Torment (10 page)

They filled her plane of vision, stretching twenty feet into the sky. Broad and beautiful, glowing in the night, they must have been the most glorious wings in all of Heaven. Underneath her own feet, Luce felt Daniel’s lift just barely off the ground. His wings beat lightly, almost like a heartbeat, holding both of them inches above the beach.

“Ready?” he asked.

Ready for what, she didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

Now they were moving backward in the air, as smoothly as figure skaters moved on ice. Daniel glided out over the water, holding her in his arms. Luce gasped as the first frothy wave skimmed their toes. Daniel laughed and lifted them a little higher in the sky. He dipped her backward. He spun them both around in circles. They were dancing.
On the ocean
.

The moon was like a spotlight, shining down on only them. Luce was laughing from sheer joy, laughing so much that Daniel started laughing too. She’d never felt lighter.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

His answer was a kiss. He kissed her softly at first. On her forehead, then on her nose, then finally found his way to her lips.

She kissed him back deeply and hungrily and a bit desperately, throwing her whole body into it. This was how she came home to Daniel, how she touched that easy love they’d shared for so long. For a moment, the whole world went quiet; then Luce came up gasping for air. She hadn’t even noticed they were back on the beach.

His hand cupped the back of her head, the ski cap she had tugged down over her ears. The cap concealing her bleached-blond hair. He pulled it off and a blast of ocean breeze hit her head. “What did you do to your hair?”

His voice was soft, but somehow it sounded like an accusation. Maybe it was because the song had ended, and the dance and the kiss had too, and now they were just two people standing on a beach. Daniel’s wings were arched back behind his shoulders, still visible but out of reach.

“Who cares about my hair?” All she cared about was holding him. Wasn’t that all he should care about too?

Luce reached to take back the ski cap. Her bare blond head felt too exposed, like a glowing red flag warning Daniel that she might be falling apart. As soon as she started to turn away, Daniel put his arms around her.

“Hey,” he said, pulling her close again. “I’m sorry.”

She exhaled, drew into him, and let his touch wash over her. She tipped her head up to meet his eyes.

“Is it safe now?” she asked, wanting Daniel to be the one to bring up the truce. Could they finally be together? But the worn look in his eyes gave her the answer before he opened his mouth.

“I shouldn’t be here, but I worry about you.” He held her at arm’s length. “And from the looks of things, I’m right to worry.” He fingered a lock of her hair. “I don’t understand why you did this, Luce. It isn’t you.”

She pushed him away. It had always bothered her when people said that. “Well, I’m the one who dyed it, Daniel. So, technically, it
is
me. Maybe not the ‘me’ you want me to be—”

“That’s not fair. I don’t want you to be anyone other than who you are.”

“Which is who, Daniel? Because if you know the answer to that, feel free to clue me in.” Her voice grew louder as frustration overtook the passion slipping through her fingers. “I’m on my own here, trying to figure out why. Trying to figure out what I’m doing here with all these … when I’m not even …”

“When you’re not what?”

How had they gone so quickly from dancing on air to this?

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to take it day by day. Make friends, you know? Yesterday I joined a club, and we’re planning a yacht trip somewhere. Things like that.” What she really wanted to tell him about were the shadows. And especially what she’d done in the woods. But Daniel had narrowed his eyes like she’d already done something wrong.

“You’re not going on a yacht trip anywhere.”

“What?”

“You’ll stay right here on this campus until I say so.” He exhaled, sensing her rising anger. “I hate giving you these rules, Luce, but … I’m doing so much to keep you safe. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Literally.” Luce gritted her teeth. “Good or bad or otherwise. Seems like when you’re not around you don’t want me doing anything at all.”

“That’s not true.” He shook a finger at her. She’d never seen him lose his temper so quickly. Then he looked up at the sky, and Luce followed his gaze. A shadow zipped over their heads—like an all-black firework leaving a deadly, smoky tail. Daniel seemed to be able to read it instantly.

“I have to go,” he said.

“How shocking.” She turned away. “Turn up out of nowhere, pick a fight, then duck out. This must be real, true love.”

He grabbed her shoulders and shook them until she met his eyes. “It
is
true love,” he said, with such desperation that Luce couldn’t tell whether it chipped away at or added to the pain in her heart. “You know it is.” His eyes burned violet—not with anger but with intense desire. The kind of look that made you love a person so much, you missed him even when he was standing right in front of you.

Daniel ducked his head to kiss her cheek, but she was too close to tears. Embarrassed, she turned away. She heard his sigh, and then: the beat of wings.

No
.

When she whipped her head around, Daniel was soaring across the sky, halfway between the ocean and the moon. His wings were lit bright white under a moonbeam. A moment later, it was hard to tell him apart from any of the stars in the sky.

FIVE

FOURTEEN DAYS

D
uring the night, a windless layer of fog moved in like an army, settling over the town of Fort Bragg. It didn’t lift with the sunrise, and its gloom seeped into everything and everyone. So all day Friday in school, Luce felt like she was being dragged along by a slow-moving tide. The teachers were out of focus, noncommittal, and slow with their lectures. The students sat in a heap of lethargy, struggling to stay awake though the long, damp drone of the day.

By the time classes let out, the dreariness had penetrated Luce to her very core. She didn’t know what she was doing at this school that wasn’t really hers, in this temporary life that only highlighted her lack of a real, permanent one. All she wanted to do was crawl into her bottom bunk and sleep it all away—not just the weather or her long first week at Shoreline, but also the argument with Daniel and the jumble of questions and anxieties that had shaken loose in her mind.

Sleep the night before had been impossible. In the darkest hours of the morning she’d stumbled alone back to her dorm room. She’d tossed and turned without ever really dozing off. Daniel’s shutting her out no longer surprised her, but that didn’t mean it had gotten any easier. And that insulting, chauvinistic
order
he’d given her to stay on the school grounds? What was this, the nineteenth century? It crossed her mind that maybe Daniel
had
spoken to her like that centuries ago, but—like Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet—Luce was certain no former self of hers would ever have been cool with that. And she certainly wasn’t now.

She was still angry and annoyed after class, moving through the fog toward the dorm. Her eyes were bleary and she was practically sleepwalking by the time her hand clasped her doorknob. Tumbling into the dim, empty room, she almost didn’t see the envelope someone had slipped under the door.

It was cream-colored, flimsy and square, and when she flipped it over, she saw her name typed on the front in small, blocky letters. She tore into it, wanting an apology from him. Knowing she owed him one too.

The letter inside was typewritten on cream-colored paper and folded into thirds.

Dear Luce,

There’s something I’ve been waiting too long to tell you. Meet me in town, near Noyo Point, around six o’clock tonight? The #5 bus along Hwy 1 stops a quarter of a mile south of Shoreline. Use this bus pass. I’ll be waiting by the North Cliff. Can’t wait to see you.

Love, Daniel

Shaking the envelope, Luce felt a small slip of paper inside. She pulled out a thin blue-and-white bus ticket with the number five printed on its front and a crude little map of Fort Bragg drawn on its back. That was it. There was nothing else.

Luce couldn’t figure it out. No mention of their argument on the beach. No indication that Daniel even understood how erratic it was to practically vanish into thin air one night, then expect her to travel at his whim the next.

No apology at all.

Strange. Daniel could turn up anywhere, anytime. He was usually oblivious to the logistical realities that normal human beings had to deal with.

The letter felt cold and stiff in her hands. Her more reckless side was tempted to pretend she’d never received it. She was tired of arguing, tired of Daniel’s not trusting her with details. But that pesky in-love side of Luce wondered whether she was being too harsh on him. Because their relationship was worth the effort. She tried to remember the way his eyes had looked and his voice had sounded when he told her the story about the lifetime she’d spent in the California gold rush. The way he’d seen her through the window and fallen in love with her for something like the thousandth time.

That was the image she took with her when she left her dorm room minutes later to creep along the path toward Shoreline’s front gates, toward the bus stop where Daniel had instructed her to wait. An image of his pleading violet eyes tugged at her heart while she stood under a damp gray sky. She watched colorless cars materialize in the fog, peel around the hairpin turns on guardrail-less Highway 1, and vanish again.

When she looked back at Shoreline’s formidable campus in the distance, she remembered Jasmine’s words at the party:
As long as we stay under their umbrella of surveillance, we can pretty much do as we
please
. Luce was stepping out from under the umbrella, but where was the harm? She wasn’t really a student there; and anyway, seeing Daniel again was worth the risk of getting caught.

A few minutes past the half hour, the number five bus pulled up to the stop.

The bus was old and gray and rickety, as was the driver who heaved the levered door open to let Luce board. She took an empty seat near the front. The bus smelled like cobwebs, or a rarely used attic. She had to clutch the cheap leatherette seat cushion as the bus barreled around the curves at fifty miles an hour, as if just inches beyond the road, the cliff didn’t drop a mile straight down into the jagged gray ocean.

It was raining by the time they got to town, a steady sideways drizzle just shy of a real downpour. Most of the businesses on the main street were already closed up for the night, and the town looked wet and a little desolate. Not exactly the scene she’d had in mind for a happy makeup conversation.

Climbing down from the bus, Luce pulled the ski cap out of her backpack and tugged it over her head. She could feel the chill of the rain on her nose and her fingertips. She spotted a bent green metal sign and followed its arrow toward Noyo Point.

The point was a wide peninsula of land, not lush green like the terrain on Shoreline’s campus, but a mix of patchy grass and scabs of wet gray sand. The trees thinned out here, their leaves stripped away by the fitful ocean wind. There was one lone bench on a patch of mud all the way at the edge, about a hundred yards from the road. That must have been where Daniel meant for them to meet. But Luce could see from where she stood that he wasn’t there yet. She looked down at her watch. She was five minutes late.

Daniel was never late.

The rain seemed to settle on the tips of her hair instead of soaking into it the way rain usually did. Not even Mother Nature knew what to do with a dyed-blond Luce. She didn’t feel like waiting for Daniel out in the open. There was a row of shops on the main street. Luce hung back there, standing on a long wooden porch under a rusty metal awning.
FRED’S FISH
, the closed shop’s sign read in faded blue letters.

Fort Bragg wasn’t quaint like Mendocino, the town where she and Daniel had stopped before he’d flown her up the shoreline. It was more industrial, a real old-fashioned fishing village with rotting docks fitted into a curved inlet where the land tapered down toward the water. While Luce waited, a boatful of fishermen were stepping ashore. She watched the line of rail-thin, hardened men in their soaking-wet slickers come up the rocky stairs from the docks below.

When they reached the street level, they walked alone or in silent clusters, past the empty bench and the sad slanted trees, past the shut-up storefronts to a gravel parking lot at the south edge of Noyo Point. They climbed into beat-up old trucks, turned over the engines, and drove away, the sea of grim-set faces thinning until one stood out—and he wasn’t coming off any schooner. In fact, he seemed to have appeared suddenly out of the fog. Luce jumped back against the metal shutter of the fish store and tried to catch her breath.

Cam.

He was walking west along the gravel road right in front of her, flanked by two dark-clad fishermen who didn’t seem to notice his presence. He was dressed in slim black jeans and a black leather jacket. His dark hair was shorter than when she’d last seen him, shining in the rain. A hint of the black sunburst tattoo was visible on the side of his neck. Against the colorless backdrop of the sky, his eyes were as intensely green as they had ever been.

The last time she’d seen him, Cam had been standing at the front of a sickening black army of demons, so callous and cruel and just plain … evil. It had made her blood run cold. She had a string of curses and accusations ready to fling at him, but it would be better still if she could just avoid him altogether.

Too late. Cam’s green gaze fell on her—and she froze. Not because he turned on any of the fake charm that she’d come too close to falling for at Sword & Cross. But because he looked genuinely alarmed to see her. He swerved, moving against the flow of the few final straggling fishermen, and was at her side in an instant.

“What are you doing here?”

Cam looked more than alarmed, Luce decided—he looked almost afraid. His shoulders were bunched up around his neck and his eyes wouldn’t settle on anything for longer than a second. He hadn’t said a thing about her hair; it almost seemed as if he hadn’t noticed it. Luce was certain Cam was not supposed to know that she was out here in California. Keeping her away from guys like him was the whole point of her relocation. Now she’d blown that.

“I’m just—” She eyed the white gravel path behind Cam, cutting through the grass bordering the cliff’s edge. “I’m just going for a walk.”

“You are not.”

“Leave me alone.” She tried to push past him. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“Which would be fine, since we’re not supposed to be talking to one another. But you’re not supposed to leave that school.”

Suddenly she felt nervous, like he knew something she didn’t. “How did you know I’m even going to school here?”

Cam sighed. “I know everything, okay?”

“Then you’re here to fight Daniel?”

Cam’s green eyes narrowed. “Why would I—Wait, are you saying
you’re
here to see him?”

“Don’t sound so shocked. We
are
together.” It was like Cam still hadn’t gotten over that she’d picked Daniel instead of him.

Cam scratched his forehead, looking concerned. When he finally spoke, his words were rushed. “Did he send for you? Luce?”

She winced, buckling under the pressure of his gaze. “I got a letter.”

“Let me see it.”

Now Luce stiffened, examining Cam’s peculiar expression to try to understand what he knew. He looked about as uneasy as she felt. She didn’t budge.

“You were tricked. Grigori wouldn’t send for you right now.”

“You don’t know what he would do for me.” Luce turned away, wishing Cam had never seen her, wishing herself far away. She felt a childish need to brag to Cam that Daniel had visited her last night. But the bragging would end there. There wasn’t much glory in relaying the details of their argument.

“I know he would die if you died, Luce. If you want to live another day, you’d better show me the letter.”

“You would kill me over a piece of paper?”

“I wouldn’t, but whoever sent you that note probably intends to.”

“What?” Feeling it almost burning in her pocket, Luce resisted the urge to thrust the letter into his hands. Cam didn’t know what he was talking about. He couldn’t. But the longer he stared at her, the more she began to wonder about the strange letter she was holding. That bus ticket, the directions. It
had
been weirdly technical and formulaic. Not like Daniel at all. She fished it out of her pocket, fingers trembling.

Cam snatched it from her, grimacing as he read. He muttered something under his breath as his eyes darted around the forest on the other side of the road. Luce looked around too, but she could see nothing suspicious about the few remaining fishermen loading their gear into rusty truck beds.

“Come on,” he said finally, grabbing her by the elbow. “It’s past time to get you back to school.”

She jerked away. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I hate you. What are you even doing here?”

He stepped around her in a circle. “I’m hunting.”

She sized him up, trying not to let on that he still made her nervous. Slim, punk-rock-dressed,
gunless
Cam. “Really?” She cocked her head. “Hunting what?”

Cam stared past her, toward the dusk-swept forest. He nodded once. “Her.”

Luce craned her neck to see who or what Cam was talking about, but before she could see anything, he pushed her sharply. There was a weird huff of air, and something silver zipped past her face.

“Get down!” Cam yelled, pressing hard on Luce’s shoulders. She sank to the porch floor, feeling his weight on top of her, smelling the dust on the wood planks.

“Get off me!” she shouted. As she writhed in disgust, cold fear pressed into her. Whoever was out there must be really bad. Otherwise she’d never be in a situation where
Cam
was the one protecting her.

A moment later, Cam was sprinting across the empty parking lot. He was racing toward a girl. A very pretty girl about Luce’s age, dressed in a long brown cloak. She had delicate features and white-blond hair pulled high into a ponytail, but something was strange about her eyes. They held a vacant expression that, even from this distance, struck Luce rigid with fear.

There was more: The girl was armed. She held a silver bow and was hurriedly nocking an arrow.