Torment

SEVENTEEN TWO DAYS

Luce woke to the scrape of a hanger dragging across the bar in her closet.

Before she could see who was responsible for the noise, a mound of clothes bombarded her. She sat up in bed, pushing her way out from under the pile of jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters. She plucked an argyle sock off her forehead.

“Arriane?”

“Do you like the red one? Or the black?” Arriane was holding two of Luce’s dresses up against her tiny frame, swaying as she modeled each one.

Arriane’s arms were bare of the awful tracking wristband she’d had to wear at Sword & Cross. Luce hadn’t noticed until now, and she shuddered to remember the cruel voltage sent coursing through Arriane whenever she stepped out of line. Every day in California, Luce’s memories of Sword & Cross grew hazier, until a moment like this one jolted her back into the turmoil of her stay there.

“Elizabeth Taylor says only certain women can wear red,” Arriane continued. “It’s all about cleavage and coloring. Luckily, you’ve got both.” She freed the red dress from its hanger and tossed it on the pile.

“What are you doing here?” Luce asked.

Arriane put her tiny hands on her hips. “Helping you pack, silly. You’re going home.”

“Wh-What home? What do you mean?” Luce stammered.

Arriane laughed, stepping forward to take one of Luce’s hands and tug her out of bed. “Georgia, my peach.” She patted Luce’s cheek. “With good old Harry and Doreen. And apparently some friend of yours is also flying in.”

Callie. She was actually going to get to see Callie? And her parents? Luce wobbled where she stood, suddenly speechless.

“Don’t you want to spend Thanksgiving with your fam?”

Luce was waiting for the catch. “What about—”

“Don’t worry.” Arriane tweaked Luce’s nose. “It was Mr. Cole’s idea. We’ve got to keep up the ruse that you’re still just down the road from your parents. This seemed the simplest and most fun way to go about it.”

“But when he texted me yesterday, all he said was—”

“He didn’t want to get your hopes up until he had every little thing taken care of, including”—Arriane curtseyed—“the perfect escort. One of them, anyway. Roland should be here any second.”

A knock on the door.

“He’s so good.” Arriane pointed to the red dress still in Luce’s hand. “Throw that baby on.”

Luce quickly shimmied into the dress, then ducked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and hair. Arriane had presented her with one of those rare Jump!—How high? situations. You didn’t bother with questions. You just leaped.

She emerged from the bathroom, expecting to see Roland and Arriane doing something Roland-and-Arriane-esque, like one of them standing on top of her suitcase while the other tried to zip it up.

But it wasn’t Roland who had knocked.

It was Steven and Francesca.

Shit.

The words I can explain formed on the tip of Luce’s tongue. Only, she had no idea how to talk herself out of this situation. She looked to Arriane for help. Arriane was still tossing Luce’s sneakers into the suitcase. Didn’t she know the kind of major trouble they were about to be in?

When Francesca stepped forward, Luce braced herself. But then the wide bell sleeves of Francesca’s crimson turtleneck engulfed Luce in an unexpected hug. “We came to wish you well.”

“Of course, we’ll miss you tomorrow at what we with tongue in cheek refer to as the Dinner for the Displaced,” Steven said, taking Francesca’s hand and prying her away from Luce. “But it’s always best for a student to be with family.”

“I don’t understand,” Luce said. “You knew about this? I thought I was grounded until further notice.”

“We spoke with Mr. Cole this morning,” Francesca said.

“And you weren’t grounded as punishment, Luce,” Steven explained. “It was the only way we could ensure you’d be safe under our charge. But you’re in good hands with Arriane.”

Never one to overstay her welcome, Francesca was already steering Steven toward the door. “We hear your parents are anxious to see you. Something about your mother filling up a freezer with pies.” She winked at Luce, and both she and Steven waved, and then they were gone.

Luce’s heart swelled at the prospect of getting home to her family.

But not before it went out to Miles and Shelby. They’d be crestfallen if she went home to Thunderbolt and abandoned them here. She didn’t even know where Shelby was. She couldn’t leave without—

Roland stuck his head through Luce’s open door. He looked professional in his pinstriped blazer and crisp white collared shirt. His black-and-gold dreads were shorter, spikier, making his dark, deep-set eyes even more striking.

“Is the coast clear?” he asked, shooting Luce his familiar devilish grin. “We’ve got a hanger-on.” He nodded at someone behind him—who appeared a moment later with duffel bag in hand.

Miles.

He flashed Luce a wonderfully unembarrassed grin and took a seat on the edge of her bed. An image of introducing him to her parents ran though Luce’s mind. He’d take off his baseball cap, shake both of their hands, compliment her mom’s half-finished needlepoint …

“Roland, what part of ‘top-secret mission’ don’t you understand?” Arriane asked.

“It’s my fault,” Miles admitted. “I saw Roland heading over here … and I forced it out of him. That’s why he’s late.”

“As soon as this guy heard the words Luce and Georgia”—Roland jerked his thumb at Miles—“it took him about a nanosecond to pack.”

“We kind of had a Thanksgiving deal,” Miles said, looking only at Luce. “I couldn’t let her break it.”

“No.” Luce bit back a smile. “He couldn’t.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Arriane raised an eyebrow. “I just wonder what Francesca would have to say about this. Whether someone should run it by your parents first, Miles—”

“Aw, come on, Arriane.” Roland waved his hand dismissively. “Since when do you check in with authority? I’ll look out for the kid. He won’t get into any trouble.”

“Get into any trouble where?” Shelby barged into the room, her yoga mat swinging from a string across her back. “Where are we going?”

“Luce’s house in Georgia for Thanksgiving,” Miles said.

In the hallway behind Shelby, a bleached-blond head hovered. Shelby’s ex-boyfriend. His skin was ghost-white, and Shelby was right: There was something odd about his eyes. How pale they were.

“For the last time, I said goodbye, Phil.” Shelby quickly shut the door in his face.

“Who was that?” Roland asked.

“My skeeze-and-a-half ex-boyfriend.”

“Seems like an interesting guy,” Roland said, staring at the door, distracted.

“Interesting?” Shelby snorted. “A restraining order would be interesting.” She took one look at Luce’s suitcase, then at Miles’s duffel, then haphazardly started throwing her belongings into a squat black trunk.

Arriane threw up her hands. “Can’t you do anything without an entourage?” she asked Luce. Then, turning to Roland, “I assume you want to take responsibility for this one, too?”

“That’s the holiday spirit!” Roland laughed. “We’re going to the Prices’ for Thanksgiving,” he told Shelby, whose face lit up. “The more the merrier.”

Luce couldn’t believe how perfectly everything was working out. Thanksgiving with her family and Callie and Arriane and Roland and Shelby and Miles. She couldn’t have scripted this any better.

Only one thing nagged at her. And it seriously nagged.

“What about Daniel?”

She meant: Does he know about this trip already? and What’s the real story between him and Cam? and Is he still mad at me about that kiss? and Is it wrong that Miles is coming too? and also What are the odds of Daniel showing up at my parents’ house tomorrow even though he says he can’t see me?

Arriane cleared her throat. “Yes, what about Daniel?” she repeated quietly. “Time will tell.”

“So do we have plane tickets or something?” Shelby asked. “Because if we’re flying, I need to pack my serenity kit, essential oils, and heating pad. You don’t want to see me at thirty-five thousand feet without them.”

Roland snapped his fingers.

Near his feet, the shadow cast by the open door peeled itself off the hardwood planks, rising the way a trapdoor might to lead down to a basement. A gust of cold swept up from the floor, followed by a bleak blast of darkness. It smelled like wet hay as it shrank into a small, compact sphere. But then, at a nod from Roland, it ballooned into a tall black portal. It looked like the sort of door that would lead to a restaurant kitchen, the swinging kind with a round glass window in the top. Only, this one was made out of dark Announcer fog, and all that was visible through the window was a darker, swirling blackness.

“That looks just like the one I read about in the book,” Miles said, clearly impressed. “All I could manage was a weird sort of trapezoidal window.” He smiled at Luce. “But we still made it work.”

“Stick with me, kid,” Roland said, “and you’ll see what it’s like to travel in style.”

Arriane rolled her eyes. “He’s such a show-off.”

Luce cocked her head at Arriane. “But I thought you said—”

“I know.” Arriane put up a hand. “I know I repeated that whole spiel about how dangerous Announcer travel is. And I don’t want to be one of those sucky do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do angels. But we all agreed—Francesca and Steven, Mr. Cole, everyone—”

Everyone? Luce couldn’t group them together without seeing a glaring missing piece. Where was Daniel in all of this?

“Besides.” Arriane smiled proudly. “We’re in the presence of a master. Ro’s one of the very best Announcer travelers.” And then, in a whispered aside to Roland, “Don’t let it go to your head.”

Roland swung open the Announcer’s door. It groaned and creaked on shadow hinges and swung open onto a dank, yawning pit of emptiness.

“Um … what is it again that makes traveling by Announcer so dangerous?” Miles asked.

Arriane pointed around the room, at the shadow under the desk lamp, behind Shelby’s yoga mat. All of the shadows were quivering. “An untrained eye might not know which Announcer to step through. And believe us, there are always uninvited lurkers, waiting for someone to accidentally open them.”

Luce remembered the sickly brown shadow she’d tripped over. The uninvited lurker that had given her the nightmarish glimpse of Cam and Daniel on the beach.

“If you pick the wrong Announcer, it’s very easy to get lost,” Roland explained. “To not have any idea where—or when—you’re stepping through to. But as long as you stick with us, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Nervously, Luce pointed into the belly of the Announcer. She didn’t remember the other shadows they’d stepped through looking quite so murky and dark. Or maybe she just hadn’t known the consequences until now. “We’re not just going to pop up in the middle of my parents’ kitchen, are we? Because I think my mom might pass out from the shock—”

“Please.” Arriane clucked her tongue, guiding Luce, then Miles, and then Shelby to stand before the Announcer. “Have a little faith.”

It was like pushing through a murky wet fog, clammy and unpleasant. It slid and coiled over Luce’s skin and stuck in her lungs when she breathed. An echo of ceaseless white noise filled up the tunnel like a waterfall. The two other times Luce had traveled by Announcer, she’d felt lumbering and hurried, catapulting though darkness to come out somewhere light. This was different. She’d lost track of where and when she was, even of who she was and where she was going.

Then there was a strong hand yanking her out.

When Roland let her go, the echoing waterfall trickled to a drip, and a whiff of chlorine filled her nose. A diving board. A familiar one, under a lofty arched ceiling lined with broken stained-glass panels. The sun had passed over the high windows, but its light still cast faint colored prisms onto the surface of an Olympic-size pool. Along the walls, candles flickered in stone recesses, throwing off a dim, useless light. She’d recognize this church-gymnasium anywhere.

“Oh my God,” Luce whispered. “We’re back at Sword and Cross.”

Arriane scanned the room quickly and without affection. “As far as your parents are concerned when they pick us up tomorrow morning, you’ve been here all along. Got it?”

Arriane acted as if returning to Sword & Cross for the night was no different than checking into a nondescript motel. The jolt back to this part of her life, however, hit Luce like a slap across the face. She hadn’t liked it here. Sword & Cross was a miserable place, but it was a place where things had happened to her. She’d fallen in love here, had watched a close friend die. More than anywhere else, this was a place where she had changed.

She closed her eyes and laughed bitterly. She’d known nothing then compared to what she knew now. And yet she’d felt surer of herself and her emotions than she could imagine ever feeling again.

“What the hell is this place?” Shelby asked.

“My last school,” Luce said, glancing at Miles. He seemed uneasy, huddling next to Shelby against the wall. Luce remembered: They were good kids—and though she’d never talked much about her time here, the Nephilim rumor mill could easily have filled their minds with enough vivid details to paint one scary night at Sword & Cross.

“Ahem,” Arriane said, looking at Shelby and Miles. “And when Luce’s parents ask, you guys go here too.”

“Explain to me how this is a school,” Shelby said. “What, do you swim and pray at the same time? That’s a level of freakish efficiency you’d never see on the West Coast. I think I just got homesick.”

“You think this is bad,” Luce said, “you should see the rest of campus.”

Shelby scrunched up her face, and Luce couldn’t blame her. Compared to Shoreline, this place was a gruesome sort of Purgatory. At least, unlike the rest of the kids here, they’d be gone after tonight.

“You guys look drained,” Arriane said. “Which is good, because I promised Cole we’d lie low.”

Roland had been leaning against the diving board, rubbing his temples, the Announcer shards quivering at his feet. Now he stood up and began to take charge. “Miles, you’re going to bunk up with me in my old room. And Luce, your room’s still empty. We’ll roll in a cot for Shelby. Let’s all drop our bags and meet back at my room. I’ll use the old black-market network to order a pizza.”

The mention of pizza was enough to shake Miles and Shelby out of their comas, but Luce was taking longer to adjust. It wasn’t that weird for her room to still be empty. Counting on her fingers, she realized she’d been gone from this place less than three weeks. It felt like so much longer, like every day had been a month, and it was impossible for Luce to imagine Sword & Cross without any of the people—or angels, or demons—who had made up her life here.

“Don’t worry.” Arriane stood next to Luce. “This place is like a reject revolving door. People come and go all the time because of some parole issue, crazy parents, whatever. Randy’s off tonight. No one else gives a damn. If anyone gives you a second look—just give ’em a third one. Or send them over to me.” She made a fist. “You ready to get out of here?” She pointed at the others already following Roland out the door.

“I’ll catch up with you guys,” Luce said. “There’s something I need to do first.”

In the far east corner of the cemetery, next to her father’s plot, Penn’s grave was modest but neat.

The last time Luce had seen this cemetery, it had been coated in a thick felt of dust. The aftermath of every angel battle, Daniel had told her. Luce didn’t know whether the wind had carried the dust away by now, or whether angel dust just disappeared over time, but the cemetery seemed to be back to its neglected old self. Still ringed by an ever-advancing forest of kudzu-strangled live oaks. Still barren and depleted under the no-color sky. Only, there was something missing, something vital Luce couldn’t put her finger on, but that still made her feel lonely.

A sparse layer of dull green grass had grown up and around Penn’s grave, so it didn’t look so jarringly new, compared to the centuries-old graves surrounding it. A bouquet of fresh lilies lay in front of the simple gray tombstone, which Luce stooped down to read:

PENNYWEATHER VAN SYCKLE-LOCKWOOD

A DEAR FRIEND

1991–2009

Luce inhaled a jagged breath, and tears sprang to her eyes. She’d left Sword & Cross before there’d been time to bury Penn, but Daniel had taken care of everything. It was the first time in several days that her heart ached for him. Because he had known, better than she would have known herself, exactly how Penn’s tombstone should read. Luce knelt down on the grass, her tears flowing freely now, her hands combing the grass uselessly.

“I’m here, Penn,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I had to leave you. I’m sorry you got mixed up with me in the first place. You deserved better than this. A better friend than me.”

She wished her friend were still here. She wished she could talk to her. She knew Penn’s death was her fault, and it almost broke her heart.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, and I’m scared.”

She wanted to say she missed Penn all the time, but what she really missed was the idea of a friend she could have known better if death hadn’t taken her away too soon. None of it was right.

“Hello, Luce.”

She had to wipe away the tears before she could see Mr. Cole standing on the other side of Penn’s grave. She’d gotten so used to her crisply elegant teachers at Shoreline that Mr. Cole looked almost frumpy in his bunched-up tawny suit, with his mustache, and his brown hair parted straight as a ruler just above his left ear.

Luce scrambled to her feet, sniffling against herwrist. “Hi, Mr. Cole.”

He smiled kindly. “You’re doing well over there, I hear. Everyone says you’re doing very well.”

“Oh … n-no …,” she stammered. “I don’t know about that.”

“Well, I do. I also know your parents are very happy to get to see you. It’s good when these things can work out.”

“Thank you,” she said, hoping he understood how grateful she was.

“I won’t keep you but for just one question.”

Luce waited for him to ask her about something deep and dark and over her head about Daniel and Cam, good and evil, right and wrong, trust and deceit. …

But all he said was “What did you do to your hair?”

Luce’s head was upside down in the sink in the girls’ bathroom down the hall from the Sword & Cross cafeteria. Shelby carried in the last two slices of cheese pizza stacked on a paper plate for Luce. Arriane held out a bottle of cheap black hair dye—the best Roland could do on such short notice, but not a bad match for Luce’s natural color.

Neither Arriane nor Shelby had questioned Luce about her sudden need for a change. She’d been grateful for that. Now she saw they’d only been waiting for her to be in a vulnerable half-dyed position to begin their inquisition.

“I guess Daniel will be pleased,” Arriane said in her coyest leading-question tone of voice. “Not that you’re doing this for Daniel. Are you?”

“Arriane,” Luce warned. She wasn’t going there. Not tonight.

But Shelby seemed to want to. “You know what I’ve always liked about Miles? That he likes you for who you are, not for what you do with your hair.”

“If you two were going to be that obvious about it, why didn’t you guys come down in your Team Daniel and Team Miles T-shirts?”

“We should order those,” Shelby said.

“Mine’s in the laundry,” Arriane said.

Luce tuned them out, focusing instead on the warm water and the strange confluence of things flowing over her head, into her scalp, and down the drain: Shelby’s stubby fingers had helped with Luce’s first dye job, back when Luce thought that was the only way to start afresh. Arriane’s first act of friendship toward Luce had been the command to chop off her black hair, to make her look like Luce. Now their hands worked through Luce’s scalp in the same bathroom where Penn had rinsed her clean of the meat loaf Molly had dumped on her head her first day at Sword & Cross.

It was bittersweet, and beautiful, and Luce couldn’t figure out what any of it meant. Only that she didn’t want to hide anymore—not from herself, or from her parents; not from Daniel, or even from those who sought to harm her.

She’d been seeking a cheap transformation when she first got out to California. Now she realized that the only worthwhile way to make a change was to earn a real one. Dying her hair black wasn’t the answer either—she knew she wasn’t there yet—but at least it was a step in the right direction.

Arriane and Shelby stopped arguing over which guy was Luce’s soul mate. They looked at her silently and nodded. She felt it before she even saw her reflection in the mirror: The heavy weight of melancholy, one she hadn’t even known she was shouldering, had lifted from her body.

She was back to her roots. She was ready to go home.