The Fallen Sequence (73 page)

There came a bursting sound from Luce’s side of the lake, like the letting out of a parachute. And then: A blooming shot of red-hot fire in the middle of a blizzard. A huge column of bright orange flames shooting into the sky at the edge of the pond. Where Luce had been. The other skaters rushed senselessly toward it, barreling across the pond. But the ice was melting, rapidly, catastrophically, sending their skates plunging through to the frigid water underneath. Vera’s scream echoed through the blue night, her frozen look of agony all that Luce could see
.

In the casino, Vera yanked her hand back, shaking it as if she’d been burned. Her lips quivered a few times before they formed the words: “It’s you.” She shook her head. “But it can’t be.”

“Vera,” Luce whispered, reaching her hand out again to her sister. She wanted to hold her, to take all the pain Vera had ever been caused and transfer it to herself.

“No.” Vera shook her head, backing away and wagging a finger at Luce. “No, no, no.” She backed into the dealer at the table behind her, tripping over him and sending a giant stack of poker chips cascading off the table. The colored disks slid across the floor, causing a ripple of oohs and aahs from gamblers who leaped from their seats to scoop them up.

“Dammit, Vera!” a squat man bellowed over the din. As he waddled to their table in a cheap gray polyester suit and scuffed black shoes, Luce shared a worried glance with Miles and Shelby. Three underage kids wanted nothing to do with the pit boss. But he was still chewing Vera out, his lip curled up in disgust. “How many times—”

Vera had found her feet again but kept staring, terrified, at Luce, as if Luce were the devil instead of her sister a lifetime removed. Vera’s kohl-lined eyes were white with terror as she stammered, “She c-c-can’t be here.”

“Christ,” the pit boss muttered, checking out Luce and her friends, then speaking into a walkie-talkie. “Get me security. Got a coupla hoodlum kids.”

Luce shrank back between Miles and Shelby, who said through gritted teeth, “How about one of those step-throughs, Miles?”

Before Miles could reply, three men with enormous wrists and necks appeared and towered over them. The pit boss waved his hands. “Take them to the pen. See what other kind of trouble they’ve been in.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” a girl’s voice growled from behind the wall of security guards.

All heads whipped around to find the voice, but only Luce’s face lit up. “Arriane!”

The tiny girl flashed Luce a grin as she sidled through the crowd. With five-inch platform wedges, her hair done up all crazy, and her eyes nearly swallowed by dark eyeliner, Arriane fit in with the casino’s weird clientele perfectly. Nobody seemed to know quite what to make of her, least of all Shelby and Miles.

The pit boss veered over to confront Arriane. He reeked of shoe polish and cough medicine.

“Do you need to be taken to the pen, too, missy?”

“Ooh, sounds fun.” Arriane’s eyes widened. “Alas, I’m overbooked tonight. I’ve got front-row tickets to Blue Man Group, and of course there’s dinner with Cher after the show. One more thing I know I had to do …” She tapped her chin, then looked over at Luce. “Ah yes—get these three guys the hell out of here. ’Scuse us!” She blew a kiss at the fuming pit boss, shrugged an apology at Vera, and snapped her fingers.

Then all the lights went out.

THIRTEEN

SIX DAYS

R
ushing them through the labyrinth of the dark casino, Arriane moved as if she had night vision.

“Stay cool, you three,” she sang. “I’ll have you out of here in a flash.”

She held Luce’s wrist in a tight grip, and Luce in turn held Miles’s hand; Miles held Shelby’s, as she cursed at the indignity of having to bring up the escape caboose.

Arriane led them unerringly, and though Luce
couldn’t see what she was doing, she could hear people grunt and exclaim as Arriane shouldered them aside. “Sorry ’bout that!” she’d call. “Whoops!” and “Excuse me!”

She took them down dark hallways packed with anxious tourists using their cell phones as flashlights. Up darker staircases, stuffy with disuse and crammed with empty cardboard boxes. Finally she kicked open an emergency exit, ushering them through it and into a dark, narrow alley.

The alleyway was tucked between the Mirage and another towering hotel. A row of Dumpsters sent out the foul odor of expensive rotting food. A trickle of acid-green gutter water formed a vile little river, splitting the alley in half. Straight ahead, in the middle of the bright, bustling neon-lit Strip, an old-fashioned black street clock struck twelve.

“Ahhh.” Arriane inhaled deeply. “The beginning of another glorious day in Sin City. I like to start it off right, with a big breakfast. Who’s hungry?”

“Um … er …,” Shelby stammered, looking at Luce, then Arriane, then at the casino. “What just … How did …”

Miles’s gaze was fixed on the shiny, marbled scar that spanned one side of Arriane’s neck. Luce was used to Arriane by now, but it was clear that her friends didn’t know what to make of her.

Arriane waved her finger at Miles. “This guy looks like he can eat his weight in waffles. Come on, I know a filthy diner.”

As they clipped up the alley toward the street, Miles turned to Luce and mouthed, “That was
awesome.
”

Luce nodded. It was all she could do to keep up with Arriane as she jogged across the Strip.
Vera
. She couldn’t get over it. All those memories, glimpsed in a flash. They’d been painful and startling, and she could only imagine what it had been like for Vera. But for Luce, they had also been deeply satisfying. More than with any of her glimpses through the Announcers so far, this time she felt as if she’d
experienced
one of her past lives. Strangely, she’d also seen something she’d never even thought about: Her previous selves had lives. Lives that had been full and meaningful before Daniel had shown up.

Arriane led them to an IHOP, a squat brown stucco building that looked so ancient it could have predated everything else on the Strip. It seemed more claustrophobic and sadder than other IHOPs.

Shelby led the way inside, pushing through the glass doors, chiming the cheap jingle bells duct-taped to the top. She grabbed a fistful of mints from the bowl by the register before claiming a booth in the far back corner. Arriane slid in next to her, while Luce and Miles took the other side of the cracked orange leather booth.

With a whistle and a quick circular gesture, Arriane ordered a round of coffee from the plump, pretty waitress with the pencil stuck in her hair.

The rest of them focused on the thick, spiral-bound laminated menu. Turning the pages was a battle against the ancient maple syrup welding the whole thing together—and a good way to avoid talking about the trouble they’d just narrowly escaped.

Finally Luce had to ask. “What are you doing here, Arriane?”

“Ordering something with a funny name. Rooty Tooty, I guess, since they don’t have Moons Over My Hammy here. I can never decide.”

Luce rolled her eyes. Arriane didn’t need to act so coy. It was obvious her rescue effort hadn’t been coincidental. “You know what I mean.”

“These are strange days, Luce. I figured I’d pass them in an equally strange city.”

“Yeah, well, they’re almost over. Aren’t they, according to the truce timeline?”

Arriane put down her coffee cup and cradled her chin in her palm. “Well, hallelujah. They are teaching you something at that school after all.”

“Yes and no,” Luce said. “I just overheard Roland saying something about how Daniel would be counting down the minutes. He said it had something to do with a truce, but I didn’t know exactly how many minutes we were talking about.”

Beside her, Miles’s body seemed to have stiffened at the mention of Daniel. When the waitress arrived to take their orders, he barked his out first, practically shoving the menu back at her. “Steak and eggs, rare.”

“Oooh,
manly,
” Arriane said, eyeing Miles approvingly in the midst of the eeny, meeny, miny, moe game she was playing on her menu. “Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruity it is.” She enunciated as properly as the Queen of England might, keeping a remarkably straight face.

“Pigs in a blanket for me,” Shelby said. “Actually, make that an egg-white omelet, no cheese. Aw, what the hell. Pigs in a blanket.”

The waitress turned to Luce. “How ’bout you, hon?”

“Breakfast Sampler.” Luce smiled apologetically on behalf of her friends. “Scrambled, hold the meat.”

The waitress nodded, padding off toward the kitchen.

“Okay, so what else did you hear?” Arriane asked.

“Um.” Luce started playing with the carafe of syrup next to the salt and pepper. “There was some talk of, you know, End Times.”

Snickering, Shelby splashed three little tubs of creamer into her coffee. “End Times! You actually buy into that crap? I mean, how many millennia have we been waiting around for that? And humans think they’ve been patient for a mere couple thousand years! Hah. Like anything is ever going to change.”

Arriane looked about a second away from putting
Shelby in her place, but then she set down her coffee. “How rude of me to not even introduce myself to your friends, Luce.”

“Um, we know who you are,” Shelby said.

“Yeah, there was a whole chapter on you in my eighth-grade History of Angels textbook,” Miles said.

Arriane clapped. “And they told me that book had been banned!”

“Seriously? You’re in a textbook?” Luce laughed.

“Why so surprised? You don’t find me historic?” Arriane turned back to Shelby and Miles. “Now, tell me all about yourselves. I need to know who my girl’s been palling around with.”

“Lapsed nonbelieving Nephilim.” Shelby raised her hand.

Miles stared at his food. “And the ineffectual great-great-great-to-the-nth-degree-grandson of an angel.”

“That’s not true.” Luce bumped Miles’s shoulder. “Arriane, you should have seen how he helped us step through this shadow tonight. He was great. That’s why we’re here, because he read this book and the next thing you know, he could—”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that,” Arriane said sarcastically. “But what concerns me more is this one.” She gestured at Shelby. Arriane’s face was much graver than Luce was accustomed to. Even her manic light blue eyes looked steady. “It’s not a good time to be a lapsed
anything right now. Everything’s in flux, but there will be a reckoning. And you will have to choose one side or the other.” Arriane stared deliberately at Shelby. “We all have to know where we stand.”

Before anyone could respond, the waitress reappeared, wielding a huge brown plastic tray of food.

“Well, how’s this for speedy service?” she asked. “Now, which one of you had the pigs—”

“Me!” Shelby startled the waitress with the quickness of her reach for the plate.

“Anybody need any ketchup?”

They shook their heads.

“Extra butter?”

Luce pointed down at the ice cream scoop of butter already on her pancakes. “We’re all set. Thanks.”

“If we need anything,” Arriane said, beaming down at the whipped cream happy face on her plate, “we’ll holler.”

“Oh, I know
you
will.” The waitress chuckled, tucking the tray under her arm. “Holler like the world’s about to end, this one will.”

After she left, Arriane was the only one who ate. She plucked a blueberry from the pancake’s nose, popped it into her mouth, and licked her fingers with relish. Finally she glanced around the table.

“Dig in,” Arriane said. “There’s nothing good about cold steak and eggs.” She sighed. “Come on, guys.
You’ve read the history books. Don’t you know the drill—”

“I haven’t,” Luce said. “I don’t know any drills.”

Arriane sucked meditatively on her fork. “Good point. In that case, allow me to present my version to you. Which is more fun than the history books anyway because I won’t censor the big fights and curses and all the sexy stuff. My version has everything but 3-D, which, I have to say, is totally overrated. Did you see that movie with”—she noticed the blank looks on their faces. “Oh, never mind. Okay, it starts millennia ago. Now, do I need to catch you up on Satan?”

“Waged an early power struggle against God.” Miles’s voice was a monotone, as if he were repeating a third-grade lesson plan while he speared a bit of steak with his fork.

“Before then they were super-tight,” Shelby added, dousing her pigs in blankets with syrup. “I mean, God called Satan his morning star. So it’s not like Satan wasn’t worthy or beloved.”

“But he would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” Luce chimed in. She might not have read the Nephilim histories, but she’d read
Paradise Lost
. Or at least, the CliffsNotes.

“
Very
nice.” Arriane beamed, leaning toward Luce. “You know, Gabbe was big friends with Milton’s daughters back in the day.
She
likes to take credit for that phrase, and I’m all ‘Aren’t you enough people’s darling
already?’ But whatever.” Arriane moved in on a forkful of Luce’s eggs. “Damn, these are
good
. Can we get some hot sauce over here?” she bellowed toward the kitchen. “Okay, where were we?”