Rapture

“Now that’s the way to start a morning.” Daniel’s fingers traced the petals of the peony behind her ear.



A slight weight suddenly tugged at her neck and when she reached up, her hands found a fine chain, which her fingers traced down to a silver locket. She held it out and looked at the red rose engraved on its face.



Her locket! It was the one Daniel had given to her on her last night at Sword & Cross. She had kept it tucked in the front cover of The Book of the Watchers during the short time she’d spent alone in the cabin, but everything about those days was blurry. The next thing she remembered was Mr. Cole rushing her to the airport to catch her flight to California. She hadn’t remembered the locket or the book until she’d arrived at Shoreline, and by then she was certain she’d lost them.



Daniel must have slipped it around her neck when she was sleeping. Her eyes teared again, this time with happiness. “Where did you—”



“Open it.” Daniel smiled.



The last time she’d held the locket, the image of a former Luce and Daniel had baffled her. Daniel said he’d tell her when the photograph had been taken the next time he saw her. That hadn’t happened. Their stolen time together in California had been mostly stressful and too brief, filled with silly arguments she couldn’t imagine having with Daniel anymore.



Luce was glad to have waited, because when she opened the locket this time and saw the tiny photograph behind its glass plate—Daniel in a bowtie and Luce with coiffed short hair—she instantly recognized what it was.



“Lucia,” she whispered. It was the young nurse Luce had encountered when she stepped through into World War I Milan. The girl had been much younger when Luce met her, sweet and a little sassy, but so genuine Luce had admired her right away.



She smiled now, remembering the way Lucia kept staring at Luce’s shorter modern haircut, and the way Lucia joked that all the soldiers had a crush on Luce. She remembered mostly that if Luce had stayed at the Italian hospital a little longer and if the circumstances had been . . . well, entirely different, the two of them could have been great friends.



She looked up at Daniel, beaming, but her expression quickly darkened. He was staring at her as if he’d been punched.



“What’s wrong?” She let go of the locket and stepped into him, wrapping her arms around his neck.



He shook his head, stunned. “I’m just not used to being able to share this with you. The look on your face when you recognized that picture? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”



Luce blushed and smiled and felt speechless and wanted to cry all at once. She understood Daniel completely.



“I’m sorry I left you alone like that,” he said. “I had to go and check something in one of Mazotta’s books in Bologna. I figured you’d need every bit of rest you could get, and you looked so beautiful asleep, I couldn’t bear to wake you up.”



“Did you find what you were looking for?” Luce asked.



“Possibly. Mazotta gave me a clue about one of the piazzas here in town. He’s mostly an art historian, but he knows his divinity better than any mortal I’ve ever met.” Luce slid down to the gondola’s low red velvet bench, which was like a love seat, with a padded black leather cushion and a high, sculpted back.



Daniel sank the oar into the water and the boat slid forward. The water was a bright pastel green, and as they glided, Luce could see the whole city reflected in the glassy wobble of its surface.



“The good news,” Daniel said, looking down at her from under the brim of his hat, “is that Mazotta thinks he knows where the artifact is located. I kept him up bickering until sunrise, but we finally matched my sketch to an interesting old photograph.”



“And?”



“As it turns out”—Daniel flicked his wrist and the gondola curved gracefully around a tight corner, then dipped under the low slant of a footbridge—“the serving tray is a halo.”



“A halo? I thought only angels on greeting cards had halos.” She cocked her head at Daniel. “Do you have a halo?”



Daniel smiled as if he found the question charming.



“Not in the golden-ring fashion, I don’t think. As far as we can tell, halos are representations of our light, in a way that mortals can comprehend. The violet light you saw around me at Sword & Cross, for example. I’m guessing Gabbe never told you stories about posing for da Vinci?”



“She did what?” Luce almost choked on her bombolini.



“He didn’t know she was an angel, of course, but according to her, Leonardo talked about the light that seemed to radiate from within her. That’s why he painted her with a halo circling her head.”



“Whoa.” Luce shook her head, astonished, as they glided past a pair of lovers in matching felt fedoras kissing in a balcony corner.



“It’s not just him. Artists have been depicting angels that way since we first fell to Earth.”



“And the halo we need to find today?”



“Another artist’s depiction.” Daniel’s face grew somber. The brass of a scratchy jazz record drifted out an open window and seemed to fill the space around the gondola, scoring Daniel’s narration. “This one is a sculpture of an angel, and much older, from the pre-classical era. So old, the artist’s identity is unknown. It’s from Anatolia and, like the rest of these artifacts, was stolen during the Second Crusade.”



“So we just go find the sculpture in a church or museum or whatever, lift the halo off the angel’s head, and sprint to Mount Sinai?” Luce asked.



Daniel’s eyes darkened for a split second. “For now, yes, that’s the plan.”



“That sounds too simple,” Luce said, noting the intri-cacies of the buildings around her—the high onion-domed windows in one, the verdant herb garden creeping out the window of another. Everything seemed to be sinking into the bright green water with a kind of serene surrender.



Daniel stared past her, the sunlit water reflecting in his eyes. “We’ll see how simple it is.” He squinted at a wooden sign farther down the block, then steered them out of the center of the canal. The gondola rocked as Daniel guided it to a stop against a brick wall crawling with vines. He grabbed hold of one of the mooring poles and knotting the gondola’s rope around it. The boat groaned and strained against its bindings.



“This is the address Mazotta gave me.” Daniel gestured at an ancient curved stone bridge that spanned between romantic and decrepit. “We’ll head up these stairs and head to the palazzo. It shouldn’t be far.” He hopped out of the gondola and onto the sidewalk, holding out his hand for Luce. She followed his lead, and together they crossed the bridge, hand in hand.



As they walked past bakery stand after bakery stand and vendors selling VENICE T-shirts, Luce couldn’t help looking around at all the other happy couples: Everyone here seemed to be kissing, laughing. She tugged the peony out from behind her ear and slipped it inside her purse. She and Daniel were on a mission, not a honeymoon, and there would never be another romantic encounter if they failed.



Their pace quickened as they turned left onto a narrow street, then right into a broad open piazza.



Daniel stopped abruptly.



“It is supposed to be here. In the square.” He looked down at the address, shaking his head in weary disbelief.



“What’s wrong?”



“The address Mazotta gave me is that church. He didn’t tell me that.” He pointed at the tall, spired Fran-ciscan building, with its triangle of stained-glass roseate windows. It was a massive, commanding chapel with a pale orange exterior and bright white trim around its windows and its large dome. “The sculpture—the halo—must be inside.”



“Okay.” Luce took a step toward the church, giving Daniel a bewildered shrug. “Let’s go in and check it out.” Daniel shifted his weight. His face suddenly looked pale. “I can’t, Luce.”



“Why not?”



Daniel’s body had stiffened with a palpable nervous-ness. His arms seemed nailed to his sides and his jaw was clenched so tightly it could have been wired. She wasn’t used to Daniel’s being anything other than confident.



This was strange behavior.



“Then you don’t know?” he asked.



Luce shook her head and Daniel sighed.



“I thought maybe at Shoreline, they might have taught you . . . the thing is, actually, if a fallen angel enters a sanctuary of God, the structure and all those inside it burst into flames.”



He finished his sentence quickly, just as a group of plaid-skirted German schoolgirls on a tour passed them in the piazza, filing toward the entrance of the church.



Luce watched as a few of them turned to look at Daniel, whispering and giggling to each other, smoothing their braids in case he happened to glance their way.



He fixed on Luce. He still seemed nervous. “It’s one of the many lesser-known details of our punishment. If a fallen angel desires to reenter the jurisdiction of the grace of God, we must approach the Throne directly.



There are no shortcuts.”



“You’re saying you’ve never set foot in a church? Not once in the thousands of years you’ve been here?” Daniel shook his head. “Or a temple, or a synagogue, or a mosque. Never. The closest I’ve come is the natato-rium at Sword & Cross. When it was desanctified and repurposed as a gym, the taboo was lifted.” He closed his eyes. “Arriane did once, very early on before she’d reallied herself with Heaven. She didn’t know any better.



The way she describes it—”



“Is that where she got the scars on her neck?” Luce touched her own neck instinctively, thinking back to her first hour at Sword & Cross: Arriane handing over a stolen Swiss Army knife, demanding that Luce give her a haircut. She hadn’t been able to take her eyes off the angel’s strange marbled scars.



“No.” Daniel looked away, uncomfortable. “That was something else.”



A group of tourists were posing with their guide in front of the entrance. In the time they had been talking, ten people had drifted into and out of the church without seeming to appreciate the building’s beauty or its import—and yet Daniel, Arriane, and a whole legion of angels could never step inside.



But Luce could.



“I’ll go. I know what the halo looks like from your sketch. If it’s in there, I’ll find it and—”



“You can enter, it’s true.” Daniel nodded curtly.



“There is no other way.”



“No problem.” Luce tried nonchalance.



“I’ll wait right here.” Daniel looked reluctant and relieved at the same time. He squeezed her hand and sat down on the raised rim of a fountain in the center of the square and explained what the halo should look like and how to remove it. “But be careful! It’s more than a thousand years old and delicate!” Behind him, a cherub spat out an unending stream of water. “If you have any trou-ble, Luce, if anything looks even remotely suspicious, run back out here and find me.”