Fallen_Angels in the Dark

by Lauren Kate

  “Spoken like someone who never even had a chance.”

  He punched her again, right in the eye. “I did. You hear that, Outcast? I may have lost it, but I used to have a chance.”

  Beating up the Outcasts was easy—too easy. It was a pointless exercise, like an old video game you’d bested but played again out of boredom. They’d heal like all the fallen, no matter how much damage he inflicted.

  The Outcast grunted as Cam gave her skull a final kick that knocked her to the ground. She landed facedown in the mulchy leaves. After that, she did not move. So it was up to Cam to yank her to her feet and shove her bloodied body back from whence it had come.

  “Tell your friends you are not welcome in this forest!” he shouted after her, watching as she tugged open an Announcer and fell inside.

  He leaned back against the redwood and took a long, calming drag on his cigarette just as Lucinda started down the stairs.

  LUCE AND DANIEL’S DATE

  Luce looked around the quiet cave, surprised to find that the angels, demons, Outcasts, and the transeternals had all fallen fast asleep. The last thing she remembered was Dee’s instruction to wait until the moon hit the Qayom Malak in precisely the right place before the ceremony of the three relics could begin.

  What time was it? Rays of sunlight streamed through the mouth of the cave.

  A warm hand squeezed her shoulder. She turned and her hair brushed Daniel’s cheek. “By a stroke of luck we find ourselves alone,” he laughed.

  She grinned, whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”

  They scrambled down the path, laughing like children, holding hands. When they rounded a curve on the path and found themselves looking out across a great vista of the endless desert, Daniel swept her up in his arms again.

  “I can’t keep my hands off you.”

  Luce kissed him greedily, let her hands fondle the white expanse of his wings. Like Daniel, they were strong and awe-inspiring and absolutely gorgeous. They rippled with pleasure under her hand. Daniel shuddered, exhaled deeply.

  “Do you want to fly somewhere?” he asked.

  Luce always wanted to be in the air with Daniel. She grinned. “Sure. Wherever. I just want to be with you.”

  He looked into the distance.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, “it might be nice to stay on the ground. I have this urge to let go of who we are. Just be two people, a boy and a girl, hanging out.”

  He eyed her nervously until she let go of his wing to take his hand.

  “I know what you mean. I’d love to.”

  Daniel looked grateful as he rolled his shoulders forward, coaxing his enormous wings back into his shoulders. They retreated slowly, smoothly, until they’d become two small white shoots in the back of his neck. Then they were gone completely and Daniel was merely Daniel. When he smiled, Luce realized how long it had been since she’d seen him without his wings.

  “It’ll be nice to keep our feet on the ground,” she said, looking down at her boots and Daniel’s sneakers, both caked with desert dust.

  Daniel was looking over her shoulder, down into the dry plain below. “Or maybe just slightly off the ground.”

  “What do you mean?” She spun around and stood on tiptoes to see where he was looking.

  “Have you ever ridden a camel?”

  “I don’t know,” she challenged him. “Have I?”

  They named the camel Woody, because he looked like a 1970s Woody Allen, with his red, wavy unkempt mane—though he was seven feet tall, with a double hump and two crooked front teeth. They found him grazing at the foothills of Mount Sinai with two other less amusing camels. When Daniel laid a hand on his flank, Woody didn’t kick and snort at the invisible touch; he leaned in and nuzzled Luce’s unseen face, looking lovably paranoid.

  “This is the one,” Daniel said.

  “We can’t just take him! What if he belongs to someone?”

  Daniel raised a hand to shield his eyes and made a show of looking across the vast ocean of sand. “We’re just borrowing him for the day.” He wove his fingers together and bent down to make a step for Luce with his hands. “Come on. Up you go.”

  She laughed as she swung one leg over the camel, delighted by the feel of sliding down to the base of his back between his humps.

  “How are you going to get up, normal boy?” she asked.

  Daniel stared at the hump a foot over his head and scratched his chin. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  He asked for her hand and jerked himself up but lost his footing and landed on his back in the dirt.

  “A temporary setback,” he grunted.

  For the second attempt, he came around the other side and tried to hoist himself up like a swimmer climbing out of the deep end. He slipped and fell on his face. Woody spat.

  “Okay,” Luce called, trying not to laugh. “Third time’s the charm!” The first two times had charmed her, too, and a fourth would charm her even more.

  Daniel grunted again, and when he reached for her hand, Luce really put her back into pulling him up. She could feel his body rising from the ground and was surprised by how light he felt in her arms. He landed behind her, directly on the hump, in the splits, and bellowed with pain. Luce lost it.

  She was laughing so hard it required an apology, which was tough to accomplish through a delirious convulsion. Daniel finally laughed when her fit of giggles almost sent her tumbling off the camel.

  When they finally calmed down, Luce turned to look at Daniel. She ran a finger across his lips. “It still feels like we’re flying.”

  “I guess we always are.” Daniel kissed her finger, then her lips, and without coming up for air, gave Woody a gentle kick to get him moving.

  Woody wasn’t a thoroughbred. They sauntered across the plain with the distant hope of reaching the ocean. It didn’t seem likely, but it also didn’t matter. Luce thought this endless stretch of packed brown sand looked like the most beautiful place on earth.

  They rode in happy silence until something struck Luce. “I don’t think I ever have been on a camel before.”

  “No.” She could hear the smile creep into in his voice. “You haven’t. At least, not when I’ve been around. Were you able to pull that from the memories of your past?”

  “I think so. It’s weird, I searched for it, but—recently when my mind circles around a memory and finds something I’ve done before, I feel this warmth.” She shrugged. “Since I didn’t feel anything this time, I guess it means I haven’t had this experience before.”

  “I’m impressed,” Daniel said. “Now how about you tell me about something for a change? Tell me about your time at Dover.”

  “Dover?” That caught her by surprise. She would rather talk about any of the past lives she’d visited in the Announcers than her experience at Dover.

  They passed a barren tree trunk, which looked like it hadn’t seen a leaf in centuries. They passed a dried-up river and a dirt path that didn’t lead anywhere. There was no one around to judge her. Only Daniel.

  “It was three years of boredom followed by one catastrophe that left a boy I knew dead,” she said finally. “It makes me sick to think about because I—”

  “Trevor’s death wasn’t your fault.”

  She swerved around to face him. “How did you know?”

  “There was someone else behind it. Someone who knew you would feel terrible about that fire—and wanted you to. Someone who wanted you to believe that what happens inside you when you care for someone is fatal.”

  “Who would do that?” Luce whispered.

  “Someone who wanted you never to fall in love. Someone jealous of what you and I have together.”

  “A person died because of that jealousy, Daniel. An innocent boy who had nothing to do with our curse or our love.”

  “I didn’t know it was happening. I would have stopped it. I’m sorry, Luce. I know you’ve suffered.”

  Luce rubbed her fo
rehead. “You’re saying the person behind Trevor’s death killed him so that I wouldn’t fall in love with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only … it didn’t work.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “It didn’t.”

  “Because of the curse? It still brought us together—”

  “Because no curse is stronger than our love.”

  They climbed another mountain, then another. The sun beat down like hands upon their shoulders. They slid off Woody to walk to the edge of a cliff. The drop was steep and scary, but below them the ocean crashed against the shore, a fantastic bolt of blue after so much brown. They could never get down there without flying. But Luce looked at Daniel and Daniel looked at Luce, and they smiled, knowing they had made a pact: a simple date, no wings. That was fine with both of them.

  “Come here.” Daniel touched a flat rock at the edge of the cliff, motioning for Luce to sit down. They watched the ocean for a moment, saw two back container ships like glaciers near the horizon.

  “It feels like the world is ours today, doesn’t it?” Luce said sadly.

  Daniel spun her to him, touched the tip of her nose with his. His hand parted the buttons on her jacket, then slipped under her shirt, caressing the small of her back.

  He kissed her with a new brand of abandon. His touch was smooth and soft and desperate all at once. Her mouth bore down on his as he squeezed her, lifting her on top of him, burying his free hand in her hair. Their limbs overlapped, taut with expectation. Their mouths were hot and tangled. Luce felt dizzy and alive, as if their souls had twined together. It was almost too much to bear. She could never get enough. But she would try.

  “I love you, Daniel,” Luce said between breaths.

  “I love you, too,” he replied. “More than anything. More than—”

  Boom.

  It sounded like thunder, the brewing of a dark tornado. Luce jumped awake inside the cave, where she must have fallen asleep on Daniel’s shoulder.…

  If you enjoyed this special FALLEN collection, look for Lauren Kate’s newest novel, TEARDROP, an epic saga of heart-stopping romance, devastating secrets, and dark magic … a world where everything you love can be washed away.

  Here’s a sneak peek.

  Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Lauren Kate. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York.

  PROLOGUE

  PREHISTORY

  So this was it:

  Dusky amber sunset. Humidity tugging on lazy sky. Lone car hauling up the Seven Mile Bridge, toward the airport in Miami, toward a flight that wouldn’t be caught. Rogue wave rising in the water east of the Keys, churning into a monster that would baffle oceanographers on the evening news. Traffic stopped at the mouth of the bridge by construction-suited men staging a temporary roadblock.

  And him: the boy in the stolen fishing boat a hundred yards west of the bridge. His anchor was down. His gaze hung on the last car allowed to cross. He had been there for an hour, would wait only moments more to watch—no, to oversee the coming tragedy, to make sure that this time everything went right.

  The men posing as construction workers called themselves the Seedbearers. The boy in the boat was a Seedbearer, too, the youngest in the family line. The car on the bridge was a champagne-colored 1988 Chrysler K-car with two hundred thousand on the odometer and a duct-taped rearview mirror. The driver was an archaeologist, a redhead, a mother. The passenger was her daughter, a seventeen-year-old from New Iberia, Louisiana, and the focus of the Seedbearers’ plans. Girl and mother would be dead in minutes … if the boy didn’t mess anything up.

  His name was Ander. He was sweating.

  He was in love with the girl in the car. So here, now, in the soft heat of a late Florida spring, with blue herons chasing white egrets through a black opal sky, and the stillness of the water all around him, Ander had a choice: fulfill his obligations to his family, or—

  No.

  The choice was simpler than that:

  Save the world, or save the girl.

  The car passed the first mile marker out of seven on the long bridge to the city of Marathon in the central Florida Keys. The Seedbearers’ wave was aimed at mile four, just past the midpoint of the bridge. Anything from a slight dip in temperature to the velocity of the wind to the texture of the seafloor could alter the wave’s dynamic. The Seedbearers had to be ready to adapt. They could do this: craft a wave out of the ocean using antediluvian breath, then drop the beast on a precise location, like a needle on a turntable, letting hellish music loose. They could even get away with it. No one could prosecute a crime he didn’t know had been committed.

  Wave crafting was an element of the Seedbearers’ cultivated power, the Zephyr. It wasn’t dominance over water, but rather an ability to manipulate the wind, whose currents were a mighty force upon the ocean. Ander had been raised to revere the Zephyr as divinity, though its origins were murky: it had been born in a time and place about which the elder Seedbearers no longer spoke.

  For months they had spoken only of their certainty that the right wind under the right water would be powerful enough to kill the right girl.

  The speed limit was thirty-five. The Chrysler was going sixty. Ander wiped sweat from his brow.

  Pale blue light shone within the car. Standing in his boat, Ander couldn’t see their faces. He could see just two crowns of hair, dark orbs against the headrests. He imagined the girl on her phone, texting a friend about her vacation with her mother, making plans to see the neighbor with the splash of freckles across her cheeks, or that boy she spent time with, the one Ander could not stand.

  The whole week, he’d watched her reading on the beach from the same faded paperback, The Old Man and the Sea. He’d watched her turn the pages with the slow aggression of the terrifically bored. She was going to be a senior that fall. He knew she’d signed up for three honors classes; he’d once stood an aisle over at a grocery store and listened through the cereal as she talked about it with her father. He knew how much she dreaded calculus.

  Ander didn’t go to school. He studied the girl. The Seedbearers made him do it, stalk her. By now, he was an expert.

  She loved pecans and clear nights when she could see the stars. She had horrible posture at the dinner table, but when she ran, she seemed to fly. She plucked her eyebrows with bejeweled tweezers; she dressed up in her mother’s old Cleopatra costume every year for Halloween. She doused all her food with Tabasco, ran a mile in under six minutes, played her grandfather’s Gibson guitar with no skill but plenty of soul. She painted polka dots on her fingernails and her bedroom walls. She dreamed of leaving the bayou for a big city like Dallas or Memphis, playing songs at open mikes in darkened clubs. She loved her mother with a fierce, unbreakable passion that Ander envied and struggled to understand. She wore tank tops in winter, sweatshirts to the beach, feared heights yet adored roller coasters, and planned on never getting married. She didn’t cry. When she laughed, she closed her eyes.

  He knew everything about her. He would ace any exam on her complexities. He had been watching her since the leap day she was born. All of the Seedbearers had. He had been watching her since before he or she could speak. They had never spoken.

  She was his life.

  He had to kill her.

  The girl and her mother had their windows rolled down. The Seedbearers wouldn’t like that. He was certain one of his uncles had been charged with jamming their windows while mother and daughter played gin rummy at a blue-awninged café.

  But Ander had once seen the girl’s mother shove a stick in the voltage regulator of a car with a dead battery and start it up again. He’d seen the girl change a tire at the side of the road in hundred-degree weather and barely break a sweat. They could do things, these women. More reason to kill her, his uncles would say, shepherding him always toward defending his Seedbearer line. But nothing Ander saw in the girl frightened him; everythi
ng deepened his fascination.

  Tan forearms dangled out both car windows as they passed mile marker two. Like mother, like daughter—wrists twisting in time to something on the radio that Ander wished he could hear.

  He wondered how the salt would smell on her skin. The idea of being close enough to breathe her in gripped him in a wave of dizzy pleasure that crested into nausea.

  One thing was certain: he would never have her.

  He sank to his knees on the bench. The boat rocked under his weight, shattering the reflection of the rising moon. Then it rocked again, harder, signaling a disturbance somewhere in the water.

  The wave was building.

  All he had to do was watch. His family had made that very clear. The wave would strike; the car would flow with it over the bridge like a blossom spilling over a fountain’s rim. They would be swept to the depths of the sea. That was all.

  When his family had schemed in their shabby Key West vacation rental with the “garden view” of a weedy alley, no one had spoken of subsequent waves that would wash mother and daughter into nonexistence. No one mentioned how slowly a corpse decomposed in cold water. But Ander had been having nightmares all week about the girl’s body’s afterlife.

  His family said that after the wave it would be over and Ander could begin a normal life. Wasn’t that what he said he wanted?

  He simply had to ensure that the car stayed under the sea long enough for the girl to die. If by some chance—here the uncles began to bicker—mother and daughter somehow freed themselves and rose to the surface, then Ander would have to—

  No, his aunt Chora said loudly enough to silence the roomful of men. She was the closest thing Ander had to a mother. He loved her, but he did not like her. It wouldn’t happen, she said. The wave Chora would produce would be strong enough. Ander would not have to drown the girl with his hands. The Seedbearers weren’t murderers. They were stewards of humanity, preventers of apocalypse. They were generating an act of God.