Passion (36 page)

His commitment to her, to them, touched a part of her that she’d thought she’d given up on.

She stil wanted to argue: This Daniel didn’t know the chal enges coming their way, the tears they would shed over the ages. He didn’t know that she’d seen him in his moments of deepest desperation. What the pain of her deaths would do to him.

But then—

Luce knew. And that made al the dif erence in the world.

Daniel’s lowest moments had terri ed her, but things had changed. Al along, she’d felt bound to their love, but now she knew how to protect it. Now she had seen their love from so many di erent angles. She understood it in a way she’d never thought she would. If Daniel ever faltered, she could raise him up.

She had learned how to do it from the best: from Daniel. Here she was, about to kil her soul, about to take away their love permanently, and five minutes alone with him brought her back to life.

Some people spent their entire lives looking for love like this.

Luce had had it al along.

The future held no starshot for her. Only Daniel. Her Daniel, the one she’d left in her parents’ backyard in Thunderbolt. She had to go.

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

He was seated on the steps with his knees parted just enough to let her body slide between them. She sank to her knees and faced him.

He was seated on the steps with his knees parted just enough to let her body slide between them. She sank to her knees and faced him.

Their foreheads were touching. The tips of their noses.

Daniel took her hands. He seemed to want to tel her something, but he could not find the words.

“Please,” she begged, her lips edging toward his. “Kiss me and set me free.” Daniel lunged for her, swooping her up and laying her sideways across his lap to cradle her in his arms. His lips found hers. They were as sweet as nectar. She moaned as a deep current of joy owed through her, every inch of her. Layla’s death was near, she knew that, but she never felt safer or more alive than she did when Daniel held her.

Her hands locked around the back of his neck, feeling the rm sinews of his shoulders, feeling the tiny raised scars protecting his wings.

His hands roved up her back, through her long, thick hair. Every touch was rapture, every kiss so wonderful and pure it left her dizzy.

“Stay with me,” he pleaded. The muscles in his face had grown tense, and his kisses had become hungrier, more desperate.

He must have sensed Luce’s body warming. The heat rising in her core, spreading through her chest and ushing her cheeks. Tears l ed her eyes. She kissed him harder. She’d been through this so many times before, but for some reason this felt dif erent.

With a loud whoosh he stretched his wings out, and then deftly wrapped them tight around her, a cradle of soft white holding the two of them fast.

“You real y believe it?” she whispered. “That someday I’l live through this?”

“With al my heart and soul,” he said, cupping her face in his hands, pul ing his wings tighter around them both. “I wil wait for you as long as it takes. I wil love you every moment across time.”

By then, Luce was broiling hot. She cried out from the pain, thrashing in Daniel’s arms as the heat overwhelmed her. She was burning his skin, but he never let her go.

The moment had come. The starshot was tucked inside her dress, and this—right now—was when she would have used it. But she was never going to give up. Not on Daniel. Not when she knew, no mat er how hard it got, that he would never give up on her.

Her skin began to blister. The heat was so brutal, she could do nothing but shiver.

And then she could only scream.

Layla combusted, and as the ames engulfed her body, Luce felt her own body and the soul they were sharing untwine, seeking the fastest escape from the unforgiving heat. The column of fire grew tal er and wider until it fil ed the room and the world, until it was everything, and Layla was nothing at al .

Luce expected darkness and found light.

Where was the Announcer? Could she stil be inside Layla?

The re blazed on. It did not extinguish. It spread. The ames consumed more and more of the darkness, reaching into the sky as if the great night itself were flammable, until the hot blaze of red and gold was al that Luce could see.

Every other time one of her past selves had died, Luce’s release from the ames and into the Announcer had been simultaneous. Something was dif erent, something that was making her see things that couldn’t possibly be real.

Wings on fire.

“Daniel!” she cried out. What looked like Daniel’s wings soared through waves of ames, catching re but not smoldering, as if they were made of fire. Al she could make out were white wings and violet eyes. “Daniel?” The re rol ed across the darkness like a giant wave across an ocean. It crashed onto an invisible shore and washed furiously over Luce, rushing up her body, over her head, and far behind her.

Then, as if someone had pinched out a candle, there was a quick hiss and everything went black.

A cold wind crept up behind her. Goose bumps spread across her skin. She hugged her body closer, drawing up her knees and realizing with a jolt of surprise that no ground held up her feet. She wasn’t ying exactly, just hovering, directionless. This darkness was not an Announcer. She had not used the starshot, but had she somehow … died?

She was afraid. She didn’t know where she was, only that she was alone.

No. There was someone else. A scraping sound. A dim gray light.

“Bil !” Luce shouted at the sight of him, so relieved she began to laugh. “Oh, thank God. I thought I was lost—I thought—Oh, never mind.” She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kil my soul. I’l nd another way to break the curse. Daniel and I—we won’t give up on each other.”

Bil was far away, but oating toward her, making loops in the air. The nearer he got, the larger he appeared, swel ing until he was two, then three, then ten times the size of the smal stone gargoyle she had traveled with. Then the real metamorphosis began: Behind his shoulders, a pair of thicker, ful er, jet-black wings burst forth, shat ering his familiar smal stone wings into a chaos of broken bits. The wrinkles on his forehead deepened and expanded across his entire body until he looked horri cal y shriveled and old. The claws on his feet and hands grew longer, sharper, yel ower.

They glinted in the darkness, razor-sharp. His chest swel ed, sprouting thick, curly black hairs as he grew in nitely larger than he had been before.

Luce strained to suppress the wail climbing in her throat. And she managed—right up until Bil ’s stony gray eyes, their irises dul ed beneath layers of cataracts, glowed as red as fire.

Then she screamed.

“You always did make the wrong choice.” Bil ’s voice had turned monstrous, deep and phlegm- l ed and grating, not just on Luce’s ears but on her very soul. His breath punched her, reeking of death.

“You’re—” Luce could not nish her sentence. There was only one word for the evil creature before her, and the idea of saying it aloud was frightening.

“The bad guy?” Bil cackled. “Surprise!” He held out the I sound of the word so long that Luce was sure he would double over and cough, but he didn’t.

“But—you taught me so much. You helped me figure out—Why would you—How—The whole time?”

“I was deceiving you. It’s what I do, Lucinda.”

She had cared for Bil , roguish and disgusting as he was. She’d con ded in him, listened to him, had almost kil ed her soul because he’d told her to. The thought cut her. She had almost lost Daniel because of Bil . She might lose Daniel stil because of Bil . But he wasn’t Bil —

He was no mere demon, not like Steven, or even Cam at his worst.

He was no mere demon, not like Steven, or even Cam at his worst.

He was Evil incarnate.

And he had been with Luce, breathing down her neck the whole time.

She tried to turn away from him, but his darkness was everywhere. It looked as if she were oating in a night sky, but al the stars were impossibly far away; there was no sign of Earth. Close by were patches of darker blackness, swirling abysses. And every now and then a shaft of light appeared, a beacon of hope, il umination. Then the light would vanish.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Satan sneered at the pointlessness of her question. “Neverwhere,” he said. His voice no longer had the familiar tone of her traveling companion. “The dark heart of nothing at the center of everything. Neither Heaven, nor Earth, nor Hel . A place of the darkest transits.

Nothing your mind at this stage can fathom, so it probably just looks”—his red eyes bulged—“scary to you.”

“What about those ashes of light?” Luce asked, trying not to let on just how frightening the place did look to her. She’d seen at least four flashes of light already, bril iant conflagrations igniting out of nowhere, vanishing fast into darker regions in the sky.

“Oh, those.” Bil watched one as it blazed and disappeared over Luce’s shoulder. “Angel travel. Demon travel. Busy night, isn’t it? Everyone seems to be going somewhere.”

“Yes.” Luce had been waiting for another burst of light in the sky. When it came, it cast a shadow across her, and she clawed at it, desperate to shake out an Announcer before the light disappeared. “Including me.” The Announcer expanded rapidly in her hands, so heavy and urgent and lithe that, for a moment, she thought she might make it.

Instead she felt a scabrous grip around her sides. Bil had her entire body nestled in his grimy claw. “I’m just not ready to say goodbye yet,” he whispered in a voice that made her shiver. “See, I’ve grown so fond of you. No, wait, that’s not it. I have always been … fond of you.” Luce let the shadow in her fingers wisp away into nothing.

“And like al beloveds, I need you in my presence, especial y now, so you don’t corrupt my designs. Again.”

“At least now you’ve given me a goal,” Luce said, straining against his grasp. It was no use. He gripped her tighter, squeezing her bones.

“You always did have an inner re. I love that about you.” He smiled, and it was a terrible thing. “If only your spark stayed inside, hmm?

Some people are just unlucky in love.”

“Don’t talk to me about love,” Luce spat. “I can’t believe I ever listened to a word that came out of your mouth. You don’t know a thing about love.”

“I’ve heard that one before. And I happen to know one important thing about love: You think yours is bigger than Heaven and Hel and the fate of al that rests between. But you’re wrong. Your love for Daniel Grigori is less than insignificant. It is nothing!” His shout was like a shock wave that blew back Luce’s hair. She gasped and struggled for air. “Say whatever you want. I love Daniel. I always wil . And it has nothing to do with you.”

Satan held her up to his red eyes, pinching her skin with his sharpest pointer claw. “I know you love him. You’re a fool for him. Just tel me why.”

“Why?”

“Why. Why him? Put it into words. Real y make me feel it. I want to be moved.”

“A mil ion reasons. I just do.”

His snaggletoothed smile deepened, and a sound like a thousand growling dogs came from deep inside him. “That was a test. You failed, but it isn’t your fault. Not real y. That is an unfortunate side ef ect of the curse you bear. You don’t get to make choices anymore.”

“That’s not true. If you remember, I just made a big choice not to kil my soul.” That angered him—she could see it in the way his nostrils ared, the way he reached up and bal ed his claw into a st and made a patch of the starry sky go out like a light switch had been icked somewhere. But he said nothing for the longest time. Just stared away into the night.

A horrible thought struck Luce. “Were you even tel ing the truth? What would real y have happened if I’d used the starshot to—” She shuddered, sickened that she’d come so close. “What’s in al this for you? You want me out of the picture or something so you can get to Daniel? Is that why you would never show yourself in front of him? Because he would have gone after you and—” Satan chuckled. His laughter dimmed the stars. “You think I’m scared of Daniel Grigori? You do think very highly of him. Tel me, what kind of wild lies has he been fil ing your head with about his grandiose place in Heaven?”

“You’re the liar,” Luce said. “You’ve done nothing but lie from the moment I met you. No wonder the whole universe despises you.”

“Fears. Not despises. There’s a di erence. Fear has envy in it somewhere. You may not believe it, but there are many who wish to wield the power that I wield. Who … adore me.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“You just don’t know enough. About anything. I’ve taken you on a tour of your past—shown you the futility of this existence, hoping to awaken you to the truth, and al I get from you is ‘Daniel! I want Daniel!’ ” He ung her down and she fel into blackness, coming to a stop only when he glared at her, as if he could x her in place. He moved in a tight circle around her, his hands behind his back, his wings drawn tight, his head tilted toward the sky. “Everything you see here is everything there is to see. From far away, yes, but it’s al there—al the lives and worlds and more, far beyond the weak conception of mortals. Look at it.”