by Lauren Kate
“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
“Are 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.”
Luce glanced down. She’d never been much for nail polish herself, but Gabbe’s words reminded her of her mother, who was always suggesting they go for manicures whenever Luce had a bad day. As Gabbe’s slow hands worked over her fingers, Luce wondered whether all these years, she’d been missing out.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Lullwater Hospital.”
Her first trip off campus and she ended up in a hospital five minutes from her parents’ house. The last time she’d been here was to get three stitches on her elbow when she’d fallen off her bike. Her father hadn’t left her side. Now he was nowhere to be seen.
“How long have I been here?” she asked.
Gabbe looked at a white clock on the wall and said, “They found you passed out from smoke inhalation last night around eleven. It’s standard operating procedure to call for EMTs when they find a reform kid unconcious, but don’t worry, Randy said they’re going to let you out of here pretty soon. As soon as your parents give the okay—”
“My parents are here?”
“And filled with concern for their daughter, right down to the split ends of your mama’s permed hair. They’re in the hallway, drowning in paperwork. I told them I’d keep an eye on you.”
Luce groaned and pressed her face into the pillow, calling up the deep pain at the back of her head again.
“If you don’t want to see them …”
But Luce wasn’t groaning about her parents. She was dying to see her parents. She was remembering the library, the fire, and the new breed of shadows that grew more terrifying every time they found her. They’d always been dark and unsightly, they’d always made her nervous, but last night, it had almost seemed as if the shadows wanted something from her. And then there was that other thing, the levitating force that had set her free.
“What’s that look?” Gabbe asked, cocking her head and waving her hand in the air in front of Luce’s face. “What are you thinking about?”
Luce didn’t know what to make of Gabbe’s sudden kindness toward her. Nurse’s assistant didn’t exactly seem like the kind of gig Gabbe would volunteer for, and it wasn’t like there were any guys around whose attention she could monopolize. Gabbe didn’t even seem to like Luce. She wouldn’t just show up here of her own accord, would she?
But even as nice as Gabbe was being, there was no way to explain what had happened last night. The grisly, unspeakable gathering in the hallway. The surreal sensation of being propelled forward through that blackness. The strange, compelling figure of light.
“Where’s Todd?” Luce asked, remembering the boy’s fearful eyes. She’d lost her grip on him, gone flying, and then …
The paper curtain was suddenly slung back, and there was Arriane, wearing in-line skates and a red-and-white candy striper uniform. Her short black hair was twisted up in a series of knots on top of her head. She rolled in, carrying a tray on which sat three coconut shells topped with neon-colored umbrella party straws.
“Now lemme get this straight,” she said in a throaty, nasal voice. “You put the lime in the coconut and drink ’em both up—whoa, long faces. What am I interrupting?”
Arriane wheeled to a stop at the foot of Luce’s bed. She extended a coconut with a bobbing pink umbrella.
Gabbe jumped up and seized the coconut first, giving its contents a sniff. “Arriane, she has just been through a trauma,” she scolded. “And for your information, what you interrupted was the topic of Todd.”
Arriane tossed her shoulders back. “Precisely why she needs something with a kick,” she argued, holding the tray possessively while she and Gabbe engaged in a stare-down.
“Fine,” Arriane said, looking away from Gabbe. “I’ll give her your boring old drink.” She gave Luce the coconut with the blue straw.
Luce must have been in some kind of post-traumatic daze. Where would they have gotten any of this stuff? Coconut shells? Drink umbrellas? It was like she’d been conked out at reform school and woken up at Club Med.
“Where did you guys get all this stuff?” she asked. “I mean, thank you, but—”
“We pool our resources when we need to,” Arriane said. “Roland helped.”
The three of them sat slurping the frosty, sweet drinks for a moment, until Luce couldn’t take it anymore. “So back to Todd …?”
“Todd,” Gabbe said, clearing her throat. “Thing is … he just inhaled a lot more of that smoke than you did, honey—”
“He did not,” Arriane spat. “He broke his neck.”
Luce gasped, and Gabbe hit Arriane with her drink umbrella.
“What?” Arriane said. “Luce can handle it. If she’s going to find out eventually, why sugarcoat it?”
“The evidence is still inconclusive,” Gabbe said, stressing the words.
Arriane shrugged. “Luce was there, she must have seen—”
“I didn’t see what happened to him,” Luce said. “We were together and then somehow we were thrown apart. I had a bad feeling, but I didn’t know,” she whispered. “So he’s …”
“Gone from this world,” Gabbe said softly.
Luce closed her eyes. A chill spread through her that had nothing to do with the drink. She remembered Todd’s frenzied banging on the walls, his sweaty hand squeezing hers when the shadows roared down on them, the awful moment when the two of them had been split apart and she’d been too overcome to go to
him.
He’d seen the shadows. Luce was certain of it now. And he’d died.
After Trevor died, not a week had gone by without a hate letter finding its way to Luce. Her parents started trying to vet the mail before she could read the poisonous stuff, but too much still reached her. Some letters were handwritten, some were typed, one had even been cut from magazine letters, ransom-note style. Murderer. Witch. They’d called her enough cruel names to fill a scrapbook, caused enough agony to keep her locked inside the house all summer.
She thought she’d done so much to move on from that nightmare: leaving her past behind when she came to Sword & Cross, focusing on her classes, making friends … oh God. She sucked in her breath. “What about Penn?” she asked, biting her lip.
“Penn’s fine,” Arriane said. “She’s all front-page-story, eyewitness-to-the-fire. She and Miss Sophia both got out, smelling like an East Georgia smoke pit, but no worse for the wear.”
Luce let out her breath. At least there was one piece of good news. But under the paper-thin infirmary sheets, she was trembling. Soon, surely the same types of people who’d come to her after Trevor’s death would come to her again. Not just the ones who wrote the angry letters. Dr. Sanford. Her parole officer. The police.
Just like before, she’d be expected to have the whole story pieced together. To remember every single detail. But of course, just like before, she wouldn’t be able to. One minute, he’d been at her side, just the two of them. The next—
“Luce!” Penn barged into the room, holding a big brown helium balloon. It was shaped like a Band-Aid and said Stick It Out in blue cursive letters. “What is this?” she asked, looking at the other three girls critically. “Some sort of slumber party?”
Arriane had unlaced her skates and climbed onto the tiny bed next to Luce. She was double-fisting the coconut drinks and laying her head on Luce’s shoulder. Gabbe was painting clear nail polish on Luce’s coconut-free hand.
“Yeah,” Arriane cackled. “Join us, Pennyloafer. We were just about to play Truth or Dare. We’ll let you go first.”