The Fallen Sequence (104 page)

Only Daniel remained. As immobile as the dead.

Luce hung back, too, dodging behind a squat mausoleum a few plots away, watching to see what he would do.

It was dusk. They had the graveyard to themselves. Daniel lowered himself to his knees next to Lucinda’s grave. Snow thrummed down on the cemetery, coating
Luce’s shoulders, fat flakes getting tangled in her eyelashes, wetting the tip of her nose. She edged around the corner of the mausoleum, her entire body tensed.

Would he lose it? Would he claw at the frozen dirt and pound on the gravestone and bawl until there were no more tears he could shed? He
couldn’t
feel as calm as he looked. It was impossible, a front. But Daniel barely looked at the grave. He lay down on his side in the snow and closed his eyes.

Luce stared. He was so still and gorgeous. With his eyelids closed, he looked at absolute peace. She was half in love, half confused, and stayed that way for several minutes—until she was so frozen, she had to rub her arms and stamp her feet to warm up.

“What is he doing?” she finally whispered.

Bill appeared behind her and flitted around her shoulders. “Looks like he’s sleeping.”

“But why? I didn’t even know angels needed to sleep—”

“
Need
isn’t the right word. They can sleep if they feel like it. Daniel always sleeps for days after you die.” Bill tossed his head, seeming to recall something unpleasant. “Okay, not always. Most of the time. Must be pretty taxing, to lose the one thing you love. Can you blame him?”

“S-sort of,” Luce stammered. “I’m the one who bursts into flames.”

“And he’s the one who’s left alone. The age-old question: Which is worse?”

“But he doesn’t even look
sad
. He looked bored the entire funeral. If it were me, I’d … I’d …”

“You’d what?”

Luce moved toward the grave and stopped short at the loose earth where her plot began. A coffin lay beneath this.

Her
coffin.

The thought sent shivers up her spine. She sank to her knees and put her palms down in the dirt. It was damp and dark and freezing cold. She buried her hands inside it, feeling frostbitten almost instantly and not caring, welcoming the burn. She’d wanted Daniel to do this, to feel for her body in the earth. To go mad with wanting her back—alive and in his arms.

But he was just
sleeping
, so dead asleep that he didn’t even sense her kneeling right beside him. She wanted to touch him, to wake him, but she didn’t even know what she’d say when he opened his eyes.

Instead, she pawed at the muddy earth, until the flowers laid so neatly on it were scattered and broken, until the beautiful mink coat was soiled and her arms and face were covered in mud. She dug and dug and tossed the earth aside, reaching deeper for her dead self. She ached for some connection.

At last her fingers hit something hard: the wooden
lid of the coffin. She closed her eyes and waited for the kind of flash she’d felt in Moscow, the bolt of memories that had flooded through her when she’d touched the abandoned church gate and
felt
Luschka’s life.

Nothing.

Just emptiness. Loneliness. A howling white wind.

And Daniel, asleep and unreachable.

She sat back on her heels and sobbed. She didn’t know a thing about the girl who had died. She felt she never would.

“Yoo-hoo,” Bill said quietly from her shoulder. “You’re not in there, you know?”

“What?”

“Think about it. You’re not in there. You’re a fleck of ash by now if you’re anything. You didn’t have a body to bury, Luce.”

“Because of the fire. Oh. But then why …?” she asked, then stopped herself. “My family wanted this.”

“They’re strict Lutherans.” Bill nodded. “Every Müller for a hundred years has a tombstone in this cemetery. So your past self does, too. There’s just nothing under it. Or not quite nothing. Your favorite dress. A childhood doll. Your copy of the Bible. That sort of thing.”

Luce swallowed. No wonder she felt so empty inside. “So Daniel—that’s why he wasn’t looking at the grave.”

“He’s the only one who accepts that your soul is
someplace else. He stayed because this is the closest place he can go to hold on to your memory.” Bill swooped down so close to Daniel that the buzz of his stony wings rustled Daniel’s hair. Luce almost pushed Bill away. “He’ll try to sleep until your soul is settled somewhere else. Until you’ve found your next incarnation.”

“How long does that take?”

“Sometimes seconds, sometimes years. But he won’t sleep for years. As much as he’d probably like to.”

Daniel’s movement on the ground made Luce jump.

He stirred in his blanket of snow. An agonized groan escaped his lips.

“What’s happening?” Luce said, dropping to her knees and reaching for him.

“Don’t wake him!” Bill said quickly. “His sleep is riddled with nightmares, but it’s better for him than being awake. Until your soul is settled in a new life, Daniel’s whole existence is a kind of torture.”

Luce was torn between wanting to ease Daniel’s pain and trying to understand that waking him up might only worsen it.

“Like I said, on occasion, he sort of has insomnia … and that’s when it gets
really
interesting. But you wouldn’t want to see that. Nah.”

“I would,” she said, sitting up. “What happens?”

Bill’s fleshy cheeks twitched, as if he’d been caught at something. “Well, uh, a lot of times, the other fallen angels
are around,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “They get in and they, you know, try to console him.”

“I saw them in Moscow. But that’s not what you’re talking about. There’s something you’re not telling me. What happens when—”

“You don’t want to see those lives, Luce. It’s a side of him—”

“It’s a side of him that loves me, isn’t it? Even if it’s dark or bad or disturbing, I need to see it. Otherwise I still won’t understand what he goes through.”

Bill sighed. “You’re looking at me like you need my permission. Your past belongs to you.”

Luce was already on her feet. She glanced around the cemetery until her eyes fell on a small shadow stretching out from the back of her tombstone.
There. That’s the one
. Luce was startled by her certainty. That had never happened before.

At first glance this shadow had looked like any of the other shadows she had clumsily summoned in the woods at Shoreline. But this time, Luce could see
something
in the shadow itself. It wasn’t an image depicting any specific destination, but instead a strange silver glow that suggested that this Announcer would take her where her soul needed to go next.

It was calling to her.

She answered, reaching inside herself, drawing on that glow to guide the shadow up off the ground.

The shard of darkness peeled itself off the white
snow and took shape as it moved closer. It was deep black, colder than the snow falling all around her, and it swept toward Luce like a giant, dark sheet of paper. Her fingers were cracked and numb with cold as she expanded it into a larger, controlled shape. It emitted that familiar gust of foul-smelling wind from its core. The portal was wide and stable before Luce realized she was out of breath.

“You’re getting good at this,” Bill said. There was a strange edge to his voice that Luce didn’t waste time analyzing.

She also didn’t waste time feeling proud of herself—though somewhere she could recognize that if Miles or Shelby had been here, they’d have been doing cartwheels right now. It was by far the best summoning she’d ever done on her own.

But they weren’t here. Luce was on her own, so all she could do was move on to the next life, observe more of Lucinda and Daniel, drink it all in until something began to make sense. She felt around the clammy edges for a latch or a knob, just some way in. Finally, the Announcer creaked open.

Luce took a deep breath. She looked back at Bill. “Are you coming or what?”

Gravely, he hopped onto her shoulder and grabbed hold of her lapel like the reins on a horse, and the two of them stepped through.

LHASA, TIBET • APRIL 30, 1740

Luce gasped for breath.

She’d come out of the dark of the Announcer into a swirl of fast-moving fog. The air was thin and cold and every lungful stabbed at her chest. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The fog’s cool white vapor blew her hair back, rode along her open arms, soaked her garments with dew, and then was gone.

Luce saw that she was standing at the edge of the highest cliff she’d ever seen. She wobbled and staggered back, dizzy when she saw her feet dislodge a pebble. It rolled forward a few inches and over the edge, plummeting forever down.

She gasped again, this time from fear of heights.

“Breathe,” Bill coached her. “More people pass out up here from panicking over not getting enough oxygen than from
actually
not getting enough oxygen.”

Luce inhaled carefully. That was slightly better. She lowered the dirty mink on her shoulders and enjoyed the sun on her face. But she still couldn’t get used to the view.

Stretching away from the cliff where she stood was a yawning valley spotted with what looked like farmland and flooded rice paddies. And to either side, rising into misty heights, were two towering mountains.

Far ahead, carved right into one of the steep mountainsides, was a formidable palace. Majestically white and capped by deep-red roofs, its outer walls were festooned with more staircases than she could count. The palace looked like something out of an ancient fairy tale.

“What is this place? Are we in China?” she asked.

“If we stood here long enough, we would be,” Bill said. “But right now, it’s Tibet, thanks to the Dalai Lama. That’s his pad over there.” He pointed at the monster palace. “Swanky, eh?”

But Luce wasn’t following his finger. She’d heard a laugh from somewhere nearby and had turned to seek out its source.

Her
laugh. The soft, happy laugh she hadn’t known was hers until she’d met Daniel.

She finally spotted two figures a few hundred yards away along the cliff. She’d have to clamber across some boulders to get closer, but it wouldn’t be that difficult. She hunched in her muddy coat and started carefully picking her way through the snow, toward the sound.

“Whoa there.” Bill grabbed her by the collar of the coat. “Do you see any place for us to take cover?”

Luce looked around the bare landscape: all rocky drop-offs and open spaces. Nothing even to serve as shelter from the wind.

“We’re above the tree line, pal. And you’re small, but
you ain’t invisible. You’re going to have to hang back here.”

“But I can’t see a thing—”

“Coat pocket,” Bill said. “You’re welcome.”

She felt around in the pocket of the coat—the same coat she’d been wearing at the funeral in Prussia—and pulled out a brand-new, very expensive-looking pair of opera glasses. She didn’t bother asking Bill where or when he’d got them, she just held them up to her eyes and twisted the focus.

There.

The two of them stood facing each other, several feet apart. Her past self’s black hair was knotted in a girlish bun, and her woven linen dress was the pink of an orchid. She looked young and innocent. She was smiling at Daniel, rocking back and forth on her feet like she was nervous, watching his every move with unbounded intensity. Daniel’s eyes had a teasing look in them; a bunch of round white peonies were in his arms and he was doling them out to her one by one, making her laugh harder each time.

Watching closely through the opera glasses, Luce noticed that their fingers never touched. They kept a certain distance from each other. Why? It was almost startling.

In the other lives she’d spied upon, Luce had seen so much passion and hunger. But here, it was different.
Luce’s body began to buzz, eager for just one moment of physical connection between them. If
she
couldn’t touch Daniel, at least her old self could.

But they were just standing there, now walking in circles. Never getting any closer to each other or any farther apart.

Every once in a while, their laughter would carry over to Luce again.

“Well?” Bill kept trying to squish his little face next to Luce’s so he could look through one of the lenses of the opera glasses. “What’s the word?”

“They’re just
talking
. They’re flirting kind of like they’re strangers, but at the same time they also seem to know each other really well. I don’t get it.”

“So they’re taking it slow. What’s wrong with that?” Bill asked. “Kids today, they just want things to go fast—boom boom BOOM.”

“Nothing’s wrong with taking it slow, I just—” Luce broke off.

Her past self fell to her knees. She began to rock back and forth, holding her head, then her heart. A horrified look crossed Daniel’s face. He looked so stiff in his white pants and tunic, like a statue of himself. He shook his head, looking at the sky, his lips mouthing the words
No. No. No
.

The girl’s hazel eyes had gone wild and fiery, like something had possessed her. A high-pitched scream
echoed out across the mountains. Daniel fell to the ground and buried his face in his hands. He reached out for her, but his hand hung in the air without ever connecting with her skin. His body crumpled and quaked, and when it mattered most, he looked away.