Rapture

NINE THE DESIDERATA

Fog engulfed the angels. They flew back over the river, four pairs of wings making a tremendous throosh each time they beat. They stayed low enough to the ground that the muted orange glow of sodium lampposts looked like airport runway lights. But this flight did not land.

Daniel was tense. Luce could feel it running all through his body: in both his arms around her waist, in his shoulders aligned with hers, even in the manner his broad wings beat above them. She knew how he felt; she was as anxious to get to the Foundation Library as Daniel’s grip suggested he was.

Only a few landmarks cut through the fog. There was the towering spire of the massive Gothic church, and there the darkened Ferris wheel, its empty red cabins swaying in the night. There was the green copper dome of the palace where they’d landed when they first arrived in Vienna.

But wait—they’d passed the palace already. Maybe half an hour earlier. Luce had tried to look for Olianna, who the Scale angel had knocked unconscious. She hadn’t seen her on the roof then, and she didn’t see her now.

Why were they circling? Were they lost?

“Daniel?”

He didn’t answer.

Church bells rang in the distance. It was their fourth ringing since Luce, Daniel, and the others had taken off through the shattered skylight at the museum. They’d been flying for a long time. Could it really be three o’clock in the morning?

“Where is it?” Daniel muttered under his breath, banking to the left, following the groove of the river, then breaking from it to trace a broad avenue lined with darkened department stores. Luce had seen this street already, too. They were flying in circles.

“I thought you said you knew exactly where it was!”

Arriane dipped out of the formation they’d been flying in—Daniel and Luce at the front, with Roland, Arriane, and Annabelle forming a tight triangle behind them—

and swooped down about ten feet below Daniel and Luce, close enough to talk. Her hair was wild and frizzy and her iridescent wings flickered in and out of the fog.

“I do know where it is,” Daniel said. “At least, I know where it was. ”

“You’ve got an circuitous sense of direction, Daniel.”

“Arriane.” Roland used the warning tone he reserved for those too frequent occasions when Arriane went too far. “Let him concentrate.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.” Arriane rolled her eyes. “Better return to ‘formation.’” Arriane beat her wings the way some girls batted their eyelashes, flashed a peace sign with her fingers, and fell back.

“Okay, so where was the library?” Luce asked.

Daniel sighed, drew in his wings slightly, and dropped fifty feet straight down. Cold wind blasted Luce in the face. Her stomach surged up as they plummeted, then settled when Daniel stopped abruptly, as if he’d landed on an invisible tightrope, over a residential street.

It was quiet and empty and dark, just two long stretches of stone townhouses spanning either side. Shut-ters were drawn for the night. Tiny cars rested in narrow angled spaces on the street. Young urban oak trees punctuated the cobbled sidewalk that ran along the small well-maintained front yards.

The other angels hovered on either side of Daniel and Luce, about twenty feet above street level.

“This is where it was,” Daniel said. “It was here. Six blocks from the river, just west of Türkenschanzpark. I swear it was. None of this”—he waved his hand at the stretch of indistinguishable stone townhouses below—

“was here.”

Annabelle frowned and hugged her knees to her chest, her silver wings beating softly to keep her aloft.

Her crossed ankles revealed hot-pink striped socks peeking out from her jeans. “Do you think it was destroyed?”

“If it was,” Daniel said, “I have no idea how to recover it.”

“We’re screwed,” Arriane said, kicking a cloud in frustration. She glared at its wispy tendrils, which ambled eastward, unaffected. “That’s never as satisfying as I think it’s going to be.”

“Maybe we go to Avalon,” Roland suggested. “See if Cam’s group has had any more luck.”

“We need all three relics,” Daniel said.

Luce pivoted slightly in Daniel’s arms to face him.

“It’s just a hitch. Think about what we had to go through in Venice. But we got the halo. We’ll get the desiderata, too. That’s all that matters. When was the last time any of us were at this library, two hundred years ago? Of course things are going to change. It doesn’t mean we give up. We’ll just have to . . . just have to—” Everyone was looking at her. But Luce didn’t know what to do. She only knew that they couldn’t give up.

“The kid’s right,” Arriane said. “We don’t give up.

We—”

Arriane broke off when her wings began to rattle.

Then Annabelle yelped. Her body tossed in the air as her wings shuddered, too. Daniel’s hands shook against Luce as the foggy night sky morphed into that peculiar gray—the color of a rainstorm on the horizon—that Luce now recognized as the color of a timequake.

Lucifer.

She could almost hear the hiss of his voice, feel his breath against her neck.

Luce’s teeth chattered, but she felt it deeper, too, in her core, raw and turbulent, as if everything inside her were being wound up like a chain.

The buildings below shimmered. Lampposts doubled. The very atoms of the air seemed to fracture. Luce wondered what the quake was doing to the townspeople below, dreaming in their beds. Could they feel this? If not, she envied them.

She tried to call Daniel’s name but the sound of her voice was warped, as if she were underwater. She closed her eyes but that made her feel nauseated. She opened them and tried to focus on the solid white buildings, quaking in their foundations until they became abstract blurs of white.

Then Luce saw that one structure stayed still, as if it were invulnerable to the fluctuations of the cosmos. It was a small brown building, a house, in the center of the shuddering white street.

It hadn’t been there a second before. It appeared as though through a waterfall and was visible only for a moment, before it doubled and shimmered and disappeared back into the expansive row of modern, monochrome townhouses.

But for a moment, the house had been there, one fixed thing in all-consuming chaos, both apart from and a part of the Viennese street.

The timequake shuddered to a stop and the world around Luce and the angels stilled. It was never quieter than in those moments right after a quake in time.

“Did you see that?” Roland shouted, gleeful.

Annabelle shook out her wings, smoothing the tips with her fingers. “I’m still recovering from that latest violation. I hate those things.”

“Me too.” Luce shuddered. “I saw something, Roland. A brown house. Was that it? The Foundation Library?”

“Yes.” Daniel flew in a tight circle over the place where Luce had seen the house, zeroing in.

“Maybe those booty-quakes are good for something,” Arriane said.

“Where did the house go?” Luce asked.

“It’s still there. It’s just not here,” Daniel said.

“I’ve heard legends about these things.” Roland ran fingers through his thick gold-black dreads. “But I never really thought they were possible.”

“What things?” Luce squinted to try to see the brown building again. But the row of modern townhouses stayed put. The only movement on the street was bare tree branches leaning in the wind.

“It’s called a Patina,” Daniel said. “It’s a way of bending reality around a unit of time and space—”

“It’s a rearrangement of reality in order to secret something away,” Roland added, flying to Daniel’s side and peering down as if he could still see the house.

“So while this street exists in a continuous line through one reality”—Annabelle waved at the townhouses—“beneath it lays another, independent realm, where this road leads to our Foundation Library.”

“Patinas are the boundary between realities,” Arriane said, thumbs tucked into her overall suspenders. “A laser light show only special folks can see.”

“You guys seem to know a lot about these things,” Luce said.

“Yeah,” Arriane scoffed, looking as if she’d like to kick another cloud. “’Cept how to get through one.”

Daniel nodded. “Very few entities are powerful enough to create Patinas, and those that can guard them closely. The library is here. But Arriane’s right. We’ll need to figure out the way in.”

“I heard you need an Announcer to get through one,” Arriane said.

“Cosmic legend.” Annabelle shook her head. “Every Patina is different. Access is entirely up to the creator.

They program the code.”

“I once heard Cam tell a story at a party about how he accessed a Patina,” Roland said. “Or was that a story about a party that he threw in a Patina?”

“Luce!” Daniel said suddenly, making all of them startle in midair. “It’s you. It was always you.” Luce shrugged. “Always me what?”

“You’re the one who always rang the bell. You’re the one who had entry to the library. You just need to ring the bell.”

Luce looked at the empty street, the fog tinting everything around them brown. “What are you talking about? What bell?”

“Close your eyes,” Daniel said. “Remember it. Pass into the past and find the bellpull—”

Luce was already there, back at the library the last time she’d been in Vienna with Daniel. Her feet were firmly on the ground. It was raining and her hair splayed all across her face. Her crimson hair ribbons were soaked, but she didn’t care. She was looking for something.

There was a short path up the courtyard, then a dark alcove outside the library. It had been cold outside, and a fire blazed within. There, in the musty corner near the door, was a woven cord embroidered with white peonies hanging from a substantial silver bell.

She reached into the air and pulled.

The angels gasped. Luce opened her eyes.

There, in the center of the north side of the street, the row of contemporary townhouses was interrupted at its midpoint by a single small brown house. A curl of smoke rose from its chimney. The only light—aside from the angels’ wings—was the dim yellow glow of a lamp on the sill of the house’s front window.

The angels landed softly on the empty street and Daniel’s grip around Luce softened. He kissed her hand.

“You remembered. Well done.”

The brown house was only one story high, and the surrounding townhouses had three levels, so you could see behind the house to parallel streets, more modern white stone townhouses. The house was an anomaly: Luce studied its thatched roof, the gabled gate at the edge of a weed-ridden lawn, the arched wooden asym-metrical front door, all of which made the house look as if it belonged in the Middle Ages.

Luce took a step toward the house and found herself on a sidewalk. Her eyes fell on the large bronze placard pressed into the packed-mud walls. It was a historical marker, which read in big carved letters THE FOUNDATION

LIBRARY, EXT. 1233.

Luce looked around at the otherwise mundane street.

There were recycling bins filled with plastic water bottles, tiny European cars parallel parked so closely that their bumpers were touching, shallow potholes in the road. “So we’re on a real street in Vienna—”

“Exactly,” Daniel said. “If it were daytime, you would see the neighbors, but they wouldn’t see you.”

“Are Patinas common?” Luce asked. “Was there one over the cabin I slept in on the island back in Georgia?”

“They are highly uncommon. Precious, really.” Daniel shook his head. “That cabin was just the most se-cluded safe haven we could find on such short notice.”

“A poor man’s Patina,” Arriane said.

“I.e., Mr. Cole’s summerhouse,” Roland added. Mr. Cole was a teacher at Sword & Cross. He was mortal, but he’d been a friend to the angels since they’d arrived at the school, and was covering for Luce now that she’d left. It was thanks to Mr. Cole that her parents weren’t more worried than usual about her.

“How are they made?” Luce asked.

Daniel shook his head. “No one knows that except the Patina’s artist. And there are very few of those. You remember my friend Dr. Otto?”

She nodded. The doctor’s name had been on the tip of her tongue.

“He lived here for several hundred years—and even he didn’t know how this Patina got here.” Daniel studied the building. “I don’t know who the librarian is now.”

“Let’s go,” Roland said. “If the desideratum is here, we need to find it and get out of Vienna before the Scale regroup and track us down.”

He slid open the latch on the gate and held it aside for the others to pass. The pebble path leading to the brown house was overgrown with wild purple freesia and tangled white orchids filling the air with their sweet scent.

The group reached the heavy wooden door with its arched top and flat iron knocker, and Luce grabbed Daniel’s hand. Annabelle rapped on the door.

No answer.

Then Luce looked up and saw a bellpull, woven with the same stitches as the one she’d rung in the air. She glanced at Daniel. He nodded.

She pulled and the door creaked slowly open, as if the house itself had been expecting them. They peered into a candlelit hallway so long Luce couldn’t see where it ended. The interior was far bigger than its exterior suggested; its ceilings were low and curved, like a rail-road tunnel through a mountain. Everything was made of a lovely soft-pink brick.

The other angels deferred to Daniel and Luce, the only two who had been there before. Daniel crossed the threshold into the hallway first, holding Luce’s hand.

“Hello?” he called out.

Candlelight flickered on the bricks as the other angels entered and Roland shut the door behind them. As they walked, Luce was conscious of how quiet the hallway was, of the echoing thumps their shoes made on the smooth stone floor.

She paused at the first open doorway on the left side of the hall as a memory flooded her mind. “Here,” she said, pointing inside the room. It was dark but for the yellow glow of a lamp on the windowsill, the same light they’d seen from the outside of the house. “Wasn’t this Dr. Otto’s office?”

It was too dark to see clearly, but Luce remembered a fire blazing cheerily in a hearth on the far side of the room. In her memory the fireplace had been bordered by a dozen bookshelves crammed with the leather spines of Dr. Otto’s library. Hadn’t her past self propped her wool-stockinged feet on the footrest near the fire and read Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels? And hadn’t the doctor’s freely flowing cider made the whole room smell like apples, cloves, and cinnamon?

“You’re right.” Daniel took a glowing candelabra from its brick alcove in the hallway and held it inside to give the room more light. But the grate over the fireplace was shut, as was the antique wooden secretary in the corner, and even in the warm candlelight, the air seemed cold and stale. The shelves were sagging and distressed by the weight of the books, which were covered with a mist of dust. The window, which had once looked out on a busy residential street, had its dark green shades drawn, giving the room a bleak sense of abandonment.

“No wonder he hasn’t answered any of my letters,” Daniel said. “It looks as if the doctor has moved on.” Luce moved toward the bookshelves and dragged her finger across a dusty spine. “Do you think one of these books might contain the desired thing we’re looking for?” Luce asked, pulling one from the shelf: Canzoniere by Petrarch, typeset in Gothic font. “I’m sure Dr. Otto wouldn’t mind us taking a look around if it could help us find the desi—”

She stopped speaking. She’d heard something—the soft croon of a woman’s voice.

The angels eyed one another as another sound reached them in the dark library. Now, in addition to the haunting song, came the clopping sound of shoes and the jangle of a cart being wheeled. Daniel moved to the open doorway and Luce followed, cautiously peering into the hallway.

A dark shadow stretched toward them. Candles flickered in the pink stone alcoves of the curved, tunnellike hallway, distorting the shadow, making its arms look wraithlike and impossibly long.

The shadow’s owner, a thin woman in a gray pencil skirt, a mustard-colored cardigan, and very high black heels, walked toward them, pushing a fancy silver tea tray on wheels. Her fiery red hair was pulled up in a chignon. Elegant golden hoops glittered in her ears.

Something about the way she walked, the way she carried herself, seemed familiar.

As the woman crooned her wordless melody, she lifted her head slightly, casting her profile in shadow against the wall. The curve of the nose, the upward swoop of the chin, the short jut of the brow bone—all gave Luce the feeling of déjà vu. She searched her past for other lives where she might have known this woman.

Suddenly, the blood drained from Luce’s face. All the hair dye in the world couldn’t fool her.

The woman pushing the tea cart was Miss Sophia Bliss.

Before she knew it, Luce had her hands around a cold brass fire poker resting in a stand by the library door. She raised it like a weapon, jaw clenched and heart hammering, and barreled into the hallway.

“Luce!” Daniel called.

“Dee?” Arriane shouted.

“Yes, dear?” the woman said, a second before she noticed Luce charging at her. She jumped just as Daniel’s arm engulfed Luce, holding back her lunge.

“What are you doing?” Daniel whispered.

“She’s—she’s—” Luce struggled against Daniel, feeling his grasp burn her waist. This woman had murdered Penn. She’d tried to kill Luce. Why didn’t anyone else want to kill her?

Arriane and Annabelle ran to Miss Sophia and tackled her in a double hug.

Luce blinked.

Annabelle kissed the woman’s pale cheeks. “I haven’t seen you since the Peasants’ Revolt in Nottingham . . .

when was that, the 1380s?”

“Surely it hasn’t been that long,” the woman said politely, her voice lilting the same kindly-librarian way it had early on at Sword & Cross, when she tricked Luce into liking her. “Lovely time.”

“I haven’t seen you in a while, either,” Luce said hotly. She jerked away from Daniel and raised the fire poker again, wishing it were something more deadly.

“Not since you murdered my friend—”

“Oh dear.” The woman did not flinch. She watched Luce coming at her and tapped a slender finger to her lips. “There must be some confusion.”

Roland stepped forward, separating Luce from Miss Sophia. “It’s just that you look like someone else.” His calm hand on her shoulder made Luce pause.

“What do you mean?” the woman said.

“Oh, of course!” Daniel gave Luce a sad smile. “You thought she was—we should have told you that transeternals often look alike.”

“You mean, she’s not Miss Sophia?”

“Sophia Bliss?” The woman looked as if she’d just bitten into something sour. “That bitch is still around? I was sure someone would have put her out of her misery by now.” She wrinkled her tiny nose and shrugged at Luce. “She is my sister, so I can only display a small per-centage of the rage I have accumulated over the years toward that disgusting bag.”

Luce laughed nervously. The fire poker slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. She studied the older woman, finding similarities to Miss Sophia—a face that seemed old and young at the same time—and differences. Compared to Sophia’s black eyes, this woman’s small eyes looked almost golden, emphasized by the matching yellow shade of her cardigan.

The scene with the fire poker had embarrassed Luce.

She leaned back against the curved brick wall and sank to the ground, feeling empty, unsure whether she was relieved not to have to face Miss Sophia again. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, dear,” the woman said brightly. “The day I encounter Sophia again, I’ll grab the nearest heavy object and bludgeon her myself.”

Arriane flung out a hand to help Luce up, pulling her so hard her feet shot off the ground. “Dee’s an old friend.

And a first-class party animal, might I add. Got the me-tabolism of a donkey. She almost brought the Crusades to a grinding halt the night she seduced Saladin.”

“Oh, nonsense!” Dee said, flapping a hand dismissively.

“She’s the best storyteller, too,” Annabelle added.

“Or she was before she dropped off the face of the earth.

Where’ve you been hiding, woman?”

The woman drew a deep breath and her golden eyes dampened. “Actually, I fell in love.”

“Oh, Dee!” Annabelle crooned, clasping the woman’s hand. “How wonderful.”

“Otto Z. Otto.” The woman sniffed. “May he rest . . .”

“Dr. Otto,” Daniel said, stepping out of the doorway.

“You knew Dr. Otto?”

“Backwards and forwards.” The mysterious lady sniffed.

“Oops, my manners!” Arriane said. “We must do introductions. Daniel, Roland, I don’t think you’ve ever officially met our friend Dee—”

“What a pleasure. I am Paulina Serenity Bisenger.” The woman smiled, dabbed her damp eyes with a lace handkerchief, and extended a hand to both Daniel and Roland.

“Ms. Bisenger,” Roland said, “may I ask why the girls call you Dee?”

“Just an old nickname, love,” the woman said, offer-ing the kind of cryptic smile that was Roland’s specialty.

When she turned to Luce, her golden eyes lit up.

“Ah, Lucinda.” Instead of holding out her hand, Dee opened her arms for a hug, but Luce felt funny about accepting it. “I apologize for the unfortunate resemblance that gave you such a fright. I must say that my sister looks like me; I do not look like her. But you and I have known each other so well over many lifetimes, so very many years, I forget that you might not remember. It was to me that you entrusted your darkest secrets—your love of Daniel, your fears for your future, your confusing feelings about Cam.” Luce flushed, but the woman didn’t notice. “And it was to you that I entrusted the very reasons for my existence, as well as the key to everything you seek. You were the one innocent I knew I could always rely upon to do what needed to be done.”

“I—I’m sorry I don’t remember,” Luce stammered, and she was. “Are you an angel?”

“Transeternal, dear.”

“They’re technically mortals,” Daniel explained,

“but they can live for hundreds, even thousands of years.

They have long worked closely with angels.”

“It all started with Great-Granddaddy Methuselah,” Dee said proudly. “He invented prayer. He did!”

“How did he do that?” Luce asked.

“Well, in the old days, when mortals wanted something, they just wished for it in a scattershot manner.

Granddaddy was the first to appeal to God directly, and—here’s the genius part—he asked for a message confirming that he had been heard. God responded with an angel, and the messenger angel was born. It was Gabbe, I think, who carved out the airspace between Heaven and Earth so mortal prayers could flow more freely. Granddaddy loved Gabbe, he loved the angels, and he taught all his kin to love them, too. Oh, but that was many years ago.”

“Why do transeternals live so long?” Luce asked.

“Because we are enlightened. For our family history with messenger angels, and the fact that we are able to receive an angel’s glory without being overcome as many mortals are, we were rewarded with an extended life span. We liaise between angels and other mortals, so that the world can always feel a sense of angelic guardian-ship. We can be killed at any time, of course, but short of assassinations and freak accidents, a transeternal will live on until the end of days. The twenty-four of us who remain are the last surviving descendants of Methuselah.

We used to be exemplary people, but I’m ashamed to say we are in decline. You’ve heard of Elders of Zhsmaelim?”

The mention of Miss Sophia’s evil clan sent a chill through Luce’s body.

“All transeternals,” Dee said. “The Elders began nobly. There was a time when I was involved with them myself. Of course, the good ones all defected”—she glanced at Luce and frowned—“not long after your friend Penn was murdered. Sophia has always had a cruel streak. Now it’s become ambitious.” She paused, taking out a white handkerchief to polish a corner of the silver tea cart. “Such dark things to speak of on our reunion.

There is a bright spot, though: You remembered how to travel through my Patina.” Dee beamed at Luce. “Exemplary work.”

“You made that Patina?” Arriane asked. “I had no idea you could do that!”

Dee raised an eyebrow, the faintest smile on her lips.

“A woman can’t reveal all her secrets, lest she be taken advantage of. Can she, girls?” She paused. “Well, now that we’re all friends again, what brings you to the Foundation? I was just about to sit down for my predawn jasmine tea. You really must join me, I always make too much.”

She stepped aside to reveal the silver tray packed with a tall silver teapot, china plates of tiny crustless cucumber sandwiches, fluffy scones with golden raisins, and a crystal bowl brimming with clotted cream and cherries. Luce’s stomach flopped at the sight of the food.

“So you’ve been expecting us,” Annabelle said, counting the teacups with her finger.

Dee smiled, turned around, and took up wheeling the cart down the hallway again. Luce and the angels jogged to keep up as Dee’s heels clicked along, forking right into a large room made of the same pink brick.

There were a bright fire in the corner, a polished oak dining table that could have seated sixty, and a huge chandelier made of a petrified tree trunk and decorated with hundreds of sparkling crystal candlesticks.

The table was already set with fine china for far more guests than they had in their party. Dee set about filling the teacups with steaming amber-colored tea. “Very casual here, just take a seat wherever you like.” After a few purposeful looks from Daniel, Arriane finally stepped forward and touched Dee—who was scooping a mound of cream into a goblet and topping it with fruit—lightly on the back.

“Actually, Dee, we can’t stay for tea. We’re in a bit of a hurry. See—”

Daniel stepped forward. “Has the news reached you about Lucifer? He is attempting to erase the past by carrying the host of angels forward from the time of the Fall to the present.”

“That would explain the shuddering,” Dee murmured, filling another teacup.

“You can feel the timequakes, too?” Luce asked.

Dee nodded. “But most mortals can’t, in case you were wondering.”

“We’ve come because we need to track down the original location of the Fall,” Daniel said, “the place where Lucifer and the host of Heaven will appear. We have to stop him.”

Dee looked strangely undeterred from her tea service, continuing to divvy up the cucumber sandwiches.

The angels waited for her to respond. A log in the fire splintered, cracked, and tumbled from the grate.

“And all because a boy loved a girl,” she said at last.

“Quite disturbing. Really brings out the worst in all the old enemies, doesn’t it? Scale coming unhinged, Elders killing innocents. So much unpleasantness. As if all you fallen angels didn’t have enough bother to with. I say, you must be awfully tired.” She gave Luce a reassuring smile and gestured again for them to sit down.

Roland pulled out the chair at the head of the table for Dee and sat down in the seat to her left. “Maybe you can help us.” He motioned for the others to join him.

Annabelle and Arriane sat beside him, and Luce and Daniel sat across the table. Luce slid her hand over Daniel’s, twining her fingers around his.

Dee passed the final cups of tea around the table.

After a clattering of china and spoons stirring sugar into tea, Luce cleared her throat. “We’re going to stop Lucifer, Dee.”

“I should hope so.”

Daniel grasped Luce’s fingers. “Right now we’re searching for three objects that tell the early history of the fallen. When brought together, they should reveal the original location of the Fall.”

Dee sipped her tea. “Clever boy. Had any luck?” Daniel produced the leather satchel and unzipped it to reveal the gold-and-glass halo. An eternity had passed since Luce dove into the sunken church to pry it from the statue’s head.

Dee’s forehead wrinkled. “Yes, I remember that. The angel Semihazah created it, didn’t he? Even in prehis-tory, he had a biting aesthetic. No written texts for him to satirize, so he made this as a sort of commentary on the silly ways mortal artists try to capture angelic glow. Amusing, isn’t it? Imagine bearing a hideous . . .

basketball hoop on your head. Two points and all of that.”

“Dee.” Arriane reached into the satchel and pulled out Daniel’s book, then thumbed through it until she found the notation in the margin about the desideratum. “We came to Vienna to find this”—she pointed—“the desired thing. But we’re running out of time and we don’t know what it is or where to find it.”

“How splendid. You’ve come to the right place.”

“I knew it!” Arriane crowed. She leaned back into her chair and slapped Annabelle, who was politely nib-bling at a scone, on the back. “As soon as I saw you, I knew we’d be okay. You have the desideratum, don’t you?”

“No, dear” Dee shook her head.

“Then . . . what?” Daniel asked.

“I am the desideratum.” She beamed. “I’ve been waiting such a long time to be called into service.”