by Lauren Kate
Closer. Then a little closer still.
Finally, the shadow wandered into the air just over her head.
“Shelby,” Luce whispered loudly. “Get down here.”
Shelby looked down at Luce. At the cyclone-shaped Announcer teetering over her. “What took you so long?” she asked, sprinting down the stairs just in time to watch the whole massive Announcer tumble down.
Straight into Luce’s arms.
Luce screamed—but luckily, Shelby clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Thank you,” Luce said, her words muffled against Shelby’s fingers.
The girls were still huddled three steps down from the deck, in plain view of anyone who might cross over to the shady side. Luce couldn’t straighten her knees under the weight of the shadow. It was the heaviest one she’d ever touched, and the coldest on her skin. It wasn’t black like most of the others, but a sickly greenish gray. Parts of it were still twitching, lighting up like bolts of distant lightning.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Shelby said.
“Come on,” Luce whispered. “I summoned it. Now it’s your turn to do the glimpsing.”
“My turn? Who said anything about me having a turn? You’re the one who dragged me down here.” Shelby waved her hands like the last thing on earth she wanted to do was touch the beast in Luce’s arms. “I know I said I’d help you track down your relatives, but whatever kind of relative you’ve got in here … I don’t think either of us wants to meet.”
“Shelby, please,” Luce begged, groaning from the weight, the chill, and the general nastiness of the shadow. “I’m not a Nephilim. If you don’t help me, I can’t do this.”
“What exactly are you trying to do?” A voice behind them from the top of the stairs. Steven had his hands clamped down on the banister and was glaring at the girls. He seemed larger than he did in class, towering over them, as if he had doubled in size. His deep brown eyes looked stormy, but Luce could feel the heat coming off them, and she was scared. Even the Announcer in her arms trembled and edged away.
Both girls were so startled they screamed.
Jarred by the sound, the shadow bolted from Luce’s arms. It moved so fast she had no chance to stop it, and it left nothing behind but a freezing, foul-smelling wake.
In the distance, a bell rang. Luce could sense all the other kids trooping off toward the mess hall for lunch. On his way out, Miles stuck his head over the railing and peered down at Luce, but he took one look at Steven’s red-hot expression, widened his eyes, and moved along.
“Luce,” Steven said, more politely than she expected. “Would you mind seeing me after school?”
When he lifted his hands off the railing, the wood underneath them was scorched black.
Steven opened the door before Luce even knocked. His gray shirt was a bit wrinkled and his black knit tie was loosened at the neck. But he had regained the appearance of serenity, which Luce was beginning to realize took effort for a demon. He wiped his glasses on a monogrammed handkerchief and stepped aside.
“Please come in.”
The office wasn’t big, just wide enough for a large black desk, just long enough for three tall black bookshelves, each one crammed with hundreds of well-worn books. But it was comfortable and even welcoming—not like what Luce had imagined a demon’s office would be like. There was a Persian carpet in the center of the room, a wide window looking east at the redwoods. Now, at dusk, the forest had an ethereal, almost lavender hue.
Steven sat down in one of two maroon desk chairs and motioned for Luce to take the other. She surveyed the framed pieces of art, jigsawed onto every spare inch of the wall. Most of them were portraits in varying degrees of detail. Luce recognized a few sketches of Steven himself and several flattering depictions of Francesca.
Luce took a deep breath, wondering how to begin. “I’m sorry I summoned that Announcer today; I—”
“Have you told anyone about what happened with Dawn in the water?”
“No. You told me not to.”
“You haven’t told Shelby? Miles?”
“I haven’t told anyone.”
He considered this for a moment. “Why did you call the Announcers the shadows the other day when we were talking on the boat?”
“It just slipped out. When I was growing up, they always were part of the shadows. They’d detach and come to me. So that’s what I called them, before I knew what they were.” Luce shrugged. “Stupid, really.”
“It’s not stupid.” Steven stood up and went to the farthest bookshelf. He pulled down a thick book with a dusty red cover and brought it back to the desk. Plato: The Republic. Steven opened it to the exact page he’d been looking for, turning the book right side up in front of Luce.
It was an illustration of a group of men inside a cave, shackled beside one another, facing a wall. A fire blazed behind them. They were pointing at the shadows cast on the wall by a second group of men who walked behind them. Below the image, a caption read: The Allegory of the Cave.
“What is this?” Luce asked. Her knowledge of Plato started and ended with the fact that he palled around with Socrates.
“Proof of why your name for the Announcers is actually quite smart.” Steven pointed at the illustration. “Imagine that these men spend their lives seeing only the shadows on this wall. They come to understand the world and what happens in it from these shadows, without ever seeing what casts the shadows. They don’t even understand that what they are seeing are shadows.”
She looked just beyond Steven’s finger to the second group of men. “So they can never turn around, never see the people and things creating the shadows?”
“Exactly. And because they can’t see what is actually casting the shadows, they assume that what they can see—these shadows on the wall—are reality. They have no idea that the shadows are mere representations and distortions of something much truer and more real.” He paused. “Do you understand why I’m telling you this?”
Luce shook her head. “You want me to stop messing with the Announcers?”
Steven closed the book with a snap, then crossed to the other side of the room. She felt as if she’d disappointed him somehow.
“Because I don’t believe you will stop … messing with the Announcers, even if I do ask you to. But I do want you to understand what you’re dealing with the next time you summon one. The Announcers are shadows of past events. They can be helpful, but they also contain some very distracting, sometimes dangerous distortions. There’s a lot to learn. A clean, safe summoning technique; then, of course, once you have honed your talents, the Announcer’s noise can be screened out and its message be heard clearly through—”
“You mean that whooshing noise? There’s a way to hear through that?”
“Never mind. Not yet.” Steven turned and sank his hands into his pockets. “What were you and Shelby after today?”
Luce felt flushed and uncomfortable. This meeting was not going at all as she’d expected. She’d thought maybe detention, some trash pickup.
“We were trying to learn more about my family,” she finally managed to get out. Thankfully, Steven seemed to have no idea she had seen Cam earlier. “Or my families, I guess I should say.”
“That’s all?”
“Am I in trouble?”
“You weren’t doing anything else?”
“What else would I be doing?”
It shot through her mind that Steven might think she was reaching out to Daniel, trying to send him a message or something. As if she’d even know how to do that.
“Summon one now,” Steven said, opening the window. It was past dusk and Luce’s stomach told her that most of the other students would be sitting down to dinner.
“I—I don’t know if I can.”
Steven’s eyes looked warmer than they had earlier, excited almost. “When we summon Announcers, we’re making a sort of wish. Not a wish for anything material, but a wish to better understand the world, our role in it
, and what’s to become of us.”
Immediately, Luce thought of Daniel, what she wanted most for their relationship. She didn’t feel she had much of a role in what was to become of them—and she wanted one. Was that why she’d been able to summon the Announcers before she’d even known how?
Nervously, she centered herself in her chair. She closed her eyes. She imagined a shadow detaching itself from the long darkness that stretched from the tree trunks outside, imagined it rolling away and rising, filling the space of the open window. Then floating closer to her.
She smelled the soft mildewy scent first, almost like black olives, then opened her eyes at the brush of coolness on her cheek. The temperature in the room had dropped a few degrees. Steven rubbed his hands together in the suddenly damp, drafty office.
“Yes, there you go,” he murmured.
The Announcer was drifting in the air of his office, thin and transparent, no bigger than a silk scarf. It glided straight toward Luce, then wrapped a fuzzy tendril of nothingness around a blown-glass paperweight on the desk. Luce gasped. Steven was smiling when he stepped toward her, guiding it upright until it became a blank black screen.
Then it was in her hands, and she began to pull. The careful motion felt like trying to stretch out a piecrust without breaking it, something Luce had watched her mother do at least a hundred times. The darkness swirled into muted grays; then the faintest black-and-white image came into view.
A dark bedroom with a single bed. Luce—a former Luce, clearly—lying on her side, staring out the open window. She must have been sixteen years old. The door behind the bed opened, and a face, lit up by the hallway light, appeared in it. The mother.
The mother Luce had gone to see with Shelby! But younger, much younger—maybe by as many as fifty years, glasses perched at the end of her nose. She smiled, as if pleased to find her daughter sleeping, then pulled the door shut.
A moment later, a pair of fingertips gripped the bottom of the windowpane. Luce’s eyes widened as the former Luce sat up in bed. Outside the window, the fingertips strained; then a pair of hands became visible, then two strong arms, lit up blue in the moonlight. Then Daniel’s glowing face as he came in through the window.
Luce’s heart was racing. She wanted to dive into the Announcer, as she’d wanted to yesterday with Shelby. But then Steven clicked his fingers and the whole thing snapped up like a venetian blind rolling to the top of a window frame. Then it broke apart and showered down.
The shadow lay in soft fragments on the desk. Luce reached for one, but it disintegrated in her hands.
Steven sat down behind his desk, probing Luce with his eyes as if to see what the glimpse had done to her. It suddenly felt very private, what she’d just witnessed in the Announcer; she didn’t know whether she wanted Steven to know how powerfully it had rocked her. After all, he was technically on the other side. In the past few days she’d seen more and more of the demon in him. Not just the fiery temper, welling up until he literally steamed—but the dark-glorious golden wings, too. Steven was magnetic and charming, just like Cam—and, she reminded herself, just like Cam, a demon.
“Why are you helping me with this?”
“Because I don’t want you to get hurt,” Steven barely whispered.
“Did that really happen?”
Steven looked away. “It’s a representation of something. And who knows how distorted it is. It’s a shadow of a past event, not reality. There is always some truth to the Announcer, but it’s never the simple truth. That’s what makes Announcers so problematic, and so dangerous to those without proper training.” He glanced at his watch. From below them came the sound of the door opening and closing on the landing. Steven stiffened when he heard a quick set of high heels clicking up the stairs.
Francesca.
Luce tried to read Steven’s face. He handed her The Republic, which she slipped into her backpack. Just before Francesca’s beautiful face appeared in the doorway, Steven said to Luce, “The next time you and Shelby choose not to complete one of your assignments, I will ask you to write a five-page research paper with citations. This time, I let you off with a warning.”
“I understand.” Luce caught Francesca’s eye in the doorway.
She smiled at Luce—though whether it was an off-you-go dismissal smile or a don’t-think-you’re-fooling-me-kid smile, it was impossible to tell. Trembling a little as she stood and flung her bag over her shoulder, Luce made for the door, calling back to Steven, “Thank you.”
Shelby had the fire going in the hearth when Luce got back to her dorm room. The hot pot was plugged in next to the Buddha night-light and the whole room smelled like tomatoes.
“We were out of mac and cheese, but I made you some soup.” Shelby ladled out a piping-hot bowlful, cracked some fresh black pepper on top, and brought it over to Luce, who’d collapsed on top of her bed. “Was it terrible?”
Luce watched the steam rise from her bowl and tried to figure out what to say. Bizarre, yes. Confusing. A little scary. Potentially … empowering.
But it hadn’t been terrible, no.
“It was okay.” Steven seemed to trust her, at least to the extent that he was going to allow her to continue summoning the Announcers. And the other students seemed to trust him, even admire him. No one else acted concerned about his motives or his allegiances. But with Luce he was so cryptic, so difficult to read.
Luce had trusted the wrong people before. A careless pursuit at best. At worst, it’s a good way to get yourself killed. That was what Miss Sophia had said about trust the night she’d tried to murder Luce.
It was Daniel who’d advised Luce to trust her instincts. But her own feelings seemed the most unreliable. She wondered whether Daniel had already known about Shoreline when he’d told her that, whether his advice was a way to prepare her for this long separation, when she would become less and less certain about everything in her life. Her family. Her past. Her future.
She looked up from the bowl at Shelby. “Thanks for the soup.”
“Don’t let Steven thwart your plans,” Shelby huffed. “We should totally keep working on the Announcers. I am just so sick of these angels and demons and their power trips. ‘Oooh, we know better than you because we’re full-on angels and you’re just the bastard child of some angel who got his rocks off.’ ”
Luce laughed, but she was thinking that Steven’s mini-lecture on Plato and giving her The Republic tonight was the opposite of a power trip. Of course, there was no telling Shelby that now, not when she’d dropped into her usual I’m-on-a-tirade-against-Shoreline routine on Luce’s bottom bunk.
“I mean, I know you have whatever going on with Daniel,” Shelby continued, “but seriously, what good has an angel ever done for me?”
Luce shrugged apologetically.
“I’ll tell you: nothing. Nothing besides knock up my mom and then totally ditch both of us before I was born. Real celestial behavior.” Shelby snorted. “The kicker is, my whole life, my mom’s telling me I should be grateful. For what? These watered-down powers and this enormous forehead I inherited from my dad? No thanks.” She kicked the top bunk glumly. “I’d give anything to just be normal.”
“Really?” Luce had spent the whole week feeling inferior to her Nephilim classmates. She knew the grass was always greener, but this she couldn’t believe. What advantage could Shelby possibly see in not having her Nephilim powers?
“Wait,” Luce said, “the sorry-ass ex-boyfriend. Did he …”
Shelby looked away. “We were meditating together, and, I don’t know, somehow during the mantra, I accidentally levitated. It wasn’t even a big deal, I was, like, two inches off the floor. But Phil wouldn’t let it go. He started bugging me about what else I could do, and asking all these weird questions.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Shelby said. “Some stuff about you, actually. He wanted to know if you’d taught me to levitate. Whether you could levitate too.”
“Why me?�
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“Probably more of his pervy roommate fantasies. Anyway, you should have seen the look on his face that day. Like I was some sort of circus freak. I had no choice but to break things off.”
“That’s awful.” Luce squeezed Shelby’s hand. “But it sounds like his problem, not yours. I know the rest of the kids at Shoreline look at the Nephilim funny, but I’ve been to a lot of high schools, and I’m starting to think that’s just the way most kids’ faces naturally bend. Besides, no one’s ‘normal.’ Phil must have had something freakish about him.”
“Actually, there was something about his eyes. They were blue, but faded, almost washed out. He had to wear these special contacts so people wouldn’t stare at him.” Shelby tossed her head to the side. “Plus, you know, that third nipple.” She burst out laughing, was red in the face by the time Luce joined in and practically in tears when a light tapping on the windowpane shut both of them up.
“That better not be him.” Shelby’s voice instantly sobered as she hopped up from the bed and flung open the window, knocking over a potted yucca in her haste.
“It’s for you,” she said, almost numbly.
Luce was at the window in a heartbeat, because by then, she could feel him. Bracing her palms on the sill, she leaned forward into the brisk night air.
She was face to face, lip to lip, with Daniel.
For the briefest moment, she thought he was looking past her, into the room, at Shelby, but then he was kissing her, cupping the back of her head with his soft hands and pulling her to him, taking her breath away. A week’s worth of warmth flowed through her, along with an unspoken apology for the harsh words they’d said the other night on the beach.
“Hello,” he whispered.
“Hello.”
Daniel was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She could see the cowlick in his hair. His tremendous pearl-white wings beat gently behind him, probing the black night, luring her in. They seemed to beat in the sky almost in time with her heart. She wanted to touch them, to bury herself in them the way she had the other night on the beach. It was a stunning thing to see him floating outside her third-story window.
