The Fallen Sequence (123 page)

“Please,” she begged, her lips edging toward his. “Kiss me and set me free.”

Daniel lunged for her, swooping her up and laying her sideways across his lap to cradle her in his arms. His lips found hers. They were as sweet as nectar. She moaned as a deep current of joy flowed through her, every inch of her. Layla’s death was near, she knew that, but she never felt safer or more alive than she did when Daniel held her.

Her hands locked around the back of his neck, feeling the firm sinews of his shoulders, feeling the tiny raised scars protecting his wings. His hands roved up her back, through her long, thick hair. Every touch was rapture, every kiss so wonderful and pure it left her dizzy.

“Stay with me,” he pleaded. The muscles in his face had grown tense, and his kisses had become hungrier, more desperate.

He must have sensed Luce’s body warming. The heat rising in her core, spreading through her chest and flushing her cheeks. Tears filled her eyes. She kissed him harder. She’d been through this so many times before, but for some reason this felt different.

With a loud
whoosh
he stretched his wings out, and then deftly wrapped them tight around her, a cradle of soft white holding the two of them fast.

“You really believe it?” she whispered. “That someday I’ll live through this?”

“With all my heart and soul,” he said, cupping her face in his hands, pulling his wings tighter around them
both. “I will wait for you as long as it takes. I will love you every moment across time.”

By then, Luce was broiling hot. She cried out from the pain, thrashing in Daniel’s arms as the heat overwhelmed her. She was burning his skin, but he never let her go.

The moment had come. The starshot was tucked inside her dress, and this—right now—was when she would have used it. But she was never going to give up. Not on Daniel. Not when she knew, no matter how hard it got, that he would never give up on her.

Her skin began to blister. The heat was so brutal, she could do nothing but shiver.

And then she could only scream.

Layla combusted, and as the flames engulfed her body, Luce felt her own body and the soul they were sharing untwine, seeking the fastest escape from the unforgiving heat. The column of fire grew taller and wider until it filled the room and the world, until it was everything, and Layla was nothing at all.

Luce expected darkness and found light.

Where was the Announcer? Could she still be inside Layla?

The fire blazed on. It did not extinguish. It spread. The flames consumed more and more of the darkness, reaching into the sky as if the great night itself were
flammable, until the hot blaze of red and gold was all that Luce could see.

Every other time one of her past selves had died, Luce’s release from the flames and into the Announcer had been simultaneous. Something was different, something that was making her see things that couldn’t possibly be real.

Wings on fire.

“Daniel!” she cried out. What looked like Daniel’s wings soared through waves of flames, catching fire but not smoldering, as if they were
made
of fire. All she could make out were white wings and violet eyes. “Daniel?”

The fire rolled across the darkness like a giant wave across an ocean. It crashed onto an invisible shore and washed furiously over Luce, rushing up her body, over her head, and far behind her.

Then, as if someone had pinched out a candle, there was a quick hiss and everything went black.

A cold wind crept up behind her. Goose bumps spread across her skin. She hugged her body closer, drawing up her knees and realizing with a jolt of surprise that no ground held up her feet. She wasn’t flying exactly, just hovering, directionless. This darkness was not an Announcer. She had not used the starshot, but had she somehow … died?

She was afraid. She didn’t know where she was, only that she was alone.

No. There was someone else. A scraping sound. A dim gray light.

“Bill!” Luce shouted at the sight of him, so relieved she began to laugh. “Oh, thank God. I thought I was lost—I thought—Oh, never mind.” She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill my soul. I’ll find another way to break the curse. Daniel and I—we won’t give up on each other.”

Bill was far away, but floating toward her, making loops in the air. The nearer he got, the larger he appeared, swelling until he was two, then three, then ten times the size of the small stone gargoyle she had traveled with. Then the real metamorphosis began:

Behind his shoulders, a pair of thicker, fuller, jet-black wings burst forth, shattering his familiar small stone wings into a chaos of broken bits. The wrinkles on his forehead deepened and expanded across his entire body until he looked horrifically shriveled and old. The claws on his feet and hands grew longer, sharper, yellower.

They glinted in the darkness, razor-sharp. His chest swelled, sprouting thick, curly black hairs as he grew infinitely larger than he had been before.

Luce strained to suppress the wail climbing in her throat. And she managed—right up until Bill’s stony gray eyes, their irises dulled beneath layers of cataracts, glowed as red as fire.

Then she screamed.

“You always
did
make the wrong choice.” Bill’s voice had turned monstrous, deep and phlegm-filled and grating, not just on Luce’s ears but on her very soul. His breath punched her, reeking of death.

“You’re—” Luce could not finish her sentence. There was only one word for the evil creature before her, and the idea of saying it aloud was frightening.

“The bad guy?” Bill cackled. “Surprise!” He held out the
I
sound of the word so long that Luce was sure he would double over and cough, but he didn’t.

“But—you taught me so much. You helped me figure out—Why would you—How—The
whole
time?”

“I was deceiving you. It’s what I
do
, Lucinda.”

She had cared for Bill, roguish and disgusting as he was. She’d confided in him, listened to him, had almost killed her soul because he’d told her to. The thought cut her. She had almost lost Daniel because of Bill. She might lose Daniel still because of Bill. But he wasn’t Bill—

He was no mere demon, not like Steven, or even Cam at his worst.

He was Evil incarnate.

And he had been with Luce, breathing down her neck the whole time.

She tried to turn away from him, but his darkness was everywhere. It looked as if she were floating in a
night sky, but all the stars were impossibly far away; there was no sign of Earth. Close by were patches of darker blackness, swirling abysses. And every now and then a shaft of light appeared, a beacon of hope, illumination. Then the light would vanish.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Satan sneered at the pointlessness of her question. “Neverwhere,” he said. His voice no longer had the familiar tone of her traveling companion. “The dark heart of nothing at the center of everything. Neither Heaven, nor Earth, nor Hell. A place of the darkest transits. Nothing your mind at this stage can fathom, so it probably just looks”—his red eyes bulged—“
scary
to you.”

“What about those flashes of light?” Luce asked, trying not to let on just how frightening the place did look to her. She’d seen at least four flashes of light already, brilliant conflagrations igniting out of nowhere, vanishing fast into darker regions in the sky.

“Oh, those.” Bill watched one as it blazed and disappeared over Luce’s shoulder. “Angel travel. Demon travel. Busy night, isn’t it? Everyone seems to be going somewhere.”

“Yes.” Luce had been waiting for another burst of light in the sky. When it came, it cast a shadow across her, and she clawed at it, desperate to shake out an Announcer before the light disappeared. “Including me.”

The Announcer expanded rapidly in her hands, so
heavy and urgent and lithe that, for a moment, she thought she might make it.

Instead she felt a scabrous grip around her sides. Bill had her entire body nestled in his grimy claw. “I’m just not ready to say goodbye yet,” he whispered in a voice that made her shiver. “See, I’ve grown so fond of you. No, wait, that’s not it. I have
always
been … fond of you.”

Luce let the shadow in her fingers wisp away into nothing.

“And like all beloveds, I need you in my presence, especially now, so you don’t corrupt my designs. Again.”

“At least now you’ve given me a goal,” Luce said, straining against his grasp. It was no use. He gripped her tighter, squeezing her bones.

“You always did have an inner fire. I love that about you.” He smiled, and it was a terrible thing. “If only your spark
stayed
inside, hmm? Some people are just unlucky in love.”

“Don’t talk to me about love,” Luce spat. “I can’t believe I ever listened to a word that came out of your mouth. You don’t know a thing about love.”

“I’ve heard
that
one before. And I happen to know one important thing about love: You think yours is bigger than Heaven and Hell and the fate of all that rests between. But you’re wrong. Your love for Daniel Grigori is less than insignificant. It is
nothing
!”

His shout was like a shock wave that blew back Luce’s hair. She gasped and struggled for air. “Say whatever you want. I love Daniel. I always will. And it has nothing to do with you.”

Satan held her up to his red eyes, pinching her skin with his sharpest pointer claw. “I know you love him. You’re a
fool
for him. Just tell me why.”

“Why?”

“Why. Why him? Put it into words. Really make me
feel
it. I want to be moved.”

“A million reasons. I just do.”

His snaggletoothed smile deepened, and a sound like a thousand growling dogs came from deep inside him. “That was a test. You failed, but it isn’t your fault. Not really. That is an unfortunate side effect of the curse you bear. You don’t get to make choices anymore.”

“That’s not true. If you remember, I just made a big choice
not
to kill my soul.”

That angered him—she could see it in the way his nostrils flared, the way he reached up and balled his claw into a fist and made a patch of the starry sky go out like a light switch had been flicked somewhere. But he said nothing for the longest time. Just stared away into the night.

A horrible thought struck Luce. “Were you even telling the truth? What would really have happened if I’d used the starshot to—” She shuddered, sickened that
she’d come so close. “What’s in all this for you? You want me out of the picture or something so you can get to Daniel? Is that why you would never show yourself in front of him? Because he would have gone after you and—”

Satan chuckled. His laughter dimmed the stars. “You think
I’m
scared of Daniel Grigori? You
do
think very highly of him. Tell me, what kind of wild lies has he been filling your head with about his grandiose place in Heaven?”

“You’re the liar,” Luce said. “You’ve done nothing but lie from the moment I met you. No wonder the whole universe despises you.”

“Fears. Not
despises
. There’s a difference. Fear has envy in it somewhere. You may not believe it, but there are many who wish to wield the power that I wield. Who … adore me.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“You just don’t know enough. About anything. I’ve taken you on a tour of your past—shown you the futility of this existence, hoping to awaken you to the truth, and all I get from you is ‘Daniel! I want Daniel!’ ”

He flung her down and she fell into blackness, coming to a stop only when he glared at her, as if he could fix her in place. He moved in a tight circle around her, his hands behind his back, his wings drawn tight, his head tilted toward the sky. “Everything you see here is
everything there is to see. From far away, yes, but it’s all there—all the lives and worlds and more, far beyond the weak conception of mortals. Look at it.”

She did, and it looked different than it had before. The veldt of stars was endless, the dark of night folded again and again over so many bright spots that the sky was more light than black. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s about to be a tabula rasa.” His lips curled into a twisted smile. “I’ve grown tired of this game.”

“This is all a game to you?”

“It’s a game to
him.
” He swept his hand across the sky and left a dark swath of night in his wake. “And I refuse to concede it to that Other simply because of a cosmic scale. Simply because our sides are in balance.”

“Balance. You mean, the scale between the fallen angels who allied themselves with you, and those who allied themselves with—”

“Don’t say it. But yes, that
other
. Right now there is a balance, and—”

“And one more angel has to side,” Luce said, remembering the long talk Arriane had given her at the diner in Las Vegas.

“Mmm-hmm. Except this time, I won’t leave it to chance. It was a shortsighted goal of mine, the whole starshot bit, but I’ve seen the error of my ways. I’ve been plotting. I’ve been planning. Often while you and some past iteration of Grigori were preoccupied with your
B-grade heavy petting. So, you see, no one will be able to sabotage what I have planned next.