The Fallen Sequence: An Omnibus Edition

by Lauren Kate

  Aside from Daniel, Shakespeare was the only one who knew the secret of Lucinda’s identity—her gender—and the love the players shared offstage. In exchange for his discretion, Lucinda was keeping the secret that Shakespeare was present that night at the Globe. Everyone else in the company assumed that he was in Stratford, that he’d handed over the reins of the theater to Master Fletcher. Instead, Will appeared incognito to see the play’s opening night.

  When she returned to his side, Shakespeare gazed deep into Lucinda’s eyes. “You’ve changed.”

  “I—no, I’m still”—she felt the soft brocade around her shoulders. “Yes, I found the cloak.”

  “The cloak, is it?” He smiled at her, winked. “It suits you.”

  Then Shakespeare put his hand on Lucinda’s shoulder, the way he always did when he was giving directorial instructions: “Hear this: Everyone here already knows your story. They’ll see you in this scene, and you won’t say or do very much. But Anne Boleyn is a rising star in the court. Every one of them has a stake in your destiny.” He swallowed. “As well: Don’t forget to hit the mark at the end of your line. You need to be downstage left for the start of the dance.”

  Luce could feel her lines in the play run across her mind. The words would be there when she needed them, when she stepped onstage in front of all these people. She was ready.

  The audience roared and applauded again. A rush of actors exited the stage and filled the space around her. Shakespeare had already slipped away. She could see Daniel on the opposite wing of the stage. He towered over the other actors, regal and impossibly gorgeous.

  It was her cue to walk onstage. This was the start of the party scene at Lord Wolsey’s estate, where the king—Daniel—would perform an elaborate masque before taking Anne Boleyn’s hand for the first time. They were supposed to dance and fall heavily in love. It was supposed to be the very beginning of a romance that changed everything.

  The beginning.

  But for Daniel, it wasn’t the beginning at all.

  For Lucinda, however, and for the character she was playing—it was love at first sight. Laying eyes on Daniel had felt like the first real thing ever to happen to Lucinda, just as it had felt for Luce at Sword & Cross. Her whole world had suddenly meant something in a way it never had before.

  Luce could not believe how many people were crowded into the Globe. They were practically on top of the actors, pressed so close to the stage in the pit that at least twenty spectators had their elbows propped up on the stage itself. She could smell them. She could hear them breathing.

  And yet, somehow, Luce felt calm, even energized—as if instead of panicking under all this attention, Lucinda was coming to life.

  It was a party scene. Luce was surrounded by Anne Boleyn’s ladies-in-waiting; she almost laughed at how comical her “ladies” looked around her. These teen boys’ Adam’s apples bobbed obviously under the glare of the stage lanterns. Sweat formed rings under the arms of their padded dresses. Across the stage, Daniel and his court stood watching her unabashedly, his love plain on his face. She played her part effortlessly, sneaking just enough admiring glances at Daniel to pique both his and the audience’s interest. She even improvised a move—pulling her hair away from her long, pale neck—that gave a foreboding hint of what everyone knew awaited the real Anne Boleyn.

  Two players drew close, flanking Luce. They were the noblemen of the play, Lord Sands and Lord Wolsey.

  “Ladies, you are not merry. Gentleman, whose fault is this?” Lord Wolsey’s voice boomed. He was the host of the party—and the villain—and the actor playing him had incredible stage presence.

  Then he turned and swept his gaze around to look at Luce. She froze.

  Lord Wolsey was being played by Cam.

  There was no space for Luce to shout, curse, or flee. She was a professional actor now, so she stayed collected, and turned to Wolsey’s companion, Lord Sands, who delivered his lines with a laugh.

  “The red wine first must rise in their fair cheeks, my lord,” he said.

  When it was Lucinda’s turn to deliver her line, her body trembled, and she sneaked a peek at Daniel. His violet eyes smoothed over the roughness she felt. He believed in her.

  “You are a merry gamester, my lord Sands,” Luce felt herself say loudly, in a perfectly pitched teasing tone.

  Then Daniel stepped forward and a trumpet sounded, followed by a drum. The dance was beginning. He took her hand. When he spoke, he spoke to her, not to the audience, as the other players did.

  “The fairest hand I ever touched,” Daniel said. “O Beauty, till now I never knew thee.” As if the lines had been written for the two of them.

  They began to dance, and Daniel locked eyes with her the whole time. His eyes were crystal clear and violet, and the way they never strayed from hers chipped away at Luce’s heart. She knew he’d loved her always, but until this moment, dancing with him on the stage in front of all these people, she had never really thought about what it meant.

  It meant that when she saw him for the first time in every life, Daniel was already in love with her. Every time. And always had been. And every time, she had to fall in love with him from scratch. He could never pressure her or push her into loving him. He had to win her anew each time.

  Daniel’s love for her was one long, uninterrupted stream. It was the purest form of love there was, purer even than the love Luce returned. His love flowed without breaking, without stopping. Whereas Luce’s love was wiped clean with every death, Daniel’s grew over time, across all eternity. How powerfully strong must it be by now? Hundreds of lifetimes of love stacked one on top of the other? It was almost too massive for Luce to comprehend.

  He loved her that much, and yet in every lifetime, over and over again, he had to wait for her to catch up.

  All this time, they had been dancing with the rest of the troupe, bounding in and out of the wings at breaks in the music, coming back onstage for more gallantry, for longer sets with more ornate steps, until the whole company was dancing.

  At the close of the scene, even though it wasn’t in the script, even though Cam was standing right there watching, Luce held fast to Daniel’s hand and pulled him to her, up against the potted orange trees. He looked at her like she was crazy and tried to tug her to the mark dictated by her stage directions. “What are you doing?” he murmured.

  He had doubted her before, backstage when she’d tried to speak freely about her feelings. She had to make him believe her. Especially if Lucinda died tonight, understanding the depth of her love would mean everything to him. It would help him to carry on, to keep loving her for hundreds more years, through all the pain and hardship she’d witnessed, right up to the present.

  Luce knew that it wasn’t in the script, but she couldn’t stop herself: She grabbed Daniel and she kissed him.

  She expected him to stop her, but instead he swooped her into his arms and kissed her back. Hard and passionately, responding with such intensity that she felt the way she did when they were flying, though she knew her feet were planted on the ground.

  For a moment, the audience was silent. Then they began to holler and jeer. Someone threw a shoe at Daniel, but he ignored it. His kisses told Luce that he believed her, that he understood the depth of her love, but she wanted to be absolutely sure.

  “I will always love you, Daniel.” Only, that didn’t seem quite right—or not quite enough. She had to make him understand, and damn the consequences—if she changed history, so be it. “I’ll always choose you.” Yes, that was the word. “Every single lifetime, I’ll choose you. Just as you have always chosen me. Forever.”

  His lips parted. Did he believe her? Did he already know? It was a choice, a long-standing, deep-seated choice that reached beyond anything else Luce was capable of. Something powerful was behind it. Something beautiful and—

  Shadows began to swirl in the rigging overhead. Heat quaked through her body, making her convulse, desperate for the fiery release she knew w
as coming.

  Daniel’s eyes flashed with pain. “No,” he whispered. “Please don’t go yet.”

  Somehow, it always took both of them by surprise.

  As her past self’s body erupted into flames, there was a sound of cannon fire, but Luce couldn’t be sure. Her eyes went blurry with brightness and she was cast far up and out of Lucinda’s body, into the air, into darkness.

  “No!” she cried as the walls of the Announcer closed around her. Too late.

  “What’s the problem now?” Bill asked.

  “I wasn’t ready. I know Lucinda had to die, but I—I was just—” She’d been on the brink of understanding something about the choice she’d made to love Daniel. And now everything about those last moments with Daniel had gone up in flames along with her past self.

  “Well, there’s not much more to see,” Bill said. “Just the usual routine of a building catching fire—smoke, walls of flame, people screaming and stampeding toward the exits, trampling the less fortunate underfoot—you get the picture. The Globe burned to the ground.”

  “What?” she said, feeling sick. “I started the fire at the Globe?” Surely burning down the most famous theater in English history would have repercussions across time.

  “Oh, don’t get all self-important. It was going to happen anyway. If you hadn’t burst into flames, the cannon onstage would have misfired and taken the whole place out.”

  “This is so much bigger than me and Daniel. All those people—”

  “Look, Mother Teresa, no one died that night … besides you. No one else even got hurt. Remember that drunk leering at you from the third row? His pants catch on fire. That’s the worst of it. Feel better?”

  “Not really. Not at all.”

  “How about this: You’re not here to add to your mountain of guilt. Or to change the past. There’s a script, and you have your entrances and your exits.”

  “I wasn’t ready for my exit.”

  “Why not? Henry the Eighth sucks, anyway.”

  “I wanted to give Daniel hope. I wanted him to know that I would always choose him, always love him. But Lucinda died before I could be sure he understood.” She closed her eyes. “His half of our curse is so much worse than mine.”

  “That’s good, Luce!”

  “What do you mean? That’s horrible!”

  “I mean that little gem—that ‘Wah, Daniel’s agony is infinitely more horrible than mine’—that’s what you learned here. The more you understand, the closer you’ll get to knowing the root of the curse, and the more likely it is that you’ll eventually find your way out of it. Right?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “I do. Now come on, you’ve got bigger roles to play.”

  Daniel’s side of the curse was worse. Luce could see that now very clearly. But what did it mean? She didn’t feel any closer to being able to break it. The answer eluded her. But she knew Bill was right about one thing: She could do nothing more in this lifetime. All she could do was keep going back.

  FOURTEEN

  THE STEEP SLOPE

  CENTRAL GREENLAND • WINTER, 1100

  The sky was black when Daniel stepped through. Behind him, the portal billowed in the wind like a tattered curtain, snagging and tearing itself apart before falling to pieces on the night-blue snow.

  A chill crept over his body. At first sight, there seemed to be nothing here at all. Nothing but arctic nights that seemed to go on forever, offering only the thinnest glimpse of day at the end.

  He remembered now: These fjords were the place where he and his fellow fallen angels held their meetings: all bleak dimness and harsh cold, a two days’ trek north of the mortal settlement of Brattahlíõ. But he would not find her here. This land had never been a part of Lucinda’s past, so there would be nothing in her Announcers to bring her here now.

  Just Daniel. And the others.

  He shivered and marched across the snow-swept fjord toward a warm glow on the horizon. Seven of them were gathered around the bright-orange fire. From a distance, the circle of their wings looked like a giant halo on the snow. Daniel didn’t have to count their shining outlines to know they were all there.

  None of them noticed him crossing the snow toward their assembly. They always kept a single starshot on hand just in case, but the idea of an uninvited visitor happening upon their council was so implausible it was not even a real threat. Besides, they were too busy bickering among themselves to detect the Anachronism crouching behind a frozen boulder, eavesdropping.

  “This was a waste of time.” Gabbe’s voice was the first one Daniel could make out. “We’re not going to get anywhere.”

  Gabbe’s patience could be a short-fused thing. At the start of the war, her rebellion had lasted a split second compared to Daniel’s. Ever since then, her commitment to her side had run deep. She was back in the Graces of Heaven, and Daniel’s hesitation went against everything she believed in. As she paced the perimeter of the fire, the tips of her huge feathered white wings dragged in the snow behind her.

  “You’re the one who called this meeting,” a low voice reminded her. “Now you want to adjourn?” Roland was seated on a short black log a few feet in front of where Daniel crouched behind a boulder. Roland’s hair was long and unkempt. His dark profile and his marbled gold-black wings glittered like embers in the dusk of a fire.

  It was all just as Daniel remembered.

  “The meeting I called was for them.” Gabbe stopped pacing and tossed her wing to point at the two angels sitting next to each other across the fire from Roland.

  Arriane’s slender iridescent wings were still for once, rising high above her shoulder blades. Their shimmer looked almost phosphorescent in the colorless night, but everything else about Arriane, from her short black bob to her pale, drawn lips, looked harrowingly somber and sedate.

  The angel beside Arriane was quieter than usual, too. Annabelle stared blankly into the far reaches of the night. Her wings were dark silver, almost pewter-colored. They were broad and muscular, stretching around her and Arriane in a wide, protective arc. It had been a long time since Daniel had seen her.

  Gabbe came to a stop behind Arriane and Annabelle and stood facing the other side: Roland, Molly, and Cam, who were sharing a coarse fur blanket. It was draped over their wings. Unlike the angels on the other side of the fire, the demons were shivering.

  “We didn’t expect your side tonight,” Gabbe told them, “nor are we happy to see you.”

  “We have a stake in this, too,” Molly said roughly.

  “Not in the same way we do,” Arriane said. “Daniel will never join you.”

  If Daniel hadn’t recalled where he’d sat at this meeting over a thousand years before, he might have overlooked his earlier self entirely. That earlier self was sitting alone, in the center of the group, directly on the other side of the boulder. Behind the rock, Daniel shifted to get a better view.

  His earlier self’s wings bloomed out behind him, great white sails as still as the night. As the others talked about him as if he weren’t there, Daniel behaved as if he were alone in the world. He tossed fistfuls of snow into the fire, watching the frozen clumps hiss and dissolve into steam.

  “Oh, really?” Molly said. “Care to explain why he’s inching closer to our side every lifetime? That little cursing-God bit he does whenever Luce explodes? I doubt it goes over so well upstairs.”

  “He’s in agony!” Annabelle shouted at Molly. “You wouldn’t understand because you don’t know how to love.” She scooted nearer to Daniel, the tips of her wings dragging in the snow, and addressed him directly. “Those are just temporary blips. We all know your soul is pure. If you wanted to at last choose a side, to choose us, Daniel—if at any moment—”

  “No.”

  The clean finality of the word pushed Annabelle away as quickly as if Daniel had drawn a weapon. Daniel’s earlier self would not look at any of them. And behind the boulder, watching them, Daniel remembered what had happened during t
his council, and shuddered at the forbidden horror of the memory.

  “If you won’t join them,” Roland said to Daniel, “why not join us? From what I can tell, there is no worse Hell than what you put yourself through every time you lose her.”

  “Oh, cheap shot, Roland!” Arriane said. “You don’t even mean that. You can’t believe—” She wrung her hands. “You’re only saying that to provoke me.”

  Behind Arriane, Gabbe rested a hand on her shoulder. Their wing tips touched, flashing a bright burst of silver between them. “What Arriane means is that Hell is never a better alternative. No matter how terrible Daniel’s pain may be. There is only one place for Daniel. There is only one place for all of us. You see how penitent the Outcasts are.”

  “Spare us the preaching, will ya?” Molly said. “There’s a choir up there that might be interested in your brainwashing, but I’m not, and I don’t think Daniel is, either.”

  The angels and demons all turned to stare at him together, as if they were still part of the host. Seven pairs of wings casting a glowing aura of silver-gold light. Seven souls he knew as well as his own.

  Even behind his boulder, Daniel felt suffocated. He remembered this moment: They demanded so much of him. When he was so weakened by his broken heart. He felt the assault of Gabbe’s plea for him to join with Heaven all over again. Roland’s, too, to join with Hell. Daniel felt again the shape of the one word he had spoken at the meeting, like a strange ghost in his mouth: No.

  Slowly, with a sick feeling creeping over him, Daniel remembered one more thing: That no? He hadn’t meant it. In that moment, Daniel had been on the verge of saying yes.

  This was the night he’d almost given up.