Passion

never knew thee.” As if the lines had been written for the two of them.

They began to dance, and Daniel locked eyes with her the whole time. His eyes were crystal clear and violet, and the way they never strayed from hers chipped away at Luce’s heart. She knew he’d loved her always, but until this moment, dancing with him on the stage in front of all these people, she had never really thought about what it meant.

It meant that when she saw him for the first time in every life, Daniel was already in love with her. Every time. And always had been. And every time, she had to fall in love with him from scratch. He could never pressure her or push her into loving him. He had to win her anew each time.

Daniel’s love for her was one long, uninterrupted stream. It was the purest form of love there was, purer even than the love Luce returned. His love flowed without breaking, without stopping. Whereas Luce’s love was wiped clean with every death, Daniel’s grew over time, across all eternity. How powerfully strong must it be by now? Hundreds of lifetimes of love stacked one on top of the other? It was almost too massive for Luce to comprehend.

He loved her that much, and yet in every lifetime, over and over again, he had to wait for her to catch up.

All this time, they had been dancing with the rest of the troupe, bounding in and out of the wings at breaks in the music, coming back onstage for more gallantry, for longer sets with more ornate steps, until the whole company was dancing.

At the close of the scene, even though it wasn’t in the script, even though Cam was standing right there watching, Luce held fast to Daniel’s hand and pulled him to her, up against the potted orange trees. He looked at her like she was crazy and tried to tug her to the mark dictated by her stage directions. “What are you doing?” he murmured.

He had doubted her before, backstage when she’d tried to speak freely about her feelings. She had to make him believe her. Especially if Lucinda died tonight, understanding the depth of her love would mean everything to him. It would help him to carry on, to keep loving her for hundreds more years, through all the pain and hardship she’d witnessed, right up to the present.

Luce knew that it wasn’t in the script, but she couldn’t stop herself: She grabbed Daniel and she kissed him.

She expected him to stop her, but instead he swooped her into his arms and kissed her back. Hard and passionately, responding with such intensity that she felt the way she did when they were flying, though she knew her feet were planted on the ground.

For a moment, the audience was silent. Then they began to holler and jeer. Someone threw a shoe at Daniel, but he ignored it. His kisses told Luce that he believed her, that he understood the depth of her love, but she wanted to be absolutely sure.

“I will always love you, Daniel.” Only, that didn’t seem quite right—or not quite enough. She had to make him understand, and damn the consequences—if she changed history, so be it. “I’ll always choose you.” Yes, that was the word. “Every single lifetime, I’ll choose you. Just as you have always chosen me. Forever.”

His lips parted. Did he believe her? Did he already know? It was a choice, a long- standing, deep-seated choice that reached beyond anything else Luce was capable of. Something powerful was behind it. Something beautiful and—

Shadows began to swirl in the rigging overhead. Heat quaked through her body, making her convulse, desperate for the fiery release she knew was coming.

Daniel’s eyes flashed with pain. “No,” he whispered. “Please don’t go yet.”

Somehow, it always took both of them by surprise.

As her past self’s body erupted into flames, there was a sound of cannon fire, but Luce couldn’t be sure. Her eyes went blurry with brightness and she was cast far up and out of Lucinda’s body, into the air, into darkness.

“No!” she cried as the walls of the Announcer closed around her. Too late.

“What’s the problem now?” Bill asked.

“I wasn’t ready. I know Lucinda had to die, but I—I was just—” She’d been on the brink of understanding something about the choice she’d made to love Daniel. And now everything about those last moments with Daniel had gone up in flames along with her past self.

“Well, there’s not much more to see,” Bill said. “Just the usual routine of a building catching fire—smoke, walls of flame, people screaming and stampeding toward the exits, trampling the less fortunate underfoot—you get the picture. The Globe burned to the ground.”

“What?” she said, feeling sick. “I started the fire at the Globe?” Surely burning down the most famous theater in English history would have repercussions across time.

“Oh, don’t get all self-important. It was going to happen anyway. If you hadn’t burst into flames, the cannon onstage would have misfired and taken the whole place out.”

“This is so much bigger than me and Daniel. All those people—”

“Look, Mother Teresa, no one died that night … besides you. No one else even got hurt. Remember that drunk leering at you from the third row? His pants catch on fire. That’s the worst of it. Feel better?”

“Not really. Not at all.”

“How about this: You’re not here to add to your mountain of guilt. Or to change the past. There’s a script, and you have your entrances and your exits.”

“I wasn’t ready for my exit.”

“Why not? Henry the Eighth sucks, anyway.”

“I wanted to give Daniel hope. I wanted him to know that I would always choose him, always love him. But Lucinda died before I could be sure he understood.” She closed her eyes. “His half of our curse is so much worse than mine.”

“That’s good, Luce!”

“What do you mean? That’s horrible!”

“I mean that little gem—that ‘Wah, Daniel’s agony is infinitely more horrible than mine’—that’s what you learned here. The more you understand, the closer you’ll get to knowing the root of the curse, and the more likely it is that you’ll eventually find your way out of it. Right?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“I do. Now come on, you’ve got bigger roles to play.”

Daniel’s side of the curse was worse. Luce could see that now very clearly. But what did it mean? She didn’t feel any closer to being able to break it. The answer eluded her. But she knew Bill was right about one thing: She could do nothing more in this lifetime. All she could do was keep going back.

FOURTEEN THE STEEP SLOPE

CENTRAL GREENLAND • WINTER, 1100

Ŧhe sky was black when Daniel stepped through. Behind him, the portal billowed in the wind like a tattered curtain, snagging and tearing itself apart before falling to pieces on the night-blue snow.

A chill crept over his body. At first sight, there seemed to be nothing here at all. Nothing but arctic nights that seemed to go on forever, offering only the thinnest glimpse of day at the end.

He remembered now: These fjords were the place where he and his fellow fallen angels held their meetings: all bleak dimness and harsh cold, a two days’ trek north of the mortal settlement of Brattahlíõ. But he would not find her here. This land had never been a part of Lucinda’s past, so there would be nothing in her Announcers to bring her here now.

Just Daniel. And the others.

He shivered and marched across the snow-swept fjord toward a warm glow on the horizon. Seven of them