Fallen in Love (22 page)

“Luce.” It was Gabbe, appearing at Miles’s side. “I thought I’d mention”—she glanced at Miles—“if you wanted to go visit Penn for a moment, now would be the time.”

“Good idea.” Luce nodded. “Thanks.” She glanced apologetically at Miles, but he just tugged his baseball cap over his eyes and turned to whisper something to Shelby.

“Ahem.” Shelby coughed indignantly. She was standing behind Daniel, trying to read the book over his shoulder. “What about me and Miles?”

“You’re going back to Shoreline,” Gabbe said, sounding more like Luce’s teachers at Shoreline than Luce had ever noticed before. “We need you to alert Steven and Francesca. We may need their help—and your help, too. Tell them”—she took a deep breath—“tell them it’s happening. That an endgame has come to pass, though not as we’d expected. Tell them everything. They will know what to do.”

“Fine,” Shelby said, scowling. “You’re the boss.”

“Yodelayhee-hooooo.”
Arriane cupped her palms around her mouth. “If, uh, Luce wants to get out, someone’s gonna have to help her down from the window.” She thrummed her fingers on the table, looking sheepish. “I made a library-book barricade near the entrance in case any of the Sword and Cross-eyeds felt inclined to disrupt us.”

“Dibs.” Cam already had his arm slipped through the crook of Luce’s elbow. She started to argue, but none of the other angels seemed to think it was a bad idea. Daniel didn’t even notice.

Near the back exit, Shelby and Miles both mouthed
Be careful
to Luce, with varying degrees of fierceness.

Cam walked her to the window, radiating warmth with his smile. He slid the glass pane up and together they looked out at the campus where they’d met, where they’d grown close, where he’d tricked her into kissing him. They weren’t all bad memories.…

He hopped through the window first, landing smoothly on the ledge, and held out a hand for hers.

“Milady.”

His grip was strong, and it made her feel tiny and weightless as he drifted down from the ledge, two stories in two seconds. His wings were concealed, but he still moved as gracefully as if he were flying. They landed softly on the dewy grass.

“I take it you don’t want my company,” he said. “At the cemetery—not, you know, in general.”

“Right. No, thanks.”

He looked away and reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny silver bell. It looked ancient and had Hebrew writing on it. He handed it to her. “Just ring when you want a hand back up.”

“Cam,” Luce said. “What is my role in all of this?”

Cam reached out to touch her cheek, then seemed to think better of it. His hand hovered in the air. “Daniel’s right. It isn’t our place to tell you.”

He didn’t wait for her response—just bent his knees and soared off the ground. He didn’t even look back.

Luce stared at the campus for a moment, letting the familiar Sword & Cross humidity stick to her skin. She couldn’t tell whether the dismal school, with its huge, harsh neo-Gothic buildings and sad, defeated landscaping, looked different or the same.

She strolled across the campus, across the flat, still grass of the commons, past the depressing dormitory, to
the wrought iron gate of the cemetery. There she paused, feeling goose bumps rise on her arms.

The cemetery still looked and smelled like a sinkhole in the middle of the campus. The dust from the angels’ battle had cleared. It was still early enough that most of the students were asleep, and anyway, none of them were likely to be prowling the cemetery, unless they were serving detention. She let herself in through the gate and ambled down through the leaning headstones and the muddy graves.

In the far east corner lay Penn’s final resting place. Luce sat down at the foot of her friend’s plot. She didn’t have flowers and she didn’t know any prayers, so she laid her hands on the cold, wet grass, closed her eyes, and sent her own kind of message to Penn, worrying that it might never reach her.

Luce got back to the library window feeling irritable. She didn’t need Cam or his bell to rescue her. She could get up to the ledge by herself.

It was easy enough to scale the lowest portion of the sloped roof, and from there she could climb up a few levels until she was close to the long, narrow ledge beneath the library windows. It was about two feet wide. As she crept along it, Cam’s and Daniel’s bickering voices wafted outside.

“What if one of us were to be intercepted?” Cam’s
voice was high and pleading. “You know we are stronger united, Daniel.”

“If we don’t make it there in time, our strength won’t matter. We’ll be
erased
.”

She could picture them on the other side of the wall: Cam with fists clenched and green eyes flashing, Daniel stolid and immovable, with his arms crossed over his chest.

“I don’t trust you not to act on your own behalf.” Cam’s tone was harsh.

“There’s nothing to discuss.” Daniel didn’t change his tone. “Splitting up is our only option.”

The others were quiet, probably thinking the same thing Luce was. She reached the window and saw that the two angels were facing each other. Cam and Daniel behaved far too much like brothers for anyone else to dare come between them.

Luce’s hands gripped the windowsill. She felt a small swell of pride—which she would never confess—at having made it back into the library without help. Probably none of the angels would even notice. She sighed and slid one leg inside. That was when the window began to shudder.

The glass rattled in its pane, and the sill gyrated in her hands with such force she was almost knocked off the ledge. She held on tighter, feeling vibrations inside her, as if her heart and her soul were trembling, too.

“Earthquake,” she whispered. Her foot skimmed the back of the ledge just as her grip on the windowsill loosened.

“Lucinda!”

Daniel rushed to the window. His hands found their way around hers. Cam was there, too, one hand on the base of Luce’s shoulders, another on the back of her head. The bookshelves rippled and the lights in the library flickered as the two angels pulled her through the rocking window just before the pane slipped from the frame and shattered into a thousand shards of glass.

She looked to Daniel for a clue. He was still gripping her wrists, but his eyes traveled past her, outside. He was watching the sky, which had turned angry and gray.

Worse than all of that was the lingering vibration
inside
Luce, which made her feel as if she’d been electrocuted. It seemed like an eternity, but it lasted for five, maybe ten seconds—enough time for Luce, Cam, and Daniel to fall to the dusty wooden floor of the library with a thud.

Then the trembling stopped and the world grew deathly quiet.

“What the hell?” Arriane picked herself up off the floor. “Did we step through to California without my knowledge? No one told me there were fault lines in Georgia!”

Cam pulled a long shard of glass from his forearm.
Luce gasped as bright red blood trailed down his elbow, but his face showed no sign that he was in pain. “That wasn’t an earthquake. That was a seismic shift in time.”

“A
what
?” Luce asked.

“The first of many.” Daniel looked out the jagged window, watching a white cumulus cloud roll across the now-blue sky. “The closer Lucifer gets, the stronger they’ll become.” He glanced at Cam, who nodded.

“Tick-tock, people,” Cam said. “Time’s running out. We need to fly.”

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