Rapture

FIVE A THOUSAND KISSES DEEP

They touched down in high mountain desert just before dawn. Light banded the sky near the eastern horizon, haunting pinks and golds dusted with ocher clouds, healing the purple bruise of night.

Daniel set Luce down on a flat rock plateau, too dry and unforgiving to support even the toughest desert scrub. The barren mountainscape stretched out infinitely around them, dropping steeply into darkened valleys here, rising into peaks of colossal tawny boulders resting at impossible angles there. It was cold and windy, and the air was so dry it hurt to swallow. There was scarcely room for Luce and Daniel and the five Outcasts who’d traveled with them to stand on the rock plateau.

Fine sand whipped through Luce’s hair as Daniel pulled his wings back in to his sides. “Here we are.” He sounded almost reverent.

“Where?” Luce pulled the neck of her white sweater higher to cover her ears from the wind.

“Mount Sinai.”

She sucked in a dry, sandy breath, pivoting to get a panoramic view as fine golden light lengthened over the sandstone mountains in the east. “This is where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments?”

“No.” Daniel pointed over her shoulder, where a line of doll-sized backpackers were ascending more forgiving terrain a few hundred feet to the south. Their voices carried across the cold, thin desert air. Their soft peals of laughter echoed eerily from the silent mountain summits. A blue plastic water bottle tilted into the sky over someone’s head. “That is where Moses received the Ten Commandments.” He spread his arms and looked at the small circle of rock where they were standing. “This is where some of the angels stood and watched it happen.

Gabbe, Arriane, Roland, Cam”—he pointed to one area on the rock, then another, where each of the angels had stood—“a few more.”

“What about you?”

He faced her, taking three small steps forward so that their torsos were touching, the tips of their feet overlapped. “Right”—he kissed her—“here.”

“What was it like?”

Daniel looked away. “It was the first official covenant with man. Before then, covenants had taken place only between God and the angels. Some of the angels felt betrayed, that it disrupted the natural order of things.

Others thought we’d brought it on ourselves, that it was a natural progression.”

The violet in his eyes blazed a little brighter for a moment. “The others must be on their way.” He turned to face the Outcasts, whose dark silhouettes were outlined by the growing light in the east. “Will you stand guard until they arrive?”

Phil bowed. The other four Outcasts stood behind him, the frayed edges of their soiled wings undulating in the wind.

Daniel drew his left wing across himself and, shielding his body from view, reached inside it with his right hand like a magician reaching into his cape.

“Daniel?” she asked, stepping closer to him. “What’s wrong?”

Teeth bared, Daniel shook his head at her. Then he flinched and cried out in pain, which Luce had never witnessed before. Her body tensed.

“Daniel?”

When he relaxed and extended his wing again, he held something white and shimmering in his hand.

“I should have done this sooner,” he said.

It looked like a strip of fabric, as smooth as silk but stiffer. It was a foot long and several inches wide, and it quivered in the cold breeze. Luce stared at it. Was that a strip of wing that Daniel had torn from himself? She cried out in horror and reached for it without thinking.

It was a feather!

To look at Daniel’s wings, to be wrapped up in them, was to forget they were made up of individual feathers.

Luce had always assumed that their composition was mysterious and otherworldly, the stuff of God’s dreams.

But then, this was unlike any feather Luce had seen before: broad, densely plumed, alive with the same power that coursed through Daniel.

Between her fingers, it was the softest yet strongest thing Luce had ever touched, and the most beautiful—until her eyes flew to the flow of blood from the spot where Daniel had plucked the feather.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

Daniel handed the feather to Phil, who tucked it into the lapel of his trench coat without hesitation.

“It is a pennon,” Daniel said, glancing at the bloody portion of his wing without concern. “If by chance the others arrive alone, they will know the Outcasts are friends.” His eyes followed her own, which were wide with worry, to the bloody region of his wing. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll heal. Come on—”

“Where are we going?” Luce asked.

“The sun’s about to rise,” Daniel said, taking a small leather satchel from Phil. “And I figure you must be starving.”

Luce hadn’t realized it, but she was.

“I thought we could steal a moment before anyone else shows up.”

There was a sheer, narrow path from the plateau that led to a small ledge down from where they’d landed.

They picked their way down the jagged mountain, hand in hand, and when it was too steep for walking, Daniel coasted, always flying very low to the ground, his wings tucked close to his sides.

“Don’t want to alarm the hikers,” he explained.

“Most places on Earth, people aren’t willing to let themselves see miracles, angels. If they catch a glimpse of us flying by, they convince themselves their eyes were playing tricks on them. But in a place like this—”

“People can see miracles,” Luce finished for him.

“They want to.”

“Right. And seeing leads to wonder.”

“And wonder leads to—”

“Trouble.” Daniel laughed a little.

Luce couldn’t help grinning, enjoying that at least for a little while, Daniel was her miracle alone.

They sat down next to each other on the small flat stretch in the middle of the heart of nowhere, shielded from the wind by a granite boulder and out of sight of everyone but a pale brown partridge picking its way along the scabby rocks. The view when Luce looked past the boulder was life-altering: a ring of mountains, this peak in shadow, this one draped in light, all of them growing brighter with each second that passed as the sun crested over the pink horizon.

Daniel unzipped the satchel and peered inside. He shook his head, laughing.

“What’s funny? What’s in there?” Luce asked.

“Before we left Venice, I asked Phil to pack a few things from his cupboard. Leave it to a blind Outcast to prepare a nutritious meal.” He pulled out a canister of paprika-flavored Pringles, a red bag of Maltesers, a handful of blue-foil-wrapped Baci chocolates, a pack of Day-gum, several small bottles of diet soda, and a few sleeves of powdered-espresso packets.

Luce burst out laughing.

“Will this hold you over?” he asked.

Luce snuggled up to him and crunched a few malt balls, watching the eastern sky grow pink, then gold, then baby blue as the sun crested the peaks and valleys in the distance. The light cast strange shadows in the crevices of the mountain. At first she assumed at least some of them were Announcers, but then realized no—they were simply shadows spun from shifting light.

Luce realized it had been days since she’d seen an Announcer.

Strange. For weeks, months, they’d been appearing before her more and more frequently, until she could barely shift her gaze without seeing one wobbling darkly in a corner, beckoning her. Now they seemed to have disappeared.

“Daniel, what happened to the Announcers?” He leaned back against the ledge and exhaled deeply before saying, “They are with Lucifer and the host of Heaven. They, too, are part of the Fall.”

“What?”

“This has never happened before. The Announcers belong to history. They are the shadows of significant events. They were generated by the Fall and so when Lucifer set this game into motion, they were drawn back there.”

Luce tried to picture it: a million trembling shadows surrounding a great dark orb, their tendrils licking the surface of oblivion like sunspots.

“That’s why we had to fly here instead of stepping through,” she said.

He nodded and bit into a Pringle, more out of habit of being around mortals than a need to consume food.

“The shadows disappeared within moments of our return from the past. This moment we are in right now—these nine days since Lucifer’s gambit—this is a limbo time. It’s come unmoored from the rest of history, and if we fail, it will cease to be entirely.”

“Where exactly is that? I mean, the Fall.”

“Another dimension, no place that I could describe.

We were closer to it where I caught you, after you separated from Lucifer, but we were still very far away.”

“I never thought I’d say this, but”—she watched the stillness of the everyday shadows on the mountain—“I miss them. The Announcers were my link to my past.” Daniel took her hand and looked deep into her eyes.

“The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You’ve got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.”

“But now that they’re gone—”

“Now that they’re gone, you can do it on your own.” She shook her head. “How?”

“Let’s see,” he said. “Do you see that river near the horizon?” He pointed at the barest whisper of blue snak-ing through the flat plain on the desert floor. It was about as far away as Luce’s eyes could see.

“Yes, I think I see it.”

“I’ve lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to walk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime—”

“Oded broke into a run,” Luce said without thinking.

“I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you’d never seen him move like that.”

“Yeah, well,” Daniel said. “He liked you.” They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce’s jaw dropped. “I did it!” she cried out. “It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. It came to me without thinking!”

It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel’s arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel.

No. She was finding her way to them.

It was like a gate had been left open after Luce’s quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available.

She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was—and she wasn’t just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia.

She was every girl she’d ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love.

She was Lucinda.

“Quick,” she said to Daniel. “Can we do another?”

“Okay, how about another desert life? You were living in the Serengeti when I found you. Tall and gangly and the fastest runner in your village. I was passing through one day, on my way to visit Roland, and I stopped for the night at the closest spring. All the other men were very distrustful of me, but—”

“But my father paid you three zebra skins for the knife you had in your satchel!”

Daniel grinned. “He drove a hard bargain.”

“This is amazing,” she said, nearly breathless. How much more did she have in her that she didn’t know about? How far back could she go? She pivoted to face him, drawing her knees against her chest, and leaning in so that their foreheads were almost touching. “Can you remember everything about our pasts?”

Daniel’s eyes softened at the corners. “Sometimes the order of things gets mixed up in my head. I’ll admit, I don’t remember long stretches of time I’ve spent alone, but I can remember every first glimpse of your face, every kiss of your lips, every memory I’ve ever made with you.”

Luce didn’t wait for Daniel to lean forward and kiss her. Instead, she pressed her lips to his, relishing his moan of surprised pleasure, wanting to clean any pain he’d ever felt at losing her.

Kissing Daniel was somewhere between exhilarat-ingly new and unmistakably familiar, like a childhood memory that felt dreamlike until photographic evidence was found in an old box in the attic. Luce felt as if a hangar full of monumental photographs had been discovered, and all those buried moments had been released from their captivity into the recesses of her soul.

She was kissing him now, but strangely she was kissing him then. She could almost touch the history of their love, taste its essence on her tongue. Her lips traced not just Daniel’s, but another kiss they’d shared, an older kiss, a kiss like this one, with her mouth just there and his arms around her waist like that. He slipped his tongue against her teeth, and that recalled a handful of other kisses, too, every one of them intoxicating. When he passed his hand across her back, she felt a hundred shivers like this one. And when her eyes fluttered open and shut, the sight of him through her tangled lashes seemed a thousand kisses deep.

“Daniel.” The flat voice of an Outcast ended Luce’s reverie. The pale boy stood over them, looking down from the high rock they’d been leaning against. Through his gray almost translucent wings, Luce saw a cloud passing in the sky.

“What is it, Vincent?” Daniel said, drawing to his feet. He must have known the Outcasts’ names from their time together in Heaven before the Fall.

“Forgive me for the interruption,” the Outcast said, lacking the social grace to look away from Luce’s burning cheeks. At least he couldn’t really see them.

She stood quickly, straightening her sweater, pressing a cold hand to her hot skin.

“Have the others arrived?” Daniel called up.

The Outcast stood motionless above him. “Not exactly.”

Daniel’s right hand slid around Luce’s waist. With one soft throosh of his wings, he scaled the fifty feet of vertical rock the way a mortal might take a single step up a flight of stairs. Her stomach lurched downward with the thrill of their soar up.

Setting Luce down first on the rocky plateau, Daniel turned and saw the five Outcasts who’d accompanied them huddled around a sixth figure. Daniel flinched, his wings jerking backward in shock, when he saw the sixth Outcast.

The boy was small, with a slender build and big feet.

His head was freshly shaven. He seemed like he could have been about fourteen if the Outcasts aged in mortal years. Someone had beaten him. Badly.

His face was scraped as if he’d been thrown repeat-edly against a brick wall. His lip was bleeding so pro-fusely that shiny blood coated his teeth. At first Luce didn’t recognize it as blood, because the Outcast’s blood wasn’t red. It was pale gray. His blood was the color of ashes.

He was whimpering, whispering something Luce couldn’t understand as he lay prone on the rock and let the others tend to him.

They tried to lift him to remove his dirty trench coat, which was slashed in several places and missing one of its sleeves. But the Outcast cried out so violently that even Philrelented, laying the boy back down.

“His wings are broken,” Phil said, and Luce realized that, yes, the grimy wings were splayed out unnaturally behind his back. “I don’t know how he made it back.” Daniel knelt before the Outcast, shielding the sun from the boy’s face. “What happened, Daedalus?” He rested a hand on the Outcast’s shoulder, which seemed to soothe the boy.

“It’s a trap,” Daedalus sputtered hoarsely, spitting ashen blood on his trench coat lapel.

“What is?” Vincent asked.

“Set by whom?” Daniel asked.

“Scale. Want the relic. Waiting in Vienna—for your friends. Large army.”

“Army? They’re openly fighting angels now?” Daniel shook his head in disbelief. “But they can’t have starshots.”

Daedalus’s white eyes bulged in pain. “Can’t kill us.

Only torture—”

“You fought the Scale?” Daniel seemed alarmed and impressed. Luce still didn’t understand what the Scale was. She envisioned them vaguely as dark extensions of Heaven thrusting downward into the world. “What happened?”

“Tried to fight. Outnumbered.”

“What about the others, Daedalus?” Phil’s voice still sounded emotionless, but for the first time Luce could hear something like compassion stirring underneath.

“Franz and Arda”—the boy spoke as if the words themselves caused him pain—“on their way here.”

“And Calpurnia?” Phil asked.

Daedalus closed his eyes and shook his head as gently as he could.

“Did they get to the angels?” Daniel asked. “Arriane, Roland, Annabelle? Are they safe?”

The Outcast’s eyelids flickered, then shut. Luce had never felt so far away from her friends. If anything happened to Arriane, to Roland, to any of the angels . . .

Phil wedged in next to Daniel, close to the injured boy’s head. Daniel inched back to give Phil room. Slowly, Phil drew a long dull silver starshot from the inside of his trench coat.

“No!” Luce shouted, quickly covering her mouth.

“You can’t—”

“Do not worry, Lucinda Price,” Phil said without looking back at her. He reached inside the black leather satchel, which Daniel had brought back up from the ledge, and pulled out a small glass bottle of diet soda.

Using his teeth, he popped the bottle top. It rolled in a long arc before tipping off the surface of the rock. Then, very slowly, Phil inserted the starshot into the bottle’s narrow neck.

It sizzled and hissed as it slid into the soda. Phil grimaced as the bottle smoked and steamed in his hands. A sickly sweet scent wafted from it and Luce’s eyes widened as the fizzy brown liquid, your basic diet soda, began to swirl and change to a bright iridescent silver color.

Phil withdrew the starshot from the bottle. He dragged the starshot carefully across his lips, as if to clean it, then tucked it back inside his coat. His lips glowed silver for an instant, until he licked them clean.

He nodded at one of the other Outcasts, a girl whose slick blond ponytail reached halfway down her back. Automatically, she reached behind Daedalus’s head to lift it a few inches off the rock. Carefully, using one hand to part the boy’s bleeding lips, Phil poured the silver liquid down his throat.

His face contorted as he sputtered and coughed, but then everything about Daedalus smoothed out. He began to drink, then to gulp the liquid down, slurping when he reached the bottom of the bottle.

“What is that?” Luce asked.

“There is a chemical compound in the drink,” Daniel explained, “a dull poison mortals call aspartame and believe that their scientists invented. But it is an old, Heavenly substance—a venom, which, when mixed with an antidote contained in the alloys of the starshot, reacts to produce a healing potion for angels. For light ailments such as these.”

“He will need to rest now,” the blond girl said. “But he will wake refreshed.”

“You will forgive us if we have to leave,” Daniel said, rising to his feet. His white wings dragged along the rocky surface until he straightened his shoulders and held them aloft. He reached for Luce’s hand.

“Go to your friends,” Phil said. “Vincent, Olianna, Sanders, and Emmet will accompany you. I will join you with the others when Daedalus is back on his wings.” The four Outcasts stepped forward, bowing their heads before Luce and Daniel as if awaiting a command.

“We will fly the eastern route,” Daniel instructed.

“North over the Black Sea, then west when we pass Mol-dova. The wind stream is calmer there.”

“What about Gabbe and Molly and Cam?” Luce asked.

Daniel looked at Phil, who looked up from the sleeping Outcast boy. “One of us will stand watch here. If your friends arrive, the Outcasts will send word.”

“You have the pennon?” Daniel asked.

Phil pivoted to show the abundant white feather tucked into the buttonhole of his lapel. It glowed and pulsed in the wind, its radiance sharply contrasting the Outcast’s deathly pale skin.“I hope you have cause to use it.” Daniel’s words frightened Luce, because they meant he thought the angels in Avalon were in as much danger as the ones in Vienna.

“They need us, Daniel,” she said. “Let’s go.” Daniel gave her a warm, grateful look. Then, without hesitation, he swept her up into his arms. With the halo tucked under their interlaced fingers, Daniel bent his knees and sprang into the sky.