Mount Sinai,” Daniel said, “unite the relics—”

“And say a little prayer that they shed any light what-soever on where we landed when we fell,” Cam muttered darkly, rubbing his forehead. “At which point, all that’s left is somehow coaxing the psychopathic hell-hound holding our entire existence in his jaw that he should just abandon his silly scheme for universal domination. What could be simpler? I think we have every reason to feel optimistic.”

Daniel glanced out the open window. The sun was passing over the dormitory now; Luce had to squint to look outside. “We need to leave as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” Luce said. “I have to go home, then, pack, get my passport. . . .” Her mind whirled in a hundred directions as she started making a mental to-do list. Her parents would be at the mall for at least another couple of hours, enough time for her to dash in and get her things together. . . .

“Oh, cute.” Annabelle laughed, flitting over to them, her feet inches off the ground. Her wings were muscular and dark silver like a thundercloud, protruding through the invisible slits in her hot-pink T-shirt. “Sorry to butt in but . . . you’ve never traveled with an angel before, have you?”

Sure she had. The feeling of Daniel’s wings soaring her body through the air was as natural as anything.

Maybe her flights had been brief, but they’d been unfor-gettable. They were when Luce felt closest to him: his arms threaded around her waist, his heart beating close to hers, his white wings protecting them, making Luce feel unconditionally and impossibly loved.

She had flown with Daniel dozens of times in dreams, but only three times in her waking hours: once over the hidden lake behind Sword & Cross, another time along the coast at Shoreline, and down from the clouds to the cabin just the previous night.

“I guess we’ve never flown that far together,” she said at last.

“Just getting to first base seems to be a problem for you two,” Cam couldn’t resist saying.

Daniel ignored him. “Under normal circumstances, I think you’d enjoy the trip.” His expression turned stormy. “But we don’t have room for normal for the next nine days.”

Luce felt his hands on the back of her shoulders, gathering her hair and lifting it off her neck. He kissed her along the neckline of her sweater as he wrapped his arms around her waist. Luce closed her eyes. She knew what was coming next. The most beautiful sound there was—that elegant whoosh of the love of her life letting out his driven-snow-white wings.

The world on the other side of Luce’s eyelids darkened slightly under the shadow of his wings, and warmth welled in her heart. When she opened her eyes, there they were, as magnificent as ever. She leaned back a little, cozying into the wall of Daniel’s chest as he pivoted toward the window.

“This is only a temporary separation,” Daniel announced to the others. “Good luck and wingspeed.” With each long beat of Daniel’s wings they gained a thousand feet. The air, once cool and thick with Georgia humidity, turned cold and brittle in Luce’s lungs as they climbed. Wind tore at her ears. Her eyes began to tear.

The ground below grew distant, and the world that it contained blended and shrank into a staggering canvas of green. Sword & Cross was the size of a thumbprint.

Then it was gone.

A first glimpse of the ocean made Luce dizzy, delighted as they flew away from the sun, toward the darkness on the horizon.

Flying with Daniel was more thrilling, more intense than her memory could ever do justice to. And yet something had shifted: Luce had the hang of it by now. She felt at ease, in sync with Daniel, relaxed into the shape of his arms. Her legs were crossed lightly at the ankles, the toes of her boots kissing the toes of his. Their bodies swayed in unison, responding to the motion of his wings, which arched over their heads and blocked out the sun, then throttled backward to complete another mighty stroke.

They passed the cloud line and vanished into the mist. There was nothing all around them but wispy white and the nebulous caress of moisture. Another beat of wings. Another surge into the sky. Luce didn’t pause to wonder how she would breathe up here at the limits of the atmosphere. She was with Daniel. She was fine. They were off to save the world.

Soon Daniel leveled off, flying less like a rocket and more like an unfathomably powerful bird. They did not slow—if anything, their velocity increased—but with their bodies parallel to the ground, the wind’s roar smoothed, and the world seemed bright white and startlingly quiet, as peaceful as if it had just come into existence and no one had yet experimented with sound.

“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 their 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.