The Fallen Sequence (9 page)

She couldn’t figure out what was happening now. Something was different. She was terrified, yes, but she didn’t feel cold. In fact, she felt a little bit flushed. The library was warm, but it wasn’t
that
warm. And then her eyes fell on Daniel.

He was facing the window, his back to her, leaning
over a podium that said
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
in white letters. The sleeves of his worn leather jacket were pushed up around his elbows, and his blond hair glowed under the lights. His shoulders were hunched over, and yet again, Luce had an instinct to fold herself into them. She shook it from her head and stood on tiptoe to get a better look at him. From here, she couldn’t be certain, but he looked like he was drawing something.

As she watched the slight movement of his body as he sketched, Luce’s insides felt like they were burning, like she’d swallowed something hot. She couldn’t figure out why, against all reason, she had this wild premonition that Daniel was drawing her.

She
shouldn’t
go to him. After all, she didn’t even know him, had never actually spoken to him. Their only communication so far had included one middle finger and a couple of dirty looks. Yet for some reason, it felt very important to her that she find out what was on that sketchpad.

Then it hit her. The dream she’d had the night before. The briefest flash of it came back to her all of a sudden. In the dream, it had been late at night—damp and chilly, and she’d been dressed in something long and flowing. She leaned up against a curtained window in an unfamiliar room. The only other person there was a man … or a boy—she never got to see his face. He was sketching her likeness on a thick pad of paper. Her hair.
Her neck. The precise outline of her profile. She stood behind him, too afraid to let him know she was watching, too intrigued to turn away.

Luce jerked forward as she felt something pinch the back of her shoulder, then float over her head. The shadow had resurfaced. It was black and as thick as a curtain.

The pounding of her heart grew so loud that it filled her ears, blocking out the dark rustle of the shadow, blocking out the sound of her footsteps. Daniel glanced up from his work and seemed to raise his eyes to exactly where the shadow hovered, but he didn’t start the way she had.

Of course, he couldn’t see them. His focus settled calmly outside the window.

The heat inside her grew stronger. She was close enough now that she felt like he must be able to feel it coming off her skin.

As quietly as she could, Luce tried to peer over his shoulder at his sketchpad. For just a second, her mind saw the curve of her own bare neck sketched in pencil on the page. But then she blinked, and when her eyes settled back on the paper, she had to swallow hard.

It was a landscape. Daniel was drawing the view of the cemetery out the window in almost perfect detail. Luce had never seen anything that made her quite so sad.

She didn’t know why. It was crazy—even for her—to have expected her bizarre intuition to come true. There
was no reason for Daniel to draw her. She knew that. Just like she knew he’d had no reason to flip her off this morning. But he had.

“What are you doing over here?” he asked. He’d closed his sketchbook and was looking at her solemnly. His full lips were set in a straight line and his gray eyes looked dull. He didn’t look angry, for a change; he looked exhausted.

“I came to check out a book from Special Collections,” she said in a wobbly voice. But as she looked around, she quickly realized her mistake. Special Collections wasn’t a section of books—it was an open area in the library for an art display about the Civil War. She and Daniel were standing in a tiny gallery of bronze busts of war heroes, glass cases filled with old promissory notes and Confederate maps. It was the only section of the library where there wasn’t a single book to check out.

“Good luck with that,” Daniel said, opening up his sketchbook again, as if to say, preemptively,
goodbye
.

Luce was tongue-tied and embarrassed and what she would have liked to do was escape. But then, there were the shadows, still lurking nearby, and for some reason Luce felt better about them when she was next to Daniel. It made no sense—like there was anything he could do to protect her from them.

She was stuck, rooted to her spot. He glanced up at her and sighed.

“Let me ask you, do you like being sneaked up on?”

Luce thought about the shadows and what they were doing to her right now. Without thinking, she shook her head roughly.

“Okay, that makes two of us.” He cleared his throat and stared at her, driving home the point that she was the intruder.

Maybe she could explain that she was feeling a little light-headed and just needed to sit down for a minute. She started to say, “Look, can I—”

But Daniel picked up his sketchbook and got to his feet. “I came here to get away,” he said, cutting her off. “If you’re not going to leave, I will.”

He shoved his sketchbook into his backpack. When he pushed past, his shoulder brushed hers. Even as brief as the touch was, even through their layers of clothes, Luce felt a shock of static.

For a second, Daniel stood still, too. They turned their heads to look back at each other, and Luce opened her mouth. But before she could speak, Daniel had turned on his heel and was walking quickly toward the door. Luce watched as the shadows crept over his head, swirled in a circle, then rushed out the window into the night.

She shivered in the chill of their wake, and for a long time after that, stood in the special collections area, touching her shoulder where Daniel had, feeling the heat cool down.

FOUR

GRAVEYARD SHIFT

A
hhh, Tuesday.
Waffle day
. For as long as Luce could remember, summer Tuesdays meant fresh coffee, brimming bowls of raspberries and whipped cream, and an unending stack of crispy golden brown waffles. Even this summer, when her parents started acting a little scared of her, waffle day was one thing she could count on. She could roll over in bed on a Tuesday morning, and before she was aware of anything else, she knew instinctively what day it was.

Luce sniffed, slowly coming to her senses, then sniffed again with a little more gusto. No, there was no buttermilk batter, nothing but the vinegary smell of peeling paint. She rubbed the sleep away and took in her cramped dorm room. It looked like the “before” shot on a home renovation show. The long nightmare that had been Monday came back to her: the surrender of her cell phone, the meat loaf incident and Molly’s flashing eyes in the lunchroom, Daniel brushing her off in the library. What it was that made him so spiteful, Luce didn’t have a clue.

She sat up to look out the window. It was still dark; the sun hadn’t even peeked over the horizon yet. She never woke up this early. If pressed, she didn’t actually think she could remember ever having seen the sunrise. Truthfully, something about sunrise-watching as an activity had always made her nervous. It was the waiting moments, the just-before-the-sun-snapped-over-the-horizon moments, sitting in the darkness looking out across a tree line. Prime shadow time.

Luce sighed an audibly homesick, lonely sigh, which made her even more homesick and lonely. What was she going to do with herself for the three hours between the crack of dawn and her first class?
Crack of dawn
—why did the words ring in her ears? Oh. Crap. She was supposed to be at detention.

She scrambled out of bed, tripping over her still-packed
duffel bag, and yanked another boring black sweater from the top of a stack of boring black sweaters. She tugged on yesterday’s black jeans, winced as she caught a glimpse of her disastrous bed head, and tried to run her fingers through her hair as she dashed out the door.

She was out of breath when she reached the waist-high, intricately sculpted wrought iron gates of the cemetery. She was choking on the overwhelming smell of skunk cabbage and feeling far too alone with her thoughts. Where was everyone else? Was their definition of “crack of dawn” different from hers? She glanced down at her watch. It was already six-fifteen.

All they’d told her was to meet at the cemetery, and Luce was pretty sure this was the only entrance. She stood at the threshold, where the gritty asphalt of the parking lot gave way to a mangled lot full of weeds. She spotted a lone dandelion, and it crossed her mind that a younger Luce would have pounced on it and then made a wish and blown. But this Luce’s wishes felt too heavy for something so light.

The delicate gates were all that divided the cemetery from the parking lot. Pretty remarkable for a school with so much barbed wire everywhere else. Luce ran her hand along the gates, tracing the ornate floral pattern with her fingers. The gates must have dated back to the Civil War days Arriane was talking about, back when the cemetery was used to bury fallen soldiers. When the school attached
to it was not a home for wayward psychos. When the whole place was a lot less overgrown and shadowy.

It was strange—the rest of the campus was as flat as a sheet of paper, but somehow, the cemetery had a concave, bowl-like shape. From here, she could see the slope of the whole vast thing before her. Row after row of simple headstones lined the slopes like spectators at an arena.

But toward the middle, at the lowest point of the cemetery, the path through the grounds twisted into a maze of larger carved tombs, marble statues, and mausoleums. Probably for Confederate officers, or just the soldiers who came from money. They looked like they’d be beautiful up close. But from here, the sheer weight of them seemed to drag the cemetery down, almost like the whole place was being swallowed into a drain.

Footsteps behind her. Luce whirled around to see a stumpy, black-clad figure emerge from behind a tree. Penn! She had to resist the urge to throw her arms around the girl. Luce had never been so glad to see anyone—though it was hard to believe Penn ever got detentions.

“Aren’t you late?” Penn asked, stopping a few feet in front of Luce and giving her an amused you-poor-newbie shake of the head.

“I’ve been here for ten minutes,” Luce said. “Aren’t
you
the one who’s late?”

Penn smirked. “No way, I’m just an early riser. I
never get detention.” She shrugged and pushed her purple glasses up on her nose. “But you do, along with five other unfortunate souls, who are probably getting angrier by the minute waiting for you down at the monolith.” She stood on tiptoe and pointed behind Luce, toward the largest stone structure, which rose up from the middle of the deepest part of the cemetery. If Luce squinted, she could just make out a group of black figures clustered around its base.

“They just said meet at the cemetery,” Luce said, already feeling defeated. “No one told me where to go.”

“Well, I’m telling you: monolith. Now get down there,” Penn said. “You’re not going to make many friends by cutting into their morning any more than you already have.”

Luce gulped. Part of her wanted to ask Penn to show her the way. From up here, it looked like a labyrinth, and Luce did not want to get lost in the cemetery. Suddenly, she got that nervous, far-away-from-home feeling, and she knew it was only going to get worse in there. She cracked her knuckles, stalling.

“Luce?” Penn said, giving her shoulders a bit of a shove. “You’re still standing here.”

Luce tried to give Penn a brave thank-you smile, but had to settle for an awkward facial twitch. Then she hurried down the slope into the heart of the cemetery.

The sun still hadn’t risen, but it was getting closer, and these last few predawn moments were always the
ones that creeped her out the most. She tore past the rows of plain headstones. At one point they must have been upright, but by now they were so old that most of them tipped over to one side or the other, giving the whole place the look of a set of morbid dominoes.

She slopped in her black Converse sneakers through puddles of mud, crunched over dead leaves. By the time she cleared the section of simple plots and made it to the more ornate tombs, the ground had more or less flattened out, and she was totally lost. She stopped running, tried to catch her breath. Voices. If she calmed down, she could hear voices.

“Five more minutes, then I’m out,” a guy said.

“Too bad your opinion has no value, Mr. Sparks.” An ornery voice, one Luce recognized from her classes yesterday. Ms. Tross—the Albatross. After the meat loaf incident, Luce had shown up late to her class and hadn’t exactly made the most favorable impression on the dour, spherical science teacher.

“Unless anyone wants to lose his or her social privileges this week”—groans from among the tombs—“we will all wait patiently, as if we had nothing better to do, until Miss Price decides to grace us with her presence.”

“I’m here,” Luce gasped, finally rounding a giant statue of a cherub.

Ms. Tross stood with her hands on her hips, wearing a variation of yesterday’s loose black muumuu. Her thin mouse-brown hair was plastered to her scalp and her dull
brown eyes showed only annoyance at Luce’s arrival. Biology had always been tough for Luce, and so far, she wasn’t doing her grade in Ms. Tross’s class any favors.