The Fallen Sequence (16 page)

That was putting it mildly.

“The way I see it,” Cam said, leaning back on the blanket, “location is negligible.”

Luce shot him a doubtful look. She also wished he hadn’t leaned away, but she was too shy to approach when he was reclining on his side.

“Where I grew up”—he paused—“things weren’t so different from the penitentiary-style living at Sword & Cross. The upshot is I’m officially immune to my surroundings.”

“No way.” Luce shook her head. “If I handed you a plane ticket to California right now, you wouldn’t be totally thrilled to break out of here?”

“Mmm … mildly indifferent,” Cam said, popping a deviled egg into his mouth.

“I don’t believe you.” Luce gave him a shove.

“Then you must have had a happy childhood.”

Luce bit into the chewy green skin of the apple and licked the juice running down her fingers. She ran through a mental catalog of all the parental frowns, doctors’ visits, and school changes of her childhood, the black shadows hanging like a shroud over everything. No, she wouldn’t say she’d had a
happy
childhood. But if Cam couldn’t even see a way out of Sword & Cross, something more hopeful on the horizon, then maybe his had been worse.

There was a rustling at their feet and Luce snapped into a ball when a thick green-and-yellow snake slithered past. Trying not to get too close, she rolled to her knees and peered down at it. Not just a snake, but a snake in the middle of shedding its skin. A translucent case was coming off its tail. There were snakes all over Georgia, but she’d never seen one molt.

“Don’t scream,” Cam said, resting a hand on Luce’s knee. His touch did make Luce feel safer. “He’ll move on if we just leave him alone.”

It couldn’t happen quickly enough. Luce wanted very badly to scream. She had always hated and feared snakes. They were just so slithery and scaly and … “Eugh.” She shivered, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the snake until it had disappeared in the long grass.

Cam smirked as he picked up the shed skin and placed it in her hand. It still felt alive, like the dewy skin on a bulb of garlic her father had pulled fresh from his
garden. But it had just come off a snake. Gross. She tossed it back on the ground and wiped her hands on her jeans.

“Come on, you didn’t think it was cute?”

“Did my trembling give it away?” Luce was already feeling a bit embarrassed by how childish she must have looked.

“What about your faith in the power of transformation?” Cam asked, fingering the shed skin. “That’s what we’re here for, after all.”

Cam had taken off his sunglasses. His emerald eyes were so confident. He was holding that inhumanly still pose again, waiting for her to answer.

“I’m starting to think you’re a little bit strange,” she said finally, cracking the tiniest smile.

“Oh, and just think how much more there is to know about me,” he replied, leaning in closer. Closer than he had when the snake came. Closer than she’d been expecting him to. He reached out and slowly ran his fingers through her hair. Luce tensed up.

Cam was gorgeous and intriguing. What she couldn’t figure out was how, when she should have been a bundle of nerves—like right then—she still somehow felt comfortable. She wanted to be right where she was. She couldn’t take her eyes off his lips, which were full and pink and moving closer, making her feel even dizzier. His shoulder brushed hers and she felt a strange shiver
deep inside her chest. She watched as Cam parted his lips. Then she closed her eyes.

“There y’all are!” A breathless voice pulled Luce right out of the moment.

Luce let out an exasperated sigh and shifted her attention to Gabbe, who was standing before them with a high side ponytail, and an oblivious grin on her face.

“I’ve been looking
everywhere
.”

“Why on earth would you be doing such a thing?” Cam glowered at her, scoring him a few more points with Luce.

“Cemetery was the last place I thought of,” Gabbe rattled on, counting on her fingers. “I checked your dorm rooms, then under the bleachers, then—”

“What do you
want
, Gabbe?” Cam cut her off, like a sibling, like they’d known each other a long time.

Gabbe blinked, then bit her lip. “It was Miss Sophia,” she said finally, snapping her fingers. “That’s right. She got frantic when Luce didn’t show up for class. Kept saying how you were such a promising student and all that.”

Luce couldn’t read this girl. Was she for real and just following orders? Was she mocking Luce for making a good impression on a teacher? Was it not enough for her to have Daniel wrapped around her finger—she had to move in on Cam now, too?

Gabbe must have sensed that she was interrupting something, but she just stood there blinking her big doe
eyes and twirling a strand of blond hair around her finger. “Well, come on,” she said finally, sticking out both hands to help Luce and Cam up. “Let’s get you back to class.”

“Lucinda, you can have station three,” Miss Sophia said, looking down at a sheet of paper when Luce, Cam, and Gabbe entered the library. No
Where have you been?
No points off for tardiness. Just Miss Sophia, absently placing Luce next to Penn in the computer lab section of the library. Like she hadn’t even noticed that Luce had been gone.

Luce shot Gabbe an accusatory look, but she just shrugged at Luce and mouthed, “What?”

“Wherehaveyoubeen?” Penn demanded as soon as she sat down. The only person who seemed to notice she’d been gone at all.

Luce’s eyes found Daniel, who was practically burrowed into his computer at station seven. From her seat, all Luce could see of him was the blond halo of his hair, but it was enough to bring a flush to her cheeks. She sank lower in her chair, mortified all over again by their conversation in the gym.

Even after all the laughs and smiles and that one potential near kiss she’d just shared with Cam, she couldn’t shut out what she felt when she saw Daniel.

And they were never going to be together.

That was the gist of what he had told her in the gym. After she’d basically thrown herself at him.

The rejection cut her so deeply, so close to her heart, she felt certain everyone around her could take one look at her and know exactly what had happened.

Penn was tapping her pencil impatiently on Luce’s desk. But Luce didn’t know how to explain. Her picnic with Cam had been interrupted by Gabbe before Luce had even been able to really make sense of what was happening. Or about to happen. But what was weird, and what she couldn’t figure out, was why all of that felt so much less important than what had happened in the gym with Daniel.

Miss Sophia stood in the middle of the computer lab, snapping her fingers in the air like a preschool teacher to get the students’ attention. Her stacks of silver bangle bracelets chimed like bells.

“If any of you have ever traced your own family tree,” she called over the din of the crowd, “then you’ll know what sorts of treasures lie buried in the roots.”

“Oh, jeez, please kill that metaphor,” Penn whispered. “Or kill me. One or the other.”

“You’ll have twenty minutes’ access to the Internet to begin researching your own family tree,” Miss Sophia said, tapping a stopwatch. “A generation is roughly twenty to twenty-five years, so aim to go back at least six generations.”

Groan.

An audible sigh erupted from station seven—Daniel.

Miss Sophia turned to him. “Daniel? Do you have a problem with this assignment?”

He sighed again and shrugged. “No, not at all. That’s fine. My family tree. Should be interesting.”

Miss Sophia tilted her head quizzically. “I’ll take that statement for an enthusiastic endorsement.” Addressing the class again, she said, “I trust you’ll find a line worth pursuing in a ten-to fifteen-page research paper.”

Luce could not possibly focus on this right now. Not when there was so much else to process. She and Cam in the cemetery. Maybe it hadn’t been the standard definition of romantic, but Luce almost preferred it that way. It was like nothing she’d ever done before. Skipping class to mosey through all those graves. Sharing that picnic, while he refilled her perfectly made latte. Making fun of her fear of snakes. Well, she could have done without that whole snake development, but at least Cam had been sweet about it. Sweeter than Daniel had been all week.

She hated to admit that, but it was true. Daniel wasn’t interested.

Cam, on the other hand …

She studied him, a few stations away. He winked at her before he began pecking at his keyboard. So he liked her. Callie wasn’t going to be able to shut up about how obviously into her he was.

She wanted to call Callie now, to bolt out of this library and take a rain check on the family tree assignment. Talking up another guy was the fastest—maybe the only—way to get Daniel out of her head. But there was that horrible Sword & Cross phone policy, and all the other students around her, who looked so diligent. Miss Sophia’s tiny eyes panned the class for procrastinators.

Luce sighed, defeated, and opened the search engine on her computer. She was stuck here for another twenty minutes—with not one brain cell devoted to her assignment. The last thing she wanted to do was learn about her own boring family. Instead, her listless fingers began to tap out thirteen letters entirely of their own accord:

“Daniel Grigori.”

Search.

EIGHT

A DIVE TOO DEEP

W
hen Luce answered the knock on her door Saturday morning, Penn tumbled into her arms.

“You’d think it would dawn on me someday that doors open
in,
” she apologized, straightening her glasses. “Must remember to stop leaning on peepholes. Nice digs, by the way,” she added, looking around. She crossed to the window over Luce’s bed. “Not a bad view, minus the bars and all.”

Luce stood behind her, looking out at the cemetery
and, in plain view, the live oak tree where she’d had the picnic with Cam. And, invisible from here but clear in her head, the place she’d been pinned under that statue with Daniel. The avenging angel that had mysteriously disappeared after the accident.

Remembering Daniel’s worried eyes when he whispered her name that day, the near touch of their noses, the way she’d felt his fingertips on her neck—all of it made her feel hot.

And pathetic. She sighed and turned away from the window, realizing Penn had moved on, too.

She was picking things up off Luce’s desk, giving each of Luce’s possessions careful scrutiny. The Statue of Liberty paperweight her dad had brought back from a conference at NYU, the picture of her mom with a hilariously bad perm when she was around Luce’s age, the eponymous Lucinda Williams CD Callie had given her as a going-away present before Luce had ever heard the name Sword & Cross.

“Where are your books?” she asked Penn, wanting to detour around a trip down memory lane. “You said you were coming over to study.”

By then, Penn had begun to riffle through her wardrobe. Luce watched as she quickly lost interest in the variations of dress code-style black T-shirts and sweaters. When Penn moved toward her dresser drawers, Luce stepped forward to intercept.

“Okay, that’s enough, Snoop,” she said. “Isn’t there research we should be doing on family trees?”

“Speaking of snooping.” Penn’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, there is research we should be doing. But not the kind you’re thinking.”

Luce stared at her blankly. “Huh?”

“Look.” Penn put her hand on Luce’s shoulder. “If you really want to know about Daniel Grigori—”

“Shhh!” Luce hissed, jumping to close her door. She stuck her head into the hall and scanned the scene. The coast looked clear—but that didn’t mean anything. People at this school had a suspicious way of appearing out of nowhere. Cam in particular. And Luce would die if he—or anyone—found out how enamored of Daniel she was. Or, at this point, anyone but Penn.

Satisfied, Luce closed and locked the door and turned back to her friend. Penn was sitting cross-legged at the edge of Luce’s bed. She looked amused.

Luce locked her hands behind her back and dug her toe into the circular red rug near her door. “What makes you think I want to know anything about him?”