“Are you all right?” Daniel asked.
Her heart was still racing. Why couldn’t she remember what had happened at the Roll Call? Maybe it wouldn’t help them stop Lucifer, but Luce desperately wanted to know.
“I came so close,” she said. “I almost understood what happened.”
Daniel set her softly on the ground and kissed her.
“You will get there, Luce. I know you will.” It was dusk on the eighth day of their journey. As the sun slipped over the Dardanelles, casting gold light on the sloping fallow fields, Luce wished there was a way to draw it backward.
What if one day wasn’t enough time?
Luce hunched and unhunched her shoulders. She wasn’t used to the weight of her wings, light as rose petals in the sky, but heavy as lead curtains when her feet were on the ground.
When her wings first unfurled, they’d torn through her T-shirt and the khaki army jacket. The clothes lay on the grass in shreds, strange proof. Annabelle had quickly emerged from the hut with an extra T-shirt. It was electric blue with a silk-screened image of Marlene Dietrich on the chest, subtle wing slits tailored into the back.
“Instead of thinking of all that you don’t yet remember,” Francesca said, “recognize what you have come to know.”
“Well.” Luce paced the meadow, feeling the new sensation of her wings bobbing behind her. “I know that the curse prevented me from knowing my true nature as an angel, caused me to die whenever I began to approach a memory of my past. That’s why none of you could tell me who I was.”
“You had to walk that lonesome valley by yourself,” Cam said.
“And the reason it took you until this lifetime was also part of your curse,” Daniel said.
“This time I was raised without one specific religion, without a single set of rules determining my destiny, which allows me to”—Luce paused, thinking back to the Roll Call—“choose for myself.”
“Not everyone has that luxury.” Phil spoke up from the line of Outcasts.
“That’s why the Outcasts wanted me?” she asked, knowing suddenly it was true. “But haven’t I already chosen Daniel? I couldn’t remember before, but when Dee gave me her gift of knowledge, it seemed like”—she reached for Daniel—“the choice was always already there inside of me.”
“You know who you are now, Luce,” Daniel said.
“You know what matters to you. Nothing should be beyond your grasp.”
Daniel’s words seeped into her. This was what she was now—it was what she always had been.
Her gaze moved to where the Outcasts stood at a distance from the group. Luce didn’t know how much they could have seen of her transformation, whether their blind eyes could perceive a soul’s metamorphosis.
She watched for a sign in Olianna, the female Outcast who’d guarded Luce on the rooftop in Vienna. But as she stared at Olianna, she realized Olianna had also . . . changed.
“I remember you,” Luce said, walking closer to the thin blond girl with the cavernous white eyes. She knew her, from Heaven. “Olianna, you were one of the Twelve Angels of the Zodiac. You ruled over Leo.” Olianna took a deep shuddering breath and nodded.
“Yes.”
“And you, Phresia. You were a Luminary.” Luce closed her eyes, remembering. “Weren’t you one of the Four who emanated from Divine Will? I remember your wings. They were”—she halted, feeling her expression darken at the sight of the drab brown wings the girl bore now—“exceptional.”
Phresia straightened her slumped shoulders, raised her pale gaunt face. “No one has truly seen me in ages.” Vincent, the youngest-looking of the Outcasts, stepped forward. “And me, Lucinda Price? Do you remember me?”
Luce reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder, remembering how deathly sick he’d looked after the Scale had tortured him. Then she remembered something deeper than that. “You are Vincent, Angel of the North Wind.”
Vincent’s blind eyes clouded, as if his soul wanted to cry but his body refused.
“Phil,” Luce said, gazing finally at the Outcast she’d feared so much when he came for her in her parents’
backyard. His lips were taut and white, nervous. “One of Monday’s Angels, weren’t you? Instilled with the Powers of the Moon.”
“Thank you, Lucinda Price.” Phil bowed haltingly, but graciously. “The Outcasts confess, we were wrong to try to take you away from your soul mate and your obligations. But we knew, as you have just proven, that you alone could see us for who we used to be. And that you alone could restore us to our glory.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can see you.”
“The Outcasts can see you, too,” Phil said. “You are radiant.”
“Yes, she is.”
Daniel.
She turned to him. His blond hair and violet eyes, the strong cut of his shoulders, the full lips that had brought her back to life a thousand times. They had loved each other even longer than Luce had realized. Their love had been strong since the early days of Heaven. Their relationship spanned the entire story of existence. She knew where she’d first met Daniel on Earth—right here, on the singed fields of Troy while the angels were falling—
but there was an earlier story. A different beginning to their love.
When? How had it happened?
She searched for the answer in his eyes—but she knew she wouldn’t find it there. She had to look back in her own soul. She closed her eyes.
The memories came easier now, as if her spreading wings had sent a web of fissures breaking through the wall between the girl Lucinda and the angel she had been before. Whatever separated her from her past was fragile now, as thin and brittle as an eggshell.
Flash.
Back on the Meadow, astride her silver ledge, aching for God to return. Luce was looking down at the fair-haired angel, the one she’d already remembered reaching for. She remembered his slow, sad steps on the cloudsoil. The crown of his head before he looked up.
Heaven was quiet then. Luce and the angel were alone for a rare moment, away from the harmony of others.
He turned to look up at Lucinda. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, and blue eyes the color of ice.
They crinkled when he smiled at her. She did not recognize him.
No, that wasn’t it—she recognized him, knew him.
Long before, Lucinda had loved this angel.
But he wasn’t Daniel.
Without knowing why, Luce wanted to spin away from this memory, to pretend she hadn’t seen it, to blink back and be with Daniel on the rocky plains of Troy. But her soul was welded to the scene. She could not turn away from this angel who was not Daniel.
He reached for her. Their wings entwined. He whispered in her ear:
“Our love is endless. There can be nothing else.” No.
At last, she jolted from the memory. Back at Troy.
Out of breath. Her eyes must have betrayed her. She felt wild and panicked.
“What did you see?” Annabelle whispered.
Luce’s mouth opened but no words came.
I betrayed him. Whoever he was. There was someone before Daniel, and I—
“It’s not over yet.” Finally, she found her voice. “The curse. Even though I know who I am and I know that I choose Daniel, there’s something else, isn’t there? Someone else. He’s the one who cursed me.” Daniel ran his fingers very lightly over the shining border of her wings. She shivered, because every touch against her wings burned with the passion of a deep kiss and ignited something deep inside her. Finally she knew the pleasure she brought to him when she let her hands glide over his. “You have come so very far, Lucinda. But there is still a ways to go. Search your past. You already know what you are looking for. Find it.” She closed her eyes, searching again through millennia of fraught memories.
The Earth drew away beneath her feet. A maze of colors blurred around her, and her heart hammered in her chest, and everything went white.