Torment

"Yeah. We. A long time ago." Shelby wouldn't look at her.

"Okay." Luce focused on breathing. She could handle this. But the whispers ying around the wall of girls made her skin crawl, and she shuddered.

Shelby sco ed. "I'm sorry the idea disgusts you so much."

"That's not it." But Luce did feel disgusted. Disgusted with herself. "I always ... I thought I was the only--"

Shelby put her hands on her hips. "You thought every time you disappeared for seventeen years that Daniel just twiddled his thumbs? Earth to Luce, there is a Before You for Daniel. Or an In Between, or whatever." She paused to give Luce a sideways squint. "Are you really that self- involved?"

Luce was speechless.

Shelby grunted and turned to face the rest of the hall. "This estrogen force eld needs to dissipate," she barked, waggling her ngers at them. "Move along. All of you. Now!"

As the girls scurried o , Luce pressed her head against the cold metal locker. She wanted to crawl inside it and hide.

Shelby leaned her back against the wall next to Luce's face. "You know," she said, her voice softening, "Daniel's a crap boyfriend. And a liar. He's lying to you."

Luce straightened up and went at Shelby, feeling her cheeks ush. Luce might be pissed o at Daniel right now, but nobody talked smack about her boyfriend.

"Whoa." Shelby ducked away. "Calm down, there. Jeez." She slid down the wall to sit on the oor. "Look, I shouldn't have brought it up. It was one stupid night a long time ago and the guy was clearly miserable without you. I didn't know you then, so I thought all the lore about you two was ... supremely boring. Which, if you must know, explains the huge grudge I've held with your name on it."

She patted the oor next to her, and Luce slid down the wall to sit too. Shelby gave a tentative smile. "I swear, Luce, I never thought I'd meet you. I de nitely never expected you to be ... cool."

"You think I'm cool?" Luce asked, laughing quietly to herself. "You were right about me being self-absorbed."

"Ugh, just what I thought. You're one of those impossible-to-stay-mad-at people, aren't you?" Shelby sighed. "Fine. I'm sorry for going after your boyfriend and, you know, hating you before I knew you. I won't do it again."

This was weird. The thing that could have driven two friends instantly apart was actually drawing them closer together. This wasn't Shelby's fault. Any ash of anger Luce felt about it was something she needed to take up with ... Daniel. One stupid night, Shelby had said. But what had really happened?

Sunset found Luce walking down the rocky steps to the beach. It was cold outside, colder still as she got closer to the water. The day's last rays of light danced o thin sheets of cloud, staining the ocean orange, pink, and pastel blue. The calm sea stretched out in front of her, looking like a path to Heaven.

Until she got to the wide circle of sand, still blackened from Roland's bon re, Luce didn't know what she was doing down there. Then she found herself crawling behind the tall lava rock where Daniel had tugged her away. Where the two of them had danced and then spent the precious few moments they'd had together ghting about something as stupid as the color of her hair.

Callie had once had a boyfriend at Dover whom she'd broken up with after a ght over a toaster. One of them had jammed the thing with an oversized New York bagel; the other one had ipped out. Luce couldn't remember all the details now, but she remembered thinking, Who breaks up over a kitchen appliance?

But it was never really about the toaster, Callie had told her. The toaster was just a symptom, something that represented everything else that was wrong between them.

Luce hated that she and Daniel kept getting into ghts. The one on the beach, over her dye job, reminded her of Callie's story. It felt like a preview of some bigger, uglier argument on the way.

Bracing herself against the wind, Luce realized she'd come down here to try to trace where they'd gone wrong the other night. She was idiotically looking for signs in the water, some clue carved into the rough volcanic rock. She was looking everywhere except inside herself. Because what was inside Luce was just the vast enigma of her past. Maybe the answers were still somewhere in the Announcers, but for now, they remained frustratingly out of her grasp.

She didn't want to blame Daniel. She was the one who'd been na?ve enough to assume that their relationship had been exclusive across time. But he'd never told her otherwise. So he'd practically set her up to walk right into this shock. It was embarrassing. And one more item to tick o on the long list of things that Luce thought she deserved to know and that Daniel didn't see t to tell her.

She felt something she thought was rain, a drizzly sensation on her cheeks and her ngertips. But it was warm instead of cold. It was powdery and light, not wet. She turned her face toward the sky and was blinded by shimmering violet light. Not wanting to shield her eyes, she watched even when it grew so bright it hurt. The particles slowly drifted toward the water just o shore, falling into a pattern and limning the shape she'd know anywhere.

He seemed to have grown more gorgeous. His bare feet hovered inches o the water as he approached the shore. His broad white wings seemed He seemed to have grown more gorgeous. His bare feet hovered inches o the water as he approached the shore. His broad white wings seemed to be edged with violet light and were pulsing nearly imperceptibly in the rough wind. It wasn't fair. The way he made her feel when she looked at him--awed and ecstatic and a little bit afraid. She could hardly think of anything else. Every annoyance or nagging frustration vanished. There was just that undeniable pull toward him.

"You keep turning up," she whispered.

Daniel's voice carried over the water. "I told you I wanted to talk to you."

Luce felt her mouth pucker up. "About Shelby?"

"About the danger you keep putting yourself in." Daniel spoke so plainly. She'd been expecting her mention of Shelby to elicit some reaction. But Daniel just cocked his head. He reached the wet edge of the beach, where the water foamed and rolled away, and oated just above the sand in front of her. "What about Shelby?"

"Are you really going to pretend like you don't know?"

"Hold on." Daniel lowered his feet to the ground, bending his knees in a deep pli? when his bare soles touched the sand. When he straightened, his wings pulled backward, away from his face, and sent a wave of wind back with them. Luce got her rst sense of how heavy they must be.

It took less than two seconds for Daniel to reach her, but when his arms slipped around her back and pulled her to him, he couldn't have come quickly enough.

"Let's not get o to another bad start," he said.

She closed her eyes and let him lift her o the ground. His mouth found hers and she tilted her face to the sky, letting the feel of him overwhelm her. There was no darkness, no more cold, just the lovely sensation of being bathed in his violet glow. Even the rush of the ocean was canceled out by a soft hum, the energy Daniel carried in his body.

Her hands were wrapped tight around his neck, then stroked the rm muscles on his shoulders, brushing the soft, thick perimeter of his wings. They were strong and white and shimmering, always so much bigger than she remembered. Two great sails extending from his sides, every inch of them perfect and smooth. She could feel a tension against her ngers, like touching a tightly stretched canvas. But silkier, and deliciously velvet soft. They seemed to respond to her touch, even extending forward to rub against her, pulling her closer, until she was buried in them, nestling deeper and deeper, and still never getting enough. Daniel shuddered.

"Is this okay?" she whispered, because sometimes he grew nervous when things between them started to heat up. "Does it hurt you?"

Tonight his eyes looked greedy. "It feels wonderful. Nothing compares."

His ngers glided along her waist, slipping inside her sweater. Usually, the softest caress from Daniel's hands made her go weak. Tonight his touch was more forceful. Almost rough. She didn't know what had gotten into him, but she liked it.

His lips traced hers, then drifted higher, following the bridge of her nose, coming down tenderly on each of her eyelids. When he pulled back, she opened her eyes and gazed at him.

"You are so beautiful," he whispered.

It was exactly what most girls would have wanted to hear--only, as soon as he said it, Luce felt ripped out of her body, replaced by someone else's.

Shelby's.

But not just Shelby's, because what were the odds that she had been the only one? Had other eyes and noses and cheekbones taken Daniel's kisses? Had other bodies huddled with him on a beach? Other lips tangled, other hearts pounded? Had other whispered compliments been exchanged?

"What's wrong?" he asked.

Luce felt sick. They could steam up windows with their kisses, but as soon as they started using their mouths for other things--like talking --everything got so complicated.

She turned her face away. "You lied to me."

Daniel didn't sco or get angry, as she was expecting him to--almost wanting him to. He sat down on the sand. He propped his hands on his knees and stared out at the frothy waves. "About what, exactly?"

Even as the words came out, Luce regretted where she was going. "I could take your approach--not tell you anything, ever."

"I can't tell you whatever it is you want to know if you won't tell me what's bothering you."

She thought about Shelby, but when she imagined playing the jealousy card, only to have him treat her like a child, Luce felt pathetic. Instead, she said, "I feel like we're strangers. Like I don't know you any better than anyone else."

"Oh." His voice was quiet, but his face was so infuriatingly stoic, Luce wanted to shake him. Nothing riled him up.

"You're holding me hostage out here, Daniel. I know nothing. I know no one. I'm lonely. Every time I see you, you've put up some new wall, and you never let me in. You never let me in. You dragged me all the way out here--"

She was thinking to California, but it was more than that. Her past, what limited conception of it that she had, rolled out in her mind like the dropped reel of a movie, unwinding onto the oor.

Daniel had dragged her much, much further than California. He'd dragged her through centuries of ghts like this one. Through agonizing deaths that caused pain to everyone around her--like those nice old people she'd visited last week. Daniel had ruined that couple's life. Killed their daughter. All because he'd been some hotshot angel who saw something he wanted and went after it.

No, he hadn't just dragged her to California. He'd dragged her into a cursed eternity. A burden that should have been his alone to bear. "I am su ering--me and everyone who loves me--for your curse. For all time. Because of you."

He winced as though she'd struck him. "You want to go home," he said.

She kicked the sand. "I want to go back. I want you to take back whatever it was you did to get me into this. I just want to live and die a normal life and break up with normal people over normal things like toasters, not the supernatural secrets of the universe that you don't even trust me with."

"Hold on." Daniel's face had gone completely white. His shoulders sti ened and his hands were shaking. Even his wings, which moments ago had seemed so powerful, looked frail. Luce wanted to reach out and touch them, as if somehow they would tell her whether the pain she saw in his eyes was real. But she held her ground.