Fallen: Angels in the Dark (2 page)

Luce faltered. The woods were one of the reasons she avoided these parties. For everyone else, the dark of night meant it was time to get crazy in a good way.

For Luce, it was when the shadows came out.

The bad kind of crazy.

But this was her first time one-on-one with Trevor when they weren’t holding a scalpel and breathing in formaldehyde. She was not going to blow it by being the freaky girl who couldn’t go near the woods.

“Through there?” Luce swallowed.

He ran his thumb along her cheek. It made her shiver. “It’s only dark until you get to the clearing—and I’ll hold your hand the whole time.”

It was as good an offer as anyone could make, but Luce would never be able to explain to Trevor why it wasn’t really good enough. Why she felt like she was walking into a nightmare she
might not be able to wake up from. If the shadows were in there, they would find her. They would brush up against her like black sheets of ice. But she couldn’t tell him that.

The dark closed in around them as they walked. Luce could sense murky things in the trees above their heads, could hear faint whooshes in the branches, but kept her eyes on the ground.

Until something pinched her shoulder. Something cold and sharp that made her jump—right into Trevor’s arms.

“Nothing to be afraid of. See?”

Trevor started to turn her around, but Luce tugged on his hand. “Let’s just get to the cabin.”

When they made it to the clearing, the moon came mercifully back into sight. A neat little row of cabins stood before them.

Luce glanced at the woods but couldn’t see the way back to the party. She thought she heard the whooshing shadow in the trees again.

“Race you,” she said.

She took off toward the first cabin, Trevor close on her heels, until both of them collapsed at the door. They were laughing and out of breath. Luce’s heart raced from exertion and fear—and nervous anticipation about what they were doing so far away from everyone else.

Trevor reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.

The door creaked open and they stepped into the spare, clean cabin, which featured a fireplace, a small kitchen, and a very prominently placed king-sized bed. An hour ago, Luce never would have believed she’d be alone in a cabin with her crush of three whole years. She didn’t do things like this. She’d never done anything like this in her life.

Trevor moved straight to the wet bar and started to pour something brown from a frosted glass bottle. When he handed her the small, half-full tumbler, she didn’t even know enough not to take a giant swig.

“Whoa.” He laughed when she gagged. “Finally, someone who needs a drink as badly as me.”

If Luce hadn’t still been reeling from the burning in her throat, she might have laughed and corrected his grammar, pointing out that what he meant to say was “someone who needs a drink as badly as I,” instead of what he
had
said—which meant she needed a drink as badly as
she needed … him.

He took her empty glass and wrapped an arm around her waist, drawing her so close that his body pressed against hers. She could feel his muscular chest, the warmth of his skin.

“Rachel and I, we’re all wrong, you know?”

Oh God
. She was supposed to feel bad about this, wasn’t she? He was going to kiss her and she was going to kiss him back and that would mean that her first kiss was going to be with someone who had a girlfriend. A terrible witch of a girlfriend, but still. Luce
did
know that Trevor and Rachel were all wrong, but suddenly she also knew that Trevor was lying.

Because
he
didn’t know that. He was only saying it so she’d fool around with him. Because probably he knew she adored him. Probably he’d caught her watching him countless times over the years. He must have felt pretty certain that she wanted him.

She wanted him, yes, but until now it had always been in a far-off fantasy kind of way. Up close, she had no idea what to
do
with him.

Now his face hovered over hers and his lips weren’t far away at all and his eyes looked different than they did in the yearbook picture Luce had gotten so used to.

And suddenly, she realized she didn’t know him very well at all.

But she wanted to. At the very least, she wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed, really kissed, pushed up against a wall and kissed intensely, until she was dizzy, until she was so filled with passion that there wasn’t any room for shadows or dark woods or a visit to the sanitarium.

“Luce? Are you okay?”

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

It didn’t feel quite right, but it was too late. Trevor’s lips parted and came down on hers. She opened her mouth but found it hard to kiss him back. Her tongue felt all tied up. She was struggling in his arms as if in a dream, trying not to fight the kiss, trying just to take it in and let it happen.

Trevor’s arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her to the bed. They sat down on the edge, still kissing. Her eyes were closed, but then she opened them. Trevor was staring directly at her.

“What?” she asked nervously.

“Nothing. You’re just so … beautiful.”

She didn’t know what say to that, so she laughed.

Trevor started kissing her again, his lips wet against her mouth, then her neck. She waited for the spark, for the fireworks Callie had told her about.

But everything about kissing was different than she’d expected. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Trevor, his tongue on hers, his roving hands. But he seemed to know a lot more about this than she did. She tried to go with it.

She heard something and pulled away from Trevor to look around the room. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Trevor said, nibbling her earlobe.

Luce glanced at the paneled wooden walls, but they were bare. She studied the fireplace, which was dark and still. For a second she thought she saw something—an ember, a flicker of yellow and red—but then it was gone.

“Are you sure we’re alone?” she asked.

“Of course.” Trevor’s hands gripped the bottom of her shirt, inching it up and over her head. Before she could say anything, she was sitting on the bright blue comforter in just her bra.

“Whoa,” Trevor said, holding his hand over his eyes like he was staring into the sun.

“What?” Luce winced, feeling pale and a little embarrassed.

“Everything’s so bright all of a sudden,” Trevor said, blinking. “Isn’t it?”

Luce thought she knew what he meant. Like something between them was lighting up the whole room. Was this the spark she’d been waiting for? She felt warm and alive, but also a little bit too aware of her body. And how exposed it was.

It made her uncomfortable. When he leaned into her again, her insides felt like they were burning, like she’d swallowed something hot. Then the whole cabin warmed and grew way too light. It was getting hard to breathe, and she was suddenly, sharply dizzy, her vision burning bright as if the blood was rushing from her head. She couldn’t see a thing.

Trevor grabbed her waist, but she began to pull away. She heard noises again, and she was sure someone else was there in the cabin, but she couldn’t see anyone, could only hear a growing racket, like the rasping of a thousand saws against a thousand metal sheets. She tried to move but felt like she was stuck, Trevor’s arms tightening around her. They gripped her rib cage until she thought he might break her bones, until his skin felt like it was burning into her flesh, until—

Until he was gone.

Someone was shaking Luce’s shoulders.

It was Shawna Clip. She was screaming.

“What did you do, Lucinda?”

Luce blinked and shook her head. She was sitting outside in the smoky black night. Her throat stung and her skin felt raw and freezing cold.

“Where’s Trevor?” she could hear herself murmur. The wind whipped through her hair. She reached up to brush the loose strands from her face and gasped when a whole lock of thick black hair seemed to slide right off her scalp. What landed in her palm was brittle and badly singed. She screamed.

Luce stumbled to her feet. Crossed her arms over her chest and looked around. Still the cool, dark woods, still the sense of the hovering black shadows, still the neat row of cabins—

The cabins were on fire.

The cabin where she swore she’d just been with Trevor—Had she? How far had they gone? What had happened?—was now engulfed in flames. The cabins to the left and the right were just starting to catch fire from the blaze in the middle. The night air reeked of sulfur.

The last thing she remembered was the kiss—

“What the
hell
did you do with my boyfriend?”

Rachel. She stood between Luce and the burning cabins, a bright red flush dotting her cheeks. The look in her eyes made Luce feel like a murderer.

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

Shawna pointed at Luce. “I followed her. I thought I would catch the two of them screwing around”—she covered her face with her hands and sniffled—“but they went inside, and then … the whole thing just
exploded
!”

Rachel’s face and her body went slack as she swiveled back toward the cabin and began to wail. The awful sound rose in the night.

It was only then that Luce realized, with a horrified clenching in her chest: Trevor was still inside.

Then the roof of the cabin caved in, spitting out a plume of smoke.

By then, the nearby cabins had really begun to burn, but Luce could feel a darkness hovering, huge and implacable. The shadows, once confined to the woods, now swirled directly
above. So close she might have touched them. So close she could almost hear what they were whispering.

It sounded like her name,
Luce
, repeated a thousand times, circling her and then fading endlessly into some dark past.

“Wide load! Coming through!”

Arriane wheeled a large red shopping cart down the housewares aisle of the Savannah Salvation Army thrift store. Her thin arms gripped the handlebar as she heaved the heavy cart forward. She’d already loaded it up with two polka-dotted lamp shades, a sofa’s worth of tacky pillows, nine plastic Halloween lanterns filled with long-expired candy, half a dozen cheap patterned dresses, a few shoe boxes full of bumper stickers, and a pair of neon roller skates. So by this point it was difficult for Arriane, who stood scarcely five feet tall, to see where she was steering.

“Step aside, toots, unless you have no need for your toes. That’s right, I’m talking to you. And your toddler.”

“Arriane,” Roland said calmly. He was one aisle over, flipping through a milk crate crammed with dusty vinyl records. His pin-striped blazer was unbuttoned, showing a Pink Floyd T-shirt underneath. His thick dreadlocks hung down slightly over his dark eyes. “You really know how to keep a low profile, don’t you?”

“Hey!” Arriane sounded wounded as she tried to maneuver her shopping cart in a hairpin turn and wheeled down Roland’s aisle. She stopped in front of him and jabbed an electric-blue-painted fingernail into his chest. “I take my work here seriously, pal. We have a lot of goods to procure in just two days.”

Arriane’s words seemed to remind her of something that filled her with sudden joy. Her pastel blue eyes ignited and a wide grin spread across her face. She gripped Roland’s arm and shook him, causing her long black hair to tumble from its messy bun. It flowed down to her waist and shimmered as she cried, “Two days! Two days! Our Lucy’s coming back to us in two freaking days!”

Roland chuckled. “You’re cute when you’re excited.”

“Then I must be the mayor of Adorableville right now!” Arriane leaned against a rack of old stereo equipment and sighed a happy little sigh. “I live for her arrivals. I mean, not in the same way Daniel does, obviously. But I do feel a certain speck of delight at the prospect of seeing her again.” She rested her head on Roland’s shoulder. “Do you think she’ll have
changed?”

Roland was back to flipping through the box of records. Every third or fourth one he tossed into Arriane’s shopping cart. “She’s had a whole other life, Arri. Of course she’ll have changed a little bit.”

Arriane threw down the Sly and the Family Stone album she’d been examining. “But she’ll still be our Lucinda—”

“That does seem to be the pattern,” Roland said, giving Arriane the are-you-crazy look she got from most people—including everyone else at the thrift store—but not usually from Roland. “At least, it’s been that way for the past several thousand years. Why would you even have to ask?”

“Dunno.” Arriane shrugged. “I passed Miss Sophia in the office at Sword and Cross. She was hauling around all these boxes of files, muttering about ‘preparations.’ Like everything had to be perfect or something. I don’t want Luce to show up and be disappointed. Maybe she’ll be different, really different this time. You know how I feel about change.”

She peered into her shopping cart. The tacky pillows she’d thrown into it in case this Luce, like the last Luce, could be cheered up with a raging pillow fight—suddenly, they just looked ugly and childish to Arriane. And the roller skates? When were they ever going to use roller skates at a reform school? What was she thinking? She’d gotten carried away. Again.

Roland tweaked Arriane’s nose. “At the risk of sounding banal, I say just be yourself. Luce will love you. She always does. And if all else fails,” he said, sifting through the booty Arriane had tossed into the cart, “there’s always your secret weapon.” He held up the small plastic bag of drinking straws with paper umbrellas glued to them. “You should definitely bust out these guys.”

“You’re right. As usual.” Arriane smiled, patting Roland on the head. “I do throw a mean happy hour.” She slung her arm around his waist as the two of them wheeled the heavy cart down the aisle.

As they walked, Roland looked down at the shopping list he’d made on his BlackBerry. “We got the party music. We got the decorations for your room, and the duct tape—”

“How you go through so much duct tape is one of the great mysteries of the universe.”

“Anything else we need here before we go to the gourmet store?”