The Fallen Sequence (96 page)

“You’re not the first to skip around the past, you know, and everybody needs a guide. Lucky you, you chanced upon me. You could have gotten stuck with Virgil—”

“Virgil?” Luce asked, having a flashback to sophomore English. “As in the guy who led Dante through the nine circles of Hell?”

“That’s the one. He’s
so
by the book, it’s a snooze. Anyway, you and I aren’t sojourning through Hell right now,” he explained with a shrug. “Tourist season.”

Luce thought back to the moment she’d seen Luschka burst into flames in Moscow, to the raw pain she’d felt when Lucia had told her Daniel had disappeared from the hospital in Milan.

“Sometimes it feels like Hell,” she said.

“That’s only because it took us this long to be introduced.” Bill extended his stony little hand toward hers.

Luce stalled. “So what, um, side are you on?”

Bill whistled. “Hasn’t anyone told you it’s more complicated than that? That the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have been blurred by millennia of free will?”

“I know all that, but—”

“Look, if it makes you feel any better, have you ever heard of the Scale?”

Luce shook her head.

“Sorta like hall monitors within Announcers who make sure travelers get where they’re going. Members of the Scale are impartial, so there’s no siding with Heaven or with Hell. Okay?”

“Okay.” Luce nodded. “So you’re in the Scale?”

Bill winked. “Now, we’re almost there, so—”

“Almost where?”

“To the next life you’re traveling to, the one that cast this shadow we’re in.”

Luce ran her hand through the water running down the wall. “This shadow—this Announcer—is different.”

“If it is, it’s only because that’s what you want it to be. If you want a rest-stop–type cave inside an Announcer, it appears for you.”

“I didn’t want a rest stop.”

“No, but you
needed
one. Announcers can pick up on that. Also, I was here helping out, wanting it on your behalf.” The little gargoyle shrugged, and Luce heard a sound like boulders knocking against each other. “The inside of an Announcer isn’t anyplace at all. It’s a neverwhere, the dark echo cast by something in the past. Each one is different, adapting to the needs of its travelers, so long as they’re inside.”

There was something wild about the idea of this echo of Luce’s past knowing what she wanted or needed better than she did. “So how long do people stay inside?” she asked. “Days? Weeks?”

“No time. Not the way you’re thinking. Within Announcers, real time doesn’t pass at all. But still, you don’t want to hang around here
too
long. You could forget where you’re going, get lost forever. Become a hoverer. And that’s ugly business. These are portals, remember, not destinations.”

Luce rested her head against the damp stone wall. She didn’t know what to make of Bill. “This is your job. Serving as a guide to, uh, travelers like me?”

“Sure, exactly.” Bill snapped his fingers, the friction sending up a spark. “You nailed it.”

“How’d a gargoyle like you get stuck doing this?”

“Excuse me, I take pride in my work.”

“I mean, who hired you?”

Bill thought for a moment, his marble eyes rolling back and forth in their sockets. “Think of it as a volunteer position. I’m good at Announcer travel, is all. No reason not to spread my expertise around.” He turned to her with his palm cupping his stony chin. “When are we going to, anyway?”

“
When
are we …?” Luce stared at him, confused.

“You have no idea, do you?” He slapped his forehead. “You’re telling me that you dove out of the present without any fundamental knowledge about stepping through? That how you end up
when
you end up is a complete mystery to you?”

“How was I supposed to learn?” Luce said. “No one told me anything!”

Bill fluttered down from her shoulder and paced along the ledge. “You’re right, you’re right. We’ll just go back to basics.” He stopped in front of Luce, tiny hands on his thick hips. “So. Here we go: What is it that you want?”

“I want … to be with Daniel,” she said slowly. There was more, but she wasn’t sure how to explain it.

“Huh!” Bill looked even more dubious than his heavy brow, stone lips, and hooked nose made him look naturally. “The hole in your argument there, Counselor, is that Daniel was already right there beside you when you skipped out of your own time. Was he not?”

Luce slid down the wall and sat, feeling another strong rush of regret. “I had to leave. He wouldn’t tell me anything about our past, so I had to go find out for myself.”

She expected Bill to argue with her more, but he simply said, “So, you’re telling me you’re on a
quest.
”

Luce felt a faint smile cross her lips. A quest. She liked the sound of that.

“So you
do
want something. See?” Bill clapped. “Okay, first thing you ought to know is that the Announcers are summoned to you based upon what’s going on in here.” He thumped his stony fist against his chest. “They’re kind of like little sharks, drawn by your deepest desires.”

“Right.” Luce remembered the shadows at Shoreline, how it was almost as though the specific Announcers had chosen
her
and not the other way around.

“So when you step through, the Announcers that seem to quiver before you, begging you to pick them up? They funnel you to the place your soul longs to be.”

“So the girl I was in Moscow, and in Milan—and all the other lives I glimpsed before I knew how to step through—I wanted to visit them?”

“Precisely,” Bill said. “You just didn’t know it. The Announcers knew it for you. You’ll get better at this, too. Soon you should begin to feel yourself sharing their knowledge. As strange as it may feel, they’re a part of you.”

Each one of those cold, dark shadows, a part of her? It made sudden, unexpected sense. It explained how even from the beginning, even when it scared her, Luce hadn’t been able to stop herself from stepping through them. Even when Roland warned her they were dangerous. Even when Daniel gaped at her like she’d committed some horrible crime. The Announcers always felt like a door opening. Was it possible that they really were?

Her past, once so unknowable, was out there, and all she had to do was step through into the right doorways? She could see who she’d been, what had drawn Daniel to her, why their love had been damned, how it had grown and changed over time. And, most importantly, what they could be in the future.

“We’re already well on our way somewhere,” Bill said, “but now that you know what you and your Announcers are capable of, the next time you go stepping through, you need to think about what you want. And don’t think
place
or
time
, think overall
quest
.”

“Okay.” Luce was working to tidy the jumble of emotions inside her into words that might make any sense out loud.

“Why not try it out now?” Bill said. “Just for practice.
Might give us a heads-up about what we’re going to walk into. Think about what it is you’re after.”

“Understanding,” she said slowly.

“Good,” Bill said. “What else?”

A nervous energy was coursing through her, as if she was on the brink of something important. “I want to find out why Daniel and I were cursed. And I want to break that curse. I want to stop love from killing me so that we can finally be together—for real.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Bill started waving his hands like a man stranded on the side of a dark road. “Let’s not get crazy. This is a very long-standing damnation you’re up against here. You and Daniel, it’s like … I don’t know, you can’t just snap your pretty little fingers and break out of that. You gotta start small.”

“Right,” Luce said. “Okay. Then I should start by getting to know one of my past selves. Get up close and see her relationship with Daniel unfold. See if she feels the same things I feel.”

Bill was nodding, a wacky smile spreading across his full lips. He led her to the edge of the ledge. “I think you’re ready. Let’s go.”

Let’s go?
The gargoyle was coming with her? Out of the Announcer and into another past? Yes, Luce could use some company, but she barely knew this guy.

“You’re wondering why you should trust me, aren’t you?” Bill asked.

“No, I—”

“I get it,” he said, hovering in the air in front of her. “I’m an acquired taste. Especially compared to the company you’re used to keeping. I’m certainly no angel.” He snorted. “But I can help make this journey worth your while. We can make a deal, if you want. You get sick of me—just say so. I’ll be on my way.” He held out his long clawed hand.

Luce shuddered. Bill’s hand was crusty with rocky cysts and scabs of lichen, like a ruined statue. The last thing she wanted to do was take it in her own hand. But if she didn’t, if she sent him on his way right now …

She might be better off with him than without him.

She glanced down at her feet. The short wet ledge beneath them ended where she was standing, dropped off into nothing. Between her shoes, something caught her eye, a shimmer in the rock that made her blink. The ground was shifting … softening … swaying under her feet.

Luce looked behind her. The slab of rock was crumbling, all the way to the wall of the cave. She stumbled, teetering at the edge. The ledge jerked beneath her—harder—as the particles that held the rock together began to break apart. The ledge disappeared around her, faster and faster, until fresh air brushed the backs of her heels and she jumped—

And sank her right hand into Bill’s extended claw. They shook in the air.

“How do we get out of here?” she cried, grasping tight to him now for fear of falling into the abyss she couldn’t see.

“Follow your heart.” Bill was beaming, calm. “It won’t mislead you.”

Luce closed her eyes and thought of Daniel. A feeling of weightlessness overcame her, and she caught her breath. When she opened her eyes, she was somehow soaring through static-filled darkness. The stone cave shifted and pulled in on itself into a small golden orb of light that shrank and was gone.

Luce glanced over, and Bill was right there with her.

“What was the first thing I ever told you?” he asked.

Luce recalled how his voice had seemed to reach all the way inside her.

“You said to slow down. That I’d never learn anything zipping around my past so quickly.”

“And?”

“It was exactly what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know I wanted it.”

“Maybe that’s why you found me when you did,” Bill shouted over the wind, his gray wings bristling as they sped along. “And maybe that’s why we’ve ended up … right … here.”

The wind stopped. The static crackling smoothed to silence.

Luce’s feet slammed onto the ground, a sensation like flying off a swing set and landing on a grassy lawn. She was out of the Announcer and somewhere else. The air was warm and a little humid. The light around her feet told her it was dusk.

They were sunk deep in a field of thick, soft, brilliant green grass, as high as her calves. Here and there the grass was dotted with tiny bright-red fruit—wild strawberries. Ahead, a thin row of silver birch trees marked the edge of the manicured lawn of an estate. Some distance beyond that stood an enormous house.

From here she could make out a white stone flight of stairs that led to the back entrance of the large, Tudor-style mansion. An acre of pruned yellow rosebushes bordered the lawn’s north side, and a miniature hedge maze filled the area near the iron gate on the east. In the center lay a bountiful vegetable garden, beans climbing high along their poles. A pebble trail cut the yard in half and led to a large whitewashed gazebo.

Goose bumps rose on Luce’s arms. This was the place. She had a visceral sense that she had been here before. This was no ordinary déjà vu. She was staring at a place that had meant something to her and Daniel. She half expected to see the two of them there right now, wrapped in each other’s arms.

But the gazebo was empty, filled only with the orange light of the setting sun.

Someone whistled, making her jump.

Bill.

She’d forgotten he was with her. He hovered in the air so that their heads were on the same level. Outside the Announcer, he was somewhat more repulsive than he’d seemed at first. In the light, his flesh was dry and scaly, and he smelled pretty strongly of mildew. Flies buzzed around his head. Luce edged away from him a little, almost wishing he’d go back to being invisible.

“Sure beats a war zone,” he said, eyeing the grounds.

“How did you know where I was before?”

“I’m … Bill.” He shrugged. “I know things.”

“Okay, then, where are we now?”

“Helston, England”—he pointed a claw tip toward his head and closed his eyes—“in what you’d call 1854.” Then he clasped his stone claws together in front of his chest like a gnomey sort of schoolboy reciting a history report. “A sleepy southern town in the county of Cornwall, granted charter by King John himself. Corn’s a few feet tall, so I’d say it’s probably midsummer. Pity we missed the month of May—they have a Flora Day festival here like you wouldn’t believe. Or maybe you would! Your past self was the belle of the ball the last two years in a row. Her father’s very rich, see. Got in at the ground level of the copper trade—”

“Sounds terrific.” Luce cut him off and started tramping across the grass. “I’m going in there. I want to talk to her.”

“Hold up.” Bill flew past her, then looped back, fluttering a few inches in front of her face. “Now, this? This won’t do at all.”

He waved a finger in a circle, and Luce realized he was talking about her clothes. She was still in the Italian nurse’s uniform she’d worn during the First World War.

He grabbed the hem of her long white skirt and lifted it to her ankles. “What do you have on under there? Are those
Converse
? You’ve gotta be kidding me with those.” He clucked his tongue. “How you ever survived those other lifetimes without me …”

“I got along fine, thank you.”

“You’ll need to do more than ‘get along’ if you want to spend some time here.” Bill flew back up to eye level with Luce, then zipped around her three times. When she turned to look for him, he was gone.