Torment

"I'll email you, okay?" Callie hung up before Luce could even respond.

This was not good. Luce ipped the phone shut. She shouldn't have felt like Callie was intruding by inviting herself to Thanksgiving. She should have felt great that her friend still wanted to see her. But all she felt was helpless, homesick, and guilty for perpetuating this stupid cycle of lies.

Was it even possible to just be normal and happy anymore? What on earth--or beyond it--would it take for Luce to be as content with her life as someone like Miles seemed to be? Her mind kept circling around Daniel. And she had her answer: The only way she could be carefree again would be to have never met Daniel. To have never known true love.

Something rustled in the treetops. A frigid wind assailed her skin. She hadn't been concentrating on an Announcer speci cally, but she realized --just as Steven had told her--that her wish for answers must have summoned one.

No, not one.

She shivered, looking up into the tangle of branches. Hundreds of stealthy, murky, foul-smelling shadows.

They owed together in the high redwood branches over her head. Like someone in the clouds had tipped over a giant pot of black ink that had They owed together in the high redwood branches over her head. Like someone in the clouds had tipped over a giant pot of black ink that had spread across the sky and dripped down into the canopy of the trees, bleeding one branch into another until the forest was a solid wash of blackness. At rst it was almost impossible to tell where one shadow stopped and the next one began, which shadow was real and which an Announcer.

But soon they began to morph and make themselves obvious--slyly at rst, as if they were moving innocently in the fading light of the day--but then more boldly. They pinched themselves free from the branches they'd been occupying, wrenching their tendrils of blackness down, down, close to Luce's head. Beckoning or threatening her? She steeled herself but couldn't catch her breath. There were too many. It was too much. She gasped for air, trying not to panic, knowing it was already too late.

She ran.

She started south, back toward the dorm. But the swirling black abyss in the treetops just moved with her, hissing along the lower branches of the redwoods, drawing closer. She felt the icy pinpricks of their touch on her shoulders. She yelped as they groped for her, swatting them away with her bare hands.

She changed course, swung herself around in the opposite direction, toward the Nephilim lodge to the north. She would nd Miles or Shelby or even Francesca. But the Announcers wouldn't let her go. Immediately, they slithered ahead, swelling out in front of her, swallowing the light and blocking the path to the lodge. Their hissing drowned out the distant murmurs of the Nephilim camp re, making Luce's friends seem impossibly far away.

Luce forced herself to stop and take a deep breath. She knew more about the Announcers than she ever had before. She should be less afraid of them. What was her problem? Maybe she knew she was getting closer to something, some memory or information that could alter the course of her life. And her relationship with Daniel. The truth was, she wasn't just terri ed of the Announcers. She was terri ed of what she might see within them.

Or hear.

Yesterday, Steven's mention of tuning out the Announcers' noise had nally clicked--she could listen in on her past lives. She could cut through the static and focus on what she wanted to know. What she needed to know. Steven must have meant to give her this clue, must have known she would listen and take her new knowledge straight to the Announcers.

She turned and stepped back into the dark solitude of the trees. The whooshing sounds from the Announcers quieted and settled.

The darkness under the branches engulfed her in cold and the peaty smell of decomposing leaves. In the twilight, the Announcers crept forward, settling into the dimness all around her, camou aging themselves again among the natural shadows. Some of them moved swiftly and sti y, like soldiers; others had a nimble grace. Luce wondered whether their appearances re ected anything about the messages they contained.

So much about the Announcers still felt impenetrable. Tuning them in wasn't intuitive, like ddling with an old radio dial. What she'd heard yesterday--that one voice among the riot of voices--had come to her by accident.

The past might have been unfathomable to her before, but she could feel it pressing up against the dark surfaces, waiting to break into the light. She closed her eyes and cupped her hands together. There, in the darkness, her heart pounding, she willed them to come out. She called on those coldest, darkest things, asking them to deliver her past, to illuminate her and Daniel's story. She called on them to solve the mystery of who he was and why he had chosen her.

Even if the truth broke her heart.

A rich, feminine laugh rang out in the forest. A laugh so clear and full, it felt as if it were surrounding Luce, bouncing o the branches in the trees. She tried to trace its origin, but there were so many shadows gathered--Luce didn't know how to pinpoint the source. And then she felt her blood go cold.

The laughter was hers.

Or had once been hers, back when she was a child. Before Daniel, before Sword & Cross, before Trevor ... before a life full of secrets and lies and so many unanswerable questions. Before she'd ever seen an angel. It was too innocent a laugh, too carefree to belong to her anymore.

A breath of wind swirled in the branches overhead, and a scattering of brown redwood needles broke o and showered to the ground. They pattered like raindrops as they joined a thousand predecessors on the mulchy forest oor. Among them was one large frond.

Thick and feathery, fully intact, it drifted slowly down somehow outside the power of gravity. It was black instead of brown. And instead of falling to the ground, it drifted lightly onto Luce's outstretched palm.

Not a frond, but an Announcer. As she leaned down to examine it more closely, she heard the laughter again. Somewhere inside, another Luce was laughing.

Gently, Luce gave the Announcer's prickly edges a pull. It was more pliant than she expected, but cold as ice and tacky against her ngers. It grew larger at the lightest touch. When it had grown to about a square foot, Luce released it from her grip and was pleased to watch it hover at eye level in front of her. She made a special e ort to focus--on hearing, on tuning out the world around her.

Nothing at rst, and then--

One more rising laugh sang out from within the shadow. Then the veil of blackness shredded and an image inside became clear.

This time, Daniel was the rst one to come into view.

Even through the Announcer's screen, it was heaven to see him. His hair was a couple of inches longer than he wore it now. And he was tan--his shoulders and the bridge of his nose were both a deep, golden brown. He wore trim navy swim trunks, snug around his hips, the kind she'd seen in family pictures from the seventies. He made them look so good.

Behind Daniel was the verdant edge of a thick, dense rain forest, lush green but bright with berries and white owers that Luce had never seen before. He stood at the lip of a short but dramatic cli , which looked down at a sparkling pool of water. But Daniel kept glancing up, toward the sky.

That laugh again. And then Luce's own voice, broken apart by giggles. "Hurry up and get down here!"

Luce leaned forward, closer to the window of the Announcer, and saw her former self treading water in a yellow halter-top bikini. Her long hair danced around her, oating on the water's surface like a deep black halo. Daniel kept an eye on her but was also still glancing overhead. The muscles on his chest were tensing up. Luce had a bad feeling she already knew why.

The sky was lling with Announcers, like a ock of enormous black crows, a cloud so thick they blocked the sun. The long-ago Luce in the water noticed nothing, saw nothing. But watching all those Announcers it and gather in the humid air of that rain forest, in an image made by an Announcer, had the Luce in the forest feeling suddenly dizzy. Announcer, had the Luce in the forest feeling suddenly dizzy.

"You make me wait forever," long-ago Luce called up to Daniel. "Pretty soon I'm going to freeze."

Daniel tore his eyes away from the sky, looking down at her with a broken expression. His lip was trembling and his face was ghostly white. "You won't freeze," he told her. Were those tears Daniel was wiping away? He closed his eyes and shivered. Then, arcing his hands over his head, he pushed o the rock and dove.

Daniel surfaced a moment later, and long-ago Luce swam toward him. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her face bright and happy. Luce watched it all play out with a mixture of sickness and satisfaction. She wanted her former self to have as much of Daniel as she could get, to feel that innocent, ecstatic closeness of being with the person she loved.

But she knew, just as Daniel knew, as the swarm of Announcers knew, exactly what was going to happen as soon as this Luce pressed her lips to his. Daniel was right: She wasn't going to freeze. She was going to combust in a horrifying burst of ames.

And Daniel would be left to mourn her.

But he wasn't the only one. This girl had had a life, friends, and a family who loved her, who would be devastated when they lost her.

Suddenly, Luce was enraged. Furious with the curse that had been hanging over her and Daniel. She had been innocent, powerless; she didn't understand a thing about what was going to happen. She still didn't understand why it happened, why she always had to die so quickly after

nding Daniel.

Why it hadn't happened to her yet in this life.

The Luce in the water was still alive. Luce wouldn't--couldn't let her die.

She grabbed at the Announcer, curling its edges in her sts. It twisted and bent, contorting the swimmers' images like a fun-house mirror might. Inside its screen, the other shadows were descending. The swimmers were running out of time.

In frustration, Luce screamed and swung her sts at the Announcer-- rst one, then the other, raining blows upon the scene before her. She struck out at it again and again, heaving and crying as she tried her best to stop what was going to transpire.

Then it happened: Her right st broke through and her arm sank in up to her elbow. Instantly, she felt the shock of a temperature change. The heat of a summer sunset spreading across her palm. Gravity shifted. Luce couldn't tell which way was up or down. She felt her stomach recoiling and feared she was going to throw up.

She could go through. She could save her old self. Tentatively, she stretched her left arm forward. It, too, disappeared into the Announcer, like passing through a bright, clammy sheet of Jell-O that rippled and widened as if it could just let her through.

"It wants me to," she said aloud. "I can do this. I can save her. I can save my life." She leaned back slightly and then thrust her body into the Announcer.

There was sunlight, so bright she had to close her eyes, and a warmth so tropical a sheen of sweat immediately broke out on her skin. And a nauseating scene of gravity tilting and upending, like at the height of a pe. In a moment she'd be falling--

Except something had hold of her left ankle. And her right. That something was pulling Luce very forcefully backward.

"No!" Luce cried out, because she could see now, could see, far below, a burst of yellow in the water. Too bright to be the halter top of her bathing suit. Was long-ago Luce already burning up?

Then it all vanished.

Luce was yanked roughly back into the cool, dim patch of redwood trees behind the Shoreline dorm. Her skin felt cold and clammy and her balance was all screwed up and she fell at on her face in the dirt and redwood needles on the forest oor. She rolled over and saw two gures in front of her, but her vision was spinning so much she couldn't even tell who they were.