Rapture

EIGHTEEN CATCH A FALLING STAR

The darkness was total.

Luce had only ever traveled through her own Announcers, which were cool and damp, even peaceful.

The entrance to Lucifer’s was stale, hot, filled with acrid smoke—and deafening. Phlegmy pleas for mercy and jagged radiating sobs permeated its inner wall.

Luce’s wings bristled—a sensation she’d never experienced—as she realized that the devil’s Announcers were outposts of Hell.

It’s just a passage, she told herself. It’s like any other Announcer, a portal to pass through to another place and time.

She pushed forward, gagging on smoke. The ground was spiked with something she didn’t recognize until she stumbled to her knees and felt the excruciation of glass shards in the hands Daniel had just released.

Don’t get hung up there, he had told her. Move through until you find him.

She took a deep breath, righted herself, remembered what she was. She spread her wings and the Announcer flooded with light. Now Luce could see how horrible it was—every smoldering surface covered by protruding shards of glass of different colors, semi-human forms dead or dying in sticky pools on the floor, and, worst of all, an overwhelming sense of loss.

Luce looked down at her bleeding hands, vicious little triangles of brown glass sticking out of her palms. In an instant they were healed. She gritted her teeth and flew, her body penetrating the Announcer’s inner wall, deep into the belly of Lucifer’s stolen Fall.

It was vast. That was the first thing. Vast enough to be its own universe, and eerily silent. The Fall was so bright with the light of falling angels that Luce could hardly see. Somehow, she could feel them—all around, her sisters and her brothers, more than a hundred million of Heaven’s host, decorating the sky like paintings.

They hung suspended, frozen in space and time, each one entombed in a different orb of light.

That was how she’d fallen, too. She remembered it now, painfully. Those nine days had contained nine hundred eternities. And yet still as the falling angels were, Luce saw now that they were changing all the time. Their forms took on a strange, inchoate translucence. Here and there light flashed on the underside of a pair of wings. An arm hazily flickered into being, then became indistinct again. This was what Daniel meant about the shift that occurred within the Fall—souls metamorphosing from the way they had been in the Heavenly realm to the way they would be in the Earthly realm.

The angels were shedding their angelic purity, entering the incarnations they would wear on Earth.

Luce drew near the nearest angel. She recognized him: Tzadkiel, the angel of Divine Justice, her brother and her friend. She had not seen his soul in ages. He didn’t see her now, and he couldn’t have responded if he had.

The light within him warbled, causing Tzadkiel’s essence to shimmer like a gem in muddy water. It coalesced into a blurry face Luce didn’t recognize. It looked gro-tesque—crudely formed eyes, half-realized lips. It wasn’t him, but as soon as the angels hit the unforgiving soil of Earth, it would be.

The farther she waded into the suspended sea of souls, the heavier she felt. Luce recognized all of them—

Saraquel, Alat, Muriel, Chayo. She realized with horror that when her wings drew near enough, she could hear each angel’s falling thoughts.

Who will take care of us? Whom will we adore?

I can’t feel my wings.

I miss my orchards. Will there be orchards in Hell?

I am sorry. I am so sorry.

It was too painful to remain near any of them for longer than a single thought. Luce pushed on, direction-less, overwhelmed, until a bright, familiar light attracted her.

Gabbe.

Even in unformed transition, Gabbe was gorgeous.

Her white wings folded like rose petals around her focusing features; the dark drape of her eyelashes made her look peaceful and steady.

Luce pressed up against Gabbe’s silvery orb of light.

For a moment, she considered that there might be a bright side to Lucifer’s Fall: Gabbe would return.

Then the light within Gabbe flickered and Luce heard the falling angel think.

Move on. Lucinda. Please move on. Dream what you already know.

Luce thought of Daniel, waiting on the other side.

She thought of Lu Xin, the girl she’d been during the ancient Shang dynasty in China. She had killed a king, dressed in his general’s clothes, and readied herself for a war that wasn’t hers to fight—all because of her love for Daniel.

Luce had recognized her soul inside Lu Xin from the moment she saw her. She could find herself here, too, even with bright souls shining all around her like city lights flung up in the air. She would find herself within the Fall.

That, she knew suddenly, was where she would find Lucifer.

She closed her eyes, beat her wings lightly, asked her soul to guide her to herself. She moved through millions, sliding over glowing tidal waves of angels. It took a small eternity. For nine days she and her friends had been racing time, thinking only of how to find the Fall. Now that they had found it, how long would it take Luce to locate the soul she needed, the needle in this haystack made of angels changing forms? How much time was left?

Then, in a galaxy of frozen angels, Luce froze.

Someone was singing.

It was a love song so beautiful it made her wings quiver.

She came to rest behind the fixed white orb of a falling angel called Ezekiel, and listened:

“My sea has found a shore . . . My burning has found a flame . . .”

Her soul swelled with a long-forgotten memory. She peered around Ezekeel, the Angel of the Clouds, to see who was singing in the clearing.

It was a boy, cradling a girl in his arms, his serenading voice soft and sweet as honey.

The slow rocking of his arms was the only motion in the entire frozen Fall.

Then Luce realized that girl was not simply a girl. She was a half-formed orb of light surrounding an angel in metamorphosis. She was the soul that used to be Lucinda.

The boy looked up, sensing a presence. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, and eyes the color of ice, radiant with dumb love.

But he was not a boy. He was an angel so devastat-ingly beautiful that Luce’s body clenched with a loneliness she didn’t want to remember.

He was Lucifer.

This was how he used to look in Heaven. But he was mobile, fully formed, unlike the millions of angels surrounding him—which assured Luce he was the demon of the present, the one who had cast his Announcer around the Fall to incite its second link with Earth. His own falling soul could be anywhere in here, just as paralyzed as the rest of them had been when the Throne cast them out of Heaven.

Luce had been right about her soul’s leading her to Lucifer. After he set this Fall in motion, he must have dipped through his own Announcer inside here.

And spent the past nine days doing what? Singing lul-labies and rocking back and forth while the world hung in the balance and armies of angels raced around the world to stop him?

Her wings burned. She knew this was all he’d done, because she knew that he loved her, that he still wanted her. Her betrayal of Lucifer was what this was all about.

“Who’s there?” he called.

Luce moved forward. She had not come here to hide from him. Besides, he had already sensed her soul’s glow behind Ezekeel. She heard the vexed recognition in his voice.

“Oh. It’s you.” He raised his arms slightly, holding out Luce’s falling self. “Have you met my love? I think you’d find her”—Lucifer looked above him, searching for a word—“refreshing.”

Luce edged closer, drawn equally to the radiant angel who had broken her heart and the strange, half-formed version of herself. This was the angel who would become the girl Luce had been on Earth. She watched her own face flicker into being inside the light in Lucifer’s arms.

Then it was gone.

She considered cleaving to this strange creature. She knew that she could do it: reach out and take possession of her oldest body, feel her stomach drop as she joined with her past, blink and find herself in Lucifer’s arms, in falling Lucinda’s mind, as she had done so many times before.

But she didn’t need to do that anymore. Bill had taught Luce how to cleave before she had known who she truly was, before she’d had access to the memories she did now. She didn’t have to cleave to her falling soul for help with what to say to Lucifer. Luce already knew the whole story.

She folded her hands in front of her. She thought of Daniel on the other side of the Announcer.

“The love you feel is not returned, Lucifer.” He offered Luce a bright, defiant smile. “Do you have any idea how rare a moment like this is?” Without thinking, Luce found herself drawing nearer.

“The two of you, together at once? The one who cannot leave me”—he caressed the metamorphosing body in his arms and looked up—“and the one who doesn’t know how to stay away.”

“She and I share the same soul,” Luce said. “And neither one of us loves you anymore.”

“And they say my heart has hardened!” Lucifer grimaced, all sweetness gone. His voice plunged downward through the registers, deeper than anything Luce had ever heard. “You disappointed me in Egypt. You shouldn’t have done that, and you shouldn’t be here now. I depos-ited you in the outer realm so that you could not interfere.”

His figure changed: the youthful, lovely face shriveled into wrinkles that splintered down his body in long craggy seams. Mighty wings burst from behind his shoulders. Claws shot from his fingers, long and curled and yellow. Luce winced as they dug into her falling half-formed body in his grip.

His eyes glowed from icy blue to red like molten lead and he swelled to ten times the size he’d been. Luce knew this was because he was indulging the rage he had sub-dued in order to appear as his lovely, former self. He seemed to fill all empty space, shrinking the expanse of suspended angels in an instant.

Luce flew up to his eye level and sighed.

“You might as well stop there,” she said.

“Built up a tolerance, have you?”

Luce shook her head and extended her wings as wide as they would go. They stretched to lengths that still astonished her.

“I know who I am, Lucifer. I know what I can do.

Neither of us is constrained by mortal bounds. I could become horrific, too. But what’s the point?” Steam rose off Lucifer’s head as he studied Luce’s wings. “Your wings always were breathtaking,” he said.

“But don’t get used to them. Time’s almost up and then—and then—”

He was watching her face for fear or agitation. She knew how he worked, from where he drew his energy and power. His grainy muscles flexed, and Luce watched the light of her falling body flicker, agitated but immobile, defenseless in his arms. It was like witnessing a loved one in grave danger, but Luce would not reveal that it bothered her.

“I am not afraid of you.”

His grunt was a cloud of mucus and smoke. “You will be, as you have been before, as you really are now. Fear is the only way to greet the devil.”

The swelling stopped. His eyes cooled back to their startling ice blue. His muscles relaxed into the sleek figure that had once made him the most gorgeous among Heaven’s host. There was a shimmer to his pale skin that Luce hadn’t remembered until now.

He was more beautiful even than Daniel.

Luce let herself remember. She had loved him. He had been her first true love. She had given him her whole heart. And Lucifer had loved her, too.

When his gaze fell on her, the entire history of their relationship played across his handsome face: the fire of their early romance, his desperate yearning to possess her, the anguish of love he’d said had inspired his rebellion against the Throne.

Her mind knew it was Great Deceiver’s first great lie—but her heart felt something different, in part because she knew Lucifer had come to believe his lie. It had a secret, spreading power, like a flood nobody saw.

She couldn’t help it: She softened. Lucifer’s eyes bore the same tenderness that Daniel’s did when he looked at her. She felt her eyes begin to return this tenderness to Lucifer.

He still loved her—and every moment that he didn’t have her hurt him deeply. That was why he’d spent the past nine days with a shadow of her soul, why he’d sought to reset the entire universe to have her back.

“Oh, Lucifer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You see?” He laughed. “You are afraid of me. You’re afraid of what I make you feel. You don’t want to remember—”

“No, it’s not—”

From a hidden sheath behind his back, Lucifer produced a long silver starshot. He rolled it between his fingers, humming a tune Luce recognized. She shivered.

It was the hymn he’d written, pairing the two of them together. Lucinda, his Evening Light.

She watched the starshot gleam. “What are you doing?”

“You loved me. You were mine. Those of us who understand eternity know what true love means. Love never dies. That’s why I know that when we hit the ground, when everything starts over, you will make the right choice. You will choose me instead of him, and we will rule together. We will be together”—he looked up at her—“or else—”

Then Lucifer came at her with the starshot.

“Yes!” Luce shouted. “I loved you once!”

He froze, the dull deadly weapon poised above her breast, her earlier soul dangling from the crook of his arm.

“But it was longer ago than you recall,” she said.

“You appreciate eternity, but you don’t appreciate how in a moment eternity can change. I did not love you when we fell.”

“Lies.” He lowered the starshot closer. “You’ve loved me more recently than you think. Even just last week, in your Announcers, thinking you loved another—we were wonderful together. Remember nesting in the passion fruit tree in Tahiti? We had earlier moments, too. I expect you’ve been remembering those.” He stepped away from her, studied her reaction.

“I taught you everything you think you know about love! We were supposed to rule together. You promised to follow me. You deceived me. ” His eyes pleaded with her, conflagrations of pain and rage. “Imagine how lonely it was, in a Hell of my own making, stranded at the altar, the greatest fool of all time, enduring six thousand years of agony.”

“Stop,” she whispered. “You have to stop loving me.

Because I stopped loving you.”

“Because of Daniel Grigori, who isn’t a tenth of the angel I am, even at my worst? It’s ridiculous! You know that I have always been more radiant, more talented. You were there when I invented love. I made it out of nothing, out of mere . . . adoration!” Lucifer frowned as he said the word, as if it made him nauseated.

“And you don’t even know the half. Without you, I went on to invent evil, the other end of the spectrum, the necessary balance. I inspired Dante! Milton! You should see the underworld. I took the Throne’s ideas and improved them. You can do whatever you want!

You’ve missed out on everything. ”

“I missed nothing.”

“Oh, darling”—he reached for her, his soft hand caressing her cheek—“surely you can’t believe that. I could give you the greatest kingdom never known—we work hard, then we party. Even the Throne offered you the benefits of eternal peace! And what have you chosen?

Daniel. What has that haircut ever done?” Luce brushed his hand away. “He has captured my heart. He loves me for who I am, not what I can bring to him.”

He smirked. “You always were a sucker for acknowledgment. Baby, that’s your Achilles’ heel.” She glanced at the glowing, still souls around them, millions of them, stretching thousands of miles into the distance, accidental eavesdroppers on the truth about the universe’s first romantic love.

“I thought that what I felt for you was right,” Luce said. “I loved you until it hurt me, until our love was consumed by your pride and rage. The thing you called love made me disappear. So I had to stop loving you.” She paused. “Our adoration never diminished the Throne, but your love diminished me. I never meant to hurt you. I only meant to stop you from hurting me.”

“Then stop hurting me!” he pleaded, stretching out arms that Luce remembered encircling her, feeling like home. “You can learn to love me again. It is the only way to stop my pain. Choose me now, again, for always.”

“No,” she said. “It’s really over, Lucifer.” She motioned toward the other angels falling around them. “It was over before any of this even happened. I never promised to rule with you outside of Heaven. You projected that dream onto me, like I was another one of your blank slates. You will accomplish nothing by dropping this Lucinda to Earth. She will not return your love.”

“She might.” He gazed down at the angel in his arms.

He tried to kiss her, but the light surrounding Lucinda’s falling self blocked his lips from touching her skin.

“I am sorry for the pain I caused you,” Luce said. “I was . . . young. I got . . . swept up. I played with fire. I shouldn’t have. Please, Lucifer. Let us go.”

“Oh.” He nuzzled his face into the body in his arms.

“I ache.”

“You will ache less if you accept that what we shared is in the past. Things are not the way they were. If you love me, you must find it in your soul to let me go on as I must.”

Lucifer took a long look at Luce. His expression darkened, then turned quizzical, as if he was considering an idea. He looked away for a moment, blinked, and when he looked at Luce again, she thought he could see her as she truly was: the angel who’d become a girl, who’d lived through millennia, who’d grown more and more certain of her destiny, who had found her way back to becoming an angel once again. “You . . .deserve more,” Lucifer whispered.

“More than Daniel?” Luce shook her head. “I don’t want anything more than him.”

“I mean you deserve more than all this suffering. I’m not blind to what you’ve been through. I’ve been watching. At times, your pain has caused me a kind of joy. I mean, you know me.” Lucifer smiled sadly. “But even my brand of joy is always edged with guilt. If I could do away with guilt, you’d really see something big.”

“Free me from my suffering. Stop the Fall, Lucifer. It is within your power.”

He staggered toward her. His eyes filled with tears.

The devil shook his head. “Tell me how a guy, with a decent job, loses a—”

“ENOUGH!”

The voice brought everything to a halt. The orbit of the sun, the inner consciousness of three hundred and eighteen million angels, even the velocity of the plummeting Fall itself simply stopped.

It was the voice that had created the universe: layered and rich, as if millions of versions of it spoke in unison.

Enough.

The Throne’s command ripped through Luce. It consumed her. Light flooded her vision, obscuring Lucifer, her falling self, the whole world with brightness. Her soul buzzed with unspeakable electricity as a weight fell from her, zipped into the distance.

The Fall.

It was gone. Luce had been thrust out of it with a single word and a jolt that made her feel inside out. She was moving across a great void, toward an unknown destination, faster than the speed of light multiplied by the speed of sound.

She was moving at Godspeed.