Rapture

He tilted his head and swallowed, considering his words carefully.

He drew her close, and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Her heart pounded as his lips by-passed hers and came to a stop, whispering in her ear:

“Don’t let him flip you off next time.”

“You know I won’t.” She laughed.

“Ah, Daniel, a mere shadow of a true bad boy.” He pressed a hand to his heart and raised an eyebrow at her.

“Make sure he treats you well. You deserve the best of everything there is.”

For once, she didn’t want to let go of his hand. “What will you do?”

“When you’re ruined, there’s so much to choose from. Everything opens up.” He looked past her into the distant desert clouds. “I’ll play my role. I know it well. I know goodbye.”

He winked at Luce, nodded one final time at Daniel, then rolled back his shoulders, spread his tremendous golden wings, and vanished into the roiling sky.

Everyone watched until Cam’s wings were a fleck of far-off gold. When Luce lowered her eyes, they fell on Lucifer. His skin had its lovely shimmer, but his eyes were glacial. He said nothing, and it seemed he would have held her in his gaze forever if she hadn’t turned away.

She had done all she could for him. His pain was not her problem anymore.

The voice boomed from the Throne. “One more goodbye.”

Together, Luce and Daniel turned to acknowledge the Throne, but the second their eyes fell upon it, the stately figure of the woman blazed into white-hot glory, and they had to shield their eyes.

The Throne was indiscernible again, a gathering of light too brilliant to be gazed upon by angels.

“Hey, guys.” Arriane sniffed. “I think she meant for you two to say goodbye to each other.”

“Oh,” Luce said, turning to Daniel, suddenly panicked. “Right now? We have to—”

He took her hand. His wings brushed hers. He kissed the centers of her cheeks.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

“What did I tell you?”

She sifted through the million exchanges she and Daniel had ever shared—the good, the sad, the ugly. One rose above the clouds of her mind.

She was shaking. “That you will always find me.”

“Yes. Always. No matter what.”

“Daniel—”

“I can’t wait to make you the love of my mortal life.”

“But you won’t know me. You won’t remember. Everything will be different.”

He wiped away her tear with his thumb. “And you think that will stop me?”

She closed her eyes. “I love you too much to say goodbye.”

“It isn’t goodbye.” He gave her one last angelic kiss and embraced her so tightly she could hear his steady heartbeat, overlapping her own. “It’s until we meet again.”

TWENTY PERFECT STRANGERS

Seventeen Years Later

Luce clipped her dorm room key card between her teeth, craned her neck to swipe it through the lock, waited for the small electric click, and opened the door with her hip.

Her hands were full: Her collapsible yellow laundry basket was heaped with clothes, most of which had shrunk during their first dryer cycle away from home.

She dumped the clothes onto her narrow bottom bunk, amazed she’d found a way to wear so many different things in so short a span of time. The whole week of freshman orientation at Emerald College had passed in a disconcerting blur.

Nora, her new roommate, the first person outside Luce’s family to see her wearing her retainer (but it was cool because Nora had one, too), was sitting in the windowsill, painting her nails and talking on the phone.

She was always painting her nails and talking on the phone. She had a whole bookshelf devoted to nail polish bottles and had already given Luce two pedicures in the week they’d known each other.

“I’m telling you, Luce isn’t like that.” Nora waved excitedly at Luce, who leaned against the bed frame, eavesdropping. “She’s never even kissed a guy. Okay, once—Lu, what was that shrimpy kid’s name, from summer camp, the one you were telling me about—”

“Jeremy?” Luce wrinkled her nose.

“Jeremy, but it was, like, truth or dare or something.

Child’s play. So yeah—”

“Nora,” Luce said. “Is this really something you need to share with . . . who are you even talking to?”

“Just Jordan and Hailey.” She stared at Luce. “We’re on speaker. Wave!”

Nora pointed out the window at the dusky autumn evening. Their dorm was a pretty U-shaped white brick building with a small courtyard in the middle where everyone hung out all the time. But that wasn’t where Nora was pointing. Directly across from Luce and Nora’s third-floor window was another third-floor window.

The pane was up, tan legs dangled out, and two girls’ arms appeared, waving.

“Hi, Luce!” one of them shouted.

Jordan, the spunky strawberry blond from Atlanta, and Hailey, petite and always giggling, with thick black hair that fell in dark cascades around her face. They seemed nice, but why were they discussing all the boys Luce had never kissed?

College was so weird.

Before Luce had driven the nineteen hundred miles up to Emerald College with her parents a week earlier, she could have named each time she’d been outside Texas—once for a family vacation to Pikes Peak in Colo-rado, twice for regional championship swim meets in Tennessee and Oklahoma (the second year, she beat her own personal best in freestyle and took home a blue ribbon for the team), and the yearly holiday visits to her grandparents’ house in Baltimore.

Moving to Connecticut to go to college was a huge deal for Luce. Most of her friends from Plano Senior High were going to Texas schools. But Luce had always had the feeling that there was something waiting for her way out in the world, that she had to leave home to find it.

Her parents supported her—especially when she got that partial scholarship for her butterfly stroke. She’d packed her whole life into one oversized red duffel bag and filled a few boxes with sentimental favorites she couldn’t part with: the Statue of Liberty paperweight her dad had brought her back from New York; a picture of her mom with a bad haircut when she was Luce’s age; the stuffed pug that reminded her of the family dog, Mozart. The cloth along the bucket back seats of her battered Jeep was frayed, and it smelled like cherry Popsicles, and that was comforting to Luce. So was the view of the back of her parents’ heads as her father drove the speed limit for four long days up the East Coast, stopping from time to time to read historical markers and take a tour at a pretzel factory in northwestern Delaware.

There had been one moment when Luce thought about turning back. They were already two days’ drive from home, somewhere in Georgia, and her dad’s “shortcut” from their motel to the highway took them out along the coast, where the road got pebbly and the air started to stink from all the skunk grass. They were barely a third of the way up to school and already Luce missed the house she’d grown up in. She missed her dog, the kitchen where her mom made yeast rolls, and the way, in late summer, her father’s rosebushes grew up around her windowsill, filling her room with their soft scent and the promise of fresh-cut bouquets.

And that was when Luce and her parents drove past a long winding driveway with a high, foreboding gate that looked electrified, like a prison. A sign outside the gate read in bold black letters SWORD & CROSS REFORM SCHOOL.

“That’s a little ominous,” her mother chirped from the front seat, looking up from her home-remodeling magazine. “Glad you’re not going to school there, Luce!”