Torment

"Are we breaking up?" he asked, his voice weak and low. "Are we breaking up?" he asked, his voice weak and low.



"Are we even together, Daniel?"



He got to his feet and cupped her face. Before she could jerk away, she felt the heat subside from her cheeks. She closed her eyes, trying to resist the magnetic force of his touch, but it was so strong, stronger than anything else.



It erased her anger, left her identity in tatters. Who was she without him? Why did the pull toward Daniel always defeat anything that pulled her away? Reason, sensibility, self-preservation: None of them could ever compete. It must have been part of Daniel's punishment. That she was bound to him forever, like a marionette to its puppeteer. She knew she shouldn't want him with every ber of her being, but she couldn't help herself. Gazing at him, feeling his touch--the rest of the world faded into the background.



She just wished loving him didn't always have to be so hard.



"What's this business about wanting a toaster?" Daniel whispered in her ear.



"I guess I don't know what I want."



"I do." His eyes were intent, holding hers. "I want you."



"I know, but--"



"Nothing will ever change that. No matter what you hear. No matter what happens."



"But I need more than to be wanted. I need for us to be together--actually together."



"Soon. I promise. All of this is only temporary."



"So you've said." Luce saw that the moon had risen overhead. It was brilliant orange and waning, a quiet blaze. "What did you want to talk to me about?"



Daniel tucked her blond hair behind her ear, examining the lock for way too long. "School," he said with a hesitancy that made her think he was being less than truthful. "I asked Francesca to look after you, but I wanted to see for myself. Are you learning anything? Are you having an okay time?"



She felt the sudden urge to brag to him about her work with the Announcers, about her talk with Steven and the glimpses she'd had of her parents. But Daniel's face looked more eager and open than she had seen it all evening. He seemed to be trying to avoid a ght, so Luce decided to do the same.



She closed her eyes. She told him what he needed to hear. School was ne. She was ne. Daniel's lips came down on hers again, brie y, hotly, until her whole body was tingling.



"I have to go," he said at last, getting to his feet. "I shouldn't even be here, but I cannot keep myself away from you. I worry about you in every waking moment. I love you, Luce. So much it hurts."



She closed her eyes against the beat of his wings and the sting of the sand he raised in his wake.



Chapter Ten



NINE DAYS



An echoing series of whooshes and clangs cut through the song of ospreys. A long, singing note of metal scraping metal, then the clash of the thin silver blade glancing o its opponent's guard.



Francesca and Steven were ghting.



Well, no--they were fencing. A demonstration for the students who were about to stage matches of their own.



"Knowing how to wield a sword--whether it's the light foils we're using today, or something as dangerous as a cutlass--is an invaluable skill," Steven said, slicing the point of his sword through the air in short, whiplike movements. "The armies of Heaven and Hell rarely engage in battle, but when they do"--without looking, he snapped his blade sideways toward Francesca, and without looking, she brought her sword up and parried the blow--"they remain untouched by modern warfare. Daggers, bows and bolts, giant aming swords, these are our eternal tools."



The duel that followed was for show, merely a lesson; Francesca and Steven weren't even wearing masks.



It was late in the morning on Wednesday, and Luce was seated on the deck's wide bench between Jasmine and Miles. The entire class, including their two teachers, had changed out of their regular clothes into the white out ts fencers always wore. Half the class held black mesh face masks in their hands. Luce had arrived at the supply closet just after the last face mask had been snagged, which hadn't bothered her at all. She was hoping to avoid the embarrassment of having the entire class witness her cluelessness: It was obvious from the way the others were making lunges at the sides of the deck that they had been through these practices before.



"The idea is to present as small a target for your opponent as possible," Francesca explained to the circle of students surrounding her. "So you set your weight on one foot and lead with your sword foot, and then rock back and forth--into striking range and then away."



She and Steven were suddenly engaged in a rush of jabs and parries, making a dense clatter as they expertly fought o each other's blows. When her blade glanced wide to the left, he lunged forward, but she rocked back, sweeping her sword up and around and onto his wrist. "Touch?," she said, laughing.



Steven turned to the class. "Touch?, of course, is French for `touched.' In fencing, we count points by touches."



"Were we ghting for real," Francesca said, "I'm afraid that Steven's hand would be lying bloody on the deck. Sorry, darling."



"Quite all right," he said. "Quite. All. Right." He threw himself sideways at her, almost seeming to rise o the ground. In the frenzy that followed, Luce lost track of Steven's sword as it crisscrossed through the air again and again, nearly slicing into Francesca, who ducked sideways just in time and resurfaced behind him.



But he was ready for her and knocked her blade away before dropping the point of his and striking out at her instep.



"I'm afraid you, my dear, have gotten o on the wrong foot."



"We'll see." Francesca raised a hand and smoothed her hair, the two of them staring at each other with murderous intensity.



Each new round of violent play caused Luce to tense up in alarm. She was used to being jittery, but the rest of the class was also surprisingly jittery today. Jittery with excitement. Watching Francesca and Steven, not one of them could keep still.



Until today, she'd wondered why none of the other Nephilim played on any of Shoreline's varsity sports teams. Jasmine had scrunched up her nose when Luce asked whether she and Dawn were interested in swim team tryouts in the gym. In fact, until she'd overheard Lilith in the locker room this morning yawning that every sport except fencing was "exquisitely boring," Luce had gured the Nephilim just weren't athletic. But that wasn't it at all. They just chose carefully what to play.



Luce winced as she imagined Lilith, who knew the French translation for all the fencing terms Luce didn't even know in English, throwing her svelte, spiteful self into an attack. If the rest of the class were one-tenth as skilled as Francesca and Steven, Luce was going to end up a pile of body parts by the end of the session.



Her teachers were obvious experts, stepping lithely in and out of lunges. Sunlight glinted o their swords, o their white padded vests. Francesca's thick blond waves cascaded out in a gorgeous halo around her shoulders as she spun around Steven. Their feet wove patterns on the deck with such grace, the match looked almost like a dance.



The expressions on their faces were dogged and full of a brutal determination to win. After those rst few touches, they were evenly matched. They must have been getting tired. They'd been fencing for more than ten minutes without a hit. They began to fence so quickly that the arcs of their blades all but disappeared; there were only a ne fury and a faint buzz in the air and the constant crack of their foils against one another.



Sparks began to y each time their swords connected. Sparks of love or hatred? There were moments when it almost looked like both.



And that unnerved Luce. Because love and hate were supposed to stand cleanly on opposite sides of the spectrum. The pision seemed as clear as ... well, angels and demons would once have seemed to her. Not anymore. As she watched her teachers in awe and fear, memories of last night's argument with Daniel fenced through her mind. And her own feelings of love and hate--or if not quite hate, a building fury--knotted up within her.



A cheer rang out from her classmates. It felt like Luce had only blinked, but she had missed it. The point of Francesca's sword jabbed into Steven's chest. Close to the heart. She pressed against him to the point where her thin blade bent into an arc. Both of them stood still for a moment, looking each other in the eye. Luce couldn't tell whether this, too, was part of the show.



"Right through my heart," Steven said.



"As if you had one," Francesca whispered.



The two teachers seemed momentarily unaware that the deck was full of students.



"Another win for Francesca," Jasmine said. She tipped her head toward Luce and dropped her voice. "She comes from a long line of winners. Steven? Not so much." The comment seemed loaded, but Jasmine just bounded lightly o the bench, slid her mask over her face, and tightened her ponytail. Ready to go. ponytail. Ready to go.



As the other students started bustling around her, Luce tried to picture a similar scene between her and Daniel: Luce taking the upper hand, holding him at the mercy of her sword as Francesca had Steven. It was, frankly, impossible to imagine. And that bothered Luce. Not because she wanted to lord it over Daniel, but because she didn't want to be the one ruled over either. The night before, she'd been too much at his mercy. Remembering that kiss made her anxious, ushed, and overwhelmed--and not in a good way.



She loved him. But.



She should have been able to think the phrase without tacking on that ugly little conjunction. But she couldn't. What they had right now was not what she wanted. And if the rules of the game were always going to stay this way, she just didn't know if she even wanted to play. What kind of match was she for Daniel? What kind of match was he for her? If he'd been drawn to other girls ... at some point he must have wondered, too. Could someone else give them each a more level playing eld?



When Daniel kissed her, Luce knew in her bones that he was her past. Folded into his embrace, she was desperate for him to remain her present. But the second their lips parted, she couldn't really be sure he was her future. She needed the freedom to make that decision one way or the other. She didn't even know what else was out there.



"Miles," Steven called. He was fully back in teacher mode, sheathing his sword in a narrow black leather case and nodding to the northwest corner of the deck. "You'll match with Roland over here."



On her left, Miles leaned in to whisper, "You and Roland go back a ways--what's his Achilles heel? I am not going to lose to the new kid."



"Um ... I don't really ..." Luce's mind went blank. Looking over at Roland, whose mask already covered his face, she realized how very little she really knew about him. Other than his catalog of black-market goods. And his harmonica playing. And the way he'd made Daniel laugh so hard that rst day at Sword & Cross. She'd still never found out what they'd been talking about ... or what Roland was really doing at Shoreline anyway. When it came to Mr. Sparks, Luce was de nitely in the dark.



Miles patted her knee. "Luce, I was kidding. There's no way that guy's not going to kick my ass." He stood up, laughing. "Wish me luck."



Francesca had moved to the other side of the deck, near the entrance to the lodge, and was sipping a bottle of water. "Kristy and Millicent, take this corner," she told two Nephilim girls with pigtails and matching black sneakers. "Shelby and Dawn, come match right here." She gestured to the corner of the deck directly in front of Luce. "The rest of you will watch."