etched into the wall. “I tried to keep track of the day, but you know how it is. Time passes in funny ways. It gets away from you.”
“I remember.” Daniel shuddered. “But the Nephilim. You talked to them?” He racked his memory, and faint images came to mind from his imprisonment, images of a girl and boy. He’d always taken them for the phantoms of grief, just two more of the delusions that beset him when she’d gone and he was alone again.
“For a moment.” The prisoner’s voice sounded tired and far away. “They weren’t all that interested in me.”
“Good.”
“Once they found out she was dead, they were in a great hurry to move on.” His gray eyes were eerily penetrating. “Something you and I can understand.”
“Where did they go?”
“Don’t know.” The prisoner cracked a smile too big for his thin face. “I don’t think they did, either. You should have seen how long it took them to open an Announcer. Looked like couple of bumbling fools.”
Daniel felt himself almost begin to laugh.
“It isn’t funny,” his past self said. “They care for her.”
But Daniel felt no tenderness for the Nephilim. “They’re a threat to all of us. The destruction they could cause …” He closed his eyes. “They have no idea what they’re doing.”
“Why can’t you catch her, Daniel?” His past self laughed dryly. “We’ve seen each other before over the millennia—I remember you chasing her. And never catching her.”
“I—I don’t know.” The words stuck in Daniel’s throat, a long sob building behind them. Quivering, he stifled it. “I can’t reach her. Somehow I am eternally arriving a heartbeat too late, as though someone or something is working behind the scenes to keep her from me.”
“Your Announcers will always take you where you need to be.”
“Perhaps they know what you need better than you know yourself.”
“What?”
“Maybe she shouldn’t be stopped.” The prisoner rattled his chain listlessly. “That she is able to travel at all means something fundamental was changed. Maybe you can’t catch her until she works that change into the original curse.”
“But—” He didn’t know what to say. The sob rose in Daniel’s chest, drowning his heart in a torrent of shame and sadness. “She needs me. Every second is a lost eternity. And if she makes a misstep, everything could be lost. She could change the past and … cease to exist.”
“But that’s the nature of risk, isn’t it? You gamble everything on the slenderest of hopes.” His past self began to reach out, almost touching Daniel’s arm. Both of them wanted to feel a connection. At the last instant, Daniel jerked away.
His past self sighed. “What if it’s
“Impossible.” Daniel snorted. “Look at me. Look at you. We’re wretched without her. We’re nothing when we’re not with Lucinda. There is no reason why my soul wouldn’t want to find her as quickly as possible.”
Daniel wanted to fly away from here. But something was nagging at him.
“Why haven’t you offered to accompany me?” he asked finally. “I would refuse you, of course, but some of the others—when I encountered myself in another life, he wanted to join in. Why don’t you?”
A rat crawled along the prisoner’s leg, stopping to sniff at the bloody chains around his ankles.
“I escaped once,” he said slowly. “You remember?”
“Yes,” Daniel said, “when you—when
The prisoner leaned back and rattled his chains. “We had no other choice. It was the closest place to her.” He drew in a ragged breath. “It’s so hard when she’s in between. I never feel I can go on. I was glad when the duke anticipated my escape, figured out where I’d go. He was waiting in Savoy, waiting at my patron’s dinner table with his men. Waiting to drag me back here.”
Daniel remembered. “The punishment felt like something I’d earned.”
“Daniel.” The prisoner’s forlorn face looked like it had been given a jolt of electricity. He looked alive again, or at least, his eyes did. They glowed violet. “I think I’ve got it.” The words rushed carelessly out. “Take a lesson from the duke.”
Daniel licked his lips. “Excuse me?”
“All these lives you say that you’ve been trailing after her. Do as the duke did with us.
“But I don’t know where her Announcers will take her.”
“Of course you do,” his past self insisted. “You must have faint memories of where she’ll end up. Maybe not every step along the way, but eventually, it all has to end where it started.”
A silent understanding passed between them. Running his hands along the wall near the window, Daniel summoned a shadow. It was invisible to him in the darkness, but he could feel it moving toward him, and he deftly worked it into shape. This Announcer seemed as despondent as he felt. “You’re right,” he said, jerking open the portal. “There is one place she’s sure to go.”
“Yes.”
“And you. You should take your own advice and leave this place,” Daniel said grimly. “You’re rotting in here.”
“At least this body’s pain distracts me from the pain in my soul,” his past self said. “No. I wish you luck, but I won’t leave these walls now. Not until she’s settled in her next incarnation.”
Daniel’s wings bristled at his neck. He tried to sort out time and lives and memories in his head, but he kept circling around the same irksome thought. “She—she should be settled now. In conception. Can’t you feel it?”
“Oh,” his imprisoned past self said softly. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know that I can feel anything anymore.” The prisoner sighed heavily. “Life’s a nightmare.”
“No, it’s not. Not anymore. I’ll find her. I’ll redeem us both,” Daniel shouted, desperate to get out of there, desperately taking another leap of faith through time.
THIRTEEN
STAR-CROSSED
Something crunched under Luce’s feet.
She raised the hem of her black gown: A layer of discarded walnut shells on the ground was so thick the stringy brown bits rose up over the buckles of her emerald-green high-heeled slippers.
She was at the rear of a noisy crowd of people. Almost everyone around her was dressed in muted browns or grays, the women in long gowns with ruched bodices and wide cuffs at the ends of their bell sleeves. The men wore tapered pants, broad mantles draping their shoulders, and flat caps made of wool. She’d never stepped out of an Announcer into such a public place before, but here she was, in the middle of a packed amphitheater. It was startling—and riotously loud.
“Look out!” Bill grabbed the neck of her velvet capelet and yanked her backward, pinning her against the wooden rail of a staircase.
A heartbeat later, two grimy boys barreled past in a reckless game of tag that sent a trio of women in their path falling over one another. The women heaved themselves back up and shouted curses at the boys, who jeered back, barely slowing down.
“Next time,” Bill shouted in her ear, cupping his stone claws around his mouth, “could you try directing your little stepping-through exercises into a more—I don’t know
