Fallen Series 04 - Rapture (20 page)

“I will have to produce a second Patina, surrounding only our bodies, guaranteeing us safe passage. Then I will open this one and let the Scale flow in.”

“I think I’m smelling what you’re cooking,” Arriane said, climbing up a branch like a monkey to sit nestled in the oak tree.

“The Foundation will be sacrificed”—Dee frowned—

“but at least the Scale will make nice kindling.”

“Hold on, how does the library get sacrificed?” Roland crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at Dee.

“I was hoping you could help with that, Roland,” Dee said, eyes twinkling. “You’re rather good at starting fires, aren’t you?”

Roland raised his eyebrows, but Dee had already turned around. Facing the tree trunk, she reached for a knot in its bark, pulled it like a secret doorknob, and opened the trunk to a hollowed chamber. Inside, the wood was polished, the chamber about the size of a small locker. Dee’s arm dipped in and pulled out a long golden key.

“That’s how you open the Patina?” Luce asked, surprised that it required so physical a key.

“Well, this is how I unlock it so that it can be manipulated for our needs.”

“When you open it, if there’s a fire,” Luce said, remembering the way the woman walking her dog blinked out of existence for a moment while she crossed the Foundation’s front lawn, “what will happen to the houses, to the people on the street?”

“Funny thing about the Patina,” Dee said, kneeling down and rooting around in the garden for something.

“The way it sits on the border between realities past and present, we can be here, and not here, in the present, and also elsewhere. It’s a place where everything we imagine about time and space comes together materially.” She lifted up the fronds of an oversized fern, then dug in the dirt with her hands. “No mortals outside will be affected, but if the Scale are as ravenous as we all know they are, as soon as I open this Patina, they’ll swoop right towards us. For one tense moment, they will join us in the elsewhere reality when the Foundation Library stood on this street.”

“And we’ll fly out, enclosed in the second Patina,” Daniel guessed.

“Precisely,” Dee said. “Then we have only to close this one around them. Just as they can’t get in now, they won’t be able to get out then. And while we soar on safely to lovely, ancient Avignon, the library will go up in smoke, with the Scale trapped inside.”

“It’s brilliant,” Daniel said. “The Scale will still technically be alive, so our action won’t tip the Heavenly balance, but they’ll be—”

“Burn marks of the past, sealed off, out of our way.

Right. Everybody on board?” Dee’s face lit up. “Ah,
there
it is!”

As Luce and the angels stood over her, Dee brushed the dirt off a collared hole that had been buried in the garden. She closed her eyes, held the key close to her heart, and whispered a blessing:

“Light surround us, love enfold us, shelter us, Patina, from the evil that must come.”

Carefully, she fit the key into the lock. Her wrist shook with the force required to turn the key, but finally, it creaked a quarter turn to the right. Dee exhaled heavily and rose to her feet, wiping her hands on her skirt.

“Here we go.”

She raised her arms above her head and then, very slowly, very purposefully, brought them down toward her heart. Luce waited for the earth to shift, for anything to happen, but for a moment, nothing seemed to have changed.

Then, as the space around them grew pin-drop quiet, Luce heard an almost inaudible swishing sound, like bare palms being rubbed together. The air seemed to slightly warp, making everything—the brown house, the row of Viennese townhouses surrounding it, even the blue wings of the Scale above—waver. Colors bent, melted. It was like standing inside the cloudy haze over flowing gaso-line.

As before, Luce could both see and not see the Patina. Its amorphous boundary was visible one moment—

with the iridescent transparency of a soap bubble—then it disappeared. But she could
feel
it molding around the small space in the garden where she and the others stood, emanating warmth and the feeling of being embraced by something powerfully protective.

No one spoke, silenced by the wonderment of Dee.

Luce studied the old woman, who was humming so intensely she almost seemed to buzz. Luce was surprised when she sensed the inner Patina was complete. Something that hadn’t felt whole a moment before now did.

Dee nodded, her hands at her heart as if in prayer. “We are in the Patina within the Patina. We are in the heart of safety and security. When I open the outer rim to the Scale, trust that security and remain calm. No harm can come to you.”

She whispered the words again—
Light surround us,
love enfold us, shelter us, Patina, from the evil that must
come
—and Luce found herself murmuring along. Daniel’s voice chimed in, too.

Then there was a hole, like a gust of cold air entering a warm room. They shuffled closer together, wings pressing up against each other, Luce in the center. They watched the shifting sky.

A savage shriek came from high above, and a thousand others joined in. The Scale could see it now.

They swarmed toward the hole.

The opening was mostly invisible to Luce, but it must have been directly over the chimney of the brown house.

That was where the Scale headed, like winged ants at-tacking a drop of fallen jam. They thudded to the roof, to the grass, to the eaves of the house. Their cloaks rippled with the impact of rough landings. Their eyes trolled the property—both sensing and not sensing Luce, Dee, and the angels.

Luce held her breath, did not make a sound.

The Scale kept coming. Soon the yard bristled with their stiff blue wings. They surrounded Dee’s inner Patina, casting glances hungry as wolves’ directly at the place where the prey they sought were hiding. But the Scale could not see the angels, the girl, and the transeternal safe inside.

“Where are they?” one of them snarled, his cloak tangling in a sea of blue wings as he pushed through the crowd of his brethren. “They’re here somewhere.”

“Prepare to fly fast and hard to Avignon,” Dee whispered, standing stiffly as a Scale angel with a birthmark splashed across his face leaned in near the limits of their Patina and sniffed like a pig seeking slop.

Arriane’s wings were trembling and Luce knew she was thinking of what the Scale had done to her. Luce reached for her friend’s hand.

“Roland, how about that mighty conflagration?” Daniel said through pursed lips.

“You got it.” Roland interlaced his fingers and furrowed his brow, then gave one hard glance at the brown house. There was a great blast, like a detonating bomb, and the Foundation Library exploded. Scale were sent shrieking into the Patina sky, their cloaks engulfed in fin-gerlike flames.

Roland waved his hand, and the hole where the library had stood became a volcano spewing flames and lava rivers through the lawn. The oak tree caught fire.

Flames spread through its branches as if they were matches in a box. Luce was sweating and dizzy from the heat searing through the Patina, but even as the Scale were blown back by repercussive shock waves, the group inside Dee’s small Patina did not burn.

Dee shouted, “Let’s fly!” just as a tornado of hot, flame-laden air swirled through the yard, swallowing a hundred Scale and lifting them into its blazing core, car-ouseling them across the lawn.

“Ready, Luce?” Daniel’s arms wrapped around her just as Roland’s wrapped tight around Dee. Smoke ricocheted off the walls on the outside of the Patina, but Luce was having a hard time breathing through her sore, bruised neck.

Then Daniel had lifted her off the ground. They flew straight up. Out of the corners of her eyes, Luce saw Roland’s marbled wings on the right, Annabelle and Arriane on the left. All the angels’ wings were beating so fast and hard that they wove a pure blinding brightness, straight up out of the fire and into clear blue air.

But the Patina was still open. The Scale who could still fly had some sense that they were being tricked, trapped. They tried to rise out of the blaze, but Roland sent another wave of flame washing down onto them, thrusting them back into the burning earth, singeing off their crinkled skin until they were skeletons with wings.

“Just another moment . . .” Dee’s fingertips and steady gaze manipulated the boundaries of the Patina.

Luce studied Dee, then the mess of burning Scale. She imagined the Patina cinching at the top like a cloak around a neck, sealing the Scale inside, choking them out.

“All done,” Dee shouted as Roland took her higher through the air.

Luce looked down, beneath her and Daniel’s feet, as the ground sped away from them. She saw the ugly fire blink, then shiver, and then disappear, swallowed into a smoking hidden elsewhere. The street they left below was white, and modern, and full of people who had never sensed anything at all.

The ground was miles beneath them when Luce stopped envisioning Scale wings cooking in red flames.

There was no use looking back. She could only look ahead toward the next relic, toward Cam, Gabbe, and Molly, toward Avignon.

Through gaps in the thin sheets of clouds, the terrain became rocky, dark gray, and mountainous. The winter air grew colder, sharper, and the ceaseless beat of angel wings shattered the quiet at the edges of the atmosphere.

About an hour into the flight, Roland’s marbled wings came into view a few feet below Luce and Daniel.

He carried Dee the same way Daniel carried Luce: shoulders lined up with hers, one arm wrapped over her chest, the other around her waist. Like Luce, Dee crossed her legs at the ankles, and her stiletto heels dangled precari-ously so high above the ground. Roland’s dark muscles casing Dee’s frail, older frame made the pair look almost comical as they came into and out of focus, rippling through the clouds. But the thrilled sparkle in Dee’s eyes made her seem much younger than she was. Strands of her red hair whipped across her cheek, and her scent—cold cream and roses—perfumed the air through which they flew.

“Well, I think the coast is clear,” Dee said.

Luce felt the air around her warble. Her body tensed in preparation for another timequake. But this time, it wasn’t Lucifer’s encroaching Fall causing the ripple. It was Dee, withdrawing the second Patina. A hazy boundary moved closer to Luce’s skin, then passed through her, making her shiver with an untraceable pleasure.

Then it retracted until it was a tiny orb of light around Dee. She closed her eyes and, a moment later, ab-sorbed the Patina into her skin. It was mostly invisible—

and was one of the most beautiful things Luce had ever seen.

Dee smiled and beckoned Luce nearer with a little wave. The two angels carrying them tilted their wings upward so that the ladies could talk.

Dee cupped a hand over her mouth and called to Luce over the wind. “So tell me, dear, how did you two meet?”

Luce felt Daniel’s shoulder shudder behind her with a chuckle. It was a normal question to ask two people in a happy relationship; why did it make Luce miserable?

Because the answer was needlessly complicated.

Because she didn’t even know the answer.

She pressed a hand to the locket at her neck. It bobbed against her skin as Daniel’s wings beat another strong beat. “Well, we went to the same school, and I . . .”

“Oh, Lucinda!” Dee was laughing. “I was teasing. I merely wondered whether you had uncovered the story behind your 
original
 meeting.”

“No, Dee,” Daniel said firmly. “She has not learned that yet—”

“I’ve asked, but he won’t tell me.” Luce eyed the ver-tiginous drop below, feeling as far away from the truth of that first meeting as she was from the towns lining the Adriatic Sea over which they were flying. “It drives me crazy that I don’t know.”

“All in good time, dear,” Dee said calmly, staring straight ahead at the curved horizon. “I take it you have at least tapped into 
some
 of your earlier memories?” Luce nodded.

“Brilliant. I’ll settle for the tale of the earliest romance you can recall. Go on, dear. Humor an old lady.

It’ll help us pass the time to Avignon, like Canterbury pilgrims.”

A memory flashed before Luce’s eyes: the cold, damp tomb she’d been locked in with Daniel in Egypt, the way his lips pressed against hers, their bodies against each other, as though they were the last two people in the world . . .

But they hadn’t been alone. Bill had been there, too.

He’d been there waiting, watching, wanting her soul to die inside a dank Egyptian tomb.

Luce snapped her eyes open, returning to the present, where his red eyes could not find her. “I’m tired,” she said.

“Rest,” Daniel said softly.

“No, I’m tired of being punished simply because I love you, Daniel. I don’t want anything to do with Lucifer, with Scale and Outcasts and whatever other sides there are. I’m not a pawn; I’m a person. And I’ve had enough.”

Daniel wrapped his hand over Luce’s and squeezed.

Dee and Roland both looked as if they wanted to reach out and do the same.

“You’ve changed, dear,” Dee said.

“Since when?”

“Since before. I’ve never heard you talk like that.

Have you, Daniel?”

Daniel was quiet for a moment. Finally, over the sounds of wind and the flapping of the angels’ wings against thin air, he said, “No. But I’m glad she can now.”

“And why not? It’s a trans-dimensional tragedy what you kids have been through. But this is a girl with tenac-ity, a girl with muscles, a girl who once told me she would never cut her hair, even though she was cursed—your words, dear—by snarls and tangles, a magnet for briars, because that hair was a part of her, indelibly tied to her soul.”

Luce squinted at the old woman. “What are you talking about?”

Dee tilted her head at Luce and pursed her plump lips.

Luce stared at her hard, at her golden eyes and fine red hair, at the delicate way she hummed as they flew.

And it hit her.

“I remember you!”

“Lovely,” Dee said, “I remember you, too!”