Rapture

She was back at the Roll Call. This time she would force herself to remember how it went.

Every son and every daughter of Heaven would be asked to choose a side. God or Lucifer. Good or . . . no, he wasn’t evil.

Evil didn’t exist yet.

Crowded together like that, every angel was stunning, distinct but somehow indistinguishable from the next. There was Daniel, in the center, the purest glow she would ever know. In her memory, Lucinda was moving toward him.

Moving from where?

Daniel’s voice filled her ears: Search your past.

She hadn’t looked at Lucifer yet. She didn’t want to.

Look where you do not want to look.

When she turned to the far end of the Meadow, she saw the light around Lucifer. It was splendid and osten-tatious, as if he sought to compete with everything in the Meadow—the Orchard, the Heavenly hum, the Throne itself. Lucinda had to focus hard to see him clearly.

He was . . . lovely. Amber hair spilled down his shoulders in shiny waves. His body seemed grander, defined by muscle no mortal would ever achieve. His cold blue eyes were mesmerizing.

Lucinda couldn’t take her eyes off him. Then, between bars of the Heavenly hum, she heard it. Though she didn’t remember learning the song, she knew the words and would always know them, the way mortals carried nursery rhymes through their lives.

Of all the pairs the Throne endorsed None rose to burn as bright

As Lucifer, the Morning Star,

And Lucinda, his Evening Light

The lines echoed in her head, drawing memory to them, recollection raining down with every word.

Lucinda, his Evening Light?

Lucinda’s soul crawled, sickened, toward a realization. Lucifer had written this song. It was a part of his design.

She was . . . had she been Lucifer’s lover?

The moment she wondered whether that horror was possible, Luce knew it was the oldest, coldest truth. She had been wrong about everything. Her first love had been Lucifer, and Lucifer had been hers. Even their names were paired. Once, they had been soul mates. She felt twisted, foreign to herself, as if she’d awakened to realize she had killed someone in her sleep.

Across the Meadow, Lucinda and Lucifer locked eyes at the Roll Call. Hers widened in disbelief as his crinkled up in an inscrutable smile.

Flash.

A memory inside a memory. Luce tunneled even further through the darkness, to the place where she most loathed to go.

Lucifer held her, his wings caressing hers, creating unmentionable pleasure, openly, there on her silver seat around the empty Throne.

Our love is endless. There can be nothing else.

When he kissed her, Lucinda and Lucifer became the first beings to experiment with affection beyond God.

The kisses had been strange and wonderful and Lucinda had wanted more, but she feared what the other angels would think of Lucifer’s kisses on her. She worried that his kiss would look like a brand on her lips. Most of all, she feared God would know when God returned and resumed the title of the Throne.

“Say you adore me,” Lucifer begged.

“Adoration is for God,” Lucinda replied.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Lucifer whispered. “Imagine how strong we’d be if we could openly declare our love before the Throne, you adoring me, me adoring you.

The Throne is only one—united in love, we could be greater.”

“What’s the difference between love and adoration?” Lucinda asked.

“Love is taking the adoration you feel for God and giving it to somebody actually here. ”

“But I don’t want to be greater than God.” Lucifer’s face darkened at her words. He spun away from her, rage taking root in his soul. Lucinda sensed a strange change within him, but it was so foreign she didn’t recognize it. She began to fear him. He seemed to fear nothing, except her ever leaving him. He taught her the song about the greatness of their union. He made her sing it constantly, until Lucinda saw herself as Lucifer’s Evening Light. He told Lucinda this was love.

Luce writhed with the pain of the memory. It went on and on like that with Lucifer. With every interaction, every caress of Lucinda’s wings, he grew more possessive, more envious of her adoration of the Throne, telling Lucinda that if she truly loved him, Lucifer would be enough.

There was one day she remembered during that dark period: She’d been weeping in the Meadow, up to her neck in cloudsoil, wanting to sink away from everything.

An angel’s shadow hovered over her.

“Leave me alone!” she had cried.

But the wing that draped over hers did the opposite.

It cradled her. The angel seemed to know what she needed better than she knew herself. Slowly, Lucinda lifted her head. The angel’s eyes were violet.

“Daniel.” She knew him as the sixth Archangel, charged with watching over lost souls. “Why have you come to me?”

“Because I have been watching you.” Daniel stared and Luce knew that before then, no one had ever seen an angel cry. Lucinda’s tears were the first. “What is happening to you?”

For a long time she searched for the words. “I feel like I’m losing my light.”

The story poured out of her, and Daniel let it come.

No one had listened to Lucinda in a very long time.

When she finished, Daniel’s eyes were wet with tears.

“What you call love does not sound very beautiful,” he said slowly. “Think of the way we adore the Throne.

That adoration makes us the best versions of ourselves.

We feel encouraged to go further with our instincts, not to change ourselves for love. If I were yours and you were mine, I would want you to be exactly as you are. I would never eclipse you with my desires.” Lucinda took Daniel’s warm, strong hand. Maybe Lucifer had discovered love, but this angel seemed to understand how to build it into something wonderful.

Suddenly, Lucinda was kissing Daniel, showing him how it was done, needing for the first time to give her soul entirely to another. They held each other, Daniel’s and Lucinda’s souls glowing brighter, two halves made better as a whole.

Flash.

Of course, Lucifer came back to her. The rage within him had swelled so much that he was twice as tall as her.

They used to stand eye to eye. “I can stand the yoke no longer. Will you come before the Throne with me and declare your sole allegiance to our love?”

“Lucifer, wait—” Lucinda wanted to tell him about Daniel, but he wouldn’t have heard her anyway.

“It is a lie for me to play adoring angel when I have you and require nothing more. Let us make plans, Lucinda, you and I. Let us scheme for glory.”

“How is that love?” she had cried. “You adore your dreams, your ambition. You taught me how to love, but I cannot love a soul so dark it eats up others’ light.” He did not believe her, or he pretended not to hear her, because Lucifer soon challenged the Throne to gather all the souls in the Meadow for the Roll Call.

He’d held Lucinda in his grip when he made the challenge, but when he started to speak, he was distracted and she was able to slip away. She walked into the Meadow, wandered among bright souls. She saw the one she’d been seeking all along.

Lucifer bellowed at the angels:

“A line has been drawn in the cloudsoil of the Meadow. Now you are all free to choose. I offer you equality, an existence without an authority’s arbitrary rankings.”

Luce knew he meant that she was only free to follow him. Lucifer might have thought he loved her, but what he loved was controlling her with a dark, destructive fascination. It was as if Lucifer thought Lucinda was an aspect of him.

She huddled next to Daniel in the Meadow, basking in the warmth of a burgeoning love that was pure and sustaining, as Daniel’s name rang out across the Meadow.

He had been called. He rose above the riot of angelic light and said with calm self-possession, “With respect, I will not do this. I will not choose Lucifer’s side, nor will I choose the side of Heaven.”

A roar went up from the vast camps of angels, from those who stood beside the Throne, from Lucifer most of all. Lucinda had been stunned.

“Instead, I choose love, ” Daniel went on. “I choose love and leave you to your war. You’re wrong to bring this upon us,” Daniel said to Lucifer.

Then, to the Throne: “All that is good in Heaven and on Earth is made of love. Maybe that wasn’t your plan when you created the universe—maybe love was just one aspect of a complicated and brutal world.

But love was the best thing you made, and it has become the only thing worth saving. This war is not just.

This war is not good. Love is the only thing worth fighting for.”

The Meadow fell silent after Daniel’s words. Most of the angels looked dumbfounded, as if they did not understand what Daniel meant.

It had not been Lucinda’s turn. The angels’ names were called by the celestial secretaries according to their rank, and Lucinda was one of a handful of angels higher than Daniel. It didn’t matter. They were a team. She rose to his side in the Meadow.

“There should never have to be a choice between love and You,” Lucinda declared to the Throne. “Maybe one day You will find a way to reconcile adoration and the true love You have made us capable of. But if forced to choose, I must stand beside my love. I choose Daniel and will choose him forevermore.”

Then Luce remembered the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. She turned to Lucifer, her first love. Without being honest with him, none of this would count. “You showed me the power of love, and for that I will always be grateful. But love ranks a distant third for you, far behind your pride and rage. You have begun a fight you can never win.”

“I am doing all of this for you!” Lucifer shouted.

It was his first great lie, the universe’s first great lie.

Arm in arm with Daniel in the center of the Meadow, Lucinda had made the only possible choice. Her fear paled in comparison to her love.

But she never could have anticipated the curse. Luce remembered now that the punishment had come from both sides. That was what had made the curse so binding: Both the Throne and Lucifer—out of jealousy or spite or a loveless view of justice—had sealed Daniel and Lucinda’s fate for many thousands of years.

In the silence of the Meadow, a strange thing happened: Another Daniel soared up next to Lucinda and Daniel. He was an Anachronism—the Daniel she had met at Shoreline, the angel Luce Price knew and loved.

“I come here to beg clemency,” Daniel’s twinning spoke. “If we must be punished—and, my Master, I do not question your decision—please at least remember that one of the great features of Your power is Your mercy, which is mysterious and large and humbles us all.”

At the time Lucinda had not understood this—but in Luce’s memory, finally, everything made sense. He had given Luce the gift of a loophole in the curse, so that someday in the distant future, she could liberate their love.

The last thing she remembered was clutching Daniel tightly when the cloudsoil boiled black. The ground dropped out from under them and the angels began their fugue, their Fall. Daniel had slipped from her reach. Her body had fixed into immobility. She lost him. She lost all memory. She lost herself.