She had learned how to do it from the best: from Daniel. Here she was, about to kill her soul, about to take away their love permanently, and five minutes alone with him brought her back to life.
Some people spent their entire lives looking for love like this.
Luce had had it all along.
The future held no starshot for her. Only Daniel. Her Daniel, the one she’d left in her parents’ backyard in Thunderbolt. She had to go.
“Kiss me,” she whispered.
He was seated on the steps with his knees parted just enough to let her body slide between them. She sank to her knees and faced him. Their foreheads were touching. The tips of their noses.
Daniel took her hands. He seemed to want to tell her something, but he could not find the words.
“Please,” she begged, her lips edging toward his. “Kiss me and set me free.”
Daniel lunged for her, swooping her up and laying her sideways across his lap to cradle her in his arms. His lips found hers. They were as sweet as nectar. She moaned as a deep current of joy flowed through her, every inch of her. Layla’s death was near, she knew that, but she never felt safer or more alive than she did when Daniel held her.
Her hands locked around the back of his neck, feeling the firm sinews of his shoulders, feeling the tiny raised scars protecting his wings. His hands roved up her back, through her long, thick hair. Every touch was rapture, every kiss so wonderful and pure it left her dizzy.
“Stay with me,” he pleaded. The muscles in his face had grown tense, and his kisses had become hungrier, more desperate.
He must have sensed Luce’s body warming. The heat rising in her core, spreading through her chest and flushing her cheeks. Tears filled her eyes. She kissed him harder. She’d been through this so many times before, but for some reason this felt different.
With a loud whoosh he stretched his wings out, and then deftly wrapped them tight around her, a cradle of soft white holding the two of them fast.
“You really believe it?” she whispered. “That someday I’ll live through this?”
“With all my heart and soul,” he said, cupping her face in his hands, pulling his wings tighter around them both. “I will wait for you as long as it takes. I will love you every moment across time.”
By then, Luce was broiling hot. She cried out from the pain, thrashing in Daniel’s arms as the heat overwhelmed her. She was burning his skin, but he never let her go.
The moment had come. The starshot was tucked inside her dress, and this—right now—was when she would have used it. But she was never going to give up. Not on Daniel. Not when she knew, no matter how hard it got, that he would never give up on her.
Her skin began to blister. The heat was so brutal, she could do nothing but shiver.
And then she could only scream.
Layla combusted, and as the flames engulfed her body, Luce felt her own body and the soul they were sharing untwine, seeking the fastest escape from the unforgiving heat. The column of fire grew taller and wider until it filled the room and the world, until it was everything, and Layla was nothing at all.
Luce expected darkness and found light.
Where was the Announcer? Could she still be inside Layla?
The fire blazed on. It did not extinguish. It spread. The flames consumed more and more of the darkness, reaching into the sky as if the great night itself were flammable, until the hot blaze of red and gold was all that Luce could see.
Every other time one of her past selves had died, Luce’s release from the flames and into the Announcer had been simultaneous. Something was different, something that was making her see things that couldn’t possibly be real.
Wings on fire.
“Daniel!” she cried out. What looked like Daniel’s wings soared through waves of flames, catching fire but not smoldering, as if they were made of fire. All she could make out were white wings and violet eyes. “Daniel?”
The fire rolled across the darkness like a giant wave across an ocean. It crashed onto an invisible shore and washed furiously over Luce, rushing up her body, over her head, and far behind her.
Then, as if someone had pinched out a candle, there was a quick hiss and everything went black.
A cold wind crept up behind her. Goose bumps spread across her skin. She hugged her body closer, drawing up her knees and realizing with a jolt of surprise that no ground held up her feet. She wasn’t flying exactly, just hovering, directionless. This darkness was not an Announcer. She had not used the starshot, but had she somehow … died?
She was afraid. She didn’t know where she was, only that she was alone.
No. There was someone else. A scraping sound. A dim gray light.
“Bill!” Luce shouted at the sight of him, so relieved she began to laugh. “Oh, thank God. I thought I was lost—I thought—Oh, never mind.” She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill my soul. I’ll find another way to break the curse. Daniel and I—we won’t give up on each other.”
Bill was far away, but floating toward her, making loops in the air. The nearer he got, the larger he appeared, swelling until he was two, then three, then ten times the size of the small stone gargoyle she had traveled with. Then the real metamorphosis began:
Behind his shoulders, a pair of thicker, fuller, jet-black wings burst forth, shattering his familiar small stone wings into a chaos of broken bits. The wrinkles on his forehead deepened and expanded across his entire body until he looked horrifically shriveled and old. The claws on his feet and hands grew longer, sharper, yellower.
They glinted in the darkness, razor-sharp. His chest swelled, sprouting thick, curly black hairs as he grew infinitely larger than he had been before.
Luce strained to suppress the wail climbing in her throat. And she managed—right up until Bill’s stony gray eyes, their irises dulled beneath layers of cataracts, glowed as red as fire.
Then she screamed.
“You always did make the wrong choice.” Bill’s voice had turned monstrous, deep and phlegm-filled and grating, not just on Luce’s ears but on her very soul. His breath punched her, reeking of death.
“You’re—” Luce could not finish her sentence. There was only one word for the evil creature before her, and the idea of saying it aloud was frightening.
“The bad guy?” Bill cackled. “Surprise!” He held out the I sound of the word so long that Luce was sure he would double over and cough, but he didn’t.
“But—you taught me so much. You helped me figure out—Why would you—How—The whole time?”
“I was deceiving you. It’s what I do, Lucinda.”
She had cared for Bill, roguish and disgusting as he was. She’d confided in him, listened to him, had almost killed her soul because he’d told her to. The thought cut her. She had almost lost Daniel because of Bill. She might lose Daniel still because of Bill. But he wasn’t Bill—
He was no mere demon, not like Steven, or even Cam at his worst.
He was Evil incarnate.
And he had been with Luce, breathing down her neck the whole time.
She tried to turn away from him, but his darkness was everywhere. It looked as if she were floating in a night sky, but all the stars were impossibly far away; there was no sign of Earth. Close by were patches of darker blackness, swirling abysses. And every now and then a shaft of light appeared, a beacon of hope, illumination. Then the light would vanish.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Satan sneered at the pointlessness of her question. “Neverwhere,” he said. His voice no longer had the familiar tone of her traveling companion. “The dark heart of nothing at the center of everything. Neither Heaven, nor Earth, nor Hell. A place of the darkest transits. Nothing your mind at this stage can fathom, so it probably just looks”—his red eyes bulged—“scary to you.”