Torment

Chapter Seven

TWELVE DAYS

"I don't get why you're being so weird," Shelby said to Luce the next morning. "You've been here, what, six days? And you're Shoreline's biggest hero. Maybe you're going to live up to your reputation after all."

The Sunday-morning sky was dotted with cumulus clouds. Luce and Shelby were walking along Shoreline's tiny beach, sharing an orange and a thermos of chai. A strong wind carried the earthy scent of old redwoods down from the woods. The tide was rough and high, kicking up long swaths of knotted black seaweed, jelly sh, and rotting driftwood into the girls' path.

"It was nothing," Luce muttered, which wasn't exactly true. Jumping into that icy water after Dawn had certainly been something. But Steven --the severity of his tone, the force of his grip on her arm--had put a fear into Luce about ever speaking of Dawn's rescue.

She eyed the salty foam left in the wake of a receding wave. She was trying not to look out at the deep, dark water beyond--so she wouldn't have to think about hands down in its icy depths. For your own protection. Steven must have meant your in its plural form. As in, it's for all the students' protection. Otherwise, if he only meant Luce ...

"Dawn's okay," she said. "That's all that matters."

"Um, yeah, because of you, Baywatch."

"Do not start calling me Baywatch."

"You prefer to think of yourself as a jack-of-all-trades kind of savior?" Shelby had the most deadpan way of teasing. "Frankie says some mystery creep's been lurking around the school grounds the past two nights. You should give him what for--"

"What?" Luce almost spat out her chai. "Who is it?"

"I repeat: Mystery creep. They dunno." Shelby took a seat on a weathered at of limestone, skipping a few stones expertly into the ocean. "Just some dude. I overheard Frankie talking to Kramer about it on the boat yesterday after all the hoopla."

Luce sat down next to Shelby and began to root around in the sand for stones.

Someone was sneaking around Shoreline. What if it was Daniel?

It would be just like him. So stubborn about keeping his own promise not to see her, but unable to stay away. The thought of him made her yearn for him that much more. She could feel herself almost on the brink of tears, which was crazy. Odds were the mystery creep wasn't even Daniel. It could be Cam. It could be anyone. It could be an Outcast.

"Did Francesca seem worried?" she asked Shelby.

"Wouldn't you be?"

"Wait a minute. Is that why you didn't sneak out last night?" It was the rst night Luce hadn't been woken up by Shelby coming in through the window.

"No." Shelby's skipping arm was toned from all her yoga. Her next stone skipped six times in a wide arc, coming almost all the way back to them, like a boomerang.

"Where do you go every night, anyway?"

Shelby stu ed her hands in the pockets of her pu y red ski vest. She was staring at the gray waves so intensely that it was clear she'd either seen something out there--or she was avoiding the question. Luce followed her gaze, almost relieved to see nothing in the water but gray-and-white waves all the way to the horizon.

"Shelby."

"What? I don't go anywhere."

Luce started to stand up, annoyed that Shelby felt she couldn't tell her anything. Luce was brushing damp sand from the backs of her legs when Shelby's hand tugged her back down onto the rock.

"Okay, I used to go see my sorry-ass boyfriend." Shelby sighed heavily, pitching a rock artlessly into the water, nearly pelting a fat seagull swooping down for a sh. "Before he became my sorry-ass ex-boyfriend."

"Oh. Shel, I'm sorry." Luce chewed on her lip. "I didn't even know you had a boyfriend."

"I had to start keeping him at arm's length. He got way too into the fact that I had a new roommate. Kept bugging me to let him come over late at night. Wanted to meet you. I don't know what kind of girl he thinks I am. No o ense, but three's a crowd in my book."

"Who is he?" Luce asked. "Does he go here?"

"Phillip Aves. He's a senior in the main school."

Luce didn't think she knew him.

"That pale kid with the bleached-blond hair?" Shelby said. "Kind of looks like an albino David Bowie? You can't really miss him." Her mouth twitched. "Unfortunately."

"Why didn't you tell me you broke up?"

"I prefer downloading Vampire Weekend songs that I lip-sync to when you're not around. Better for my chakras. Besides"--she pointed a stubby

nger at Luce--"you're the one being all moody and weird today. Daniel treating you wrong or something?"

Luce leaned back on her elbows. "That would require us actually seeing each other, which apparently we aren't allowed to do."

If Luce closed her eyes, she could let the sound of the waves take her back to the very rst night she'd kissed Daniel. In this lifetime. The humid tangle of their bodies on that languishing Savannah boardwalk. The hungry pressure of his hands pulling her in. Everything seemed possible then. She opened her eyes. She was so far away from all of that now. She opened her eyes. She was so far away from all of that now.

"So your sorry-ass ex-boyfriend--"

"No." Shelby made a zip-it motion with her ngers. "I don't want to talk about SAEB any more than I guess you want to talk about Daniel. Next."

That was fair. But it wasn't exactly that Luce didn't want to talk about Daniel. It was more like, if she started talking about Daniel, she might not be able to shut up. She already sounded like a broken record in her own mind--cycling on repeat through the total of oh, four physical experiences she'd had with him in this life. (She chose only to start counting once he stopped pretending she didn't exist.) Imagine how quickly she would bore Shelby, who'd probably had tons of boyfriends, tons of experience. Compared to Luce's next to none.

One kiss she could barely remember with a boy who'd burst into ames. A handful of very hot moments with Daniel. That just about summed it up. Luce was certainly no expert when it came to love.

Again she felt the unfairness of her situation: Daniel had all these great memories of them together to fall back on when things got rough. She had nothing.

Until she looked up at her roommate.

"Shelby?"

Shelby had her pu y red hood pulled over her head and was poking a stick into the wet sand. "I told you I don't want to talk about him."

"I know. I was wondering, remember when you mentioned that you knew how to glimpse your past lives?"

This was what she'd been about to ask Shelby when Dawn fell overboard.

"I never said that." The stick plunged deeper into the sand. Shelby's face was ushed and her thick blond hair was frizzing out of her ponytail.

"Yes ... you did." Luce tilted her head. "You wrote it on my paper. That day when we were doing the icebreaker? You grabbed it out of my hands and said you could speak more than eighteen languages and glimpse past lives and which one did I need you to ll out--"

"I remember what I said. But you misunderstood what I meant."

"Okay," Luce said slowly, "well--"

"Just because I have glimpsed a past life before doesn't mean I know how to do it, and it doesn't mean it was my own."

"So, it wasn't yours?"

"Hell no, reincarnation is for freaks."

Luce frowned and dug her hands into the wet sand, wanting to bury herself in it.

"Hello, that was a joke." Shelby nudged Luce playfully. "Tailored especially for the girl who's had to go through puberty a thousand times." She grimaced. "Once was enough for me, thank you very much."

So Luce was That Girl. The girl who'd had to go through puberty a thousand times. She'd never thought about it that way before. It was almost funny: From the outside, going through endless puberties seemed like the worst part of her lot. But it was so much more complicated than that. Luce started to say she'd go through a thousand more pimples and hormone uctuations if she could look into her past lives and understand more about herself, but then she looked up at Shelby. "If it wasn't yours, then whose past life did you glimpse?"

"Why are you being so nosy? Damn."

Luce could feel her blood pressure rising. "Shelby, ohmigod, throw me a bone!"

"Okay," Shelby said nally, making a chill-out motion with her hands. "I was at this party one night in Corona. Things got pretty crazy, half- naked s?ances and shit, and--well, that's not really the story. So I remember taking a walk to get some air. It was raining, hard to see where I was going. I turned the corner in an alleyway and there was this guy, kind of beat-up-looking. He was bent over a sphere of darkness. I'd never seen anything like it, shaped like a globe, but glowing, kind of oating above his hands. He was crying."

"What was it?"

"I didn't know then, but now I know it was an Announcer."

Luce was mesmerized. "And you saw some of the past life he was glimpsing? What was it like?"

Shelby met Luce's eyes and swallowed. "It was pretty gruesome, Luce."

"I'm sorry," Luce said. "I was only asking because ..."

It felt like a big deal to admit what she was about to admit. Francesca would de nitely be opposed to this. But Luce needed answers, and she needed help. Shelby's help.

"I need to glimpse some of my past lives," Luce said. "Or I need to at least try. Things have been happening recently that I'm supposed to just accept because I don't know any better--only I could know better, a lot better, if I could just see where I come from. Where I've been. Does that make any sense?"

Shelby nodded.

"I need to know what I had in the past with Daniel so I can feel surer of what I have with him now." Luce took a breath. "That guy, the one in the alley ... did you see what he did to the Announcer?"

Shelby scrunched her shoulders. "He just sort of guided it into shape. I didn't even know what it was at the time, and I don't know how he tracked it down. That's why Francesca and Steven's demonstration freaked me out so much. I saw what happened that one night, and I've been trying to forget about it ever since. I had no idea that what I was seeing was an Announcer."

"If I could track down an Announcer, do you think you could guide it?"

"No promises," Shelby said, "but I'll give it a shot. You know how to track them down?"

"Not really, but how hard can it be? They've been haunting me all my life."

Shelby cupped her hand over Luce's on the rock. "I want to help you, Luce, but it's weird. I'm scared. What if you see something you, you know, shouldn't?"

"When you broke up with SAEB--"

"I thought I told you not to--"

"Just listen: Aren't you glad you gured out whatever it was that made you break up with him, sooner rather than later? I mean, what if you got engaged or something and only then--"

"Blech!" Shelby put up a hand to stop Luce. "Point taken. Now, come on, nd us a shadow." Luce led Shelby back across the beach and up the steep stone stairs, where dashes of battered red and yellow verbenas had pushed up through the wet, sandy soil. They crossed the neat green terrace, trying not to interrupt a group of non-Nephilim students in a game of ultimate Frisbee. They passed their third-story dorm room window and wound around the back of the building. At the edge of the forest of redwoods, Luce pointed to a space between the trees. "That's where I found one the last time."