Rapture

“All in good time, dear,” Dee said calmly, staring straight ahead at the curved horizon. “I take it you have at least tapped into some of your earlier memories?” Luce nodded.

“Brilliant. I’ll settle for the tale of the earliest romance you can recall. Go on, dear. Humor an old lady.

It’ll help us pass the time to Avignon, like Canterbury pilgrims.”

A memory flashed before Luce’s eyes: the cold, damp tomb she’d been locked in with Daniel in Egypt, the way his lips pressed against hers, their bodies against each other, as though they were the last two people in the world . . .

But they hadn’t been alone. Bill had been there, too.

He’d been there waiting, watching, wanting her soul to die inside a dank Egyptian tomb.

Luce snapped her eyes open, returning to the present, where his red eyes could not find her. “I’m tired,” she said.

“Rest,” Daniel said softly.

“No, I’m tired of being punished simply because I love you, Daniel. I don’t want anything to do with Lucifer, with Scale and Outcasts and whatever other sides there are. I’m not a pawn; I’m a person. And I’ve had enough.”

Daniel wrapped his hand over Luce’s and squeezed.

Dee and Roland both looked as if they wanted to reach out and do the same.

“You’ve changed, dear,” Dee said.

“Since when?”

“Since before. I’ve never heard you talk like that.

Have you, Daniel?”

Daniel was quiet for a moment. Finally, over the sounds of wind and the flapping of the angels’ wings against thin air, he said, “No. But I’m glad she can now.”

“And why not? It’s a trans-dimensional tragedy what you kids have been through. But this is a girl with tenac-ity, a girl with muscles, a girl who once told me she would never cut her hair, even though she was cursed— your words, dear—by snarls and tangles, a magnet for briars, because that hair was a part of her, indelibly tied to her soul.”

Luce squinted at the old woman. “What are you talking about?”

Dee tilted her head at Luce and pursed her plump lips.

Luce stared at her hard, at her golden eyes and fine red hair, at the delicate way she hummed as they flew.

And it hit her.

“I remember you!”

“Lovely,” Dee said, “I remember you, too!”

“Didn’t I live in a hut on an open plain?” Dee nodded.

“And we did talk about my hair! I’d—I’d run through a patch of nettles diving after something on a hunt . . .

was it a fox?”

“You were quite the tomboy. Braver than some of the men on the prairie, actually.”

“And you,” Luce said, “you spent hours picking them out of my hair.”

“I was your favorite auntie, figuratively speaking.

You used to say the devil cursed you with such thick hair.

A trifle dramatic, but you were only sixteen—and not far off from the truth, as only sixteen-year-olds can be.”

“You said a curse is only a curse if I allowed myself to be cursed by it. You said . . . I had it in my power to free myself of any curse—that curses were preludes to bless-ings. . . .”

Dee winked.

“Then you told me to cut it off. My hair.”

“That’s right. But you wouldn’t.”

“No.” Luce closed her eyes as the cool mist of a cloud washed over her, its condensation tickling her skin. She was suddenly inexplicably sad. “I wouldn’t. I wasn’t ready to.”

“Well,” Dee said. “I certainly like how you’ve styled your hair since you’ve come to your senses!”

“Look.” Daniel pointed to where the cloud floor fell away like a cliff. “We’re here.”

They descended into Avignon. The sky above the town was clear, no clouds to interrupt their view. The sun cast shadows of the angels’ wings onto the small medieval village of stone buildings bordered by verdant pastures of farmland. Cows loafed below them. A tractor threaded through land.

They banked left and flew over a horse stable, breathing in the dank stench of hay and manure. They swooped low over a cathedral made from the same tawny stone as most of the buildings in the town. Tourists sipped coffees in a cheerful café. The town glowed golden in the mid-day sun.

The startled sense of arriving so quickly mingled with the feeling of time slipping through Luce’s fingers. They had been searching for the relics for four and a half days.

Half the time was up before Lucifer’s Fall would be upon them.

“That’s where we’re going.” Daniel pointed to a bridge on the outskirts that did not extend fully across the shimmering river winding through the town. It was as if half the bridge had crumbled into the water. “Pont Saint Bénézet.”

“What happened to it?” Luce asked.

Daniel glanced over his shoulder. “Remember how quiet Annabelle got when I mentioned we were coming here? She inspired the boy who built that bridge in the Middle Ages in the time when the popes lived here and not in Rome. He noticed her flying across the Rhône one day when she didn’t think anyone could see her. He built the bridge to follow her to the other side.”

“When did it collapse?”

“Slowly, over time, one arch would fall into the river.

Then another. Arriane says the boy—his name was Bénézet—had a vision for angels, but not for architecture.

Annabelle loved him. She stayed in Avignon as his muse until he died. He never married, kept apart from the rest of Avignon society. The town thought he was crazy.” Luce tried not to compare her relationship with Daniel to what Annabelle had had with Bénézet, but it was hard not to. What kind of a relationship could an angel and a mortal really have? Once all this was over, if they beat Lucifer . . . then what? Would she and Daniel go back to Georgia and be like any other couple, going out for ice cream on Fridays after a movie? Or would the whole town think she was crazy, like Bénézet?

Was it all just hopeless? What would become of them in the end? Would their love vanish like a medieval bridge’s arches?

The idea of sharing a normal life with an angel was what was crazy. She sensed that every moment Daniel flew her through the sky. And yet she loved him more each day.

They landed on the bank of the river under the shade of a weeping willow tree, sending a flock of agitated ducks flapping into the water. In broad daylight, the angels folded in their wings. Luce stood behind Daniel to watch the intricate process as his retracted into his skin.

They drew in from the center first, making a series of soft snaps as layers of muscle folded on empyreal feathers. Last came Daniel’s thin, nearly translucent wing tips, which glowed as they disappeared inside his body, leaving no trace on his specially tailored T-shirt.

They walked to the bridge, like any other tourists interested in architecture. Annabelle walked much more stiffly than normal, and Luce saw Arriane reach out and touch her hand. The sun was bright and the air smelled like lavender and river water. The bridge was made of big white stones, held up by long arches underneath.

There was a small stone chapel with a single tower attached to one side near the entrance of the bridge. It held a sign that read CHAPEL DE SAINT NICOLAS. Luce wondered where the real tourists were.

The chapel was coated with a fine, silvery dust.

They walked the bridge silently, but Luce noticed that Annabelle wasn’t the only one upset. Daniel and Roland were trembling, keeping well clear of the entrance to the chapel, and Luce remembered they were forbid- den to enter a sanctuary of God.