by Lauren Kate
Bill perched above her shoulder, hovering in the air. “Check her out.” His stone claw pointed toward the palm.
Luce watched in awe as a pair of feet emerged from the fronds high on the quaking tree trunk. Then a girl wearing little more than a woven skirt and an enormous floral lei tossed four shaggy brown coconuts to the beach before scampering down the knobby trunk to the ground.
Her hair was long and loose, catching in its dark strands diamonds of light from the sun. Luce knew the exact feel of it, the way it would tickle her arms as it swayed in waves past her waist. The sun had turned Lulu’s skin a deep golden brown—darker than Luce had ever been, even when she spent a whole summer at her grandmother’s beach house in Biloxi—and her face and arms were etched with dark geometric tattoos. She existed somewhere between utterly unrecognizable and absolutely Luce.
“Wow,” Luce whispered as Bill yanked her behind the shelter of a shrubby, purple-flowered tree. “Hey—Ow! What are you doing?”
“Escorting you to a safer vantage.” Bill dragged her up again into the air, until they were rising through the canopy of leaves. Once they cleared the trees, he flew her to a high, sturdy branch and plunked her down, and she could see the whole beach.
“Lulu!”
The voice sank though Luce’s skin and straight into her heart. Daniel’s voice. He was calling to her. He wanted her. Needed her. Luce moved toward the sound. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d started to rise from her seat on the high branch, as if she could just walk off the treetop and fly to him—until Bill gripped her elbow.
“Precisely why I had to drag your popa’a ass up here. He’s not talking to you. He’s talking to her.”
“Oh.” Luce sank back down heavily. “Right.”
On the black sand, the girl with the coconuts, Lulu, was running. And down the beach, sprinting toward her, was Daniel.
He was shirtless, gorgeously tanned and muscular, wearing only cropped navy-blue trousers that were fraying at the edges. His skin glittered with seawater, fresh from a dip in the ocean. His bare feet kicked up sand. Luce envied the water, envied the sand. Envied everything that got to touch Daniel when she was stuck up in this tree. She envied her past self the most.
Running toward Lulu, Daniel looked happier and more natural than Luce could ever remember seeing him. It made her want to cry.
They reached each other. Lulu threw her arms around him, and he swept her up, twirling her in the air. He set her back on her feet and showered her with kisses, kissing her fingertips and her forearms, all the way up to her shoulders, her neck, her mouth.
Bill reclined against Luce’s shoulder. “Wake me up when they get to the good stuff,” he said, yawning.
“Pervert!” She wanted to slug him, but she didn’t want to touch him.
“I mean the tattooing, gutter-brain. I’m into tats, okay?”
When Luce looked back at the couple on the beach, Lulu was leading Daniel to a woven mat that was spread on the sand not far from the hut. Daniel pulled a short machete from the belt of his trousers and hacked at one of the coconuts. After a few slashes, he split off the top and handed the rest of it to Lulu. She drank deeply, milk dripping from the corners of her mouth. Daniel kissed them clean.
“There’s no tattooing, they’re just—” Luce broke off when her past self disappeared into the hut. Lulu reappeared a moment later carrying a small parcel bound in palm leaves. She unwrapped a tool that looked like a wooden comb. The bristles gleamed in the sun, as if they were needle-sharp. Daniel lay back on the mat, watching as Lulu dipped the comb into a large shallow seashell filled with a black powder.
Lulu gave him a quick kiss and then began.
Starting at his breastbone, she pressed the comb into his skin. She worked quickly, pressing hard and fast, and each time she moved the comb she left a smear of black pigment tattooed on his skin. Luce could begin to make out a design: a small checkerboard-patterned breastplate. It was going to span his entire chest. Luce’s only trip to a tattoo parlor had been once in New Hampshire with Callie, who wanted a tiny pink heart on her hip. It had taken less than a minute and Callie had bellowed the whole time. Here, though, Daniel lay silently, never making a sound, never moving his eyes off Lulu. It took a long while, and Luce felt sweat trickle down the small of her back as she watched.
“Eh? How ’bout that?” Bill nudged her. “Did I promise to show you love or did I promise to show you love?”
“Sure, they seem like they’re in love.” Luce shrugged. “But—”
“But what? Do you have any idea how painful that is? Look at that guy. He makes getting inked look like being caressed by a soft breeze.”
Luce squirmed on the branch. “Is that the lesson here? Pain equals love?”
“You tell me,” Bill said. “It may surprise you to hear this, but the ladies aren’t exactly banging down Bill’s door.”
“I mean, if I tattooed Daniel’s name on my body would that mean I loved him more than I already do?”
“It’s a symbol, Luce.” Bill let out a raspy sigh. “You’re being too literal. Think about it this way: Daniel is the first good-looking boy Lulu has ever seen. Until he washed ashore a few months ago, this girl’s whole world was her father and a few fat natives.”
“She’s Miranda,” Luce said, remembering the love story from The Tempest, which she’d read in her tenth-grade Shakespeare seminar.
“How very civilized of you!” Bill pursed his lips with approval. “They are like Ferdinand and Miranda: The handsome foreigner shipwrecks on her shores—”
“So, of course it was love at first sight for Lulu,” Luce murmured. This was what she was afraid of: the same thoughtless, automatic love that had bothered her in Helston.
“Right,” Bill said. “She didn’t have a choice but to fall for him. But what’s interesting here is Daniel. You see, he didn’t have to teach her to craft a woven sail, or gain her father’s trust by producing a season’s worth of fish to cure, or exhibit C”—Bill pointed at the lovers on the beach—“agree to tattoo his whole body according to her local custom. It would have been enough if Daniel had just shown up. Lulu would have loved him anyway.”
“He’s doing it because—” Luce thought aloud. “Because he wants to earn her love. Because otherwise, he would just be taking advantage of their curse. Because no matter what kind of cycle they’re bound to, his love for her is … true.”
So then why wasn’t Luce entirely convinced?
On the beach, Daniel sat up. He took hold of Lulu by the shoulders and began kissing her tenderly. His chest bled from the tattooing, but neither of them seemed to notice. Their lips barely parted, their eyes never left each other.
“I want to leave now,” Luce said suddenly to Bill.
“Really?” Bill blinked, standing up on the tree branch as if she’d startled him.
“Yes, really. I’ve gotten what I came here for and I’m ready to move on. Right now.” She tried to stand, too, but the branch swayed under her weight.
“Um, okay.” Bill took her arm to steady her. “Where to?”
“I don’t know, but let’s hurry.” The sun was sinking in the sky behind them, lengthening the lovers’ shadows on the sand. “Please. I want to hold on to one good memory. I don’t want to see her die.”
Bill’s face was pinched up and confused, but he didn’t say anything.
Luce couldn’t wait any longer. She closed her eyes and let her desire call to an Announcer. When she opened her eyes again, she could see a quiver in the shadow of a nearby passion fruit tree. She concentrated, summoning it with all her might until the Announcer began to tremble.
“Come on,” she said, gritting her teeth.
At last, the Announcer freed itself, zipping off the tree and through the air, floating directly in front of her.
“Easy now,” Bill said, hovering above the branch. “Desperation and Announcer-travel do not mix well. Like pickles and chocolate.”
Luce stared at him.
“I mean: Don’t get so desperate that you lose sight of what you want.”
“I want to get out of here,” Luce said, but she couldn’t coax the shadow into a stable shape, no matter how hard she tried. She wasn’t looking at the lovers on the beach, but nonetheless she could feel the darkness gathering in the sky over the beach. It wasn’t rain clouds. “Help me, Bill?”
He sighed, reaching for the dark mass in the air, and drew it toward him. “This is your shadow, you realize. I’m manipulating it, but it’s your Announcer and your past.”
Luce nodded.
“Which means you have no idea where it’s taking you, and I have no liability.”
She nodded again.
“Okay, then.” He rubbed at a part of the Announcer until it went darker; then he caught the dark spot with a claw and yanked on it. It worked like a sort of doorknob. The stink of mildew flooded out, making Luce cough.
“Yeah, I smell it, too,” Bill said. “This is an old one.” He gestured her forward. “Ladies first.”
PRUSSIA • JANUARY 7, 1758
A snowflake kissed Luce’s nose.
Then another, and another, and more, until a storm of flurries filled the air and the whole world turned white and cold. She exhaled a long cloud of breath into the frost.
Somehow, she’d known they would end up here, even though she wasn’t exactly sure where here was. All she knew was that the afternoon skies were dark with a furious storm, and wet snow was seeping through her black leather boots, biting at her toes and chilling her to the bone.
She was walking into her own funeral.
She’d felt it in the instant passing through this last Announcer. An oncoming coldness, unforgiving as a sheet of ice. She found herself at the gates of a cemetery, everything blanketed by snow. Behind her was a tree-lined road, the bare branches clawing at the pewter sky. Before her was a low rise of snow-shrouded earth, tombstones and crosses jutting out of the white like jagged, dirty teeth.
A few feet behind her, someone whistled. “You sure you’re ready for this?” Bill. He sounded out of breath, like he’d just caught up with her.
“Yes.” Her lips were chattering. She didn’t turn around until Bill swooped down near her shoulders.
“Here,” he said, holding out a dark mink coat. “Thought you might be cold.”
“Where did you—”
“I yoinked it off a broad coming home from the market back there. Don’t worry, she had enough natural padding already.”
“Bill!”
“Hey, you needed it!” He shrugged. “Wear it in good health.”
He draped the thick coat over Luce’s shoulders, and she pulled it closer. It was unbelievably soft and warm. A wave of gratitude rushed over her; she reached up and took his claw, not even caring that it was sticky and cold.
“Okay,” Bill said, squeezing her hand. For a moment, Luce felt an odd warmth in her fingertips. But then it was gone, and Bill’s stone fingers were stone cold. He took a deep, nervous breath. “Um. Uh. Prussia, mid-eighteenth century. You live in a small village on the banks of the river Handel. Very nice.” He cleared his throat and hacked up a large wad of phlegm before he went on. “I should say, er, that you lived. You’ve actually, just—well—”
“Bill?” She craned her neck to look at him sitting hunched forward on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “You don’t have to explain. Let me just, you know, feel it.”
“That’s probably best.”
As Luce walked quietly through the cemetery gates, Bill hung back. He sat cross-legged on top of a lichen-swathed shrine, picking at the grit under his claws. Luce lowered her shawl over her head to obscure more of her face.
Up ahead were mourners, black-clad and somber, pressed so tightly together for warmth that they looked like a single mass of grief. Except for one person who stood behind the group and off to one side. He hung his bare blond head.
No one spoke to or even looked at Daniel. Luce couldn’t tell whether he was bothered by being left out or whether he preferred it.
By the time she reached the back of the small crowd, the burial was drawing to a close. A name was carved into a flat gray tombstone: Lucinda Müller. A boy, no older than twelve, with dark hair and pale skin and tears streaming down his face, helped his father—her father from this other life?—shovel the first mound of dirt over the grave.
These men must have been related to her past self. They must have loved her. There were women and children crying behind them; Lucinda Müller must have meant something to them as well. Maybe she’d meant everything to them.
But Luce Price didn’t know these people. She felt callous and strange to realize that they meant nothing to her, even as she saw the pain mar their faces. Daniel was the only one here who really mattered to her, the one she wanted to run to, the one she had to hold herself back from.
He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t even staring at the grave like everyone else. His hands were clasped in front of him and he was looking far away—not at the sky, but far into the distance. His eyes were violet one moment, gray the next.
When the family members had cast a few shovelfuls of dirt over the casket and the plot had been scattered with flowers, the funeral-goers split apart and walked shakily back to the main road. It was over.
Only Daniel remained. As immobile as the dead.
Luce hung back, too, dodging behind a squat mausoleum a few plots away, watching to see what he would do.
It was dusk. They had the graveyard to themselves. Daniel lowered himself to his knees next to Lucinda’s grave. Snow thrummed down on the cemetery, coating Luce’s shoulders, fat flakes getting tangled in her eyelashes, wetting the tip of her nose. She edged around the corner of the mausoleum, her entire body tensed.
Would he lose it? Would he claw at the frozen dirt and pound on the gravestone and bawl until there were no more tears he could shed? He couldn’t feel as calm as he looked. It was impossible, a front. But Daniel barely looked at the grave. He lay down on his side in the snow and closed his eyes.
Luce stared. He was so still and gorgeous. With his eyelids closed, he looked at absolute peace. She was half in love, half confused, and stayed that way for several minutes—until she was so frozen, she had to rub her arms and stamp her feet to warm up.
“What is he doing?” she finally whispered.
Bill appeared behind her and flitted around her shoulders. “Looks like he’s sleeping.”
“But why? I didn’t even know angels needed to sleep—”
“Need isn’t the right word. They can sleep if they feel like it. Daniel always sleeps for days after you die.” Bill tossed his head, seeming to recall something unpleasant. “Okay, not always. Most of the time. Must be pretty taxing, to lose the one thing you love. Can you blame him?”
“S-sort of,” Luce stammered. “I’m the one who bursts into flames.”
“And he’s the one who’s left alone. The age-old question: Which is worse?”
“But he doesn’t even look sad. He looked bored the entire funeral. If it were me, I’d … I’d …”
“You’d what?”
Luce moved toward the grave and stopped short at the loose earth where her plot began. A coffin lay beneath this.
Her coffin.
The thought sent shivers up her spine. She sank to her knees and put her palms down in the dirt. It was damp and dark and freezing cold. She buried her hands inside it, feeling frostbitten almost instantly and not caring, welcoming the burn. She’d wanted Daniel to do this, to feel for her body in the earth. To go mad with wanting her back—alive and in his arms.
But he was just sleeping, so dead asleep that he didn’t even sense her kneeling right beside him. She wanted to touch him, to wake him, but she didn’t even know what she’d say when he opened his eyes.
Instead, she pawed at the muddy earth, until the flowers laid so neatly on it were scattered and broken, until the beautiful mink coat was soiled and her arms and face were covered i
n mud. She dug and dug and tossed the earth aside, reaching deeper for her dead self. She ached for some connection.
At last her fingers hit something hard: the wooden lid of the coffin. She closed her eyes and waited for the kind of flash she’d felt in Moscow, the bolt of memories that had flooded through her when she’d touched the abandoned church gate and felt Luschka’s life.
Nothing.
Just emptiness. Loneliness. A howling white wind.
And Daniel, asleep and unreachable.
She sat back on her heels and sobbed. She didn’t know a thing about the girl who had died. She felt she never would.
“Yoo-hoo,” Bill said quietly from her shoulder. “You’re not in there, you know?”
“What?”
“Think about it. You’re not in there. You’re a fleck of ash by now if you’re anything. You didn’t have a body to bury, Luce.”
“Because of the fire. Oh. But then why …?” she asked, then stopped herself. “My family wanted this.”
“They’re strict Lutherans.” Bill nodded. “Every Müller for a hundred years has a tombstone in this cemetery. So your past self does, too. There’s just nothing under it. Or not quite nothing. Your favorite dress. A childhood doll. Your copy of the Bible. That sort of thing.”
Luce swallowed. No wonder she felt so empty inside. “So Daniel—that’s why he wasn’t looking at the grave.”
“He’s the only one who accepts that your soul is someplace else. He stayed because this is the closest place he can go to hold on to your memory.” Bill swooped down so close to Daniel that the buzz of his stony wings rustled Daniel’s hair. Luce almost pushed Bill away. “He’ll try to sleep until your soul is settled somewhere else. Until you’ve found your next incarnation.”
“How long does that take?”
“Sometimes seconds, sometimes years. But he won’t sleep for years. As much as he’d probably like to.”
Daniel’s movement on the ground made Luce jump.
He stirred in his blanket of snow. An agonized groan escaped his lips.