Fallen (34 page)

“Listen.” He pulled her back down with a force that made her shoulder throb. His eyes flashed violet and she could tell he was getting angry. Well, so was she.

Daniel looked up into the peach tree canopy, as if for help. “I’m begging you, let me explain.” His voice quaked. “The problem isn’t loving you.”

She took a deep breath. “What is it?” She willed herself to listen, to be stronger and not to feel hurt. Daniel looked like he was broken up enough for both of them.

“I get to live forever,” he said.

The trees rustled around them, and Luce noticed the faintest trickle of a shadow out of the corner of her eye. Not the sick, all-consuming swirl of blackness from the bar last night, but a warning. The shadow was keeping its distance, seething coldly around the corner, but it was waiting. For her. Luce felt a deep chill, down in her bones. She couldn’t shake the sensation that something colossal, black as night, something
final
was on its way.

“I’m sorry,” she said, dragging her eyes back to Daniel. “Could you, um, say that again?”

“I get to live forever,” he repeated. Luce was still lost, but he kept talking, a stream of words pouring out of his mouth. “I get to live, and to watch babies being born, and grow up, and fall in love. I watch them have babies of their own and grow old. I watch them die. I am condemned, Luce, to watch it all over again and again. Everyone but you.” His eyes were glassy. His voice dropped to a whisper. “You don’t get to fall in love—”

“But …,” she whispered back. “I’ve … fallen in love.”

“You don’t get to have babies and grow old, Luce.”

“Why not?”

“You come along every seventeen years.”

“Please—”

“We meet. We
always
meet, somehow we’re always thrown together, no matter where I go, no matter how I
try to distance myself from you. It never matters. You always find me.”

He was staring down at his clenched fists now, looking like he wanted to hit something, unable to raise his eyes.

“And every time we meet, you fall for me—”

“Daniel—”

“I can resist you or flee from you or try my hardest not to respond to you, but it makes no difference. You fall in love with me, and I with you.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“And it kills you.”

“Stop it!” she cried. “What are you trying to do? Scare me away?”

“No.” He snorted. “It wouldn’t work, anyway.”

“If you don’t want to be with me …,” she said, hoping that it was all an elaborate joke, a breakup speech to end all breakup speeches, and not the truth. It could not be the truth. “… there’s probably a more believable story to tell.”

“I know you can’t believe me. This is why I couldn’t tell you until now, when I
have
to tell you. Because I thought I understood the rules and … we kissed, and now I don’t understand anything.”

His words from the night before came back to her:
I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know what to do
.

“Because you kissed me.”

He nodded.

“You kissed me and when we were done, you were surprised.”

He nodded again, having the grace to look a little sheepish.

“You kissed me,” Luce continued, searching for a way to put it all together, “and you thought I wasn’t going to
survive
it?”

“Based on previous experience,” he said hoarsely. “Yes.”

“That’s just crazy,” she said.

“It’s not about the kiss this time, it’s about what it means. In some lives we can kiss, but in most we can’t.” He stroked her cheek, and she wrestled with how good it felt. “I must say, I prefer the lives where we can kiss.” He looked down. “Though it does make losing you that much harder.”

She wanted to be mad at him. For making up such a bizarre story when they should have been locked in an embrace. But something was there, like an itch at the back of her mind, telling her not to run from Daniel now, but to stick around and listen as long as she could.

“When you
lose
me,” she said, feeling out the shape of the word in her mouth. “How does it happen? Why?”

“It depends on you, on how much you can see about our past, on how well you’ve come to know me, who I am.” He tossed his hands up in a shrug. “I know this sounds incredibly—”

“Crazy?”

He smiled. “I was going to say vague. But I’m trying not to hide anything from you. It’s just a very, very delicate subject. Sometimes, in the past, just talking like this has …”

She watched for the shape of the words on his lips, but he wouldn’t say anything.

“Killed me?”

“I was going to say ‘broken my heart.’”

He was in obvious pain, and Luce wanted to comfort him. She could feel herself drawn, something in her breast tugging her forward. But she couldn’t. That was when she felt certain that Daniel knew about the glowing violet light. That he had everything to do with it.

“What are you?” she asked. “Some kind of—”

“I wander the earth always knowing at the back of my mind that you’re coming. I used to look for you. But then, when I started hiding from you—from the heartbreak I knew was inevitable—you started seeking me out. It didn’t take long to realize that you came around every seventeen years.”

Luce’s seventeenth birthday had been in late August, two weeks before she enrolled at Sword & Cross. It had been a sad celebration, just Luce, her parents, and a store-bought cake. There were no candles, just in case. And what about her family? Did they come back every seventeen years, too?

“It’s not long enough for me to ever have gotten over
the last time,” he said. “Just long enough that I would let my guard down again.”

“So you knew I was coming?” she asked dubiously. He looked serious, but she still couldn’t believe him. She didn’t want to.

Daniel shook his head. “Not the day you showed up. It’s not like that. Don’t you remember my reaction when I saw you?” He looked up, like he was thinking back on it himself. “For the first few seconds every time, I’m always so elated. I forget myself. Then I remember.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “You smiled, and then … is
that
why you flipped me off?”

He frowned.

“But if this happens every seventeen years like you say,” she said, “you still
knew
I was coming. In some sense, you knew.”

“It’s complicated, Luce.”

“I saw you that day, before you saw me. You were laughing with Roland outside Augustine. You were laughing so hard I was jealous. If you know all this, Daniel, if you’re so smart that you can predict when I’m going to come, and when I’m going to die, and how hard all of that is going to be for
you
, how could you laugh like that? I don’t believe you,” she said, feeling her voice tremble. “I don’t believe any of this.”

Daniel gently pressed his thumb to her eye to wipe away a tear. “It’s such a beautiful question, Luce. I adore
you for asking it, and I wish I could explain it better. All I can tell you is this: The only way to survive eternity is to be able to appreciate each moment. That’s all I was doing.”

“Eternity,” Luce repeated. “Yet another thing I wouldn’t understand.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t laugh like that anymore. As soon as you show up, I’m overtaken.”

“You’re not making any sense,” she said, wanting to leave before it got too dark. But Daniel’s story was so much more than nonsensical. The whole time she’d been at Sword & Cross, she’d half believed she was crazy. Her madness paled in comparison to Daniel’s.

“There’s no manual for how to explain this …
thing
to the girl you love,” he pleaded, brushing her hair with his fingers. “I’m doing the best I can. I want you to believe me, Luce. What do I need to do?”

“Tell a different story,” she said bitterly. “Make up a saner excuse.”

“You said yourself you felt as if you knew me. I tried to deny it as long as I could because I knew this would happen.”

“I felt I knew you from somewhere, sure,” she said. Now her voice was clotted with fear. “Like the mall or summer camp or something. Not some
former life.”
She shook her head. “No … I can’t.”

She covered her ears. Daniel uncovered them.

“And yet you know in your heart it’s true.” He clasped her knees and looked her deeply in the eye. “You knew it when I followed you to the top of Corcovado in Rio, when you wanted to see the statue up close. You knew it when I carried you two sweaty miles to the River Jordan after you got sick outside Jerusalem. I told you not to eat all those dates. You knew it when you were my nurse in that Italian hospital during the first World War, and before that when I hid in your cellar during the tsar’s purge of St. Petersburg. When I scaled the turret of your castle in Scotland during the Reformation, and danced you around and around at the king’s coronation ball at Versailles. You were the only woman dressed in black. There was that artists’ colony in Quintana Roo, and the protest march in Cape Town where we both spent the night in the pen. The opening of the Globe Theatre in London. We had the best seats in the house. And when my ship wrecked in Tahiti, you were there, as you were when I was a convict in Melbourne, and a pickpocket in eighteenth-century Nîmes, and a monk in Tibet. You turn up everywhere, always, and sooner or later you sense all the things I’ve just told you. But you won’t let yourself accept what you feel might be the truth.”

Daniel stopped to catch his breath and looked past her, unseeing. Then he reached over, pressing his hand to her knee and sending that fire through her again.

She closed her eyes, and when she’d opened them,
Daniel was holding the most perfect white peony. It practically glowed. She turned to see where he had plucked it from, how she hadn’t noticed it before. There were only weeds and the rotting flesh of fallen fruit. They held the flower together.

“You knew it when you picked white peonies every day for a month that summer in Helston. Remember that?” he stared at her, like he was trying to see inside her. “No,” he sighed after a moment. “Of course you don’t. I envy you for that.”

But even as he said it, Luce’s skin began to feel warm, as if it were responding to the words her brain didn’t know what to make of. Part of her wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“I do all of these things,” Daniel said, leaning into her so that their foreheads touched, “because you’re my love, Lucinda. For me, you’re all there is.”

Luce’s lower lip was trembling. Her hands went slack in his. The flower’s petals sifted through their fingers to the ground.

“Then why do you look so sad?”

It was all too much to even begin to think about. She leaned away from Daniel and stood up, wiping the leaves and grass from her jeans. Her head was spinning. She had lived …
before?

“Luce.”

She waved him off. “I think I need to go somewhere,
by myself, to lie down.” She leaned her weight on the peach tree. She felt weak.

“You’re not okay,” he said, standing up and taking her hand.

“No.”

“I’m so sorry.” Daniel sighed. “I don’t know what I expected to happen, telling you. I shouldn’t have …”

She would never have thought a moment could come when she’d need a break from Daniel, but she had to get away. The way he was looking at her, she could tell he wanted her to say she would find him later, that they would talk about things more, but she was no longer sure that was a good idea. The more he said, the more she felt something waking up inside her—something she wasn’t sure she was ready for. She didn’t feel crazy anymore—and she wasn’t sure Daniel was, either. To anyone else, his explanation would have made less and less sense as it went along. To Luce … she wasn’t sure yet, but what if Daniel’s words were
answers
that could make sense out of her whole life? She didn’t know. She felt more afraid than she ever had before.

She shook his hand loose and started toward her dorm. A few strides away, she stopped and slowly turned.

Daniel hadn’t moved. “What is it?” he asked, lifting his chin.

She stood where she was, at a distance from him. “I
promised you I’d stick around long enough to hear the good news.”

Daniel’s face relaxed into an almost-smile. But there was something vexed about his expression. “The good news is”—he paused, carefully choosing his words—“I kissed you, and you’re still here.”

L
uce collapsed on her bed, giving the weary springs a jolt. After she’d fled the cemetery—and Daniel—she’d practically sprinted up to her room. She hadn’t even bothered to turn on a light, so she’d tripped over her desk chair and stubbed her toe hard. She’d curled into a ball and gripped her throbbing foot. At least the pain was something real that she could cope with, something sane and of this world. She was so glad to finally be alone.

There was a knock on her door.

She could
not
catch a break.

Luce ignored the knock. She didn’t want to see anyone, and whoever it was would get the hint. Another knock. Heavy breathing and a phlegmy, allergy-ridden throat-clearing sound.

Penn.

She couldn’t see Penn right now. She’d either
sound
crazy if she tried to explain all that had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours, or she’d
go
crazy trying to put on a normal face and keep it to herself.