Torment

ELEVEN EIGHT DAYS

“Hold on.” Callie’s voice boomed across the line. “Let me pinch myself to make sure I’m not—”

“You’re not dreaming,” Luce said into her borrowed cell phone. Reception was spotty from her position at the edge of the woods, but Callie’s sarcasm came through loud and clear. “It’s really me. I’m sorry I’ve been such a crap friend.”

It was Thursday after dinner, and Luce was leaning up against the stout trunk of a redwood tree behind her dorm. To her left was a rolling hill and then the cliff, and beyond that, the ocean. There was still a little amber light in the sky over the water. Her new friends would all be in the lodge making s’mores, telling demon stories around the hearth. It was a Dawn-and-Jasmine social event, part of the Nephilim Nights Luce was supposed to have helped organize, but all she’d really done was request a few bags of marshmallows and some dark chocolate from the mess hall.

And then she’d escaped out to the shadowy fringe of the woods to avoid everyone at Shoreline and reconnect with a few other important things:

Her parents. Callie. And the Announcers.

She’d waited until tonight to call home. Thursdays chez Price meant her mom would be out playing mahjongg at the neighbors’ and her dad would have gone to the local movie theater to watch the Atlanta opera on simulcast. She could handle their voices on the ten-plus-year-old answering machine message, could manage to leave a thirty-second voice mail saying she was petitioning hard for Mr. Cole to let her off campus for Thanksgiving—and that she loved them very much.

Callie wasn’t going to let her off so easy.

“I thought you could only call on Wednesdays,” Callie was saying now. Luce had forgotten the strict telephone policy at Sword & Cross. “At first I stopped making plans on Wednesdays, waiting for your call,” Callie went on. “But after a while, I kinda gave up. How did you get a cell phone, anyway?”

“That’s it?” Luce asked. “How did I get a cell phone? You’re not mad at me?”

Callie let out a long sigh. “You know, I thought about being mad. I even practiced this whole fight in my mind. But then we both lose.” She paused. “And the thing is, I just miss you, Luce. So I figured, why waste time?”

“Thank you,” Luce whispered, close to tears—happy ones. “So, what’s been going on with you?”

“Unh-unh. I’m in charge of this conversation. That’s your punishment for dropping off my radar. And what I want to know is: What’s going on with that guy? I think his name started with a C?”

“Cam.” Luce groaned. Cam was the last guy she’d told Callie about? “He didn’t turn out to be … the kind of guy I thought he was.” She paused for a moment. “I’m seeing someone else now, and things are really …” She thought of Daniel’s glowing face, the way it had darkened so quickly during their last meeting outside her window.

Then she thought of Miles. Warm, dependable, charmingly no-drama Miles, who’d invited her home to his family’s house for Thanksgiving. Who ordered pickles on his hamburgers at the mess hall now even though he didn’t like them—just so he could pick them off and give them to Luce. Who tilted his head up when he laughed so that she could see the sparkle in his Dodgers-cap-shaded eyes.

“Things are good,” she finally said. “We’ve been hanging out a lot.”

“Ooh, bouncing around from one reform school boy to the next. Living the dream, aren’t you? But this one sounds serious, I can hear it in your voice. Are you going to do Thanksgiving together? Bring him home to face the wrath of Harry? Hah!”

“Um … yeah, probably,” Luce mumbled. She wasn’t totally sure whether she’d been talking about Daniel or Miles.

“My parents are insisting on some big family reunion in Detroit that weekend,” Callie said, “which I am boycotting. I wanted to come visit, but I figured you’d be locked up in reformville.” She paused, and Luce could picture her curled up on her bed in her dorm room at Dover. It seemed like a lifetime ago since Luce had been at school there herself. So very much had changed. “If you’ll be home, though, and bringing reform school boy, try and stop me.”

“Okay, but Callie—”

Luce was interrupted by a squeal. “So it’s settled? Imagine: In one week we’ll be curled up on your couch, catching up! I’ll make my famous kettle corn to help us through the boring slide shows your dad will show. And your crazy poodle will be going berserk. …”

Luce had never actually been to Callie’s brownstone in Philadelphia, and Callie had never actually been to Luce’s house in Georgia. They’d both only seen pictures. A visit from Callie sounded so perfect, so exactly what Luce needed right now. It also sounded utterly impossible.

“I’ll look up flights right now.”

“Callie—”

“I’ll email you, okay?” Callie hung up before Luce could even respond.

This was not good. Luce flipped 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 specifically, 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 flowed 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 first 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 first, 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 find 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 campfire, 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 terrified of the Announcers. She was terrified of what she might see within them.

Or hear.

Yesterday, Steven’s mention of tuning out the Announcers’ noise had finally 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, camouflaging themselves again among the natural shadows. Some of them moved swiftly and stiffly, like soldiers; others had a nimble grace. Luce wondered whether their appearances reflected anything about the messages they contained.

So much about the Announcers still felt impenetrable. Tuning them in wasn’t intuitive, like fiddling 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 off 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 off and showered to the ground. They pattered like raindrops as they joined a thousand predecessors on the mulchy forest floor. 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 fingers. 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 effort to focus—on hearing, on tuning out the world around her.

Nothing at first, 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 first 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 flowers that Luce had never seen before. He stood at the lip of a short but dramatic cliff, 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, floating 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 filling with Announcers, like a flock 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 flit 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.

“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 off 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 flames.

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 finding 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 fists. 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 fists at the Announcer—first 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 fist 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 dive. 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 flat on her face in the dirt and redwood needles on the forest floor. She rolled over and saw two figures in front of her, but her vision was spinning so much she couldn’t even tell who they were.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Shelby. Luce shook her head and blinked a few times. Not just Shelby, but Miles, too. Both of them looked exhausted. Luce was exhausted. She glanced at her watch, not surprised by now to see how long she’d spent glimpsing the Announcer. It was after one in the morning. What were Miles and Shelby still doing up?

“Wh-What … what were you trying to …,” Miles stammered, pointing at the place where the Announcer had been. She looked over her shoulder. It had splintered into hundreds of shadowy pine needles that rained down, brittle enough to turn to ash where they landed.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Luce muttered, rolling to the side and aiming behind a nearby tree. She heaved a few times, but nothing came up. She closed her eyes, racked with guilt. She’d been too weak and too late to save herself.

A cool hand reached around and pulled her short blond waves back from her face. Luce saw Shelby’s frayed black yoga pants and flip-flopped feet and felt a wave of gratitude.

“Thanks,” she said. After a long moment, she wiped her mouth and unsteadily got to her feet. “Are you mad at me?”

“What mad? I’m proud of you. You figured it out. Why do you even need someone like me anymore?” Shelby gave Luce a one-shoulder shrug.

“Shelby—”

“No, I’ll tell you why you need me,” Shelby blurted. “To keep you out of catastrophes like the one you almost just threw yourself into! Willy-nilly, might I add. What were you trying to do? Do you know what happens to people who go inside Announcers?”

Luce shook her head.

“Me neither, but I doubt it’s pretty!”

“You just have to know what you’re doing,” Miles said suddenly from behind them. His face looked paler than normal. Luce must really have shaken him up.

“Oh, and I presume you know what you’re doing?” Shelby challenged.

“No,” he mumbled. “But one summer my parents made me take a workshop with this old angel who knew how, okay?” He turned to Luce. “And the way you were doing it? Wasn’t even close. You really scared me, Luce.”

“I’m sorry.” Luce winced. Shelby and Miles were acting like she’d betrayed them by coming out here alone. “I thought you guys were going to the campfire behind the lodge.”

“We thought you were going,” Shelby shot back. “We were there for a while, but then Jasmine started crying about how Dawn had disappeared, and the teachers got all weird, especially when they realized you were missing too, so the party kinda broke up. So then I mention casually to Miles that I kind of sort of have an idea what you might be up to and that I’m off to find you and suddenly he’s Mr. Superglue—”

“Wait a minute,” Luce broke in. “Dawn disappeared?”

“Probably not,” Miles offered. “I mean, you know how she and Jasmine are. They’re just flighty.”

“But it was her party,” Luce said. “She wouldn’t miss her own party.”

“That was what Jasmine kept saying,” Miles offered. “She didn’t come to the room last night, and wasn’t at mess this morning, so finally Frankie and Steven instructed us all to go back to the dorms, but—”

“Twenty bucks says Dawn’s mugging down with some non-Neph greaseball in the woods around here.” Shelby rolled her eyes.

“No.” Luce had a bad feeling about this. Dawn had been so excited about the campfire. She’d ordered T-shirts online even though there was no way in the world she’d be able to convince any of the Nephilim kids to wear them. She wouldn’t just disappear—not of her own volition. “How long has she been gone?”

When the three of them came out of the woods, Luce was even more shaken up. And not just about Dawn. She was shaken by what she’d seen in the Announcer. Watching death close in on her former self was agony, and this was the first time she had seen it. Daniel, on the other hand, had had to watch it hundreds of times. Only now could she understand why he’d been so cold to her when they first met: to save them both the trauma of going through another gruesome death. The reality of Daniel’s plight began to overwhelm her, and she was desperate to see him.

Crossing the lawn to the dorm, Luce had to shade her eyes. Powerful flashlights were sweeping over the campus. A helicopter droned in the distance, its searchlight tracing the shoreline, sweeping back and forth along the beach. A wide line of men in dark uniforms walked along the path from the Nephilim lodge to the mess hall, slowly scanning the ground.

Miles said, “That’s standard formation for search parties. Form a line and leave no inch of ground uncovered.”

“Oh God,” Luce said under her breath.

“She really is missing.” Shelby winced. “Not good karma.”

Luce broke into a jog toward the Nephilim lodge. Miles and Shelby followed. The path, decked with flowers and so pretty in the daylight, now looked overgrown with shadow. Ahead of them, the campfire in the pit had faded to glowing embers, but all the lights were on at the lodge, inside each of the two stories, and all around the deck. The great A-frame building was ablaze and looked formidable in the dark night.

Luce could see the scared faces of a lot of the Nephilim kids who were sitting on the benches around the deck. Jasmine was crying, her red knit cap tugged low on her head. She was holding Lilith’s stiff hand for support as two cops with notebooks ran through a bunch of questions. Luce’s heart went out to the girl. She knew how horrific that process could be.

The cops swarmed around the deck, passing out blown-up black-and-white photocopies of a recent photograph of Dawn that someone had printed off the Internet. Glancing down at the low-resolution image, Luce was surprised to see how much Dawn did resemble her—at least, before she’d dyed her hair. She remembered talking the morning after she’d done it, how Dawn kept joking about their not being Twinkies anymore.

Luce covered her gasp with her hand. Her head hurt as she began to add up so many things that hadn’t made sense. Until now.

The awful moment on the life raft. Steven’s harsh warning about keeping it a secret. Daniel’s paranoia about “dangers” he’d never explained to Luce. The Outcast who’d lured her off campus, the threat that Cam had destroyed in the forest. The way Dawn looked so much like her in the fuzzy black-and-white photograph.

Whoever took Dawn had been mistaken. It was Luce they wanted.