The Fallen Sequence (68 page)

He pointed behind her. Francesca was beckoning toward Luce with a finger. The other Nephilim had all taken seats on the benches, except for a few students who looked like they were preparing to fence. Jasmine and a Korean girl named Sylvia, two tall, skinny boys whose names Luce could never keep straight, and Lilith, standing alone, examining the blunt rubber tip of her sword with careful scrutiny.

“Luce?” Francesca said in a low voice. She motioned to the space on the deck in front of Lilith. “Take your place.”

“Trial by fire.” Roland whistled, patting Luce on the back. “Show no fear.”

There were only five other students standing in the middle of the deck, but to Luce, it felt as though there were a hundred.

Francesca stood with her arms folded casually over her chest. Her face was serene, but to Luce it looked like
a forced serenity. Maybe she intended for Luce to lose in the most brutal, embarrassing match possible. Why else would she pit Luce against Lilith, who towered over Luce by at least a foot, and whose fiery red hair protruded from behind her mask like a lion’s mane?

“I’ve never done this,” Luce said lamely.

“It’s okay, Luce, you don’t need to be skilled yet,” Francesca said. “We’re trying to gauge your relative capacity. Just remember what Steven and I showed you at the start of the session and you’ll do fine.”

Lilith laughed and whipped the point of her foil in a broad Z. “The mark of zero, loser,” she said.

“Showing off the number of friends you have?” Luce asked. She remembered what Roland had said about showing no fear. She slid the mask down over her face, took her foil from Francesca. Luce didn’t even know how to hold it. She fumbled with the handle, wondering whether to put it in her right or left hand. She wrote right-handed, bowled and batted with her left.

Lilith was already looking at her like she wished Luce were dead, and Luce knew she couldn’t afford the time to test out her swing in both hands. Did they even call it a swing in fencing?

Wordlessly, Francesca moved behind her. She stood with her shoulders brushing Luce’s back, practically folding her narrow body around Luce and taking Luce’s left hand, and the sword, in hers.

“I’m left-handed too,” she said.

Luce opened her mouth, unsure whether or not to protest.

“Just like you.” Francesca leaned around her and gave Luce a knowing look. As she repositioned her grip, something warm and tremendously soothing flowed through Francesca’s fingers into Luce. Strength, or maybe courage—Luce didn’t understand how it worked, but she was grateful.

“You’ll want a light grip,” Francesca said, directing Luce’s fingers around the hilt under the guard. “Grip too tightly and your direction of the blade becomes less nimble, your defensive moves more limited. Grip too lightly and the blade can be spun out of your hands.”

Her smooth, thin fingers guided Luce’s to hold the curved grip of the sword’s hilt just under the guard. With one hand on the sword and the other on Luce’s shoulder, Francesca galloped lightly sideways one step, blocking out the move.

“Advance.” She moved forward, thrusting the sword in Lilith’s direction.

The redheaded girl ran her tongue across her teeth and glared at Luce with something like middle child syndrome.

“Disengage.” Francesca moved Luce back as if she were a chess piece. She stepped away and circled to face Luce, whispering, “The rest is just gilding the lily.”

Luce swallowed. Gilding the what?

“
En garde!
” Lilith practically shouted. Her long legs were bent, and her right arm was holding the foil straight at Luce.

Luce retreated, two quick galloping steps; then, when she felt at a safe enough distance, lunged forward with her sword extended.

Lilith dipped deftly to the left of Luce’s sword, spun around, then came back from below with her own, clashing against Luce’s. The two blades slid against each other until they reached a midpoint, then held. Luce had to put all her strength into stopping Lilith’s foil with the pressure of her own. Her arms were shaking, but she was surprised to find she could hold Lilith back in this position. At last Lilith broke away and backed off. Luce watched her dip and spin a few times, and began to figure her out.

Lilith was a grunter, making tons of effort-filled noise. It was a bit of misdirection. She would make a huge noise and feint in one direction, then whip the point of her foil around in a high, tight arc to try to get past Luce’s defenses.

So Luce tried the same move. When she swung the tip of her sword back around to get her first point, just south of Lilith’s heart, the girl let out a deafening roar.

Luce winced and backed away. She didn’t think she’d even touched Lilith very hard. “Are you okay?” she called out, about to lift her mask.

“She’s not hurt,” Francesca answered for Lilith. A smile parted her lips. “She’s angry that you’re beating her.”

Luce didn’t have time to wonder what it meant that Francesca seemed suddenly to be enjoying herself, because Lilith was barreling toward her once again, sword poised. Luce raised her sword to meet Lilith’s, turning her wrist to clash three times before they disengaged.

Luce’s pulse was racing and she felt good. She sensed an energy coursing through her that she hadn’t felt in a long time. She was actually
good
at this, almost as good as Lilith, who looked like she’d been bred to skewer people with sharp things. Luce, who had never even picked up a sword, realized she actually had a chance to win. Just one more point.

She could hear the other students cheering, some even calling out her name. She could hear Miles, and she thought she could hear Shelby, which really egged her on. But the sound of their voices was woven through with something else. Something staticky and too loud. Lilith fought as fiercely as ever, but suddenly Luce was having a hard time concentrating. She backed up and blinked, looking into the sky. The sun was obscured by the overhanging trees—but that wasn’t all. A growing fleet of shadows was stretching forth from the branches, like ink stains extending right above Luce’s head.

No—not now, not in public with everyone watching,
and not when it might cost her this match. Yet no one else even noticed them, which seemed impossible. They were making so much noise it was impossible for Luce to do anything but cover her ears and try to block them out. She raised her hands to her ears, which made her sword tip skyward, confusing Lilith.

“Don’t let her freak you out, Luce. She’s toxic!” Dawn chirped from the bench.

“Use the
prise de fer
!” Shelby called. “Lilith sucks at the
prise de fer
. Correction: Lilith sucks at
everything
, but especially the
prise de fer.
”

So many voices—more, it seemed, than there were people on the deck. Luce winced, trying to block it all out. But one voice separated from the crowd, as though it were whispering into her ear from just behind her head. Steven:

“Screen out the noise, Luce. Find the message.”

She whipped her head around, but he was on the other side of the deck, looking toward the trees. Was he talking about the other Nephilim? All the noise and chatter they were making? She glanced at their faces, but they weren’t even talking. So who was? For the briefest moment, she caught Steven’s eyes, and he lifted his chin toward the sky. As if he were gesturing at the shadows.

In the trees above her head. The announcers were
speaking
.

And she could
hear
them. Had they been speaking all along?

Latin, Russian, Japanese. English with a southern accent. Broken French. Whispers, singing, bad directions, lines of rhyming verse. And one long bloodcurdling scream for help. She shook her head, still holding Lilith’s sword at bay, and the voices overhead stayed with her. She looked at Steven, then Francesca. They showed no signs, but she knew they heard it. And she knew they knew she was listening too.

For the message behind the noise.

All her life she’d heard the same noise when the shadows came—whooshing, ugly, wet noise. But now it was different. …

Clash
.

Lilith’s sword collided with Luce’s. The girl was snorting like an angry bull. Luce could hear her own breath inside the mask, panting as she tried to hold Lilith’s sword. Then she could hear so much more among all the voices. Suddenly she could focus on them. Finding the balance just meant separating the static from the significant stuff. But how?

Il faut faire le coup double. Après ca, c’est facile a gagner
, one of the Announcers whispered in French.

Luce had just two years of high school French to go on, but the words touched her somewhere deeper than her brain. It wasn’t just her head understanding the
message. Somehow her body knew it too. It seeped into her, right down to the bone, and she remembered: She’d been in a place like this before, in a sword fight like this, a standoff like this.

The Announcer was recommending the double cross, a complicated fencing move in which two separate attacks came one right after the other.

Her sword slid down her opponent’s and the two of them broke away. A moment sooner than Lilith, Luce lunged forward in one clean intuitive motion, thrusting her sword point right, then left, then flush against the side of Lilith’s rib cage. The Nephilim cheered, but Luce didn’t stop. She disengaged, then came straight back a second time, plunging the tip of her foil into the padding near Lilith’s gut.

That was three.

Lilith dashed her sword to the deck, tore off her mask, and gave Luce a terrifying scowl before making quickly for the locker room. The rest of the class was on their feet, and Luce could feel her classmates surrounding her. Dawn and Jasmine hugged her from both sides, giving dainty little squeezes. Shelby came forward next for a high five, and Luce could see Miles waiting patiently behind her. When it was his turn, he surprised her, swooping her off the deck and into a long, tight hug.

She hugged him back, remembering how awkward
she’d felt earlier when she’d gone to him after his match, only to find that Dawn had gotten to him first. Now she was just glad to have him, glad of his easy and honest support.

“I want fencing lessons from you,” he said, laughing.

In his arms, Luce looked up at the sky, at the shadows lengthening from the long branches. Their voices were softer now, less distinct, but still clearer than they’d ever been before, like a static-filled radio she’d been listening to for years that had finally been tuned in. She couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to be grateful or afraid.

ELEVEN

EIGHT DAYS

“H
old 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?”