by Lauren Kate
She swayed where she stood, unable to take her eyes away. An intense wave of heat stroked her skin.
Behind Luce, someone cried out. The cry was followed by another, and then another, and then a whole chorus of voices crying out.
Something was burning. It was acrid and choking and turned her stomach instantly. Then, in the corner of her vision, there was an explosion of flame, right where Zotz had been standing a moment before. The boom knocked her backward, and she turned away from the burning brightness of Daniel, coughing on the black ash and bitter smoke.
Hanhau was gone, the ground where she’d stood scorched black. The gap-toothed man was hiding his face, trying hard not to look at Daniel’s radiance. But it was irresistible. Luce watched as the man peeked between his fingers and burst into a pillar of flame.
All around the cenote, the Mayans stared at Daniel. And one by one, his brilliance set them ablaze. Soon a bright ring of fire lit up the jungle, lit up everyone but Luce.
“Ix Cuat!” Daniel reached for her.
His glow made Luce scream out in pain, but even as she felt as if she were on the verge of asphyxiation, the words tumbled from her mouth. “You’re glorious.”
“Don’t look at me,” he pleaded. “When a mortal sees an angel’s true essence, then—you can see what happened to the others. I can’t let you leave me again so soon. Always so soon—”
“I’m still here,” Luce insisted.
“You’re still—” He was crying. “Can you see me? The true me?”
“I can see you.”
And for just a fraction of a second, she could. Her vision cleared. His glow was still radiant but not so blinding. She could see his soul. It was white-hot and immaculate, and it looked—there was no other way to say it—like Daniel. And it felt like coming home. A rush of unparalleled joy spread through Luce. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a bell of recognition chimed. She’d seen him like this before.
Hadn’t she?
As her mind strained to draw upon the past she couldn’t quite touch, the light of him began to overwhelm her.
“No!” she cried, feeling the fire sear her heart and her body shake free of something.
“Well?” Bill’s scratchy voice grated on her eardrums.
She lay against a cold stone slab. Back in one of the Announcer caves, trapped in a frigid in-between place where it was hard to hold on to anything outside. Desperately, she tried to picture what Daniel had looked like out there—the glory of his undisguised soul—but she couldn’t. It was already slipping away from her. Had it really even happened?
Luce closed her eyes, trying to remember exactly what he’d looked like. There were no words for it. It was just an incredible, joyous connection.
“I saw him.”
“Who, Daniel? Yeah, I saw him, too. He was the guy who dropped the ax when it was his turn to do the chopping. Big mistake. Huge.”
“No, I really saw him. As he truly is.” Her voice shook. “He was so beautiful.”
“Oh, that.” Bill tossed his head, annoyed.
“I recognized him. I think I’ve seen him before.”
“Doubt it.” Bill coughed. “That was the first and last time you’ll be able to see him like that. You saw him, and then you died. That’s what happens when mortal flesh looks upon an angel’s unbridled glory. Instant death. Burned away by the angel’s beauty.”
“No, it wasn’t like that.”
“You saw what happened to everyone else. Poof. Gone.” Bill plopped down beside her and patted her knee. “Why do you think the Mayans started doing sacrifices by fire after that? A neighboring tribe discovered the charred remains and had to explain it somehow.”
“Yes, they burst into flames right away. But I lasted longer—”
“A couple of extra seconds? When you were turned away? Congratulations.”
“You’re wrong. And I know I’ve seen that before.”
“You’ve seen his wings before, maybe. But Daniel shedding his human guise and showing you his true form as an angel? Kills you every time.”
“No.” Luce shook her head. “You’re saying he can never show me who he really is?”
Bill shrugged. “Not without vaporizing you and everyone around you. Why do you think Daniel’s so cautious about kissing you all the time? His glory shines pretty damn bright when you two get hot and heavy.”
Luce felt like she could barely hold herself up. “That’s why I sometimes die when we kiss?”
“How ’bout a round of applause for the girl, folks?” Bill said snarkily.
“But what about all those other times, when I die before we kiss, before—”
“Before you even have a chance to see how toxic your relationship might become?”
“Shut up.”
“Honestly, how many times do you have to see the same story line before you realize nothing is ever going to change?”
“Something has changed,” Luce said. “That’s why I’m on this journey, that’s why I’m still alive. If I could just see him again—all of him—I know I could handle it.”
“You don’t get it.” Bill’s voice was rising. “You’re talking about this whole thing in very mortal terms.” As he grew more agitated, spit flew from his lips. “This is the big time, and you clearly cannot handle it.”
“Why are you so angry all of a sudden?”
“Because! Because.” He paced the ledge, gnashing his teeth. “Listen to me: Daniel slipped up this once, he showed himself, but he never does that again. Never. He learned his lesson. Now you’ve learned one, too: Mortal flesh cannot gaze upon an angel’s true form without dying.”
Luce turned away from him, growing angrier herself. Maybe Daniel changed after this lifetime in Chichén Itzá, maybe he’d become more cautious in the future. But what about the past?
She approached the limit of the ledge inside the Announcer, looking up into the vast, gaping blackness that tunneled above into her dark unknown.
Bill hovered over her, circling her head as if he were trying to get inside it. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re only going to end up disappointed.” He drew close to her ear and whispered. “Or worse.”
There was nothing he could say to stop her. If there was an earlier Daniel who still dropped his guard, then Luce was going to find him.
SIXTEEN
BEST MAN
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL • 27 NISSAN 2760
(APPROXIMATELY APRIL 1, 1000 BCE)
Daniel was not entirely himself.
He was still cloven to the body he had joined with on the dark fjords of Greenland. He tried to slow down as he left the Announcer, but his momentum was too great. Heavily off-balance, he spun out of the darkness and rolled across rocky earth until his head slammed into something hard. Then he was still.
Cleaving with his past self had been a vast mistake.
The simplest way to split apart two entwined incarnations of a soul was to kill the body. Freed from the cage of the flesh, the soul sorted itself out. But killing himself wasn’t really an option for Daniel. Unless …
The starshot.
In Greenland, he had snatched it from where it lay nestled in the snow at the edge of the angels’ fire. Gabbe had brought it along as symbolic protection, but she would never have expected Daniel to cleave and steal it.
Had he really thought he could just drag the dull silver tip across his chest and split apart his soul, casting his past self back into time?
Stupid.
No. He was too likely to slip up, to fail, and then instead of splitting his soul, he might accidentally kill it. Soulless, Daniel’s earthly guise, this dull body, would wander the earth in perpetuity, searching for its soul but settling for the next best thing: Luce. It would haunt her until the day she died, and maybe after that.
What Daniel needed was a partner. What he needed was impossible.
He grunted and rolled over onto his back, squinting into the bright sun directly overhead.
“See?” a v
oice above him said. “I told you we were in the right place.”
“I don’t see why this”—another voice, a boy’s this time—“is proof of us doing anything right.”
“Oh, come on, Miles. Don’t let your beef with Daniel keep us from finding Luce. He obviously knows where she is.”
The voices drew closer. Daniel opened his eyes in a squint and saw an arm slice the light of the sun, extending toward him.
“Hey there. Need a hand?”
Shelby. Luce’s Nephilim friend from Shoreline.
And Miles. The one she’d kissed.
“What are you two doing here?” Daniel sat up sharply, rejecting Shelby’s offered hand. He rubbed his forehead and glanced behind him—the thing he’d collided with was the gray trunk of an olive tree.
“What do you think we’re doing here? We’re looking for Luce.” Shelby gaped down at Daniel and wrinkled her nose. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” Daniel tried to stand up, but he was so dizzy he quickly lay down again. Cleaving—especially dragging his past body into another life—had made him sick. He fought his past from inside, slamming up against the edges, bruising his soul on bones and skin. He knew the Nephilim could sense that something unmentionable had happened to him. “Go home, trespassers. Whose Announcer did you use to get here? Do you know how much trouble you could get yourselves in?”
All of a sudden, something silver gleamed under his nose.
“Take us to Luce.” Miles was pointing a starshot at Daniel’s neck. The brim of his baseball cap hid his eyes, but his mouth was screwed in a nervous grimace.
Daniel was dumbstruck. “You—you have a starshot.”
“Miles!” Shelby whispered fiercely. “What are you doing with that thing?”
The dull tip of the arrow quaked. Miles was clearly nervous. “You left it in the yard after the Outcasts left,” he said to Daniel. “Cam grabbed one, and in the chaos, no one noticed when I picked up this one. You took off after Luce. And we took off after you.” He turned to Shelby. “I thought we might need it. Self-defense.”
“Don’t you dare kill him,” Shelby said to Miles. “You’re an idiot.”
“No,” Daniel said, very slowly sitting up. “It’s okay.”
His mind was spinning. What were the odds? He had only seen this done once before. Daniel was no expert at cleaving. But his past writhed inside him—he couldn’t go on like this. There was only one solution. Miles was holding it in his hands.
But how could he get the boy to attack him without explaining everything? And could he trust the Nephilim?
Daniel edged backward until his shoulders were against the tree trunk. He slid up it, holding both empty hands wide, showing Miles there was nothing to be afraid of. “You took fencing?”
“What?” Miles looked bewildered.
“At Shoreline. Did you take a fencing class or not?”
“We all did. It was kind of pointless and I wasn’t all that good, but—”
That was all Daniel needed to hear. “En garde!” he shouted, drawing out his concealed starshot like a sword.
Miles’s eyes grew wide. In an instant he’d raised his arrow as well.
“Oh, crap,” Shelby said, scurrying out of the way. “You guys, seriously. Stop!”
The starshots were shorter than fencing foils but a few inches longer than normal arrows. They were featherlight but as hard as diamonds, and if Daniel and Miles were very, very careful, the two of them might make it out of this alive. Somehow, with Miles’s help, Daniel might cleave free of his past.
He sliced through the air with his starshot, advancing a few steps toward the Nephilim.
Miles responded, fighting off Daniel’s blow, his arrow glancing hard toward the right. When the starshots clashed, they did not make the tinny clanks that fencing foils made. They made a deep, echoing whooomp that reverberated off the mountains and shook the ground under their feet.
“Your fencing lesson wasn’t pointless,” Daniel said as his arrow crisscrossed with Miles’s in the air. “It was to prepare for a moment like this.”
“A moment”—Miles grunted as he lunged forward, sweeping his starshot up until it slid against Daniel’s in the air—“like what?”
Their arms strained. The starshots made a frozen X in the air.
“I need you to release me from an earlier incarnation that I’ve cloven to my soul,” Daniel said simply.
“What the…,” Shelby murmured from the sidelines.
Confusion flashed across Miles’s face, and his arm faltered. His blade fell away, and his starshot clattered to the ground. He gasped and fumbled for it, looking back at Daniel, terrified.
“I’m not coming after you,” Daniel said. “I need you to come after me.” He managed a competitive smirk. “Come on. You know you want to. You’ve wanted to for a long time.”
Miles charged, holding the starshot like an arrow instead of a sword. Daniel was ready for him, dipping to one side just in time and spinning around to clash his starshot against Miles’s.
They were locked in each other’s grip: Daniel with his starshot pointing past Miles’s shoulder, using his strength to hold the Nephilim boy back, and Miles with his starshot inches away from Daniel’s heart.
“Are you going to help me?” Daniel demanded.
“What’s in it for us?” Miles asked.
Daniel had to think about this for a moment. “Luce’s happiness,” he said at last.
Miles didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no.
“Now”—Daniel’s voice faltered as he gave the instructions—“very carefully, drag your blade in a straight line down the center of my chest. Do not pierce the skin or you will kill me.”
Miles was sweating. His face was white. He glanced over at Shelby.
“Do it, Miles,” she whispered.
The starshot trembled. Everything was in this boy’s hands. The blunt end of the starshot touched Daniel’s skin and traveled down.
“Omigod.” Shelby’s lips curled up in horror. “He’s molting.”
Daniel could feel it, like a layer of skin was lifting off his bones. His past self’s body was slowly cleaving from his own. The venom of separation coursed through him, threading deep into the fibers of his wings. The pain was so raw it was nauseating, roiling deep inside him with great tidal swells. His vision clouded; ringing filled his ears. The starshot in his hand tumbled to the ground. Then, all at once, he felt a great shove and a sharp, cold breath of air. There was a long grunt and two thuds, and then—
His vision cleared. The ringing ceased. He felt lightness, simplicity.
Free.
Miles lay on the ground below him, chest heaving. The starshot in Daniel’s hand had disappeared. Daniel spun around to find a specter of his past self standing behind him, his skin gray and his body wraithlike, his eyes and teeth coal-black, the starshot grasped in his hand. His profile wobbled in the hot wind, like the picture on a shorted-out television.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said, reaching forward and clutching his past self at the base of his wings. When Daniel lifted the shadow of himself off the ground, his body felt scant and insufficient. His fingers found the graying portal of the Announcer through which both Daniels had traveled just before it fell apart. “Your day will come,” he said.
Then he pitched his past self back into the Announcer.
He watched the void fading in the hot sun. The body made a drawn-out whistling sound as it tumbled into time, as if it were falling off a cliff. The Announcer split into infinitesimal traces, and was gone.
“What the hell just happened?” Shelby asked, helping Miles to his feet.
The Nephilim was ghostly white, gaping down at his hands, flipping them over and examining them as if he’d never seen them before.
Daniel turned to Miles. “Thank you.”
The Nephilim boy’s blue eyes looked eager and terrified at the same time, as if he wanted to pump every detail out of Daniel about what had just happened b
ut didn’t want to show his excitement. Shelby was speechless, which was an unprecedented event.
Daniel had despised Miles until then. He’d been annoyed by Shelby, who’d practically led the Outcasts straight toward Luce. But at that moment, under the olive tree, he could see why Luce had befriended both of them. And he was glad.
A horn whined in the distance. Miles and Shelby jumped.
It was a shofar, a sacred ram’s horn that made a long, nasal note—often used to announce religious services and festivals. Until then Daniel hadn’t looked around enough to realize where they were.
The three of them stood under the mottled shade of the olive tree at the crest of a low hill. In front of them, the hill sloped down to a wide, flat valley, tawny with the tall native grasses that had never been cut by man. In the middle of the valley was a narrow strip of green, where wildflowers grew alongside a narrow river.
Just east of the riverbed, a small group of tents stood clustered together, facing a larger square structure made of white stones, with a latticed wooden roof. The blast of the shofar must have come from that temple.
A line of women in colorful cloaks that fell to their ankles moved in and out of the temple. They carried clay jugs and bronze trays of food, as if in preparation for a feast.
“Oh,” Daniel said aloud, feeling a profound melancholy settle over him.
“Oh what?” Shelby asked.
Daniel gripped the hood of Shelby’s camouflage sweatshirt. “If you’re looking for Luce here, you won’t find her. She’s dead. She died a month ago.”
Miles nearly choked.
“You mean the Luce from this lifetime,” Shelby said. “Not our Luce. Right?”
“Our Luce—my Luce—isn’t here, either. She never knew this place existed, so her Announcers wouldn’t bring her here. Yours wouldn’t have, either.”
Shelby and Miles shared a glance. “You say you’re looking for Luce,” Shelby said, “but if you know she isn’t here, why are you still hanging around?”
