The Fallen Sequence (50 page)

Following the flow of other kids, Luce entered the classroom. It was broad and had three shallow risers, with desks on them, that led down to a couple of long tables. Most of the light came in through skylights. The natural lighting and high ceilings made the room seem even bigger than it was. An ocean breeze blew in through the open doors and kept the air comfortable and fresh. It could not have been more different from Sword & Cross. Luce thought she could almost have liked Shoreline, if it hadn’t been for the fact that her whole reason for being here—the most important person in her life—was missing. She wondered if Daniel was thinking about her. Did he miss her the way she missed him?

Luce chose a desk close to the windows, between Jasmine and a cute boy-next-door kind of guy who was wearing cutoffs, a Dodgers cap, and a navy sweatshirt. A few girls stood clustered near the door to the bathroom. One of them had curly hair and boxy purple glasses. When Luce saw the girl’s profile, she nearly bolted from her seat.

Penn
.

But when the girl turned toward Luce, her face was a little squarer and her clothes were a little tighter and her laugh was a little louder and Luce almost felt like her heart was wilting. Of course it wasn’t Penn. It never would be, ever again.

Luce could feel the other kids glancing at her—some of them outright stared. The only one who didn’t was Shelby, who gave Luce an acknowledging nod.

It wasn’t a huge class, just twenty desks arranged on the risers, facing the two long mahogany tables at the front. There were two dry-erase white boards behind the tables. Two bookshelves on either side. Two trash cans. Two desk lamps. Two laptops, one on each table. And the two teachers, Steven and Francesca, huddled near the front of the room, whispering.

In a move Luce wasn’t expecting, they turned and stared at her too, then glided to the tables. Francesca sat on top of one, with one leg tucked beneath her and one of her high heels skimming the wood floor. Steven
leaned against the other table, opened a heavy maroon leather portfolio, and rested his pen between his lips. For an older man, he was good-looking, sure, but Luce almost wished he weren’t. He reminded her of Cam, and of how deceptive a demon’s charm could be.

She waited for the rest of the class to take out textbooks she didn’t have, to plunge into some reading assignment she’d be behind on, so she could surrender to feeling overwhelmed and just daydream about Daniel.

But none of that happened. And most of the kids were still sneaking glances at her.

“By now you must all have noticed that we’re welcoming a new student.” Francesca’s voice was low and honey-thick, like a jazz singer’s.

Steven smiled, showing a flash of brilliant white teeth. “Tell us, Luce, how are you liking Shoreline so far?”

The color drained from Luce’s face as the other students’ desks made scraping sounds on the floor. They were actually turning in their seats to focus on her.

She could feel her heart race and her palms grow damp. She shrank in her seat, wishing she were just a normal kid at a normal school back home in normal Thunderbolt, Georgia. At times over the past few days, she’d wished she’d never seen a shadow, never gotten into the kind of trouble that left her dear friends dead, or got her involved with Cam, or made it impossible for
Daniel to be near her. But there was where her anxious, tumbling mind always came to a full stop: How to be normal and still have Daniel? Who was so very far from normal. It was impossible. So here she was, sucking it up.

“I guess I’m still getting used to Shoreline.” Her voice wobbled, betraying her, echoing off the sloped ceiling. “But it seems all right so far.”

Steven laughed. “Well, Francesca and I thought to help you get used to it, we’d change gears from our usual Tuesday-morning student presentations—”

From across the room, Shelby hooted, “Yes!” and Luce noticed that she had a stack of notecards on her desk and a big poster at her feet that read
APPARITIONS AIN’T SO BAD
. So Luce had just gotten her out of a presentation. That had to be worth something in roommate points.

“What Steven means,” Francesca chimed in, “is that we’re going to play a game, as an icebreaker.” She slid down from her table and walked around the room, heels clicking as she distributed a sheet of paper to each student.

Luce expected the chorus of groans that those words usually evoked from a classroom of teens. But these kids all seemed so agreeable and well-adjusted. They were actually just going to go with the flow.

When she laid the sheet on Luce’s desk, Francesca
said, “This should give you an idea of who some of your classmates are, and what goals we work toward in this class.”

Luce looked down at the paper. Lines had been drawn on the page, dividing it into twenty boxes. Each box contained a phrase. It was a game she’d played before, once at summer camp in western Georgia as a little kid, and again a couple of times in her classes at Dover. The object was to go around the room and match a different student with each phrase. Mostly, she was relieved; there were definitely more embarrassing icebreakers out there. But when she looked more closely at the phrases—expecting normal things like “Has a pet turtle” or “Wants to go skydiving someday”—she was a little unnerved to see things like “Speaks more than eighteen languages” and “Has visited the outerworld.”

It was about to be painfully obvious that Luce was the only non-Nephilim in the class. She thought back to the nervous waiter who had brought her and Shelby their breakfast. Maybe Luce would be more comfortable among the scholarship kids. Beaker Brady didn’t even know he’d dodged a bullet.

“If no one has questions,” Steven said from the front of the room, “you’re welcome to begin.”

“Go outside, enjoy yourselves,” Francesca added. “Take all the time you need.”

Luce followed the rest of the students onto the deck.
As they walked toward the railing, Jasmine leaned over Luce’s shoulder, pointing a green-lacquered fingernail at one of the boxes. “I have a relative who’s a full-blooded cherub,” she said. “Crazy old Uncle Carlos.”

Luce nodded, like she knew what that meant, and jotted in Jasmine’s name.

“Ooh, and I can levitate,” Dawn chirped, pointing to the top left corner of Luce’s page. “Not, like, a hundred percent of the time, but usually after I’ve had my coffee.”

“Wow.” Luce tried not to stare—it didn’t seem like Dawn was making a joke. She could
levitate?

Trying not to show that she was feeling more and more inadequate, Luce searched the page for something, anything she knew anything about.

Has experience summoning the Announcers
.

The shadows. Daniel had told her the proper name for them that last night at Sword & Cross. Though she’d never actually “summoned” them—they’d always just shown up—Luce did have some experience.

“You can write me in there.” She pointed to the bottom left corner of the paper. Both Jasmine and Dawn looked up at her, a little awed but not disbelieving, before moving on to fill in the rest of their sheets. Luce’s heart slowed down a little. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad.

In the next few minutes she met Lilith, a prim redhead
who was one of three Nephilim triplets (“You can tell us apart by our vestigial tails,” she explained. “Mine’s curly”); Oliver, a deep-voiced, squat boy who had visited the outerworld on summer vacation last year (“So totally overrated I can’t even begin to tell you”); and Jack, who felt like he was on the cusp of being able to read minds and thought it would be all right if Luce wrote him down for that. (“I sense that you’re okay with that, am I right?” He made a gun out of his fingers and clicked his tongue.) She had three boxes left when Shelby tugged the paper out of her hands.

“I can do both of these,” she said, pointing at two of the boxes. “Which one do you want me for?”

Speaks more than eighteen languages
or
Has glimpsed a past life
.

“Wait a minute,” Luce whispered. “You’ve … you can glimpse past lives?”

Shelby waggled her eyebrows at Luce and dashed her signature into the box, adding her name in the “eighteen languages” box for good measure. Luce stared at the paper, thinking about all her own past lives and how frustratingly off-limits they were to her. She had underestimated Shelby.

But her roommate was already gone. Standing in Shelby’s place was the boy she’d sat next to inside the classroom. He was a good half foot taller than Luce, with a bright, friendly smile, a splash of freckles on his
nose, and clear blue eyes. Something about him, even the way he was chewing on his pen, looked … sturdy. Luce realized this was a strange word to describe someone she’d never spoken to, but she couldn’t help it.

“Oh, thank God.” He laughed, smacking his forehead. “The one thing I can do is the one thing you have left.”

“ ‘Can reflect a mirror image of self or others’?” Luce read slowly.

He tossed his head from side to side and wrote his name in the box. Miles Fisher. “Real impressive to someone like you, I’m sure.”

“Um. Yeah.” Luce turned away. Someone like her, who didn’t even know what that meant.

“Wait, hey, where are you going?” He tugged her sleeve. “Uh-oh. You didn’t catch the self-effacing joke?” When she shook her head, Miles’s face fell. “I just meant, compared to everyone else in the class, I’m barely hanging on. The only person I’ve ever been able to reflect other than myself was my mom. Freaked my dad out for about ten seconds, but then it faded.”

“Wait.” Luce blinked at Miles. “You made a mirror image of your mother?”

“By accident. They say it’s easy to do with the people you, like, love.” He blushed, the faintest rosy pink across his cheekbones. “Now you’re going to think I’m some kind of mama’s boy. I just mean ‘easy’ is about where my powers end. Whereas you—you’re the famous
Lucinda Price.” He waved his hands in a very masculine version of spirit fingers.

“I wish everyone would stop saying that,” she snapped. Then, feeling rude, she sighed and leaned against the deck’s railing to look out at the water. It was just so hard to process all these hints that other people here knew more about her than she knew about herself. She didn’t mean to take it out on this guy. “I’m sorry, it’s just, I thought I was the only one barely hanging on. What’s your story?”

“Oh, I’m what they call ‘diluted,’ ” he said, making exaggerated air quotes. “Mom has angel in her blood a few generations back, but all my other relatives are mortal. My powers are embarrassingly low-grade. But I’m here because my parents endowed the school with, um, this deck you’re standing on.”

“Whoa.”

“It’s really not impressive. My family’s obsessed with me being at Shoreline. You should hear the pressure I get at home to date a ‘nice Nephilim girl for once.’ ” Luce laughed—one of the first real laughs she’d had in days. Miles rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “So, I saw you having breakfast with Shelby this morning. She your roommate?”

Luce nodded. “Speaking of nice Nephilim girls,” she joked.

“Well, I know she’s kind of, um …” Miles hissed and made a clawing motion with one hand, causing Luce
to crack up again. “Anyway, I’m not the star student here or anything, but I’ve been around a while, and half the time I still think this place is pretty crazy. So if you ever want to have a very normal breakfast or something—”

Luce found herself bobbing her head.
Normal
. Music to her mortal ears.

“Like … tomorrow?” Miles asked.

“That sounds great.”

Miles grinned and waved goodbye, and Luce realized that all the other students had already gone back inside. Alone for the first time all morning, she looked down at the sheet of paper in her hand, unsure how to feel about the other kids at Shoreline. She missed Daniel, who could have decoded a lot of this for her if only he hadn’t been—where
was
he, anyway? She didn’t even know.

Too far away.

She pressed a finger to her lips, remembering his last kiss. The incredible embrace of his wings. She felt so cold without him, even in the California sunshine. But she was here because of him, accepted into this class of angels or whatever they were—complete with her bizarre new reputation—all thanks to him. In a weird way, it felt good to be connected to Daniel so inextricably.

Until he came for her, it was all she had to hold on to.

THREE

SIXTEEN DAYS

“O
kay, hit me, what’s the weirdest thing about Shoreline so far?”

It was Wednesday morning before class, and Luce was seated at a sunny breakfast table on the terrace, sharing a pot of tea with Miles. He was wearing a vintage yellow T-shirt with a Sunkist logo on it, a baseball cap pulled down just above his blue eyes, flip-flops, and frayed jeans. Feeling inspired by the very relaxed dress code at Shoreline, Luce had swapped out her standard
black getup. She was wearing a red sundress with a short white cardigan, which felt kind of like the first day of sunshine after a long stretch of rain.

She dropped a spoonful of sugar into her cup and laughed. “I don’t even know where to start. Maybe my roommate, who I think snuck in just before sunrise this morning and was gone again before I woke up. No, wait, it’s taking a class taught by a demon-and-angel couple. Or”—she swallowed—“the way kids here look at me like I’m some legendary freak. Anonymous freak, I got used to. But notorious freak—”