Rapture

Flames spread through its branches as if they were matches in a box. Luce was sweating and dizzy from the heat searing through the Patina, but even as the Scale were blown back by repercussive shock waves, the group inside Dee’s small Patina did not burn.



Dee shouted, “Let’s fly!” just as a tornado of hot, flame-laden air swirled through the yard, swallowing a hundred Scale and lifting them into its blazing core, car-ouseling them across the lawn.



“Ready, Luce?” Daniel’s arms wrapped around her just as Roland’s wrapped tight around Dee. Smoke ricocheted off the walls on the outside of the Patina, but Luce was having a hard time breathing through her sore, bruised neck.



Then Daniel had lifted her off the ground. They flew straight up. Out of the corners of her eyes, Luce saw Roland’s marbled wings on the right, Annabelle and Arriane on the left. All the angels’ wings were beating so fast and hard that they wove a pure blinding brightness, straight up out of the fire and into clear blue air.



But the Patina was still open. The Scale who could still fly had some sense that they were being tricked, trapped. They tried to rise out of the blaze, but Roland sent another wave of flame washing down onto them, thrusting them back into the burning earth, singeing off their crinkled skin until they were skeletons with wings.



“Just another moment . . .” Dee’s fingertips and steady gaze manipulated the boundaries of the Patina.



Luce studied Dee, then the mess of burning Scale. She imagined the Patina cinching at the top like a cloak around a neck, sealing the Scale inside, choking them out.



“All done,” Dee shouted as Roland took her higher through the air.



Luce looked down, beneath her and Daniel’s feet, as the ground sped away from them. She saw the ugly fire blink, then shiver, and then disappear, swallowed into a smoking hidden elsewhere. The street they left below was white, and modern, and full of people who had never sensed anything at all.



The ground was miles beneath them when Luce stopped envisioning Scale wings cooking in red flames.



There was no use looking back. She could only look ahead toward the next relic, toward Cam, Gabbe, and Molly, toward Avignon.



Through gaps in the thin sheets of clouds, the terrain became rocky, dark gray, and mountainous. The winter air grew colder, sharper, and the ceaseless beat of angel wings shattered the quiet at the edges of the atmosphere.



About an hour into the flight, Roland’s marbled wings came into view a few feet below Luce and Daniel.



He carried Dee the same way Daniel carried Luce: shoulders lined up with hers, one arm wrapped over her chest, the other around her waist. Like Luce, Dee crossed her legs at the ankles, and her stiletto heels dangled precari-ously so high above the ground. Roland’s dark muscles casing Dee’s frail, older frame made the pair look almost comical as they came into and out of focus, rippling through the clouds. But the thrilled sparkle in Dee’s eyes made her seem much younger than she was. Strands of her red hair whipped across her cheek, and her scent—cold cream and roses—perfumed the air through which they flew.



“Well, I think the coast is clear,” Dee said.



Luce felt the air around her warble. Her body tensed in preparation for another timequake. But this time, it wasn’t Lucifer’s encroaching Fall causing the ripple. It was Dee, withdrawing the second Patina. A hazy boundary moved closer to Luce’s skin, then passed through her, making her shiver with an untraceable pleasure.



Then it retracted until it was a tiny orb of light around Dee. She closed her eyes and, a moment later, ab-sorbed the Patina into her skin. It was mostly invisible—



and was one of the most beautiful things Luce had ever seen.



Dee smiled and beckoned Luce nearer with a little wave. The two angels carrying them tilted their wings upward so that the ladies could talk.



Dee cupped a hand over her mouth and called to Luce over the wind. “So tell me, dear, how did you two meet?”



Luce felt Daniel’s shoulder shudder behind her with a chuckle. It was a normal question to ask two people in a happy relationship; why did it make Luce miserable?



Because the answer was needlessly complicated.



Because she didn’t even know the answer.



She pressed a hand to the locket at her neck. It bobbed against her skin as Daniel’s wings beat another strong beat. “Well, we went to the same school, and I . . .”



“Oh, Lucinda!” Dee was laughing. “I was teasing. I merely wondered whether you had uncovered the story behind your original meeting.”



“No, Dee,” Daniel said firmly. “She has not learned that yet—”



“I’ve asked, but he won’t tell me.” Luce eyed the ver-tiginous drop below, feeling as far away from the truth of that first meeting as she was from the towns lining the Adriatic Sea over which they were flying. “It drives me crazy that I don’t know.”



“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.