The Fallen Sequence (22 page)

She felt a hand grip her left wrist and spun around, expecting to see Penn. It was Todd. The whites of his own eyes were huge, and he was coughing, too.

“We have to get out of here,” he said, breathing fast. “I think there’s an exit toward the back.”

“What about Penn, and Miss Sophia?” Luce asked. She was feeling weak and dizzy. She rubbed her eyes.
“They were over there.” When she pointed up the aisle toward the entrance, she could see how much thicker the smoke was in that direction.

Todd looked doubtful for a second, but then he nodded. “Okay,” he said, keeping hold of her wrist as they crouched down and sprinted toward the front doors of the library. They took a right when one aisle looked particularly thick with smoke, then found themselves facing a wall of books without a clue which way to run. Both of them stopped to gasp. The smoke that only a moment earlier had hovered just above their heads now pressed low against their shoulders.

Even ducking below it, they were choking. And they couldn’t see as much as a few feet in front of them. Making sure to keep a hold on Todd, Luce spun around in a circle, suddenly unsure which direction they’d come from. She reached out and felt the hot metal shelf of one of the stacks. She couldn’t even make out the letters on the spines. Were they in the D section or the O’s?

There were no clues to guide them toward Penn and Miss Sophia, and no clues to guide them to the exit, either. Luce felt a surge of panic course through her, making it even more difficult to breathe.

“They must have already gone out the front doors!” Todd shouted, sounding only half convinced. “We have to turn back!”

Luce bit her lip. If anything happened to Penn …

She could barely see Todd, who was standing right in front of her. He was right, but which way was back? Luce nodded mutely, and felt his hand tugging hers.

For a long time, she moved without knowing where they were going, but as they ran, the smoke lifted, little by little, until, eventually, she saw the red glow of an emergency exit sign. Luce breathed a sigh of relief as Todd fumbled for the door handle and finally pushed it open.

They were in a hallway Luce had never seen before. Todd slammed the door shut behind them. They gasped and filled their lungs with clean air. It tasted so good, Luce wanted to sink her teeth into it, to drink a gallon of it, bathe herself in it. She and Todd both coughed the smoke out of their lungs until they started laughing, an uneasy, only half-relieved laugh. They laughed until she was crying. But even when Luce finished crying and coughing, her eyes continued to tear.

How could she breathe in this air when she didn’t even know what had happened to Penn? If Penn hadn’t made it out—if she was collapsed somewhere inside—then Luce had failed someone she cared about again. Only this time it would be so much worse.

She wiped her eyes and watched a puff of smoke curl out from underneath the crack at the base of the door. They weren’t safe yet. There was another door at the end of the hallway. Through the glass panel in the door, Luce could see the wobble of a tree branch in the night.
She exhaled. In a few moments, they’d be outside, away from these choking fumes.

If they were fast enough, they could go around to the front entrance and make sure Penn and Miss Sophia had made it out okay.

“Come on,” Luce told Todd, who was folded over himself, wheezing. “We have to keep going.”

He straightened up, but Luce could see he was really overcome. His face was red, his eyes were wild and wet. She practically had to drag him toward the door.

She was so focused on getting out that it took her too long to process the heavy, swishing noise that had fallen over them, drowning out the alarms.

She looked up into a maelstrom of shadows. A spectrum of shades of gray and deepest black. She should only be able to see as far as the ceiling overhead, but the shadows seemed somehow to extend beyond its limits. Into a strange and hidden sky. They were all tangled up in each other, and yet they were distinct.

Amid them was the lighter, grayish one she’d seen earlier. It was no longer shaped like a needle, but now looked almost like the flame of a match. It bobbed over them in the hallway. Had
she
really fended off that amorphous darkness when it threatened to graze Penn’s head? The memory made her palms itch and her toes curl.

Todd started banging on the walls, as if the hallway were closing in on them. Luce knew they were nowhere near the door. She grabbed for his hand, but their sweaty
palms slid off each other. She wrapped her fingers tight around his wrist. He was white as a ghost, crouched down near the floor, almost cowering. A terrified moan escaped his lips.

Because the smoke was now filling up the hallway?

Or because he could sense the shadows, too?

Impossible.

And yet his face was pinched and horrified. Much more so now that the shadows were overhead.

“Luce?” His voice shook.

Another horde of shadows rose up directly in their path. A deep black blanket of dark spread out across the walls and made it impossible for Luce to see the door. She looked at Todd—could he see it?

“Run!” she yelled.

Could he even run? His face was ashy and his eyelids drooped shut. He was on the verge of passing out. But then it suddenly seemed like he was carrying her.

Or
something
was carrying both of them.

“What the hell?” Todd cried out.

Their feet skimmed the floor for just a moment. It felt like riding a wave in the ocean, a light crest that lifted her higher, filling her body with air. Luce didn’t know where she was headed—she couldn’t even see the door, just a snarl of inky shadows all around. Hovering but not touching her. She should have been terrified, but she wasn’t. Somehow she felt protected from the shadows, like something was shielding her—something fluid
but impenetrable. Something uncannily familiar. Something strong, but also gentle. Something—

Almost too quickly, she and Todd were at the door. Her feet hit the floor again, and she shoved herself against the door’s emergency exit bar.

Then she heaved. Choked. Gasped. Gagged.

Another alarm was clanging. But it sounded far away.

The wind whipped at her neck. They were outside! Standing on a small ledge. A flight of stairs led down to the commons, and even though everything in her head felt cloudy and filled with smoke, Luce thought she could hear voices somewhere nearby.

She turned back to try to figure out what had just happened. How had she and Todd made it through that thickest, blackest, impenetrable shadow? And
what
was the thing that had saved them? Luce felt its absence.

She almost wanted to go back and search for it.

But the hallway was dark, and her eyes were still watering, and she couldn’t make out the twisting shadow shapes anymore. Maybe they were gone.

Then there was a jagged stroke of light, something that looked like a tree trunk with branches—no, like a torso with long, broad limbs. A pulsing, almost violet column of light hovering over them. It made Luce think, absurdly, of Daniel. She was seeing things. She took a deep breath and tried to blink the smoky tears from her eyes. But the light was still there. She sensed more than
heard it call to her, calming her, a lullaby in the middle of a war zone.

So she didn’t see the shadow coming.

It body-slammed into her and Todd, breaking their grip on each other and tossing Luce into the air.

She landed in a heap at the foot of the stairs. An agonized grunt escaped her lips.

For one long moment, her head throbbed. She’d never known pain as deep and searing as this. She cried out into the night, into the clash of light and shadow overhead.

But then it all became too much and Luce surrendered, closing her eyes.

ELEVEN

RUDE AWAKENING

“A
re you scared?” Daniel asked. His head was tilted sideways, his blond hair disheveled by a soft breeze. He was holding her, and while his grip was firm around her waist, it was as smooth and light as a silk sash. Her own fingers were laced behind his shirtless neck.

Was she scared? Of course not. She was with Daniel. Finally. In his arms. The truer question pulling at the back of her mind was:
Should
she be scared? She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t even know where she was.

She could smell rain in the air, close by. But both she and Daniel were dry. She could feel a long white dress flowing down to her ankles. There was only a little light left in the day. Luce felt a stabbing regret at wasting the sunset, as if there were anything she could do to stop it. Somehow she knew these final rays of light were as precious as the last drops of honey in a jar.

“Will you stay with me?” she asked. Her voice was the thinnest whisper, almost canceled out by a low groan of thunder. A gust of wind swirled around them, brushing Luce’s hair into her eyes. Daniel folded his arms more tightly around her, until she could breathe in his breath, could smell his skin on hers.

“Forever,” he whispered back. The sweet sound of his voice filled her up.

There was a small scratch on the left side of his forehead, but she forgot it as Daniel cupped her cheek and brought her face nearer. She tilted her head back and felt the whole of her body go slack with expectation.

Finally, finally, his lips came down on hers with an urgency that took her breath away. He kissed her as if she belonged to him, as naturally as if she were some long-lost part of him that he could at last reclaim.

Then the rain started to fall. It soaked their hair, ran down their faces and into their mouths. The rain was warm and intoxicating, like the kisses themselves.

Luce reached around his back to draw him closer,
and her hands slid over something velvety. She ran one hand over it, then another, searching for its limits, and then peered past Daniel’s glowing face.

Something was unfurling behind him.

Wings. Lustrous and iridescent, beating slowly, effortlessly, shining in the rain. She’d seen them before, maybe, or something like them somewhere.

“Daniel,” she said, gasping. The wings consumed her vision and her mind. They seemed to swirl into a million colors, making her head hurt. She tried to look elsewhere, anywhere else, but on all sides, all she could see besides Daniel were the endless pinks and blues of the sunset sky. Until she looked down and took in one last thing.

The ground.

Thousands of feet below them.

When she opened her eyes, it was too bright, her skin was too dry, and there was a splitting pain at the back of her head. The sky was gone and so was Daniel.

Another dream.

Only this one left her feeling almost sick with desire.

She was in a white-walled room. Lying on a hospital bed. To her left, a paper-thin curtain had been dragged halfway across the room, separating her from something bustling on the other side.

Luce gingerly touched the tender spot at the base of her neck and whimpered.

She tried to get her bearings. She didn’t know where she was, but she had a distinct feeling that she wasn’t at Sword & Cross any longer. Her billowy white dress was—she patted her sides—a baggy hospital gown. She could feel every part of the dream slipping away—everything but those wings. They’d been so real. The touch of them so velvety and fluid. Her stomach churned. She clenched and unclenched her fists, hyper-aware of their emptiness.

Someone grasped and squeezed her right hand. Luce turned her head quickly and winced. She’d assumed she was alone. Gabbe was perched on the edge of a faded blue rolling chair that seemed, annoyingly, to bring out the color of her eyes.

Luce wanted to pull away—or at least, she
expected
to want to pull away—but then Gabbe gave her the warmest smile, one that made Luce feel somehow safe, and she realized she was glad she wasn’t alone.

“How much of it was a dream?” she murmured.

Gabbe laughed. She had a pot of cuticle cream on the table next to her, and she began rubbing the white, lemon-scented stuff into Luce’s nail beds. “That all depends,” she said, massaging Luce’s fingers. “But never mind dreams. I know that whenever I feel my world turning upside down, nothing grounds me like a manicure.”