Passion

cleanly, their deaths were instantaneous, as close to painless as possible.

“De!” she shouted, more loudly.

At the sound of her voice, his head shot up. Luce leaned over her saddle to show him her nearly empty quiver. He tossed her a hooked sword.

She caught it by the hilt. It felt strangely natural in her hand. Then she remembered—the fencing lesson she’d taken at Shoreline. In her very first match, she’d destroyed Lilith, a prissy, cruel classmate who’d been fencing all her life.

Certainly she could do it again.

Just then, a warrior leaped from his horse onto hers. The sudden weight of him made her mount stumble and made Luce scream, but a moment later, his throat was slit and his body shoved to the ground and the blade of her sword shone with fresh blood.

There was a warm flush across her chest. Her entire body buzzed. She charged ahead, spurring her horse to full speed, faster and faster until—

The world went white.

Then slammed into black.

Finally it flared through a blaze of brilliant colors.

She raised her hand to block the light, but it wasn’t coming from outside her. Her horse still galloped beneath her. Her dagger was still gripped in her fist, still slashing right and left, into throats, into chests. Enemies still fell at her feet.

But somehow Luce wasn’t quite there anymore. A riot of visions assaulted her mind, visions that must have belonged to Lu Xin—and then some visions that couldn’t possibly have belonged to Lu Xin.

She saw Daniel hovering over her in his simple peasant’s clothes … but then, a moment later, he was bare- chested, with long blond hair … and suddenly he wore a knight’s helmet, whose visor he lifted to kiss her lips … but before he did, he shifted into his present self, the Daniel she’d left in her parents’ backyard in Thunderbolt when she stepped through into time.

This was the Daniel, she realized, she’d been looking for all along. She reached for him, she called his name, but then he changed again. And again. She saw more Daniels than she’d ever thought possible, each one more gorgeous than the last. They folded into each other like a vast accordion, each image of him tilting and altering in the light of the sky behind him. The cut of his nose, the line of his jawbone, the tone of his skin, the shape of his lips, all whirled in and out of focus, morphing all the time. Everything changed except his eyes.

His violet eyes always stayed the same. They haunted her, hiding something terrible, something she didn’t understand. Something she didn’t want to understand.

Fear?

In the visions, the terror in Daniel’s eyes was so intense Luce actually wanted to look away from their beauty. What could someone as powerful as Daniel fear?

There was only one thing: Luce’s dying.

She was experiencing a montage of her death over and over and over again. This was what Daniel’s eyes looked like, throughout time, just before her life went up in flames. She had seen this fear in him before. She hated it because it always meant their time was over. She saw it now in every one of his faces. The fear flashed from infinite times and places. Suddenly, she knew there was more:

He wasn’t afraid for her, not because she was walking into the darkness of another death. He didn’t fear that it might cause her pain.

Daniel was afraid of her.

“Lu Xin!” his voice cried out to her from the battlefield. She could see him through the haze of visions. He was the only thing coming in clearly—because everything else around her was lit up startlingly white. Everything inside her was, too. Was her love of Daniel burning her up? Was it her own passion, not his, that destroyed her every time?

“No!” His hand reached out for hers. But it was too late.

* * *

Her head hurt. She didn’t want to open her eyes.

Bill was back, the floor was cool, and Luce was in a welcome pocket of darkness. A waterfall sprayed somewhere in the background, drizzling on her hot cheeks.

“You did okay out there after all,” he said.

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Luce said. “How about explaining where you disappeared to?”

“Can’t.” Bill sucked in his fat lips to show that they were sealed.

“Why not?”

“Personal.”

“Is it Daniel?” she asked. “He’d be able to see you, wouldn’t he? And there’s some reason you don’t want him to know that you’re helping me.”

Bill snorted. “My business isn’t always about you, Luce. I have other things stewing in the pot. Besides, you seem pretty independent of late. Maybe it’s time to end our little arrangement, bust off your training wheels. What the hell do you need me for anymore?”

Luce was too exhausted to pander to him, and too stunned by what she’d just seen. “It’s hopeless.”

All the rage left Bill like air being let out of a balloon. “How do you mean?”

“When I die, it’s not because of anything that Daniel does. It’s something that happens inside me. Maybe his love brings it out, but—it’s my fault. That has to be part of the curse, only I have no idea what it means. All I know is, I saw a look in his eyes right before I died—it’s always the same.”

He tilted his head. “So far.”

“I make him miserable more than I make him happy,” she said. “If he hasn’t given up on me, he should. I can’t do this to him anymore.”

She dropped her head into her hands.

“Luce?” Bill sat on her knee. There was the strange tenderness he’d shown when she first met him. “Do you want to put this endless charade to rest? For Daniel’s sake?”

Luce looked up and wiped her eyes. “You mean, so he won’t have to go through this again? There’s something I can do?”

“When you assume one of your past self’s bodies, there is one moment in each one of your lives, just before you die, where your soul and the two bodies—past and present—split apart. It only happens for a fraction of an instant.”

Luce squinted. “I think I’ve felt that. At the moment when I realize I’m going to die, right before I actually do?”

“Exactly. It has to do with how your lives cleave together. In that fraction of a moment, there is a way to cleave your cursed soul from your present body. Kind of like carving out your soul. It would, effectively, extinguish that pesky reincarnation element of your curse.”

“But I thought I was already at the end of my cycle of reincarnations, that I wasn’t coming back anymore. Because of the baptism thing. Because I never—”

“That doesn’t matter. You’re still bound to see the cycle to its end. As soon as you go back to the present, you could still die at any moment because of—”

“My love of Daniel.”

“Sure, something like that,” Bill said. “Ahem. That is, unless you break the bond with your past.”

“So I’d cleave from my past and she would still die as she always did—”

“And you would still be cast out just as you’ve been before, only you’d leave your soul behind to die, too. And the body you would return to”—he poked her in the shoulder—“this one—would be free to live outside the curse that’s been hanging over you since the dawn of time.”

“No more dying?”

“Not unless you jump off a building or get into a car with a murderer or take a whole lot of Unisom or—”

“I get it,” she cut him off. “But it’s not like”—she struggled to steady her voice—“it’s not like Daniel would kiss me and I’d … or—”

“It’s not like Daniel would do anything.” Bill stared at her purposefully. “You wouldn’t be drawn to him anymore. You’d move on. Probably marry some dull sweetheart and have twelve kids of