“I don’t know.” The girl began to weep. “He left. He just left. I don’t know where.” She looked up at Luce, tears filling her hazel eyes. “He said to tell you goodbye.”
“He can’t be gone,” Luce said under her breath. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk—
Of course they hadn’t. Daniel had known exactly what he was doing when he left. He didn’t want to tell her the whole truth. He was hiding something. What were the rules he’d mentioned? And what loophole?
Lucia’s face was flushed. Her speech was broken up by hiccups. “I know I shouldn’t be crying, but I can’t explain it.… I feel like someone has died.”
Luce recognized the feeling. They had that in common: When Daniel left, both girls were inconsolable. Luce balled up her fists, feeling angry and despondent. “Don’t be childish.”
Luce blinked, thinking at first that the girl was speaking to her, but then she realized Lucia was chiding herself. Luce straightened, holding her trembling shoulders high again, as if she were trying to recover the calm poise the nurses had shown.
“Lucia.” Luce reached for the girl, moving to embrace her.
But the girl inched away, turning from Luce to face Daniel’s empty bed. “I’m fine.” She went back to stripping the sheets. “The only thing we can control is the work we do. Nurse Fiero always says that. The rest is out of our hands.”
No. Lucia was wrong, but Luce couldn’t see how to correct her. Luce didn’t understand much, but she understood that—her life didn’t have to be out of her hands. She could shape her own destiny. Somehow. She didn’t have it all figured out yet, but she could feel a solution drawing nearer. How else would she have found herself here in the first place? How else would she have known now that it was time to move on?
In the late-morning light, a shadow stretched out from the supply closet in the corner. It looked like one she could use, but she wasn’t entirely confident of her abilities to summon. She focused on it for a moment and waited to see the place where it wobbled.
There. She watched it twitch. Fighting the disgust she still felt, she grabbed hold of it.
Across the room, Lucia’s focus was on bundling the bedsheets, on trying hard not to show that she was still crying.
Luce worked fast, drawing the Announcer into a sphere, then working it out with her fingers more quickly than she ever had before.
She held her breath, made a wish, and disappeared.
FOUR
TIME WOUNDS ALL HEELS
Daniel felt guarded and on edge as he pushed out of the Announcer.
He was unpracticed at how to quickly make sense of the new time and place, not knowing exactly where he was or what he should do. Knowing that at least one version of Luce was bound to be nearby, bound to need him.
The room was white. White sheets on the bed in front of him, white-framed window in the corner, bright white sunshine beating through the pane. For a moment, all was quiet. Then the chatter of memories rushed in.
Milan.
He was back in the hospital where she had been his nurse during the first of the mortal world wars. There, in the bed in the corner, was Traverti, his roommate from Salerno who’d stepped on a land mine on his way to the canteen. Both of Traverti’s legs had been burned and broken, but he was so charming he had all the nurses sneaking him bottles of whiskey. He’d always had a joke for Daniel. And there, on the other side of the room, was Max Porter, the Brit with the burned face, who never made a peep until he screamed and fell to pieces when they took his bandage off.
Right now, both of Daniel’s old roommates were far gone in morphine-induced afternoon naps.
In the middle of the room was the bed where he had lain after that bullet found his neck near the Piave River front. It was a stupid attack; they had walked right into it. But Daniel had only enlisted in the war because Lucia was a nurse, so it was just as well. He rubbed at the place where he’d been hit. He could feel the pain almost as if it had happened yesterday.
If Daniel had stuck around long enough to let the wound heal, the doctors would have been amazed by the absence of a scar. Today, his neck was smooth and flawless, as if he had never been shot.
Over the years, Daniel had been beaten, battered, flung over balconies, shot in the neck and the gut and the leg, tortured over hot coals, and dragged through a dozen city streets. But a close study of every inch of his skin would reveal only two small scars: two fine white lines above his shoulder blades where his wings unfurled.
All of the fallen angels acquired these scars when they took their human bodies. In a way, the scars were all any of them had to show for themselves.
Most of the others reveled in their immunity to scarring. Well, except for Arriane, but the scar on her neck was another story. But Cam and even Roland would pick the most gruesome fights with just about anyone on Earth. Of course, they never lost to mortals, but they seemed to like getting a little bit shattered on the way. In a couple of days, they knew they’d look flawless again.
For Daniel, an existence without scars was just another indication that his destiny was out of his hands. Nothing he did ever made a dent. The weight of his own futility was crushing—especially when it came to Luce.
And he suddenly remembered seeing her here, back in 1918. Luce. And he remembered fleeing the hospital.
That was the one thing that could leave a scar on Daniel—on his soul.
He’d been confused by seeing her back then, just as he was confused now. At the time, he’d thought there was no way that the mortal Lucinda should be able to do this—to run pell-mell through time, visiting her old selves. No way she should be alive at all. Now, of course, Daniel knew that something had changed with the life of Lucinda Price, but what was it? It started with her lack of covenant with Heaven, but there was more—
Why couldn’t he figure it out? He knew the rules and parameters of the curse as well as he knew anything, so how could the answer elude him—
Luce. She must have worked the change into her own past herself. The realization made his heart flutter. It must have happened during this very flight of hers through the Announcers. Of course, she must have shifted something to make all of this possible. But when? Where? How? Daniel could not interfere with any of it.
He had to find her, just as he’d always promised he would. But he also had to make sure she managed to do whatever it was she had to do, worked whatever change into her past she needed to work so that Lucinda Price—his Luce—could happen.
Maybe if he could catch up with her, he could help. He could steer her toward the moment when she changed the rules of the game for all of them. He’d just missed her in Moscow, but he would find her in this life. He just had to figure out why she had landed here. There was always a reason, something held inside, in deep folds of her memory—
Oh.
His wings burned and he felt ashamed. This life in Italy had been a dark and ugly death for her. One of the worst. He would never stop blaming himself for the horrible way she had passed out of this life.
But that was years after where Daniel stood today. This was the hospital where they’d first met, when Lucia was so young and lovely, innocent and saucy in the same breath. Here she had loved him instantly and completely. Though she was too young for Daniel to show he loved her back, he had never discouraged her affection. She used to slip her hand inside his when they strolled under the orange trees on the Piazza della Repubblica, but when he squeezed her hand, she would blush. It always made him laugh, the way she could be so bold, then suddenly turn shy. She used to tell him that she wanted to marry him someday.