Rapture (Fallen #4)

Rapture (Fallen #4) Page 38

Dee’s gold eyes were paler, her skin almost translucent. Everything about her seemed muted and soft, as if she were already someplace else. A new sob rose in Lu-ce’s chest as Dee took a halting step toward her.

“Dee!” Luce closed the gap between them, holding out her arms to catch the dying woman. Her body felt like a shard of what she’d been before Luce had taken the dagger in her hands.

“Shhh,” Dee cooed. “I only wanted to thank you, dear. And to give you this small parting gift.” She reached her hand inside her cloak. When she withdrew it, her thumb was dark with blood. “The gift of self-knowledge.

You must remember how to dream what you already know. Now it’s time for me to sleep and for you to wake up.”

Dee’s eyes swept over Luce’s face, and it seemed like she could see everything there was to see about her—all her past and all her future. Finally, she daubed the center of Luce’s forehead with her bloody thumb.

“Enjoy it, dear.”

Then she hit the ground.

“Dee!” Luce lunged for her, but the old woman was dead. “No!”

Behind Luce, Daniel clasped her shoulders with his hands, giving her all the strength he could. It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t bring Dee back or change the fact that Luce had killed her. Nothing could.

Tears blurred Luce’s eyes. Wind swept in from the west and whistled off the curving cliffs, bringing with it another shriek of Scale. It felt like every inch of the world was in chaos, and nothing would ever settle down.

She reached up and touched the bloody thumbprint on her forehead—

White light blazed around her. Her insides seared with heat. She staggered, holding her arms out in front of her and swaying as her body filled with . . .

Light.

“Luce?” Daniel’s voice sounded far away.

Was she dying?

She felt suddenly galvanized, as if the thumbprint on her forehead were an ignition switch and Dee had launched her soul.

“Is this another timequake?” she asked, though the sky was not gray but a brilliant white. So bright she couldn’t see Daniel or any of the other angels around her on the slab.

“No.” Roland’s voice. “It’s her.”

“It’s you, Luce.” Daniel’s voice trembled.

Her feet skimmed the stone as her body rose in a splendor of weightlessness. For a moment, the world hummed with incandescent harmony.

Now it’s time for you to wake up.

The air before Luce seemed to sputter, turning from white to blurry gray. Then deep in the distance came the vision of Bill’s cackling face. His black wings spread wider than the sky, wider than a thousand galaxies, filling her mind, filling every crevice in the universe, engulfing Luce with infinite fury.

This time I will win.

His voice like shards of glass dragging across bare skin.

How close was he now?

Luce’s feet slammed into the mesa floor. The light was gone.

She fell to her knees, landing next to Dee, who had come to rest on her side, one arm slung out to cradle her head, her long red hair spilling out like blood. Her eyes were closed, her face serene, so unlike the face that had been haunting Luce for the past week. She tried to stand, but she felt clumsy.

Daniel dropped to his knees at her side. Sitting next to her on the Slab, he took her in his arms. The smell of his hair and the touch of his hands soothed her. He whispered, “I’m here, Luce, it’s okay.”

She didn’t want to tell him she kept seeing Bill. She wanted to go back to that light. She touched the thumbprint on her forehead and nothing happened. Dee’s blood was dry.

Daniel was staring at her, lips tight. He brushed the hair out of her eyes and pressed his palm to her forehead. “You’re burning up.”

“I’m fine.” She did feel feverish, but there was no time to worry about that. She staggered to her feet and looked up at the moon.

It was directly overhead, in the center of the sky. This was the moment Dee had told them to wait for, the moment her death would become worthwhile.

“Luce. Daniel.” Roland’s voice. “You’d better look at this.”

He held the goblet at an angle and was tipping the last of Dee’s blood into the depression at the base of the map. When Luce and Daniel filed in next to the others, the blood had already flowed into most of the marble’s broken lines. Though Dee had said that the Earth was different back at the time of the angels’ Fall, the map before them looked increasingly similar to a contemporary map of the Earth.

South America was nearer to bumping against Africa.

The northeast corner of North America nudged more closely to Europe, but mostly it was the same. There was the slip of water where the Gulf of Suez parted mainland Egypt from the Sinai Peninsula, and in the middle of the peninsula was the yellow stone marking the plateau where they were right now. To the north was the Medi-terranean, dimpled with a thousand tiny islands—and on the other side of its narrow belt, at the point where Asia reached for Europe, was a shallow pool of blood sharpening slowly into a star.

Luce heard Daniel swallow at her side. The angels all looked stupefied as Dee’s blood filled out the points of the star, indicating modern Turkey—more specifically—

“Troy,” Daniel said finally, shaking his head in amaze-ment. “Who would have guessed . . .”

“There again,” Roland said, his tone conveying a tortured history with the city.

“I always got the sense that place was doomed.” Arriane shivered. “But I—”

“Never knew why,” Annabelle finished.

“Cam?” Daniel said, and the others looked away from the map to eye the demon.

“I’ll go,” Cam said quickly. “I’m fine.”

“Then that’s it,” Daniel said as if he couldn’t believe it. “Phillip,” he called, looking upward.

Phil and his three Outcasts rose from their perches on the cliff peaks overhead.

“Alert the others.”

What others? Who else was left by now? Luce thought.

“What will I tell them?” Phil asked.

“Tell them we know the site of the Fall, that we’re leaving now for Troy.”

“No.” Luce’s voice halted the Outcasts’ movement.

“We can’t leave yet. What about Dee?”

In the end, it was no surprise that Dee had taken care of everything, down to the details for her memorial. Annabelle found them tucked into a slat on the roof of the creaky wooden trunk, which, as Dee’s letter explained, flipped over to form a catafalque. The sun was low in the sky by the time they began to make her memorial. It was the end of the seventh day; Dee’s letter assured them this wouldn’t be a waste of their time.

Roland, Cam, and Daniel carried the catafalque to the center of the marble platform. They covered the map completely so that when the Scale descended there, they would see a funeral, not the site of the angels’ Fall.

Annabelle and Arriane carried Dee’s body behind the catafalque. They laid her carefully on its center, so that her heart was directly above the star of her blood. Luce remembered that Dee had said that sanctuaries were built on top of sanctuaries. Her body would form a sanctuary for the map it hid.

Cam draped Dee’s cloak over her body, but he left her face exposed to the sky. In her final resting place, Dee, their desideratum, looked small but mighty. She looked at peace. Luce wanted to believe Dee was wandering through dreams with Dr Otto.

“She wants Luce to be the one to bless her,” Annabelle read from the letter.

Daniel squeezed her hand, as if to say, Are you okay?

Luce had never done anything like this before. She waited to feel awkward, guilty for speaking at the funeral for someone she had slain, but in those emotions’ place sat a sense of honor and awe.

She stepped up to the catafalque. She gave herself a few moments to gather her thoughts.

“Dee was our desideratum,” she began. “But she was more than one desired thing.”

She took a breath and realized she wasn’t blessing just Dee, but also Gabbe and Molly, whose bodies were air—and Penn, whose funeral she couldn’t attend. It was all too much. Her vision swirled and the words vanished and all she knew was that Dee had smeared sacrificial blood on Luce’s forehead.

It was Dee’s gift to Luce.

You must remember how to dream what you already know.

Blood thrummed at her temples. Her head and her heart were ablaze with heat, her hands icy as she wove them through Dee’s.

“Something’s happening.” Luce held her face in her hands, her hair spilling down around her. She closed her eyes and found bright white light on the backs of her eyelids.

“Luce—”

When she opened her eyes, the angels had flung off their cloaks and unfurled their wings. The mesa flooded with light. A great mass of Scale shrieked somewhere just above her.

“What’s happening?” She shielded her eyes.

“We need to hurry, Daniel,” Roland shouted from above. Had the other angels already alighted? What was the source of the light?

Daniel’s arms wrapped around her waist. He held her tightly. It felt good but she was still afraid.

“I’m here with you, Lucinda. I love you, no matter what.”

She knew that her feet were drifting from the ground, that her body was taking flight. She knew she was with Daniel. But she was barely aware of their transit through the burning sky, barely aware of anything beyond the strange new pulsing in her soul.

SIXTEEN

APOCALYPSE

Somewhere along the way it started raining.

Raindrops pattered on Daniel’s wings. Thunder rolled in the sky before them. Lightning ripped through the night. Luce had been sleeping, or in a heavy state of something similar to sleep, because when the storm came, she stirred to a dreamy half-awareness.

The headwind was brutal and incessant, flattening Luce against Daniel’s body. The angels flew through it at a tremendous speed, every wingbeat thrusting them across whole cities, mountain ranges. They flew over clouds that looked like giant icebergs, passing them in the blink of an eye.

Luce didn’t know where they were or how long they’d been traveling. She didn’t feel like asking.

It was dark again. How much time remained? She couldn’t remember. Counting seemed impossible, though Luce had once loved to solve complex calculus proofs. She almost laughed at the thought of sitting at a wooden desk in calculus, chewing on an eraser next to twenty mortal kids. Had that ever really happened to her?

The temperature dropped. The rain intensified as the angels flew into a gale that stretched farther than her eye could see. Now the raindrops pelting Daniel’s wings sounded like hail hitting icy snow.

The weather came sideways and upward. Luce’s clothes were drenched. She felt hot one moment, frozen the next. Daniel’s hands, encircling her body, rubbed goose bumps from her arms. She watched water streaming off the toes of her black boots toward the ground, thousands of feet below.

Visions appeared in the darkness through the storm.

She saw Dee letting down red hair that swirled around her body. The old lady was whispering, Break the curse.