The Fallen Sequence (116 page)

“Don’t you dare kill him,” Shelby said to Miles. “You’re an idiot.”

“No,” Daniel said, very slowly sitting up. “It’s okay.”

His mind was spinning. What were the odds? He had only seen this done once before. Daniel was no expert at cleaving. But his past writhed inside him—he couldn’t go on like this. There was only one solution. Miles was holding it in his hands.

But how could he get the boy to attack him without explaining everything? And could he trust the Nephilim?

Daniel edged backward until his shoulders were against the tree trunk. He slid up it, holding both empty hands wide, showing Miles there was nothing to be afraid of. “You took fencing?”

“What?” Miles looked bewildered.

“At Shoreline. Did you take a fencing class or not?”

“We all did. It was kind of pointless and I wasn’t all that good, but—”

That was all Daniel needed to hear.
“En garde!”
he shouted, drawing out his concealed starshot like a sword.

Miles’s eyes grew wide. In an instant he’d raised his arrow as well.

“Oh, crap,” Shelby said, scurrying out of the way. “You guys, seriously. Stop!”

The starshots were shorter than fencing foils but a few inches longer than normal arrows. They were featherlight but as hard as diamonds, and if Daniel and Miles were very, very careful, the two of them might make it out of this alive. Somehow, with Miles’s help, Daniel might cleave free of his past.

He sliced through the air with his starshot, advancing a few steps toward the Nephilim.

Miles responded, fighting off Daniel’s blow, his arrow glancing hard toward the right. When the starshots clashed, they did not make the tinny clanks that fencing foils made. They made a deep, echoing
whooomp
that reverberated off the mountains and shook the ground under their feet.

“Your fencing lesson wasn’t pointless,” Daniel said as his arrow crisscrossed with Miles’s in the air. “It was to prepare for a moment like this.”

“A moment”—Miles grunted as he lunged forward,
sweeping his starshot up until it slid against Daniel’s in the air—“like what?”

Their arms strained. The starshots made a frozen X in the air.

“I need you to release me from an earlier incarnation that I’ve cloven to my soul,” Daniel said simply.

“What the…,” Shelby murmured from the sidelines.

Confusion flashed across Miles’s face, and his arm faltered. His blade fell away, and his starshot clattered to the ground. He gasped and fumbled for it, looking back at Daniel, terrified.

“I’m not coming after you,” Daniel said. “I need you to come after me.” He managed a competitive smirk. “Come on. You know you want to. You’ve wanted to for a long time.”

Miles charged, holding the starshot like an arrow instead of a sword. Daniel was ready for him, dipping to one side just in time and spinning around to clash his starshot against Miles’s.

They were locked in each other’s grip: Daniel with his starshot pointing past Miles’s shoulder, using his strength to hold the Nephilim boy back, and Miles with his starshot inches away from Daniel’s heart.

“Are you going to help me?” Daniel demanded.

“What’s in it for us?” Miles asked.

Daniel had to think about this for a moment. “Luce’s happiness,” he said at last.

Miles didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no.

“Now”—Daniel’s voice faltered as he gave the instructions—“very carefully, drag your blade in a straight line down the center of my chest. Do not pierce the skin or you will kill me.”

Miles was sweating. His face was white. He glanced over at Shelby.

“Do it, Miles,” she whispered.

The starshot trembled. Everything was in this boy’s hands. The blunt end of the starshot touched Daniel’s skin and traveled down.

“Omigod.” Shelby’s lips curled up in horror. “He’s
molting.
”

Daniel could feel it, like a layer of skin was lifting off his bones. His past self’s body was slowly cleaving from his own. The venom of separation coursed through him, threading deep into the fibers of his wings. The pain was so raw it was nauseating, roiling deep inside him with great tidal swells. His vision clouded; ringing filled his ears. The starshot in his hand tumbled to the ground. Then, all at once, he felt a great shove and a sharp, cold breath of air. There was a long grunt and two thuds, and then—

His vision cleared. The ringing ceased. He felt lightness, simplicity.

Free.

Miles lay on the ground below him, chest heaving.
The starshot in Daniel’s hand had disappeared. Daniel spun around to find a specter of his past self standing behind him, his skin gray and his body wraithlike, his eyes and teeth coal-black, the starshot grasped in his hand. His profile wobbled in the hot wind, like the picture on a shorted-out television.

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said, reaching forward and clutching his past self at the base of his wings. When Daniel lifted the shadow of himself off the ground, his body felt scant and insufficient. His fingers found the graying portal of the Announcer through which both Daniels had traveled just before it fell apart. “Your day will come,” he said.

Then he pitched his past self back into the Announcer.

He watched the void fading in the hot sun. The body made a drawn-out whistling sound as it tumbled into time, as if it were falling off a cliff. The Announcer split into infinitesimal traces, and was gone.

“What the hell just happened?” Shelby asked, helping Miles to his feet.

The Nephilim was ghostly white, gaping down at his hands, flipping them over and examining them as if he’d never seen them before.

Daniel turned to Miles. “Thank you.”

The Nephilim boy’s blue eyes looked eager and terrified at the same time, as if he wanted to pump every detail out of Daniel about what had just happened but
didn’t want to show his excitement. Shelby was speechless, which was an unprecedented event.

Daniel had despised Miles until then. He’d been annoyed by Shelby, who’d practically led the Outcasts straight toward Luce. But at that moment, under the olive tree, he could see why Luce had befriended both of them. And he was glad.

A horn whined in the distance. Miles and Shelby jumped.

It was a shofar, a sacred ram’s horn that made a long, nasal note—often used to announce religious services and festivals. Until then Daniel hadn’t looked around enough to realize where they were.

The three of them stood under the mottled shade of the olive tree at the crest of a low hill. In front of them, the hill sloped down to a wide, flat valley, tawny with the tall native grasses that had never been cut by man. In the middle of the valley was a narrow strip of green, where wildflowers grew alongside a narrow river.

Just east of the riverbed, a small group of tents stood clustered together, facing a larger square structure made of white stones, with a latticed wooden roof. The blast of the shofar must have come from that temple.

A line of women in colorful cloaks that fell to their ankles moved in and out of the temple. They carried clay jugs and bronze trays of food, as if in preparation for a feast.

“Oh,” Daniel said aloud, feeling a profound melancholy settle over him.

“Oh what?” Shelby asked.

Daniel gripped the hood of Shelby’s camouflage sweatshirt. “If you’re looking for Luce here, you won’t find her. She’s dead. She died a month ago.”

Miles nearly choked.

“You mean the Luce from this lifetime,” Shelby said. “Not our Luce. Right?”

“Our Luce—my Luce—isn’t here, either. She never knew this place existed, so her Announcers wouldn’t bring her here. Yours wouldn’t have, either.”

Shelby and Miles shared a glance. “You say you’re looking for Luce,” Shelby said, “but if you know she isn’t here, why are you still hanging around?”

Daniel stared past them, at the valley below. “Unfinished business.”

“Who is that?” Miles asked, pointing at a woman in a long white dress. She was tall and willowy, with red hair that shimmered in the sunlight. Her dress was cut low, showing off a lot of golden skin. She was singing something soft and lovely, a tease of a song they could barely hear.

“That’s Lilith,” Daniel said slowly. “She’s supposed to be married today.”

Miles took a few steps along a path leading down from the olive tree toward the valley where the temple
stood, about a hundred feet below them, as if to get a better look.

“Miles, wait!” Shelby scrambled after him. “This isn’t like when we were in Vegas. This is some freaking … other time or whatever. You can’t just see a hot girl and go strolling in like you own the place.” She turned to look at Daniel for help.

“Stay low,” Daniel instructed them. “Keep under the grass line. And stop when I say stop.”

Carefully, they wound down the path, stopping at last near the bank of the river, downstream from the temple. All the tents in the small community had been strewn with garlands of marigolds and cassis flowers. They were in earshot of the voices of Lilith and the girls who were helping prepare her for the wedding. The girls laughed and joined in Lilith’s song as they braided her long red hair into a wreath around her head.

Shelby turned to Miles. “Doesn’t she look kind of like Lilith from our class at Shoreline?”

“No,”
Miles said instantly. He studied the bride for a moment. “Okay, maybe a little bit. Weird.”

“Luce probably never mentioned her,” Shelby explained to Daniel. “She’s a total bitch from Hell.”

“It makes sense,” Daniel said. “Your Lilith might come from the same long line of evil women. They’re all descendants of the original mother Lilith. She was Adam’s first wife.”

“Adam had more than one wife?” Shelby gaped. “What about Eve?”

“Before Eve.”

“
Pre-Eve?
No way.”

Daniel nodded. “They weren’t married very long when Lilith left him. It broke his heart. He waited for her a long time, but eventually, he met Eve. And Lilith never forgave Adam for getting over her. She spent the rest of her days wandering the earth and cursing the family Adam had with Eve. And her descendants—sometimes they start out all right, but eventually, well, the apple never really falls far from the tree.”

“That’s messed up,” Miles said, despite seeming hypnotized by Lilith’s beauty.

“You’re telling me that Lilith Clout, the girl who set my hair on fire in ninth grade, could be
literally
a bitch from Hell? That all my voodoo toward her might have been justified?”

“I guess so.” Daniel shrugged.

“I’ve never felt so vindicated.” Shelby laughed. “Why wasn’t this in any of our angelology books at Shoreline?”

“Shhh.” Miles pointed toward the temple. Lilith had left her maidens to complete the decorations for the wedding—strewing yellow and white poppies near the entrance to the temple, weaving ribbons and small chimes made of silver into the low branches of the oak trees—and walked away from them, west, toward the
river, toward where Daniel, Shelby, and Miles were hiding.

She carried a bouquet of white lilies. When she reached the riverbank, she plucked a few petals and scattered them over the water, still singing softly under her breath. Then she turned to walk north along the bank, toward a huge old carob tree with branches that drooped into the river.

A boy sat beneath it, staring into the current. His long legs were propped up close to his chest, with one arm draped over them. The other arm was skipping stones into the water. His green eyes sparkled against his tan skin. His jet-black hair was a little shaggy, and damp from a recent swim.

“Oh my god, that’s—” Shelby’s cry was cut off by Daniel’s hand clamping over her mouth.

This was the moment he’d been afraid of. “Yes, it’s Cam, but it’s not the Cam you know. This is an earlier Cam. We are thousands of years in the past.”

Miles narrowed his eyes. “But he’s still evil.”

“No,” Daniel said. “He’s not.”

“Huh?” Shelby asked.

“There was a time when we were all part of one family. Cam was my brother. He was not evil, not yet. Maybe not even now.”

Physically, the only difference between this Cam and the one Shelby and Miles knew was that his neck was
bare of the sunburst tattoo he’d gotten from Satan when he’d thrown in his lot with Hell. Otherwise, Cam looked exactly as he did now.

Except that this long-ago Cam’s face was stiff with worry. It was an expression Daniel hadn’t seen on Cam in millennia. Probably not since this very moment.

Lilith stopped behind Cam and wrapped her arms around his neck so that her hands rested just over his heart. Without turning or saying a word, Cam reached up and cupped her hands in his. Both of them closed their eyes, content.

“This seems really private,” Shelby said. “Should we be—I mean, I feel weird.”

“Then leave,” Daniel said slowly. “Don’t make a scene on your way out—”

Daniel broke off. Someone was walking toward Cam and Lilith.

The young man was tall and tanned, dressed in a long white robe, and carrying a thick scroll of parchment. His blond head was down, but it was obviously Daniel.

“I’m not leaving.” Miles’s eyes locked on Daniel’s past self.

“Wait, I thought we just sent that guy back into the Announcers,” Shelby said, confused.

“That was a later early version of myself,” Daniel said.

“
A later early version of myself
, he says!” Shelby snorted. “Exactly how many Daniels
are
there?”

“He came from two thousand years in the future
beyond the moment where we are right now, which is still one thousand years in the true past. That Daniel shouldn’t have been here.”

“We’re three thousand years in the past right now?” Miles asked.

“Yes, and you really shouldn’t be.” Daniel stared Miles down. “But that past version of me”—he pointed at the boy who had stopped next to Cam and Lilith—“belongs here.”

Across the river, Lilith smiled. “How are you, Dani?”

They watched as Dani knelt down next to the couple and unrolled the scroll of parchment. Daniel remembered: It was their marriage license. He’d inscribed the whole thing himself in Aramaic. He was supposed to perform the ceremony. Cam had asked him months before.