Passion (4 page)

The Church of Christ the Savior.

How did Luce know that? Why would she feel with every ber of her being that this nothingness had once been a formidable white church?

Because she had been there moments before. She saw someone else’s handprints in the ash on the metal: Luschka had stopped here, too, had gazed at the ruins of the church and felt something.

Luce gripped the railing and blinked again and saw herself—or Luschka—as a girl.

She was seated inside on one of the pews in a white lace dress. An organ played as people led in before a service. The handsome man to her left must have been her father, and the woman next to him, her mother. There was the grandmother Luce had just met, and Kristina. Both of them looked younger, bet er fed. Luce remembered her grandmother saying that both her parents were dead. But here they looked so alive. They seemed to know everyone, greeting each family passing their pew. Luce studied her past self watching her father as he shook hands with a good-looking young blond man. The young man leaned down over the pew and smiled at her. He had the most beautiful violet eyes.

She blinked again and the vision disappeared. The lot was once again lit le more than rubble. She was freezing. And alone. Another bomb went of across the river, and the shock of it dropped Luce to her knees. She covered her face with her hands—

Until she heard someone softly crying. She lifted her head and squinted into the deeper darkness of the ruins, and she saw him.

“Daniel,” she whispered. He looked just the same. Almost radiating light, even in the freezing darkness. The blond hair she never wanted to stop running her ngers through, the violet-gray eyes that seemed to have been made to lock with hers. That formidable face, the high cheekbones, those lips. Her heart pounded and she had to tighten her grip on the iron fence to keep from running to him.

Because he wasn’t alone.

He was with Luschka. Consoling her, stroking her cheek and kissing her tears away. Their arms were wrapped around one another, their heads tipped forward in a never-ending kiss. They were so lost in their embrace they didn’t seem to feel the street rol ing and quaking with another explosion. They looked like al there was in the world was just the two of them.

There was no space between their bodies. It was too dim to see where one of them ended and the other one began.

Lucinda got to her feet and crept forward, moving from one pile of rubble in the dark to the next, just longing to be closer to him.

“I thought I’d never find you,” Luce heard her past self say.

“We wil always find each other,” Daniel answered, lifting her of the ground and squeezing her closer. “Always.”

“Hey, you two!” A voice shouted from a doorway in a neighboring building. “Are you coming?” Across the square from the empty lot, a smal group of people were being herded into a solid stone building by a guy whose face Luce couldn’t make out. That was where Luschka and Daniel were headed. It must have been their plan al along, to take shelter from the bombs together.

“Yes,” Luschka cal ed to the others. She looked at Daniel. “Let’s go with them.”

“No.” His voice was curt. Nervous. Luce knew that tone al too wel .

“We’l be safer of the street. Isn’t this why we agreed to meet here?”

Daniel turned to look back behind them, his eyes sweeping right past the place where Luce was hiding. When the sky lit up with another round of golden-red explosions, Luschka screamed and buried her face in Daniel’s chest. So Luce was the only one who saw his expression.

Something was weighing on him. Something greater than fear of the bombs.

Oh no.

“Dani l!” A boy near the building was stil holding open the door to the shelter. “Luschka! Dani l!” Everyone else was already inside.

That was when Dani l spun Luschka around, pul ed her ear close to his lips. In her shadowy hiding place, Luce ached to know what he was whispering. If he was saying any of the things Daniel ever told her when she was upset or overwhelmed. She wanted to run to them, to pul Luschka away—but she couldn’t. Something deep inside her would not budge.

She fixed on Luschka’s expression as if her whole life depended on it.

Maybe it did.

Luschka nodded as Dani l spoke, and her face changed from terri ed to calm, almost peaceful. She closed her eyes. She nodded one more Luschka nodded as Dani l spoke, and her face changed from terri ed to calm, almost peaceful. She closed her eyes. She nodded one more time. Then she tipped back her head, and a smile spread slowly across her lips.

A smile?

But why? How? It was almost like she knew what was about to happen.

Dani l held her in his arms and dipped her low. He leaned in for another kiss, pressing his lips rmly against hers, running his hands through her hair, then down her sides, across every inch of her.

It was so passionate that Luce blushed, so intimate she couldn’t breathe, so gorgeous that she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Not for a second.

Not even when Luschka screamed.

And burst into a column of searing white flame.

The cyclone of ames was otherworldly, uid and almost elegant in a ghastly way, like a long silk scarf twisting around her pale body. It engulfed Luschka, owed out of her and al around her, lighting up the spectacle of her burning limbs ailing, and ailing—and then not ailing anymore. Dani l didn’t let go, not when the re singed his clothes, not when he had to support the ful weight of her slack, unconscious body, not when the flames burned away her flesh with an ugly, acrid hiss, not when her skin began to char and blacken.

Only when the blaze zzled out—so fast, in the end, like the snu ng of a single candle—and there was nothing left to hold on to, nothing left but ashes, did Dani l drop his arms to his sides.

In al of Luce’s wildest daydreams about going back and revisiting her past lives, she’d never once imagined this: her own death. The reality was more horrible than her darkest nightmares could ever have concocted. She stood in the cold snow, paralyzed by the vision, her body bereft of the capacity to move.

Dani l staggered back from the charred mass on the snow and began to weep. The tears streaming down his cheeks made clean tracks through the black soot that was al that was left of her. His face contorted. His hands shook. They looked bare and big and empty to Luce, as if—even though the thought made her oddly jealous—his hands belonged around Luschka’s waist, in her hair, cupping her cheeks. What on earth did you do with your hands when the one thing they wanted to hold was suddenly, gruesomely gone? A whole girl, an entire life—

gone.

The pain on his face took hold of Luce’s heart and squeezed, wringing her out completely. On top of al the pain and confusion she felt, seeing his agony was worse.

This was how he felt every life.

Every death.

Over and over and over again.

Luce had been wrong to imagine that Daniel was sel sh. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he cared so much, it wrecked him. She stil hated it, but she suddenly understood his bit erness, his reservations about everything. Miles might very wel love her, but his love was nothing like Daniel’s.

It never could be.

“Daniel!” she cried, and left the shadows, racing toward him.

She wanted to return al the kisses and embraces she’d just witnessed him giving to her past self. She knew it was wrong, that everything was wrong.

Dani l’s eyes widened. A look of abject horror crossed his face.

“What is this?” he said slowly. Accusingly. As if he hadn’t just let his Luschka die. As if Luce’s being there was worse than watching Luschka die. He raised his hand, painted black with ash, and pointed at her. “What’s going on?” It was agony to have him look at her this way. She stopped in her tracks and blinked a tear away.

“Answer him,” someone said, a voice from the shadows. “How did you get here?” Luce would have recognized the haughty voice anywhere. She didn’t need to see Cam step out of the doorway of the bomb shelter.

With a soft snap and rumble like an enormous ag being unfurled, he extended his great wings. They stretched out behind him, making him even more magni cent and intimidating than usual. Luce couldn’t keep herself from staring. They cast a gold-hued glow on the dark street.

Luce squinted, trying to make sense of the scene in front of her. There were more of them, more gures lurking in the shadows. Now they al stepped forward.

Gabbe. Roland. Mol y. Arriane.

Al of them were there. Al with their wings arched tightly forward. A shimmering sea of gold and silver, blindingly bright on the dark street. They looked tense. Their wing tips quivered, as if ready to spring into bat le.

For once, Luce didn’t feel intimidated by the glory of their wings or the weight of their gazes. She felt disgusted.

“Do you al watch it every time?” she asked.

“Luschka,” Gabbe said in an even voice. “Just tel us what’s going on.”

And then Dani l was there, gripping her shoulders. Shaking her.

“Luschka!”

“I’m not Luschka!” Luce shouted, breaking away from him and backing up a half dozen steps.

She was horrified. How they could live with themselves? How they could al just sit back and watch her die?

It was al too much. She wasn’t ready to see this.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Dani l asked.

“She’s not who you think she is, Dani l,” Gabbe said. “Luschka’s dead. This is … this is—”

“What is she?” Dani l asked. “How is she standing here? When—”

“Look at her clothes. She’s clearly—”

“Shut up, Cam, she might not be,” Arriane said, but she looked fearful, too, that Luce might be whatever Cam was about to say she was.

Another shrieking from the air, and then a blast of artil ery shel s raining down on the buildings across the street, deafening Luce, igniting a wooden warehouse. The angels had no concern for the war going on around them, only for her. There were twenty feet now between Luce and the angels, and they looked as wary of her as she felt of them. None of them drew closer.

In the light from the smoldering building, Dani l’s shadow was thrown far ahead of his body. She focused on summoning it to her. Would it work? Her eyes narrowed, and every muscle in her body tensed. She was stil so clumsy at this, never knowing what it took to get the shadow into her hands.

When the dark lines began to quiver, she pounced. She gripped the shadow with both hands and started twirling the dark mass into a bal , just as she’d seen her teachers, Steven and Francesca, do on one of her rst days at Shoreline. Just-summoned Announcers were always messy just as she’d seen her teachers, Steven and Francesca, do on one of her rst days at Shoreline. Just-summoned Announcers were always messy and amorphous. They needed rst to be spun into a distinct contour. Only then could they be pul ed and stretched into a larger at surface.

Then the Announcer would transform: into a screen through which to glimpse the past—or into a portal through which to step.

This Announcer was sticky, but she soon pul ed it apart, guided it into shape. She reached inside and opened the portal.

She couldn’t stay here any longer. She had a mission now: to nd herself alive in another time and learn what price the Outcasts had referred to, and eventual y, to trace the origin of the curse between Daniel and her.

Then to break it.

The others gasped as she manipulated the Announcer.

“When did you learn how to do that?” Dani l whispered.

Luce shook her head. Her explanation would only baf le Dani l.

“Lucinda!” The last thing she heard was his voice cal ing out her true name.

Strange, she’d been looking right at his stricken face but hadn’t seen his lips move. Her mind was playing tricks.

“Lucinda!” he shouted once more, his voice rising in panic, just before Luce dove headfirst into the beckoning darkness.

TWO

TWO

HEAVEN SENT

MOSCOW • OCTOBER 15, 1941

“Łucinda!” Daniel shouted again, but too late: In that instant she was gone. He had only just emerged into the bleak, snow-swept landscape.

He’d felt a ash of light behind him and the heat of a blaze nearby, but al he could see was Luce. He rushed toward her on the darkened street corner. She looked tiny in someone else’s threadbare coat. She looked scared. He’d watched her open up a shadow and then—

“No!”

A rocket smashed into a building behind him. The ground quaked, the street bucked and split, and a shower of glass and steel and concrete gathered up in the air and then rained down.

After that, the street went deadly quiet. But Daniel barely noticed. He just stood in disbelief among the debris.

“She’s going further back,” he mut ered, brushing the dust from his shoulders.

“She’s going further back,” someone said.

That voice. His voice. An echo?

No, too close for an echo. Too clear to have come from inside his head.

“Who said that?” He dashed past a tangled mess of scaf olding to where Luce had been.

Two gasps.

Daniel was facing himself. Only not quite himself—an earlier version of himself, a slightly less cynical version of himself. But from when?