Rapture

Heaven dimmed when God left it. Lucinda felt cold and useless. It was then, she remembered, that the angels began to see one another differently, to notice the varia-tions in color among their wings. Some began to gossip that God had wearied of them and their harmonizing songs of praise. Some said that humans would soon take the angels’ place.



Lucinda remembered reclining in her silver seat next to the Throne. She remembered noticing how simple and dull it looked without God’s animating presence.



She tried to adore her Creator from afar, but she couldn’t replace her loneliness. Adoration in God’s presence was what she had been designed for and all she felt now was a hole. What could she do?



She looked down from her chair and saw an angel roaming the cloudsoil. He looked lethargic, melancholy.



He seemed to feel her gaze on him and looked up. When their eyes met, he smiled. She remembered how beautiful he’d been before God had gone away. . . .



They did not think. They reached for one another.



Their souls entwined.



Daniel, Luce thought. But she couldn’t be sure. The Meadow had been dim and her memory was foggy. . . .



Was this the moment of their first connection?



Flash.



The Meadow was bright white again. Time had passed; God had returned. The Throne blazed with sub-lime glory. Lucinda no longer sat upon her rippling silver chair beside the Throne. She was crammed into the Meadow with the full host of angels, being asked to choose something.



The Roll Call. Lucinda had been there, too. Of course she had. She felt hot and nervous without knowing why.



Her body flushed the way it used to when she was inside a past self and on the brink of dying. She could not still her trembling wings.



She had chosen—



Her stomach dropped. The air felt thin. She was . . . falling. Luce blinked and saw the sun clipping the mountains and she knew that she was back in the present, back in Troy. And falling from the sky, twenty feet . . . forty.



Her arms flailed, as if she were a mere girl again, as if she couldn’t fly.



She spread her wings, but it was too late.



She landed with a soft thump in Daniel’s arms. Her friends surrounded her on the grassy plain. Everything was just as it had been before: flat-topped cedar trees around a muddy, fallow farm; abandoned hut in the middle of barren expanse; purple hills; butterflies. Faces of fallen angels watching over her, filled with concern.



“Are you all right?” Daniel asked.



Her heart was still racing. Why couldn’t she remember what had happened at the Roll Call? Maybe it wouldn’t help them stop Lucifer, but Luce desperately wanted to know.



“I came so close,” she said. “I almost understood what happened.”



Daniel set her softly on the ground and kissed her.



“You will get there, Luce. I know you will.” It was dusk on the eighth day of their journey. As the sun slipped over the Dardanelles, casting gold light on the sloping fallow fields, Luce wished there was a way to draw it backward.



What if one day wasn’t enough time?



Luce hunched and unhunched her shoulders. She wasn’t used to the weight of her wings, light as rose petals in the sky, but heavy as lead curtains when her feet were on the ground.



When her wings first unfurled, they’d torn through her T-shirt and the khaki army jacket. The clothes lay on the grass in shreds, strange proof. Annabelle had quickly emerged from the hut with an extra T-shirt. It was electric blue with a silk-screened image of Marlene Dietrich on the chest, subtle wing slits tailored into the back.



“Instead of thinking of all that you don’t yet remember,” Francesca said, “recognize what you have come to know.”



“Well.” Luce paced the meadow, feeling the new sensation of her wings bobbing behind her. “I know that the curse prevented me from knowing my true nature as an angel, caused me to die whenever I began to approach a memory of my past. That’s why none of you could tell me who I was.”



“You had to walk that lonesome valley by yourself,” Cam said.



“And the reason it took you until this lifetime was also part of your curse,” Daniel said.



“This time I was raised without one specific religion, without a single set of rules determining my destiny, which allows me to”—Luce paused, thinking back to the Roll Call—“choose for myself.”



“Not everyone has that luxury.” Phil spoke up from the line of Outcasts.



“That’s why the Outcasts wanted me?” she asked, knowing suddenly it was true. “But haven’t I already chosen Daniel? I couldn’t remember before, but when Dee gave me her gift of knowledge, it seemed like”—she reached for Daniel—“the choice was always already there inside of me.”



“You know who you are now, Luce,” Daniel said.



“You know what matters to you. Nothing should be beyond your grasp.”



Daniel’s words seeped into her. This was what she was now—it was what she always had been.



Her gaze moved to where the Outcasts stood at a distance from the group. Luce didn’t know how much they could have seen of her transformation, whether their blind eyes could perceive a soul’s metamorphosis.



She watched for a sign in Olianna, the female Outcast who’d guarded Luce on the rooftop in Vienna. But as she stared at Olianna, she realized Olianna had also . . . changed.



“I remember you,” Luce said, walking closer to the thin blond girl with the cavernous white eyes. She knew her, from Heaven. “Olianna, you were one of the Twelve Angels of the Zodiac. You ruled over Leo.” Olianna took a deep shuddering breath and nodded.



“Yes.”



“And you, Phresia. You were a Luminary.” Luce closed her eyes, remembering. “Weren’t you one of the Four who emanated from Divine Will? I remember your wings. They were”—she halted, feeling her expression darken at the sight of the drab brown wings the girl bore now—“exceptional.”



Phresia straightened her slumped shoulders, raised her pale gaunt face. “No one has truly seen me in ages.” Vincent, the youngest-looking of the Outcasts, stepped forward. “And me, Lucinda Price? Do you remember me?”



Luce reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder, remembering how deathly sick he’d looked after the Scale had tortured him. Then she remembered something deeper than that. “You are Vincent, Angel of the North Wind.”



Vincent’s blind eyes clouded, as if his soul wanted to cry but his body refused.



“Phil,” Luce said, gazing finally at the Outcast she’d feared so much when he came for her in her parents’



backyard. His lips were taut and white, nervous. “One of Monday’s Angels, weren’t you? Instilled with the Powers of the Moon.”



“Thank you, Lucinda Price.” Phil bowed haltingly, but graciously. “The Outcasts confess, we were wrong to try to take you away from your soul mate and your obligations. But we knew, as you have just proven, that you alone could see us for who we used to be. And that you alone could restore us to our glory.”



“Yes,” she said. “I can see you.”



“The Outcasts can see you, too,” Phil said. “You are radiant.”



“Yes, she is.”



Daniel.



She turned to him. His blond hair and violet eyes, the strong cut of his shoulders, the full lips that had brought her back to life a thousand times. They had loved each other even longer than Luce had realized. Their love had been strong since the early days of Heaven. Their relationship spanned the entire story of existence. She knew where she’d first met Daniel on Earth—right here, on the singed fields of Troy while the angels were falling—



but there was an earlier story. A different beginning to their love.



When? How had it happened?



She searched for the answer in his eyes—but she knew she wouldn’t find it there. She had to look back in her own soul. She closed her eyes.



The memories came easier now, as if her spreading wings had sent a web of fissures breaking through the wall between the girl Lucinda and the angel she had been before. Whatever separated her from her past was fragile now, as thin and brittle as an eggshell.



Flash.



Back on the Meadow, astride her silver ledge, aching for God to return. Luce was looking down at the fair-haired angel, the one she’d already remembered reaching for. She remembered his slow, sad steps on the cloudsoil. The crown of his head before he looked up.



Heaven was quiet then. Luce and the angel were alone for a rare moment, away from the harmony of others.



He turned to look up at Lucinda. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, and blue eyes the color of ice.



They crinkled when he smiled at her. She did not recognize him.



No, that wasn’t it—she recognized him, knew him.



Long before, Lucinda had loved this angel.



But he wasn’t Daniel.



Without knowing why, Luce wanted to spin away from this memory, to pretend she hadn’t seen it, to blink back and be with Daniel on the rocky plains of Troy. But her soul was welded to the scene. She could not turn away from this angel who was not Daniel.



He reached for her. Their wings entwined. He whispered in her ear:



“Our love is endless. There can be nothing else.” No.



At last, she jolted from the memory. Back at Troy.



Out of breath. Her eyes must have betrayed her. She felt wild and panicked.



“What did you see?” Annabelle whispered.



Luce’s mouth opened but no words came.



I betrayed him. Whoever he was. There was someone before Daniel, and I—



“It’s not over yet.” Finally, she found her voice. “The curse. Even though I know who I am and I know that I choose Daniel, there’s something else, isn’t there? Someone else. He’s the one who cursed me.” Daniel ran his fingers very lightly over the shining border of her wings. She shivered, because every touch against her wings burned with the passion of a deep kiss and ignited something deep inside her. Finally she knew the pleasure she brought to him when she let her hands glide over his. “You have come so very far, Lucinda. But there is still a ways to go. Search your past. You already know what you are looking for. Find it.” She closed her eyes, searching again through millennia of fraught memories.



The Earth drew away beneath her feet. A maze of colors blurred around her, and her heart hammered in her chest, and everything went white.



Heaven again.



It was bright with God’s return to the Throne. The sky shone the color of an opal. The cloudsoil was thick that day, tufts of white reaching nearly to the angels’



waists. Those towering white spires to the right were trees in the Grove of Life; the silvery blossoms in full bloom to the left would soon bear the fruits of the Orchard of Knowledge. The trees were taller now. They’d had time to grow since Luce’s last recollection.



She was back in the Meadow, in the center of a great, flickering congregation of light. The angels in Heaven were gathered before the Throne, which was restored to the brightness so intense Lucinda cringed to look at it.



The silver ledge that had once been Lucifer’s had now been moved to the far end of the Meadow. It had been lowered to an insulting level by the Throne. Between Lucifer and the Throne the rest of the angels were united in a single mass—but soon, Lucinda realized, they would be partitioned off to one side or the other.