by Lauren Kate
She backed out of his grasp too quickly, mumbling apologetically for tripping over his feet. Both of them leaned up against the vanity, nervously avoiding eye contact by staring at the wall.
That should not have happened. Miles was just her friend.
“Hello! Anyone going to help me?” Shelby’s ribbed-stockinged feet were dangling from the skylight, kicking impatiently. Miles moved under the window and roughly grabbed her belt, easing her down by the waist. He released Shelby a lot more quickly, Luce noticed, than he had released her.
Shelby bounded across the gold-tiled floor and unlocked the door. “Come on, you two, what are you waiting for?”
On the other side of the door, glamorously made-up black-clad waitresses bustled by in sequined high heels, trays of cocktail shakers balanced in the crooks of their arms. Men in expensive dark suits crowded around blackjack tables, where they whooped like teenage boys each time a hand was dealt. There were no slot machines clanking and banging on an endless loop here. It was hushed, and exclusive, and endlessly exciting—but it wasn’t anything like the scene they had watched in the Announcer.
A cocktail waitress approached them. “May I help you?” She lowered her stainless steel tray to scrutinize them.
“Ooh, caviar,” Shelby said, scooping up three blini and handing one to the others. “You guys thinking what I’m thinking?”
Luce nodded. “We were just going downstairs.”
When the elevator doors opened onto the bright and glaring lobby of the casino, Luce had to be pushed out by Miles. She could tell they’d finally come to the right place. The cocktail waitresses were older, tired, showing a lot less flesh. They didn’t glide across the stained orange carpet; they thumped. And the patrons looked much more like the ones they had seen crowding the table in the glimpsing: overweight, middle-class, middle-aged, sad, wallet-emptying automatons. All they had to do now was find Vera.
Shelby maneuvered them through a cramped maze of slot machines, past clots of people at roulette tables shouting at the tiny ball as it spun in the wheel, past big, boxy games at which people blew on dice and threw them and then cheered at the outcome, down a row of tables offering poker and strange games with names like Pai Gow, until they came to a cluster of blackjack tables.
Most of the dealers were men. Tall, hunched-over, oily-haired men, bespectacled gray-mustached men, one man wearing a surgical mask over his face. Shelby didn’t slow to gape at any of them, and she was right not to: There, at the far back corner of the casino, was Vera.
Her black hair was swept up in a lopsided bun. Her pale face looked thin and saggy. Luce didn’t feel the same emotional outpouring she’d felt when she looked at her previous life’s parents in Shasta. But then again, she still didn’t know who Vera was to her besides a tired, middle-aged woman holding a deck of cards out for a half-asleep redheaded woman to cut. Sloppily, the redhead picked up the deck in the middle; then Vera’s hands started flying.
Other tables in the casino were overcrowded, but the redhead and her diminutive husband were the only two people at Vera’s. Still, she put on a good show for them, snapping the cards out with an easy dexterity that made the work look effortless. Luce could see an elegant side of Vera that she hadn’t noticed before. A flair for the dramatic.
“So,” Miles said, shifting his weight next to Luce. “Are we gonna … or …”
Shelby’s hands were suddenly on Luce’s shoulders, practically wedging her into one of the empty leather seats at the table.
Though she was dying to stare, Luce avoided eye contact at first. She was nervous that Vera might recognize her before she even had a chance. But Vera’s eyes passed over each of them with only the mildest of interest, and Luce remembered how different she looked now that she’d bleached her hair. She tugged at it nervously, not sure what to do next.
Then Miles plunked down a twenty-dollar bill in front of Luce, and she remembered the game she was supposed to be playing. She slid the money across the table.
Vera raised a penciled-in eyebrow. “Got ID?”
Luce shook her head. “Maybe we could just watch?”
Across the table, the redhead was nodding off, her head falling onto Shelby’s stiff shoulder. Vera rolled her eyes at the whole scene and pushed Luce’s money back, pointing at the neon billboard advertising Cirque du Soleil. “Circus is that way, kids.”
Luce sighed. They were going to have to wait until Vera got off work. And by then she’d probably be even less interested in talking to them. Feeling defeated, Luce reached out to take Miles’s money back. Vera’s fingers were drawing away just as Luce’s swept over the money, and their fingertips kissed. Both of them snapped up their heads. The weird shock briefly blinded Luce. She sucked in her breath. She looked deep into Vera’s wide hazel eyes.
And she saw everything:
A two-story cabin in a snowy Canadian town. Webs of ice on the windows, wind soughing at the panes. A ten-year-old girl watching TV in the living room, rocking a baby on her lap. It was Vera, pale and pretty in acid-washed jeans and Doc Martens, a thick navy turtleneck rising to her chin, a cheap wool blanket bunched up between her and the back of the couch. A bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, reduced to a handful of cold, unpopped kernels. A fat orange cat prowling the mantel, hissing at the radiator. And Luce—Luce was her sister, the baby sister in her arms.
Luce felt herself rocking in her seat at the casino, aching to remember all of this. Just as quickly, the impression faded, replaced by another.
Luce as a toddler chasing Vera, up the stairs, down the stairs, the worn wide steps beneath her thumping feet, her chest tight from breathless laughter, when the doorbell sounded and a fair, slick-haired boy arrived to pick Vera up for a date, and she stopped and straightened her clothes and turned her back, turned away ….
A heartbeat later and Luce was a teenager herself, with a mess of curly shoulder-length black hair. Sprawled on Vera’s denim bedspread, the coarse fabric somehow a comfort, flipping through Vera’s secret diary. He loves me, Vera had scrawled again and again and again, her handwriting getting loopier and loopier. And then the pages pulled away, her sister’s angry face looming, the tracks of her tears clear. …
And then again, a different scene, Luce older still, maybe seventeen. She braced herself for what was coming.
Snow pouring from the sky like soft white static. Vera and a few friends ice-skating on the frozen pond behind their house, gliding in swift circles, happy and laughing, and at the frayed icy edge of the pond, Luce crouched down, the cold seeping through her thin clothes while she laced up her skates, in a hurry, as usual, to catch up with her sister. And beside her, a warmth she didn’t have to look at to identify, Daniel, who was silent, moody, his skates already tightly laced. She could feel the urge to kiss him—and yet no shadows were visible. The evening and everything about it were star-dotted and glittering, endlessly clear and full of possibility.
Luce searched for the shadows, then realized that their absence made sense. These were Vera’s memories. And the snow made everything harder to see. Still, Daniel must know, as he had known when he dove into that lake. He must have sensed it every single time. Did he ever care what became of people like Vera after Luce was killed?
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
Rushing 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, yo
u 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.”
