Torment

NINETEEN THE TRUCE IS BROKEN

The Outcast girl lowered her bow. When the arrow relaxed along its bowstring, the string made a creaking sound, like an attic door opening. Her face was as calm as a still pond on a windless day. She was Luce’s height, with clear, dewy skin, pale lips, and dimples even in the absence of a smile.

“If you wish the boy to live,” she said, her voice flat, “I will yield to you.”

Around them, the others had stopped fighting. The tire swing rolled to a stop, thudding against the corner of the fence. Roland’s wings slowed to a soft beating and carried him down to earth. Everyone was still, but the air was charged with an electric silence.

Luce could feel the weight of so many gazes falling on her: Callie, Miles, and Shelby. Daniel, Arriane, and Gabbe. Cam, Roland, and Molly. The blind gazes of the Outcasts themselves. But she couldn’t wrench herself away from the girl with the depthless white eyes.

“You won’t kill him … just because I say not to?” Luce was so baffled, she laughed. “I thought you wanted to kill me.”

“Kill you?” The girl’s mechanical voice lilted upward, registering surprise. “Not at all. We would die for you. We want you to come with us. You are the last hope. Our entrance.”

“Entrance?” Miles voiced what Luce was too surprised to say. “To what?”

“To Heaven, of course.” The girl peered at Luce with her dead eyes. “You are the price.”

“No.” Luce shook her head, but the girl’s words knocked around inside her mind, echoing in a way that made her feel so hollow she could barely stand.

Entrance into Heaven. The price.

Luce didn’t understand. The Outcasts would take her, and do what? Use her as some sort of bargaining chip? This girl couldn’t even see Luce to know who she was. If Luce had learned one thing at Shoreline, it was that no one could keep the myths straight. They were too old, too convoluted. Everyone knew there was a history, one Luce had been involved in for a long time, but nobody seemed to know why.

“Don’t listen to her, Luce. She’s a monster.” Daniel’s wings were trembling. As if he thought she might be tempted to go. Luce’s shoulders began to itch, a hot prickling that left the rest of her body cold.

“Lucinda?” the Outcast girl called.

“Okay, hold on a minute,” Luce said to the girl. She turned to Daniel. “I want to know: What is this truce? And don’t tell me ‘nothing,’ and don’t tell me you can’t explain. Tell me the truth. You owe it to me.”

“You’re right,” Daniel said, surprising Luce. He kept sneaking glances at the Outcast, as if she might spirit Luce away at any moment. “Cam and I drew it up. We agreed to put aside our differences for eighteen days. All angels and demons. We came together to hunt down other enemies. Like them.” He pointed to the Outcast.

“But why?”

“Because of you. Because you needed time. Our end goals may be different, but for now, Cam and I—and all of our kin—we work as allies. We have one priority in common.”

The glimpse Luce had seen in the Announcer, that sickening scene with Daniel and Cam working together … that was supposed to be okay because they’d agreed upon a truce? To give her time?

“Not that you even stuck by the truce.” Cam spat in Daniel’s direction. “What good is a truce if you don’t honor it?”

“You didn’t stand by it either,” Luce said to Cam. “You were in the forest outside Shoreline.”

“Protecting you!” said Cam. “Not taking you out on moonlight parades!”

Luce turned to Arriane. “Whatever the truce is—or isn’t—once it’s over, does that mean that … Cam’s suddenly the enemy again? And Roland, too? This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Say the word, Lucinda,” the Outcast said. “I will take you far from all of this.”

“To what? To where?” Luce asked. There was something appealing about just getting away. From all the heartache and struggle and confusion.

“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Luce,” Cam warned. It was strange the way he sounded like the voice of reason, compared to Daniel, who looked practically paralyzed.

Luce glanced around her for the first time since leaving the shed. The fighting had ceased. The same felt of dust that had coated the cemetery at Sword & Cross now caked the grass of the backyard. While their group of angels seemed fully intact and accounted for, the Outcasts had lost most of their army. About ten stood at a distance, watching. Their silver bows were lowered.

The Outcast girl was still waiting for Luce to answer. Her eyes shone in the night and her feet inched backward as the angels pressed closer to her. When Cam approached, the girl raised her silver bow again, slowly, and pointed it at his heart.

Luce watched him stiffen.

“You don’t want to go with the Outcasts,” he told Luce, “especially not tonight.”

“Don’t tell her what she does or doesn’t want.” Shelby butted in. “I’m not saying she should go with the albino freaks or anything. Just everybody quit babying her and let her do her own thing for once. It’s, like, enough already.”

Her voice boomed across the yard, making the Outcast girl jump. She turned to aim her arrow at Shelby.

Luce sucked in her breath. The silver arrow quivered in the Outcast’s hands. She pulled back on the bowstring. Luce held her breath. But before the girl could shoot, her glossy eyes widened. The bow tumbled from her hands. And her body disappeared in a dim gray flash of light.

Two feet behind where the Outcast girl had stood, Molly lowered a silver bow. She had shot the girl cleanly in the back.

“What?” Molly barked as the whole group turned to gape at her. “I like that Nephilim. She reminds me of someone I know.”

She jerked an arm to gesture at Shelby, who said, “Thanks. Seriously. That was cool.”

Molly shrugged, oblivious to the towering dark presence rising up behind her. The Outcast boy Miles had beaten to the ground with the kayak. Phil.

He swung the kayak behind his body, as if it were a baseball bat, and batted Molly clear across the lawn. She landed with a grunt on the grass. Tossing the kayak aside, the Outcast reached into his trench coat for one last shining arrow.

His dead eyes were the only expressionless part of his face. The rest of him—his snarl, his brow, even his cheekbones—looked utterly ferocious. His white skin seemed stretched across his bony skull. His hands looked more like claws. Anger and desperation had changed him from a pale and strange but good-looking guy into an actual monster. He raised his silver bow and took aim at Luce.

“I’ve been patiently waiting for my chance with you for weeks. Now, I don’t mind being a little more forceful than my sister,” he growled. “You will come with us.”

On either side of Luce, silver bows were raised. Cam brought his out from inside his coat once again, and Daniel scrambled to the ground to pick up the bow that the Outcast girl had just dropped. Phil seemed to expect this. His face twisted into a dark smile.

“Do I need to kill your lover to get you to join me?” he asked, pointing his arrow now at Daniel. “Or do I need to kill them all?”

Luce stared at the strange, flat tip of the silver arrow, less than ten feet from Daniel’s chest. No chance Phil would miss from this range. She’d seen the arrows extinguish a dozen angels tonight with that paltry flash of light. But she’d also seen an arrow glance off Callie’s skin, like it was nothing more than the dull stick it appeared to be.

The silver arrows killed angels, she suddenly realized, not humans.

She leaped in front of Daniel. “I won’t let you hurt him. And your arrows can’t hurt me.”

A sound escaped from Daniel, a weird half-laugh, half-sob. She turned to him, wide-eyed. He looked afraid, but more than that, he looked guilty.

She thought of the conversation they’d had under the gnarled peach tree at Sword & Cross, the first time he’d told her about her reincarnations. She remembered sitting with him on the beach in Mendocino when he talked of his place in Heaven before her. What a struggle it had been to get him to open up about those early days. She still felt like there was more. There had to be more.

The creak of the bowstring snapped her attention back to the Outcast, who was pulling back the silver arrow. Now it was aimed at Miles. “Enough talk,” he said. “I’ll take your friends out one at a time until you surrender to me.”

In her mind, Luce saw a bright blink of light, a swirl of color, and a whirling montage of her lives flashing before her eyes—her mom and dad and Andrew. The parents she’d seen in Mount Shasta. Vera ice-skating on the frozen pond. The girl she’d been, swimming under the waterfall in a yellow halter-top bathing suit. Other cities, homes, and times she couldn’t recognize yet. Daniel’s face from a thousand different angles, under a thousand different lights. And blaze after blaze after blaze.

Then she blinked and was back in the yard. The Outcasts were drawing closer, huddling together and whispering to Phil. He kept waving them back, agitated, trying to focus on Luce. Everyone was tense.

She saw Miles staring at her. He must have been terrified. But no, not terrified. He was fixating on her with so much intensity that his gaze seemed to vibrate her very core. Luce grew woozy and her vision clouded. What followed was an unfamiliar sensation of something being lifted off her. Like a casing being removed from her skin.

And she heard her voice say, “Don’t shoot. I surrender.”

Only, it was echoing and disembodied, and Luce hadn’t actually said the words. She followed the sound with her eyes, and her body grew rigid at what she saw.

Another Luce standing behind the Outcast, tapping him on the shoulder.

But this was no glimpse of a former life. This was her, in her skinny black jeans and plaid shirt with the missing button. With her black hair cropped and newly dyed. With her hazel eyes taunting the Outcast. With the burning of her same soul clearly visible to him. Clearly visible to all the other angels, too. This was a mirror image of her. This was—

Miles’s doing.

His gift. He had splintered Luce off into a second self, just as he’d told her he could on her very first day at Shoreline. They say it’s easy to do with the people you, like, love, he’d said.

He loved her.

She couldn’t think about that right now. While everyone’s eyes were drawn to the reflection, the real Luce retreated two steps and hid inside the shed.

“What’s happening?” Cam barked at Daniel.

“I don’t know!” Daniel whispered hoarsely.

Only Shelby seemed to understand. “He did it,” she said under her breath.

The Outcast swung his bow around to aim at this new Luce. Like he didn’t quite trust the victory.

“Let’s do this,” Luce heard her own voice saying in the middle of the yard. “I can’t stay here with them. Too many secrets. Too many lies.”

A part of her did feel that way. That she couldn’t keep going on like this. That something had to change.

“You will come with me, and join my brothers and my sisters?” the Outcast said, sounding hopeful. His eyes made her nauseated. He held out his ghostly white hand.

“I will,” Luce’s voice projected.

“Luce, no.” Daniel sucked in his breath. “You can’t.”

Now the remaining Outcasts raised their bows at Daniel and Cam and the rest of them, lest they interfere.

Luce’s mirror stepped forward. Slipped her hand inside Phil’s. “Yes, I can.”

The monster Outcast cradled her in his stiff white arms. There was a great flap of dirty wings. A stale cloud of dust stormed up from the ground. Inside the shed, Luce held her breath.

She heard Daniel gasp as Luce’s mirror and the Outcast soared up and out of the backyard. The rest of them looked incredulous. Except for Shelby and Miles.

“What the hell just happened?” Arriane said. “Did she really—”

“No!” Daniel cried. “No, no, no!”

Luce’s heart ached as he tore at his hair, spun in a circle, and let his wings bloom out to their full size.

Immediately, the fleet of remaining Outcasts spread their own dingy brown wings and took flight. Their wings were so thin, they had to beat frantically just to stay in the air. They were closing in on Phil. Trying to form a shield around him so he could take Luce wherever he thought he was taking her.

But Cam was faster. The Outcasts were probably twenty feet in the air when Luce heard one final arrow loose from its bow.

Cam’s arrow wasn’t meant for Phil. It was meant for Luce.

And his aim was perfect.

Luce froze as her mirror image disappeared in a great bloom of white light. In the sky, Phil’s tattered wings shuddered open. Empty. A horrible roar escaped his mouth. He started to swoop back toward Cam, followed by his army of Outcasts. But then he stopped midway. As if he’d realized there was no more reason to go back.

“So it begins again,” he called down to Cam. To all of them. “It could have ended peacefully. But tonight you’ve made a new sect of immortal enemies. Next time we will not negotiate.”

Then the Outcasts disappeared into the night.

Back in the yard, Daniel barreled into Cam, throwing him to the ground. “What’s wrong with you?” he yelled, his fists wailing down on Cam’s face. “How could you?”

Cam strained to stop him. They rolled over each other on the grass. “It was a better end for her, Daniel.”

Daniel was seething, tackling Cam, slamming his head into the dirt. Daniel’s eyes blazed. “I’ll kill you!”

“You know I’m right!” Cam shouted, not fighting back at all.

Daniel froze. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know anything now.” His voice was ragged. He’d been gripping Cam by the lapel, but now he just slumped to the ground, burying his face in the grass.

Luce wanted to go to him. To fall on him and tell him everything was going to be okay.

Except it wasn’t.

What she’d seen tonight was too much. She felt sick from watching herself—Miles’s mirror image of her—die from the starshot.

Miles had saved her life. She couldn’t get over it.

And the rest of them thought Cam had ended it.

Her head swam as she stepped forward from the shadows of the shed, planning to tell the others not to worry, that she was still alive. But then she sensed the presence of something else.

An Announcer was quivering in the doorway. Luce stepped out of the shed and approached it.

Slowly, it broke free of a shadow cast by the moon. It slithered along the grass toward her for a few feet, picking up a dirty coat of dust left by the battle. When it reached Luce, it shuddered up and rose along her body, until it hovered blackly over her head.

She closed her eyes and felt herself raising her hand to meet it. The darkness fell to rest in her palm. It made a cold sizzling sound.

“What is that?” Daniel’s head snapped around at the noise. He raised himself from the ground. “Luce!”

She stayed put as the others gasped at the sight of her standing in front of the shed. She didn’t want to glimpse an Announcer. She’d seen enough for one night. She didn’t even know why she was doing this—

Until she did. She wasn’t looking for a vision, she was looking for a way out. Something far away enough to step through to. It had been too long since she’d had a moment to think on her own. What she needed was a break. From everything.

“Time to go,” she said to herself.

The shadow door that presented itself in front of her wasn’t perfect—it was jagged around the edges and it stank of sewage. But Luce parted its surface anyway.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, Luce!” Roland’s voice reached her at the edge of the doorway. “It could take you anywhere!”

Daniel was on his feet, jogging toward her. “What are you doing?” She could hear the profound relief in his voice that she was still alive, and the sheer panic that she could manipulate the Announcer. His anxiety only spurred her on.

She wanted to look back to apologize to Callie, to thank Miles for what he’d done, to tell Arriane and Gabbe not to worry the way she knew they were going to anyway, to leave word for her parents. To tell Daniel not to follow her, that she needed to do this for herself. But her chance to break free was closing. So she stepped forward and called over her shoulder to Roland, “Guess I’ll just have to figure it out.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daniel rushing toward her. Like he hadn’t believed until now that she would do it.

She felt the words rising up in her throat. I love you. She did. She did forever. But if she and Daniel had forever, their love could wait until she figured out a few important things about herself. About her lives and the life she had ahead of her. Tonight there was only time to wave goodbye, take a deep breath, and leap into the dismal shadow.

Into darkness.

Into her past.