Passion

loopholes in the curse. You shouldn’t be able to be here.”

“Loopholes?” Luce asked. “What kind of loopholes? I need to know—”

“I can’t help you,” he said, and coughed. “You have to learn on your own. Those are the rules.”

“Doria.” A woman Luce had never seen was standing in the doorway. She was older, blond and severe, with a starched Red Cross cap pinned so that it sat at an angle on her head. At first, Luce didn’t realize that the woman was addressing her. “You are Doria, aren’t you? The new transfer?”

“Yes,” Luce said.

“We’ll need to do your paperwork this morning,” the woman said curtly. “I don’t have any of your records. But first, you’ll do me a favor.”

Luce nodded. She could tell she was in trouble, but she had more important things to worry about than this woman and her paperwork.

“Private Bruno is going into surgery,” the nurse said.

“Okay.” Luce tried to focus on the nurse, but all she wanted was to go back to her conversation with Daniel. She had finally been getting somewhere, finally finding another piece in the puzzle of her lives!

“Private Giovanni Bruno? He’s requested that the on-duty nurse be taken off his surgery. He says he’s sweet on the nurse who saved his life. His angel?” The woman gave Luce a hard look. “The girls tell me that’s you.”

“No,” Luce said. “I’m not—”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s what he believes.” The nurse pointed toward the door. “Let’s go.”

Luce rose from Daniel’s bed. He was looking away from her, out the window. She sighed. “I have to talk to you,” she whispered, though he didn’t meet her gaze. “I’ll be right back.”

* * *

The surgery wasn’t as awful as it could have been. All Luce had to do was hold Giovanni’s small, soft hand and whisper things, pass a few instruments to the doctor and try not to look when he reached into the dark red mass of Giovanni’s exposed gut and extracted the bits of blood-sheathed shrapnel. If the doctor wondered about her evident lack of experience, he didn’t say anything. She wasn’t gone more than an hour.

Just long enough to come back to Daniel’s bed and find it empty.

Lucia was changing the sheets. She rushed toward Luce, and Luce thought she was going to hug her. Instead she collapsed at her feet.

“What happened?” Luce asked. “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.” The girl began to weep. “He left. He just left. I don’t know where.” She looked up at Luce, tears filling her hazel eyes. “He said to tell you goodbye.”

“He can’t be gone,” Luce said under her breath. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk—

Of course they hadn’t. Daniel had known exactly what he was doing when he left. He didn’t want to tell her the whole truth. He was hiding something. What were the rules he’d mentioned? And what loophole?

Lucia’s face was flushed. Her speech was broken up by hiccups. “I know I shouldn’t be crying, but I can’t explain it.… I feel like someone has died.”

Luce recognized the feeling. They had that in common: When Daniel left, both girls were inconsolable. Luce balled up her fists, feeling angry and despondent. “Don’t be childish.”

Luce blinked, thinking at first that the girl was speaking to her, but then she realized Lucia was chiding herself. Luce straightened, holding her trembling shoulders high again, as if she were trying to recover the calm poise the nurses had shown.

“Lucia.” Luce reached for the girl, moving to embrace her.

But the girl inched away, turning from Luce to face Daniel’s empty bed. “I’m fine.” She went back to stripping the sheets. “The only thing we can control is the work we do. Nurse Fiero always says that. The rest is out of our hands.”

No. Lucia was wrong, but Luce couldn’t see how to correct her. Luce didn’t understand much, but she understood that—her life didn’t have to be out of her hands. She could shape her own destiny. Somehow. She didn’t have it all figured out yet, but she could feel a solution drawing nearer. How else would she have found herself here in the first place? How else would she have known now that it was time to move on?

In the late-morning light, a shadow stretched out from the supply closet in the corner. It looked like one she could use, but she wasn’t entirely confident of her abilities to summon. She focused on it for a moment and waited to see the place where it wobbled.

There. She watched it twitch. Fighting the disgust she still felt, she grabbed hold of it.

Across the room, Lucia’s focus was on bundling the bedsheets, on trying hard not to show that she was still crying.

Luce worked fast, drawing the Announcer into a sphere, then working it out with her fingers more quickly than she ever had before.

She held her breath, made a wish, and disappeared.

FOUR TIME WOUNDS ALL HEELS

MILAN, ITALY • MAY 25, 1918

Daniel felt guarded and on edge as he pushed out of the Announcer.

He was unpracticed at how to quickly make sense of the new time and place, not knowing exactly where he was or what he should do. Knowing that at least one version of Luce was bound to be nearby, bound to need him.

The room was white. White sheets on the bed in front of him, white-framed window in the corner, bright white sunshine beating through the pane. For a moment, all was quiet. Then the chatter of memories rushed in.

Milan.

He was back in the hospital where she had been his nurse during the first of the mortal world wars. There, in the bed in the corner, was Traverti, his roommate from Salerno who’d stepped on a land mine on his way to the canteen. Both of Traverti’s legs had been burned and broken, but he was so charming he had all the nurses sneaking him bottles of whiskey. He’d always had a joke for Daniel. And there, on the other side of the room, was Max Porter, the Brit with the burned face, who never made a peep until he screamed and fell to pieces when they took his bandage off.

Right now, both of Daniel’s old roommates were far gone in morphine-induced afternoon naps.

In the middle of the room was the bed where he had lain after that bullet found his neck near the Piave River front. It was a stupid attack; they had walked right into it. But Daniel had only enlisted in the war because Lucia was a nurse, so it was just as well. He rubbed at the place where he’d been hit. He could feel the pain almost as if it had happened yesterday.

If Daniel had stuck around long enough to let the wound heal, the doctors would have been amazed by the absence of a scar. Today, his neck was smooth and flawless, as if he had never been shot.

Over the years, Daniel had been beaten, battered, flung over balconies, shot in the neck and the gut and the leg, tortured over hot coals, and dragged through a dozen city streets. But a close study of every inch of his skin would reveal only two small scars: two fine white lines above his shoulder blades where his wings unfurled.

All of the fallen angels acquired these scars when they took their human bodies. In a way, the scars were all any of them had to show for themselves.

Most of the others reveled in their immunity to scarring. Well, except for Arriane, but the scar on her neck was another story. But Cam and even Roland would pick the most gruesome fights with just about anyone on Earth. Of course, they never lost to mortals, but they seemed to like getting a little bit shattered on the way. In a couple of days, they knew they’d look flawless again.