Fallen_Angels in the Dark

by Lauren Kate

  But it was murder. At this moment the girl was alive. She had friends and a family who loved her. She had a life before her, possibilities fanning out like oak branches into infinite sky. She had a way of making everything around her seem spectacular.

  Whether she might someday do what the Seedbearers feared she would do was not something Ander liked thinking about. Doubt consumed him. As the wave rolled closer, he considered letting it take him, too.

  If he wanted to die, he would have to get out of the boat. He would have to let go of the handles at the end of the chain welded to his anchor. No matter how strong the wave was, Ander’s chain would not break; his anchor would not be wrested from the sea floor. They were made of orichalcum, an ancient metal considered mythological by modern archaeologists. The anchor on its chain was one of five relics made of the substance that the Seedbearers preserved. The girl’s mother—a rare scientist who believed in things she could not prove existed—would have traded her entire career to uncover just one.

  Anchor, spear and atlatl, lachrymatory vial, and the small carved chest that glowed unnatural green—these were what remained of his lineage, of the world no one spoke of, of the past the Seedbearers made it their sole mission to repress.

  The girl knew nothing of the Seedbearers. But did she know where she had come from? Could she trace her line backward as swiftly as he could trace his, to the world lost in the flood, to the secret to which both he and she were inextricably linked?

  It was time. The car approached the marker for mile four. Ander watched the wave emerge against the darkening sky until its white crest could no longer be mistaken for cloud. He watched it rise in slow motion, twenty feet, thirty feet, a wall of water moving toward them, black as night.

  Its roar almost drowned out the scream that came from the car. The cry didn’t sound like hers, more like her mother’s. Ander shuddered. The sound signaled that they had seen the wave at last. Brake lights flashed. Then the engine gunned. Too late.

  Aunt Chora was as good as her word; she’d built her wave perfectly. It carried the whiff of citronella—Chora’s touch to mask the burnt-metal odor that accompanied Zephyr sorcery. Compact in width, the wave was taller than a three-story building, with a concentrated vortex in its deep belly and a foaming lip that would dash the bridge in half but leave the land on either side intact. It would do its work cleanly and, more importantly, quickly. There would hardly be time for the tourists stopped at the mouth of the bridge to pull out their phones and hit record.

  When the wave broke, its barrel stretched across the bridge, then doubled back to crash into the highway divider ten feet ahead of the car, precisely as planned. The bridge groaned. The road buckled. The car swirled into the whirlpool center. Its undercarriage flooded. It was picked up by the wave and rode the crest, then shot off the bridge on a slide made of roiling sea.

  Ander watched the Chrysler somersault into the face of the wave. As it teetered down, he was appalled by a view through the windshield. There she was: dirty-blond hair splayed out and up. Soft profile, like a shadow cast by candlelight. Arms reaching for her mother, whose head knocked the steering wheel. Her scream cut Ander like glass.

  If this hadn’t happened, everything might have been different. But it did:

  For the first time in his life, she looked at him.

  His hands slipped from the handles of the orichalcum anchor. His feet lifted off the floor of the fishing boat. By the time the car splashed into the water, Ander was swimming toward her open window, fighting the wave, drawing on every ounce of ancient strength that flowed through his blood.

  It was war, Ander versus the wave. It bashed into him, thrusting him against the shoal bottom of the Gulf, pummeling his ribs, turning his body into bruise. He gritted his teeth and swam through pain, through coral reef that slashed his skin, through shards of glass and splintered fender, through thick curtains of algae and weeds. His head shot above the surface and he gasped for air. He saw the twisted silhouette of the car—then it vanished beneath a world of foam. He nearly wept at the thought of not getting there in time.

  Everything quieted. The wave retreated, gathering flotsam, dragging the car up with it. Leaving Ander behind.

  He had one chance. The windows were above the level of the water. As soon as the wave returned, the car would be crushed in its trough. Ander could not explain how his body rose from the water, skidded across air. He leapt into the wave and reached out.

  Her body was as rigid as a vow. Her dark eyes were open, churning blue. Blood trickled down her neck as she turned to him. What did she see? What was he?

  The question and her gaze paralyzed Ander. In that bewildered moment, the wave curled around them, and a crucial chance was lost: he would have time to save only one of them. He knew how cruel it was. But, selfishly, he could not let her go.

  Just before the wave exploded over them, Ander grabbed her hand.

  Eureka.

  1

  EUREKA

  In the stillness of the small beige waiting room, Eureka’s bad ear rang. She massaged it—a habit since the accident, which had left her half deaf. It didn’t help. Across the room, a doorknob turned. Then a woman with a gauzy white blouse, olive-green skirt, and very fine, upswept blond hair appeared in the lamplit space.

  “Eureka?” Her low voice competed with the burbling of a fish tank that featured a neon plastic scuba diver buried to his knees in sand but showed no sign of containing fish.

  Eureka looked around the vacant lobby, wishing to invoke some other, invisible Eureka to take her place for the hour.

  “I’m Dr. Landry. Please come in.”

  Since Dad’s remarriage four years ago, Eureka had survived an armada of therapists. A life ruled by three adults who couldn’t agree on anything proved far messier than one ruled by just two. Dad had doubted the first analyst, an old-school Freudian, almost as much as Mom had hated the second, a heavy-lidded psychiatrist who doled out numbness in pills. Then Rhoda, Dad’s new wife, came onto the scene, game to try the school counselor, and the acupuncturist, and the anger manager. But Eureka had put her foot down at the patronizing family therapist, in whose office Dad had never felt less like family. She’d actually half liked the last shrink, who’d touted a faraway Swiss boarding school—until her mother caught wind of it and threatened to take Dad to court.

  Eureka noted her new therapist’s taupe leather slip-ons. She’d sat on the couch across from many similar pairs of shoes. Female doctors did this little trick: they slipped off their flats at the beginning of a session, slid their feet back into them to signal the end. They all must have read the same dull article about the Shoe Method being gentler on the patient than simply saying time was up.

  The office was purposefully calming: a long maroon leather couch against the shuttered window, two upholstered chairs opposite a coffee table with a bowl of those coffee gold-wrapped candies, a rug stitched with different-colored footprints. A plug-in air freshener made everything smell like cinnamon, which Eureka did not mind. Landry sat in one of the chairs. Eureka tossed her bag on the floor with a loud thump—honors textbooks were bricks—then slid down low on the couch.

  “Nice place,” she said. “You should get one of those swinging pendulums with the silver balls. My last doctor had one. Maybe a water cooler with the hot and cold taps.”

  “If you’d like some water, there’s a pitcher by the sink. I’d be happy to—”

  “Never mind.” Eureka had already let slip more words than she’d intended to speak the whole hour. She was nervous. She took a breath and reerected her walls. She reminded herself she was a Stoic.

  One of Landry’s feet freed itself from its taupe flat, then used its stockinged toe to loosen the other shoe’s heel, revealing maroon toenails. With both feet tucked under her thighs, Landry propped her chin in her palm. “What brings you here today?”

  When Eureka was trapped in a bad situation, her mind fled to wild destinations she didn’t try to avoid. She imagined a
motorcade cruising through a ticker-tape parade in the center of New Iberia, stylishly escorting her to therapy.

  But Landry looked sensible, interested in the reality from which Eureka yearned to escape. Eureka’s red Jeep had brought her here. The seventeen-mile stretch of road between this office and her high school had brought her here—and every second ticked toward another minute during which she wasn’t back at school warming up for that afternoon’s crosscountry meet. Bad luck had brought her here.

  Or was it the letter from Acadia Vermilion Hospital, stating that because of her recently attempted suicide, therapy was not optional but mandatory?

  Suicide. The word sounded more violent than the attempt had been. The night before she was supposed to start her senior year, Eureka had simply opened the window and let the gauzy white curtains billow toward her as she lay down in her bed. She’d tried to think of one bright thing about her future, but her mind had only rolled backward, toward lost moments of joy that could never be again. She couldn’t live in the past, so she decided she couldn’t live. She turned up her iPod. She swallowed the remainder of the oxycodone pills Dad had in the medicine cabinet for the pain from the fused disc in his spine.

  Eight, maybe nine pills; she didn’t count them as they tumbled down her throat. She thought of her mother. She thought of Mary, mother of God, who she’d been raised to believe prayed for everyone at the hour of death. Eureka knew the Catholic teachings about suicide, but she believed in Mary, whose mercy was vast, who might understand that Eureka had lost so much there was nothing to do but surrender.

  She woke up in a cold ER, strapped to a gurney and gagging on the tube of a stomach pump. She heard Dad and Rhoda fighting in the hallway while a nurse forced her to drink awful liquid charcoal to bind to the poisons they couldn’t purge from her system.

  Because she didn’t know the language that would have gotten her out sooner—“I want to live,” “I won’t try that again”—Eureka spent two weeks in the psychiatric ward. She would never forget the absurdity of jumping rope next to the huge schizophrenic woman during calisthenics, of eating oatmeal with the college kid who hadn’t slit his wrists deep enough, who spat in the orderlies’ faces when they tried to give him pills. Somehow, sixteen days later, Eureka was trudging into morning Mass before first period at Evangeline Catholic High, where Belle Pogue, a sophomore from Opelousas, stopped her at the chapel door with “You must feel blessed to be alive.”

  Eureka had glared into Belle’s pale eyes, causing the girl to gasp, make the sign of the cross, and scuttle to the farthest pew. In the six weeks she’d been back at Evangeline, Eureka had stopped counting how many friends she’d lost.

  Dr. Landry cleared her throat.

  Eureka stared up at the drop-panel ceiling. “You know why I’m here.”

  “I’d love to hear you put it into words.”

  “My father’s wife.”

  “You’re having problems with your stepmother?”

  “Rhoda makes the appointments. That’s why I’m here.”

  Eureka’s therapy had become one of Dad’s wife’s causes. First it was to deal with the divorce, then to grieve her mother’s death, now to unpack the suicide attempt. Without Diana, there was no one to intercede on Eureka’s behalf, to make a call and fire a quack. Eureka imagined herself still stuck in sessions with Dr. Landry at the age of eighty-five, no less screwed up than she was today.

  “I know losing your mother has been hard,” Landry said. “How are you feeling?”

  Eureka fixed on the word losing, as if she and Diana had been separated in a crowd and they’d soon reunite, clasp hands, saunter toward the nearest dockside restaurant for fried clams, and carry on as if they’d never been apart.

  That morning, across the breakfast table, Rhoda had sent Eureka a text: Dr. Landry. 3 p.m. There was a hyperlink to send the appointment to her phone’s calendar. When Eureka clicked on the office address, a pin on the map marked the Main Street location in New Iberia.

  “New Iberia?” Her voice cracked.

  Rhoda swallowed some vile-looking green juice. “Thought you’d like that.”

  New Iberia was the town where Eureka had been born, had grown up. It was the place she still called home, where she’d lived with her parents for the unshattered portion of her life, until they split and her mom moved away and Dad’s confident stride began to resemble a shuffle, like that of the blue claw crabs at Victor’s, where he used to be the chef.

  That was right around Katrina, and Rita came close behind. Eureka’s old house was still there—she’d heard another family lived in it now—but after the hurricanes, Dad hadn’t wanted to put in the time or emotion to repair it. So they’d moved to Lafayette, fifteen miles and thirty light-years from home. Dad got a job as a line cook at Prejean’s, which was bigger and far less romantic than Victor’s. Eureka changed schools, which sucked. Before Eureka knew that Dad was even over her mom, the two of them were moving into a big house on Shady Circle. It belonged to a bossy lady named Rhoda. She was pregnant. Eureka’s new bedroom was down the hall from a nursery-in-progress.

  So, no, Rhoda, Eureka did not like that this new therapist lived way out in New Iberia. How was she supposed to drive all the way to the appointment and make it back in time for her meet?

  The meet was important, not only because Evangeline was racing their rival, Manor High. Today was the day Eureka had promised Coach she’d make her decision about whether to stay on the team.

  Before Diana died, Eureka had been named senior captain. After the accident, when she was physically strong enough, friends had begged her to run a few summer scrimmages. But the one run she’d gone to had made her want to scream. Underclassmen held out cups of water drenched in pity. Coach chalked up Eureka’s slow speed to the casts binding her wrists. It was a lie. Her heart wasn’t in the race anymore. It wasn’t with the team. Her heart was in the ocean with Diana.

  After the pills, Coach had brought balloons, which looked absurd in the sterile psych-ward room. Eureka hadn’t even been allowed to keep them after visiting hours ended.

  “I quit,” Eureka told her. She was embarrassed to be seen with her wrists and ankles bound to her bed. “Tell Cat she can have my locker.”

  Coach’s sad smile suggested that after a suicide attempt, a girl’s decisions weighed less, like bodies on the moon. “I ran my way through two divorces and a sister’s battle with cancer,” Coach said. “I’m not saying this just because you’re the fastest kid on my team. I’m saying this because maybe running is the therapy you need. When you’re feeling better, come see me. We’ll talk about that locker.”

  Eureka didn’t know why she’d agreed. Maybe she didn’t want to let another person down. She’d promised to try to be back in shape by the race against Manor today, to give it one more shot. She used to love to run. She used to love the team. But that was all before.

  “Eureka,” Dr. Landry prompted. “Can you tell me something you remember about the day of the accident?”

  Eureka studied the blank canvas of the ceiling, as if it might paint her a clue. She remembered so little about the accident there was no point opening her mouth. A mirror hung on the far wall of the office. Eureka rose and stood before it.

  “What do you see?” Landry asked.

  Traces of the girl she’d been before: same small, open-car-door ears she tucked her hair behind, same dark blue eyes like Dad’s, same eyebrows that ran wild if she didn’t tame them daily—it was all still there. And yet, just before this appointment, two women Diana’s age had passed her in the parking lot, whispering, “Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.”

  It was an expression, like a lot of things New Iberia said about Eureka: She could argue with the wall in China and win. Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket covered in glue. Runs faster than a stomped-on pissant at the Olympics. The trouble with expressions was how easily they rolled off the tongue. Those women weren’t thinking about the reality of Diana, who would know her daughter anywhere,
anytime, no matter the circumstances.

  Thirteen years of Catholic school had told Eureka that Diana was looking down from Heaven and recognizing her now. She wouldn’t mind the ripped Joshua Tree T-shirt under her daughter’s school cardigan, the chewed nails, or the hole in the left big toe of her houndstooth canvas shoes. But she might be pissed about the hair.

  In the four months since the accident, Eureka’s hair had gone from virgin dirty-blond to siren red (her mother’s natural shade) to peroxide white (her beauty-salon-owning aunt Maureen’s idea) to raven black (which finally seemed to fit) and was now growing out in an interesting ombré shag. Eureka tried to smile at her reflection, but her face looked strange, like the comedy mask that had hung on her drama class wall last year.

  “Tell me about your most recent positive memory,” Landry said.

  Eureka sank back onto the couch. It must have been that day. It must have been the Jelly Roll Morton CD on the stereo and her mother’s awful pitch harmonizing with her awful pitch as they drove with the windows down along a bridge they’d never cross. She remembered laughing at a funny lyric as they approached the middle of the bridge. She remembered seeing the rusted white sign whizz by—MILE MARKER FOUR.

  Then: Oblivion. A gaping black hole until she awoke in a Miami hospital with a lacerated scalp, a burst left eardrum that would never fully heal, a twisted ankle, two severely broken wrists, a thousand bruises—

  And no mother.

  Dad had been sitting at the edge of her bed. He cried when she came to, which made his eyes even bluer. Rhoda handed him tissues. Eureka’s four-year-old half siblings, William and Claire, clasped small, soft fingers around the parts of her hands not enclosed in casts. She’d smelled the twins even before she opened her eyes, before she knew anyone was there or that she was alive. They smelled like they always did: Ivory soap and starry nights.

  Rhoda’s voice was steady when she leaned over the bed and promoted her red glasses to the top of her head. “You’ve been in an accident. You’re going to be fine.”