Rapture

All she had to do was follow his dark violet gaze.

When Daniel had swum her swiftly to the surface, they had broken through in a different place than they’d entered. Where before, Luce realized, they’d seen the sunken cathedral from the front—just the twin green-gray spires rising from their sunken towers—now they were almost precisely above the center of the church, where the nave would once have been.

Now they were flanked by two longs rows of flying buttresses, which would once have held up the now-crumbling stone walls of the long nave of the church.

The arched buttresses were black with moss and weren’t nearly as tall as the spires of the façade. Their slanted stone tops broke through the surface of the water—which made them perfect benches for the group of twenty-odd Outcasts presently surrounding Luce and Daniel.

When Luce recognized them—a field of tan trench coats, pale skin, dead eyes—she stifled a gasp.

“Hello,” one said.

It wasn’t Phil, the smarmy Outcast who’d posed as Shelby’s boyfriend, then led a battle against the angels in Luce’s parents’ backyard. She didn’t see his face among the Outcasts, just a troop of blank and listless creatures she didn’t recognize and didn’t care to get to know.

Fallen angels who couldn’t make up their minds, the Outcasts were in some ways the opposite of Daniel, who refused to take any side but Luce’s. Shunned by Heaven for their indecisiveness, struck blind by Hell to everything but the dimmest glow of souls, the Outcasts made a sickening assembly. They were staring at Luce the way they had the last time, through ghastly, vacant eyes that could not see her body yet sensed something in her soul that said she was “the price.”

Luce felt exposed, trapped. The Outcasts’ leers made the water colder. Daniel swam nearer, and she felt the brush of something smooth against her back. He had unfurled his wings in the water.

“You would be ill-advised to attempt escape,” an Outcast behind Luce droned, as if sensing the stirring of Daniel’s wings under the water. “One glance behind you should convince you of our superior numbers, and it only takes one of these.” He parted his trench coat to reveal a sheath of silver starshots.

The Outcasts had them surrounded, perched on the stone remains of a sunken Venetian island. They looked haughty, seedy, with their trench coats knotted at their waists, concealing their dirty, toilet paper–thin wings.

Luce remembered from the battle in her parents’ backyard that the female Outcasts were just as callous and remorseless as the males. That had been only a few days earlier, but it felt like years had passed.

“But if you’d prefer to test us . . .” Lazily, the Outcast nocked an arrow, and Daniel could not completely mask his shudder.

“Silence.” One of the Outcasts rose to stand on the buttress. He was not wearing a trench coat, but a long gray robe, and Luce gasped when he reached up to pull back the hood and exposed his pallid face. He was the pale chanting man from the cathedral. He’d been watching her the whole time, hearing everything she said to the priest. He must have followed her here. His colorless lips curled into a smile.

“So,” he growled. “She has found her halo.”

“This is no business of yours,” Daniel shouted, but Luce could hear the desperation in his voice. She still didn’t know why, but the Outcasts were intent on making Luce their business. They believed she held some sway over their redemption, their return to Heaven, but their logic eluded her now just as much as it had in her parents’ backyard.

“Do not insult us with your lies,” the robed Outcast boomed. “We know what you seek, and you know our mission is to stop you.”

“You’re not thinking clearly,” Daniel said. “You’re not seeing this for what it is. Even you cannot want—”

“Lucifer to rewrite history?” The Outcast’s white eyes bore into the space between him and Luce. “Oh yes, in fact, we would like that very much.”

“How can you say that? Everything—the world, our very selves as we know them now—will be annihilated.

The entire universe, all consciousness, gone.”

“Do you really think our lives these last six thousand years are something worth preserving?” The leader’s eyes narrowed. “Better to wipe us out. Better to erase this blind existence before we begin to fade. Next time . . .” Again he trained his sightless eyes in Luce’s direction. She watched them swivel in their sockets, zeroing in on her soul. And it burned. “Next time we will not incur Heaven’s wrath in such a senseless way.

We will be welcomed back by the Throne. We will play our cards more wisely.” His blind gaze lingered on Luce’s soul. He smiled. “Next time we will have . . .help.”

“You’ll have nothing, just as you do now. Step aside, Outcast. This war is bigger than you.” The robed Outcast fingered a starshot and smiled. “It would be so very easy to kill you now.”

“A host of angels is already fighting for Lucinda. We will stop Lucifer, and when we do and there is time to deal with pettiness like yourselves, the Outcasts will regret this moment, along with everything you’ve done since the Fall.”

“In the next go-’round, the Outcasts will make the girl our focus from the beginning. We will charm her, as you have done. We will make her believe every word we say, as you have done. We have studied your ways. We know what to do.”

“Fools!” Daniel shouted. “You think you’ll be any smarter or more valiant next time? You think you’ll remember this moment, this conversation, this brilliant plan at all? You’ll do nothing but make the same mistakes you made this time. We all will. Only Lucifer will remember his previous errors. And his pursuits serve only his base desires. Surely you recall what his soul looks like,” Daniel said pointedly, “even if you see nothing else.”

The Outcasts rose on their rotting perches.

“I remember,” Luce heard an Outcast behind her say faintly.

“Lucifer was the brightest angel of all,” another called, full of nostalgia. “So beautiful, it blinded us.” They were sensitive, Luce realized, about their defor-mity.

“Cease your equivocation!” A louder voice called over them. The robed Outcast, this scene’s leader. “The Outcasts will see again in the next go-’round. Vision will lead to wisdom, and wisdom back through the Gates of Heaven. We will be attractive to the Price. She will guide us.”

Luce shivered against Daniel.

“Maybe we can all get a second chance at redemption.” Daniel appealed to them. “If we are able to stop Lucifer . . . there’s no reason your kind could not also—”

“No!” The robed Outcast lunged from his buttress at Daniel, his dreary, beat-up wings spreading wide with a crackle like a snapping twig.

Daniel’s wings loosened around her waist and the halo was thrust back into her hands as he rose out of the water in self-defense. The robed leader was no match for Daniel, who shot up and threw a right cross.

The Outcast flew backward twenty feet, skimming the water like a stone. He righted himself and returned to his perch on the buttress. With a wave of his pale hand, he cued the rest of his group to rise in a circle in the air.

“You know who she is!” Daniel shouted. “You know what this means for all of us. For once in your existence, do something brave instead of craven.”

“How?” the Outcast challenged him. Water streamed from the hem of his robes.

Daniel was breathing hard, eyeing Luce and the golden halo gleaming through the water. His violet eyes looked panicked for a moment—and then he did the last thing Luce would ever have expected.

He looked the robed Outcast deep in his dead white eyes, extended his hand palm up, and said, “Join us.” The Outcast laughed darkly for a long time.

Daniel did not flinch.

“The Outcasts work for no one but themselves.”

“You’ve made that clear. No one is asking you to indenture yourselves. But do not work against the only cause that is right. Seize this chance to save everyone, including yourselves. Join us in the fight against Lucifer.”

“It is a trick!” one of the Outcast girls shouted.

“He seeks to deceive you in order to gain his freedom.”

“Take the girl!”

Luce gazed in horror at the robed Outcast hovering over her. He drew nearer, his eyes widening hungrily, his white hands trembling as they reached for her. Closer.

Closer. She screamed—

But no one heard it, because at that moment, the world rippled. The air and light and every particle in the atmosphere seemed to double and split, then folded in on themselves with a crack of thunder.

It was happening again.

Through the thicket of tan trench coats and dirty wings, the sky had turned a dim and smoggy gray, like it had been the last time in the Sword & Cross library, when everything had begun to tremble. Another timequake. Lucifer drawing near.

A tremendous wave crashed over her head. Luce flailed, grasping tight to the halo, paddling frantically to keep her head above water.

She saw Daniel’s face as a great creaking sounded on their left. His white wings were soaring toward her, but not quickly enough.

The last thing Luce saw before her head dipped under the water seemed to happen in slow motion: The green-gray church spire bowed over in the water, tipping down ever so gently toward her head. Its shadow grew large until with a thud it jerked her down into darkness.

Luce woke up undulating on a wave: She was on a water bed.

Red lace reticella curtains were drawn over the windows. Gray light slipping through gaps in the intricate lace suggested it was dusk. Luce’s head ached and her ankle throbbed. She rolled over in the black silk sheets—

and came face to face with a sleepy-eyed girl with a huge mop of blond hair.

The girl moaned and batted heavily shadowed silver eyelids, stretching a slack fist over her head. “Oh,” she said, sounding much less surprised to wake next to Luce than Luce felt waking next to her. “How late did we stay out last night?” she slurred in Italian. “That party was crazy. ”

Luce lunged backward and fell out of the bed, sinking into a plush white rug. The room was a cavern, cold and stale-smelling, with dark gray wallpaper and a king-sized sleigh bed on a huge area rug in the center.

She had no idea where she was, how she’d gotten there, whose bathrobe she was wearing, who this girl was, or what party the girl thought Luce had been at the night before. Had she somehow fallen into an Announcer? There was a zebra-print footstool by the bed The clothes she’d left in the gondola were folded neatly on it—the white sweater she’d put on two days earlier at her parents’ house, her worn-in jeans, her riding boots leaning against each other to the side. The silver locket with the carved-rose face—she’d tucked it inside her boot just before she and Daniel dove into the water—was resting in a spun glass tray on the night table.

She slipped it back over her head and fumbled into her jeans. The girl in the bed had fallen back asleep, a black silk pillow stuffed over her face, her tangled blond hair spilling out from under it. Luce peeked around the high headboard, finding two empty leather recliners facing a blazing fireplace on the far wall, and a flat-screen TV mounted over it.