Rapture

desires. Surely you recall what his soul looks like,” Daniel said pointedly, “even if you see nothing else.”

The Outcasts rose on their rotting perches.

“I remember,” Luce heard an Outcast behind her say faintly.

“Lucifer was the brightest angel of all,” another called, full of nostalgia. “So beautiful, it blinded us.” They were sensitive, Luce realized, about their defor-mity.

“Cease your equivocation!” A louder voice called over them. The robed Outcast, this scene’s leader. “The Outcasts will see again in the next go-’round. Vision will lead to wisdom, and wisdom back through the Gates of Heaven. We will be attractive to the Price. She will guide us.”

Luce shivered against Daniel.

“Maybe we can all get a second chance at redemption.” Daniel appealed to them. “If we are able to stop Lucifer . . . there’s no reason your kind could not also—”

“No!” The robed Outcast lunged from his buttress at Daniel, his dreary, beat-up wings spreading wide with a crackle like a snapping twig.

Daniel’s wings loosened around her waist and the halo was thrust back into her hands as he rose out of the water in self-defense. The robed leader was no match for Daniel, who shot up and threw a right cross.

The Outcast flew backward twenty feet, skimming the water like a stone. He righted himself and returned to his perch on the buttress. With a wave of his pale hand, he cued the rest of his group to rise in a circle in the air.

“You know who she is!” Daniel shouted. “You know what this means for all of us. For once in your existence, do something brave instead of craven.”

“How?” the Outcast challenged him. Water streamed from the hem of his robes.

Daniel was breathing hard, eyeing Luce and the golden halo gleaming through the water. His violet eyes looked panicked for a moment—and then he did the last thing Luce would ever have expected.

He looked the robed Outcast deep in his dead white eyes, extended his hand palm up, and said, “Join us.” The Outcast laughed darkly for a long time.

Daniel did not flinch.

“The Outcasts work for no one but themselves.”

“You’ve made that clear. No one is asking you to indenture yourselves. But do not work against the only cause that is right. Seize this chance to save everyone, including yourselves. Join us in the fight against Lucifer.”

“It is a trick!” one of the Outcast girls shouted.

“He seeks to deceive you in order to gain his freedom.”

“Take the girl!”

Luce gazed in horror at the robed Outcast hovering over her. He drew nearer, his eyes widening hungrily, his white hands trembling as they reached for her. Closer.

Closer. She screamed—

But no one heard it, because at that moment, the world rippled. The air and light and every particle in the atmosphere seemed to double and split, then folded in on themselves with a crack of thunder.

It was happening again.

Through the thicket of tan trench coats and dirty wings, the sky had turned a dim and smoggy gray, like it had been the last time in the Sword & Cross library, when everything had begun to tremble. Another timequake. Lucifer drawing near.

A tremendous wave crashed over her head. Luce flailed, grasping tight to the halo, paddling frantically to keep her head above water.

She saw Daniel’s face as a great creaking sounded on their left. His white wings were soaring toward her, but not quickly enough.

The last thing Luce saw before her head dipped under the water seemed to happen in slow motion: The green-gray church spire bowed over in the water, tipping down ever so gently toward her head. Its shadow grew large until with a thud it jerked her down into darkness.

Luce woke up undulating on a wave: She was on a water bed.

Red lace reticella curtains were drawn over the windows. Gray light slipping through gaps in the intricate lace suggested it was dusk. Luce’s head ached and her ankle throbbed. She rolled over in the black silk sheets—

and came face to face with a sleepy-eyed girl with a huge mop of blond hair.

The girl moaned and batted heavily shadowed silver eyelids, stretching a slack fist over her head. “Oh,” she said, sounding much less surprised to wake next to Luce than Luce felt waking next to her. “How late did we stay out last night?” she slurred in Italian. “That party was crazy. ”

Luce lunged backward and fell out of the bed, sinking into a plush white rug. The room was a cavern, cold and stale-smelling, with dark gray wallpaper and a king-sized sleigh bed on a huge area rug in the center.

She had no idea where she was, how she’d gotten there, whose bathrobe she was wearing, who this girl was, or what party the girl thought Luce had been at the night before. Had she somehow fallen into an Announcer? There was a zebra-print footstool by the bed The clothes she’d left in the gondola were folded neatly on it—the white sweater she’d put on two days earlier at her parents’ house, her worn-in jeans, her riding boots leaning against each other to the side. The silver locket with the carved-rose face—she’d tucked it inside her boot just before she and Daniel dove into the water—was resting in a spun glass tray on the night table.

She slipped it back over her head and fumbled into her jeans. The girl in the bed had fallen back asleep, a black silk pillow stuffed over her face, her tangled blond hair spilling out from under it. Luce peeked around the high headboard, finding two empty leather recliners facing a blazing fireplace on the far wall, and a flat-screen TV mounted over it.

Where was Daniel?

She was zipping up her second boot when she heard a voice through the cracked French doors opposite the bed.

“You will not regret this, Daniel.”

Before he could respond, Luce’s hand was on the doorknob—and on the other side she found him, seated on a zebra-print love seat in the living room, facing Phil the Outcast.

At the sight of her in the doorway, Daniel rose to his feet. Phil rose, too, standing stiffly beside his chair. Daniel’s hands swept across Luce’s face, brushing her forehead, which Luce realized was tender and bruised.

“How are you feeling?”

“The halo—”

“We have the halo.” Daniel gestured at the enormous gold-edged glass disk resting on the large wooden dining table in the adjacent room. There was an Outcast seated at the table spooning yogurt into his mouth, another leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. Both of them were facing Luce, but it was impossible to tell whether they knew they were doing it. She felt on edge around them, felt a chill in the air, but trusted Daniel’s calm demeanor.

“What happened to the Outcast you were fighting?” Luce asked, looking for the pale creature in the robe.

“Don’t worry about him. It’s you I’m worried about.” He spoke to her as tenderly as if they’d been alone.

She remembered the church spire tilting toward her as the cathedral collapsed underwater. She remembered Daniel’s wings casting a shadow over everything as they dipped toward her.

“You took a bad knock on the head. The Outcasts helped me get you out of the water and brought us here so you could rest.”

“How long was I asleep?” Luce asked. It was night-fall. “How much time do we have left—”

“Seven days, Luce,” Daniel said quietly. She could hear how keenly he, too, felt the time slipping away from them.

“Well, we shouldn’t waste any more time here.” She glanced at Phil, who was topping off his and Daniel’s glasses from a bottle of something red called Campari.

“You do not like my apartment, Lucinda Price?” Phil said, pretending to look around the postmodernist living room for the first time. The walls were dotted with Jackson Pollock –esque paintings, but it was Phil Luce couldn’t