"You picked a fine time to come back," he said. He smiled, but his smile was weighed down with worry. His eyes kept looking beyond her, into the sky.
"You see it, too?" she asked.
Daniel just looked at her, unable to respond. His lip quivered.
"Of course you do," she whispered, because everything was coming together. The shadows, his story, their past. A choking cry welled up inside her. "How can you love me?" she sobbed. "How can you even stand me?"
He took her face in his hand. "What are you talking about? How can you say that?"
Her heart burned from racing so fast.
"Because…" She swallowed. "You're an angel."
His arms went slack. "What did you say?"
"You're an angel, Daniel, I know it," she said, feeling floodgates open within her, wider and wider until it all just tumbled out. "Don't tell me I'm crazy. I have dreams about you, dreams that are too real to forget, dreams that made me love you before you ever said one nice thing to me." Daniel's eyes didn't change at all. "Dreams where you have wings and you hold me high up in a sky I don't recognize, and yet I know I've been there, just like that, in your arms a thousand times before." She touched her forehead to his. "It explains so much—how graceful you are when you move, and the book your ancestor wrote. Why no one came to visit you on Parents' Day. The way your body seems to float when you swim. And why, when you kiss me, I feel like I've gone to Heaven." She stopped to catch her breath. "And why you can live forever. The only thing it doesn't explain is what on earth you're doing with me. Because I'm just… me." She looked up at the sky again, feeling the black spell of the shadows. "And I'm guilty of so much."
The color was gone from his face. And Luce could draw only one conclusion. "You don't understand why, either," she said.
"I don't understand what you're still doing here."
She blinked and nodded miserably, then began to turn away.
"No!" He pulled her back. "Don't leave. It's just that you've never—we've never… gotten this far." He closed his eyes. "Will you say it again?" he asked, almost shyly. "Will you tell me… what I am?"
"You're an angel," she repeated slowly, surprised to see Daniel close his eyes and moan in pleasure, almost as if they were kissing. "I'm in love with an angel." Now she was the one who wanted to close her eyes and moan. She tilted her head. "But in my dreams, your wings—"
A hot, howling wind swept sideways over them, practically swatting Luce out of Daniel's arms. He shielded her body with his. The cloud of shadow-locusts had settled in the canopy of a tree beyond the cemetery and had been making sizzling noises in the branches. Now they rose up in one great mass.
"Oh God," Luce whispered. "I have to do something. I have to stop it—"
"Luce." Daniel stroked her cheek. "Look at me. You have done nothing wrong. And there's nothing you can do about" — he pointed—"that." He shook his head. "Why would you ever think you were guilty?"
"Because," she said, "my whole life, I've been seeing these shadows—"
"I should have done something when I realized that, last week at the lake. It's the first lifetime when you've seen them—and it scared me."
"How can you know it's not my fault?" she asked, thinking of Todd and of Trevor. The shadows always came to her just before something awful happened.
He kissed her hair. "The shadows you see are called Announcers. They look bad, but they can't hurt you. All they do is scope out a situation and report back to someone else. Gossips. The demonic version of a clique of high school girls."
"But what about those?" She pointed at the trees that lined the perimeter of the cemetery. Their branches were waving, weighed down by the thick, oozing blackness.
Daniel looked out with a calm stare. "Those are the shadows the Announcers have summoned. To battle."
Luce's arms and legs went cold with fear. "What… um… what kind of battle is that?"
"The big one," he said simply, raising his chin. "But they're just showing off right now. We still have time."
Behind them a tiny cough made Luce jump. Daniel bowed in greeting to Miss Sophia, who was standing in the shadow of the mausoleum. Her hair had come loose from its pins and looked wild and unruly, like her eyes. Then someone else stepped forward from behind Miss Sophia. Penn. Her hands were stuffed into the pockets of her jacket. Her face was still red, and her hairline was damp with sweat. She shrugged at Luce as if to say I don't know what the heck is going on, but I couldn't just abandon you. Despite herself, Luce smiled.
Miss Sophia stepped forward and raised the book. "Our Lucinda has been doing her research."
Daniel rubbed his jaw. "You've been reading that old thing? Never should have written it." He sounded almost bashful—but Luce slid one more piece of their puzzle into place.
"You wrote that," she said. "And sketched in the margins. And pasted in that photograph of us."
"You found the photograph," Daniel said, smiling, holding her closer as if the mention of the picture brought back a rush of memories. "Of course."
"It took me a while to understand, but when I saw how happy we were, something opened up inside me. And I knew."
She wrapped a hand around his neck and pulled his face to hers, not even caring that Miss Sophia and Penn were right there. When Daniel's lips touched hers, the whole dark, horrid cemetery disappeared—the worn graves, too, and the pockets of shadows rooting around in the trees; even the moon and the stars above.
The first time she'd seen the Helston picture, it had scared her. The idea of all those past versions of herself existing—it was just too much to take in. But now, in Daniel's arms, she could feel all of them somehow working together, a vast consortium of Luces who'd loved the same Daniel over and over and over again. So much love—it spilled out of her heart and her soul, pouring off her body and filling the space between them.
And she at last heard what he had said when they were looking at the shadows: that she had done nothing wrong. That there was no reason to feel guilty. Could it be true? Was she innocent of Trevor's death, of Todd's, as she'd always believed? The moment she asked herself, she knew that Daniel had told her the truth. And she felt like she was waking from a long bad dream. She no longer felt like the girl with the shorn hair and the baggy black clothes, no longer the eternal screw-up, afraid of the putrid cemetery, and stuck in reform school for good reason.
"Daniel," she said, gently pushing his shoulders back so she could look at him. "Why didn't you tell me sooner that you were an angel? Why all that talk about being damned?"
Daniel eyed her nervously.
"I'm not mad." She reassured him. "Only wondering."
"I couldn't tell you," he said. "It's all wrapped up together. Until now, I didn't even know that you could discover it on your own. If I told you too quickly or at the wrong time, you'd be gone again and I would have to wait. I've already had to wait so long."
"How long?" Luce asked.
"Not so long that I've forgotten that you're worth everything. Every sacrifice. Every pain." Daniel closed his eyes for a moment. Then he looked over at Penn and Miss Sophia.
Penn was seated with her back against a mossy black tombstone. Her knees were curled up to her chin and she was chewing avidly on her fingernails. Miss Sophia had her hands on her hips. She looked like she had something to say.
Daniel stepped back, and Luce felt a rush of cool air waft between them. "I'm still afraid that any minute you could—"