The Fallen Sequence (148 page)

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 precariously so high above the ground. Roland’s dark muscles encasing 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, absorbed 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 stroke. “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 vertiginous drop below, feeling as far away from the truth of that first meeting as she was from the towns 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 tapped into at least
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 had 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 tenacity, 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!”

“Didn’t I live in a hut on an open plain?”

Dee nodded.

“And we
did
talk about my hair! I’d—I’d run through a patch of nettles diving after something on a hunt … was it a fox?”

“You were quite the tomboy. Braver than some of the men on the prairie, actually.”

“And you,” Luce said, “you spent hours picking them out of my hair.”

“I was your favorite auntie, figuratively speaking. You used to say the devil cursed you with such thick hair. A trifle dramatic, but you
were
only sixteen—and not far off from the truth, as only sixteen-year-olds can be.”

“You said a curse is only a curse if I allowed myself to be cursed by it. You said … I had it in my power to free myself of any curse—that curses were preludes to blessings.…”

Dee winked.

“Then you told me to cut it off. My hair.”

“That’s right. But you wouldn’t.”

“No.” Luce closed her eyes as the cool mist of a cloud washed over her, its condensation tickling her skin. She was suddenly inexplicably sad. “I wouldn’t. I wasn’t ready to.”

“Well,” Dee said. “I certainly like how you’ve styled your hair since you’ve come to your senses!”

“Look.” Daniel pointed to where the cloud floor fell away like a cliff. “We’re here.”

They descended into Avignon. The sky above the town was clear, with no clouds to interrupt their view. The sun cast shadows of the angels’ wings onto the small medieval village of stone buildings bordered by verdant pastures of farmland. Cows loafed below them. A tractor threaded through land.

They banked left and flew over a horse stable, breathing in the dank stench of hay and manure. They swooped
low over a cathedral made from the same tawny stone as most of the buildings in the town. Tourists sipped coffees in a cheerful café. The town glowed golden in the midday sun.

The startled sense of arriving so quickly mingled with the feeling of time slipping through Luce’s fingers. They had been searching for the relics for four and a half days. Half the time before Lucifer’s Fall would be upon them was up.

“That’s where we’re going.” Daniel pointed to a bridge on the outskirts that did not extend fully across the shimmering river winding through the town. It was as if half the bridge had crumbled into the water. “Pont Saint Bénézet.”

“What happened to it?” Luce asked.

Daniel glanced over his shoulder. “Remember how quiet Annabelle got when I mentioned we were coming here? She inspired the boy who built that bridge in the Middle Ages in the time when the popes lived here and not in Rome. He noticed her flying across the Rhône one day when she didn’t think anyone could see her. He built the bridge to follow her to the other side.”

“When did it collapse?”

“Slowly, over time, one arch would fall into the river. Then another. Arriane says the boy—his name was Bénézet—had a vision for angels, but not for architecture. Annabelle loved him. She stayed in Avignon as his muse
until he died. He never married, kept apart from the rest of Avignon society. The town thought he was crazy.”

Luce tried not to compare her relationship with Daniel to what Annabelle had had with Bénézet, but it was hard not to. What kind of a relationship could an angel and a mortal
really
have? Once all this was over, if they beat Lucifer … then what? Would she and Daniel go back to Georgia and be like any other couple, going out for ice cream on Fridays after a movie? Or would the whole town think she was crazy, like Bénézet?

Was it all just hopeless? What would become of them in the end? Would their love vanish like a medieval bridge’s arches?

The idea of sharing a normal life with an angel was what was crazy. She sensed that in every moment Daniel
flew
her through the sky. And yet she loved him more each day.

They landed on the bank of the river under the shade of a weeping willow tree, sending a flock of agitated ducks flapping into the water. In broad daylight, the angels folded in their wings. Luce stood behind Daniel to watch the intricate process as his retracted into his skin. They drew in from the center first, making a series of soft snaps as layers of muscle folded on empyreal feathers. Last came Daniel’s thin, nearly translucent wing tips, which glowed as they disappeared inside his body, leaving no trace on his specially tailored T-shirt.

They walked to the empty bridge, like any other tourists interested in architecture. Annabelle walked much more stiffly than normal, and Luce saw Arriane reach out and touch her hand. The sun was bright and the air smelled like lavender and river water. The bridge was made of big white stones, held up by long arches underneath. There was a small stone chapel with a single tower attached along one side near the entrance of the bridge. It held a sign that read
CHAPELLE DE SAINT NICOLAS
. Luce wondered where the real tourists were.

The chapel was coated with a fine, silvery dust.

They walked the bridge silently, but Luce noticed that Annabelle wasn’t the only one upset. Daniel and Roland were trembling, keeping well clear of the entrance to the chapel, and Luce remembered they were forbidden to enter a sanctuary of God.

Dee ran her fingers over the narrow brass railing with a heavy sigh. “We are too late.”

“This isn’t—” Luce touched the dust. It was insubstantial and light, with a hint of silver shimmer, like the dust that had covered her parents’ backyard. “You mean—”

“Angels have died here.” Roland’s voice was a monotone as he stared into the river.

“B-but,” Luce stammered, “we don’t know whether Gabbe and Cam and Molly even made it here.”

“This used to be a beautiful place,” Annabelle said. “Now they’ve marred it forever.
Je m’excuse
, Bénézet.”

That was when Arriane held up a quivering silver feather. “Gabbe’s pennon. Intact, so it must have been taken by her own hand. Perhaps to give to an Outcast who didn’t get it before …” She looked away, holding the feather to her chest.

“But I thought the Scale didn’t kill angels,” Luce said.

“They don’t.” Daniel bent down and wiped away some of the dust that was mounded like snow at his feet.

Something was buried underneath it.

His fingers found a dusty silver starshot. He wiped it on his shirt and Luce shivered each time his fingers drew near the deadly dull tip. At last, he held it out for the others to examine. It was branded with an ornate letter
Z
.

“The Elders,” Arriane whispered.

“
They
are happy to kill angels,” Daniel said softly. “In fact, there’s nothing they’d rather do.”

There was a sharp crack.

Luce whipped around, expecting … she didn’t know what. Scale? Elders?

Dee shook out her fist, rubbing red knuckles with her other hand. Then Luce saw: The wooden door to the chapel was smashed in the center. Dee must have punched it. No one else thought it was remarkable that such a tiny woman could cause so much damage.

“You all right there, Dee?” Arriane called out.

“Sophia has no business here.” Her voice quaked with rage. “What Lucifer is doing is beyond the compass
of the Elders’ concern. And yet she could ruin everything for you angels. I could kill her.”

“Promise?” Roland asked.

Daniel slipped the starshot into the satchel and clasped it shut. “However this battle ended, it must have begun over the third relic. Someone found it.”

“A war of resources,” Dee said.

Luce flinched. “And someone died for it.”

“We don’t know what happened, Luce,” Daniel said. “And we won’t know until we stand before the Elders. We need to track them down.”

“How?” Roland asked.

“Maybe they went to Sinai to stake us out,” Annabelle suggested.