Almost too quickly, she and Todd were at the door. Her feet hit the floor again, and she shoved herself against the door’s emergency exit bar.
Then she heaved. Choked. Gasped. Gagged.
Another alarm was clanging. But it sounded far away.
The wind whipped at her neck. They were outside! Standing on a small ledge. A flight of stairs led down to the commons, and even though everything in her head felt cloudy and filled with smoke, Luce thought she could hear voices somewhere nearby.
She turned back to try to figure out what had just happened. How had she and Todd made it through that thickest, blackest, impenetrable shadow? And what was the thing that had saved them? Luce felt its absence.
She almost wanted to go back and search for it.
But the hallway was dark, and her eyes were still watering, and she couldn’t make out the twisting shadow shapes anymore. Maybe they were gone.
Then there was a jagged stroke of light, something that looked like a tree trunk with branches—no, like a torso with long, broad limbs. A pulsing, almost violet column of light hovering over them. It made Luce think, absurdly, of Daniel. She was seeing things. She took a deep breath and tried to blink the smoky tears from her eyes. But the light was still there. She sensed more than heard it call to her, calming her, a lullaby in the middle of a war zone.
So she didn’t see the shadow coming.
It body-slammed into her and Todd, breaking their grip on each other and tossing Luce into the air.
She landed in a heap at the foot of the stairs. An agonized grunt escaped her lips.
For one long moment, her head throbbed. She’d never known pain as deep and searing as this. She cried out into the night, into the clash of light and shadow overhead.
But then it all became too much and Luce surrendered, closing her eyes.
ELEVEN
RUDE AWAKENING
“Are you scared?” Daniel asked. His head was tilted sideways, his blond hair disheveled by a soft breeze. He was holding her, and while his grip was firm around her waist, it was as smooth and light as a silk sash. Her own fingers were laced behind his shirtless neck.
Was she scared? Of course not. She was with Daniel. Finally. In his arms. The truer question pulling at the back of her mind was: Should she be scared? She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t even know where she was.
She could smell rain in the air, close by. But both she and Daniel were dry. She could feel a long white dress flowing down to her ankles. There was only a little light left in the day. Luce felt a stabbing regret at wasting the sunset, as if there were anything she could do to stop it. Somehow she knew these final rays of light were as precious as the last drops of honey in a jar.
“Will you stay with me?” she asked. Her voice was the thinnest whisper, almost canceled out by a low groan of thunder. A gust of wind swirled around them, brushing Luce’s hair into her eyes. Daniel folded his arms more tightly around her, until she could breathe in his breath, could smell his skin on hers.
“Forever,” he whispered back. The sweet sound of his voice filled her up.
There was a small scratch on the left side of his forehead, but she forgot it as Daniel cupped her cheek and brought her face nearer. She tilted her head back and felt the whole of her body go slack with expectation.
Finally, finally, his lips came down on hers with an urgency that took her breath away. He kissed her as if she belonged to him, as naturally as if she were some long-lost part of him that he could at last reclaim.
Then the rain started to fall. It soaked their hair, ran down their faces and into their mouths. The rain was warm and intoxicating, like the kisses themselves.
Luce reached around his back to draw him closer, and her hands slid over something velvety. She ran one hand over it, then another, searching for its limits, and then peered past Daniel’s glowing face.
Something was unfurling behind him.
Wings. Lustrous and iridescent, beating slowly, effortlessly, shining in the rain. She’d seen them before, maybe, or something like them somewhere.
“Daniel,” she said, gasping. The wings consumed her vision and her mind. They seemed to swirl into a million colors, making her head hurt. She tried to look elsewhere, anywhere else, but on all sides, all she could see besides Daniel were the endless pinks and blues of the sunset sky. Until she looked down and took in one last thing.
The ground.
Thousands of feet below them.
When she opened her eyes, it was too bright, her skin was too dry, and there was a splitting pain at the back of her head. The sky was gone and so was Daniel.
Another dream.
Only this one left her feeling almost sick with desire.
She was in a white-walled room. Lying on a hospital bed. To her left, a paper-thin curtain had been dragged halfway across the room, separating her from something bustling on the other side.
Luce gingerly touched the tender spot at the base of her neck and whimpered.
She tried to get her bearings. She didn’t know where she was, but she had a distinct feeling that she wasn’t at Sword & Cross any longer. Her billowy white dress was—she patted her sides—a baggy hospital gown. She could feel every part of the dream slipping away—everything but those wings. They’d been so real. The touch of them so velvety and fluid. Her stomach churned. She clenched and unclenched her fists, hyper-aware of their emptiness.
Someone grasped and squeezed her right hand. Luce turned her head quickly and winced. She’d assumed she was alone. Gabbe was perched on the edge of a faded blue rolling chair that seemed, annoyingly, to bring out the color of her eyes.
Luce wanted to pull away—or at least, she expected to want to pull away—but then Gabbe gave her the warmest smile, one that made Luce feel somehow safe, and she realized she was glad she wasn’t alone.
“How much of it was a dream?” she murmured.
Gabbe laughed. She had a pot of cuticle cream on the table next to her, and she began rubbing the white, lemon-scented stuff into Luce’s nail beds. “That all depends,” she said, massaging Luce’s fingers. “But never mind dreams. I know that whenever I feel my world turning upside down, nothing grounds me like a manicure.”
Luce glanced down. She’d never been much for nail polish herself, but Gabbe’s words reminded her of her mother, who was always suggesting they go for manicures whenever Luce had a bad day. As Gabbe’s slow hands worked over her fingers, Luce wondered whether all these years, she’d been missing out.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Lullwater Hospital.”
Her first trip off campus and she ended up in a hospital five minutes from her parents’ house. The last time she’d been here was to get three stitches on her elbow when she’d fallen off her bike. Her father hadn’t left her side. Now he was nowhere to be seen.
“How long have I been here?” she asked.
Gabbe looked at a white clock on the wall and said, “They found you passed out from smoke inhalation last night around eleven. It’s standard operating procedure to call for EMTs when they find a reform kid unconcious, but don’t worry, Randy said they’re going to let you out of here pretty soon. As soon as your parents give the okay—”
“My parents are here?”
“And filled with concern for their daughter, right down to the split ends of your mama’s permed hair. They’re in the hallway, drowning in paperwork. I told them I’d keep an eye on you.”