The night was cool and dry, nothing like Texas. This breeze refreshed her skin. There were a few stars out and a few kids in the courtyard, but no one Luce knew, so she felt free to sit down on one of the stone benches between two stout peony bushes. They were her favorite flowers.
She’d taken it as a good omen when the grounds around her dorm were blooming with them, even at the end of August. She fingered the deeply lobed petals of one of the full white blossoms and leaned forward to breathe in its soft nectar.
“Hello.”
She jumped. With her nose buried in a flower, she hadn’t seen him approach. Now a pair of ragged Con-verse sneakers was standing right in front of her. Her eyes traveled up: faded jeans, a black T-shirt, a thin red scarf tied loosely around his neck. Her heart picked up and she didn’t know why; she hadn’t even seen his face—short golden hair . . . obscenely soft-looking lips . . . eyes so gorgeous that Luce sucked in her breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” What color were his eyes?
“That’s not why I gasped. I mean . . .” The flower fell from her hand, three petals landing on the boy’s shoes.
Say something.
He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me.
Not that!
It was physically impossible to say anything. Not only was this guy the most incredible thing Luce had ever seen in all her life, he’d walked up to her and introduced himself. The way he was looking at her made Luce feel as if she were the only other person in the courtyard.
As if she were the only other person on Earth. And she was blowing it.
Instinctively, she reached up to touch her necklace—and found her neck was bare. That was strange. She always wore the silver locket her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday. It was a family heirloom, containing an old picture of her grandmother, looking very much like Luce, taken right around the time she’d met the man who would become her grandfather. Had she forgotten to put it on that morning?
The boy tilted his head in a kind of smile.
Oh no. She’d been staring at him this whole time. He raised his hand as if to give a little wave. But he didn’t wave. His fingers hovered in the air. And her heart started pounding, because all of a sudden, she had no idea what this stranger would do. He could do anything.
A friendly gesture was just one possibility. He could flip her off. She probably deserved to be flipped off for staring at him like a crazy stalker. That was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous.
He waved, as if to say, Hello in there. “I’m Daniel.” When he smiled, she saw that his eyes were beautifully gray with just a hint of—was that violet? Oh God, she was going to fall in love with a guy with purple eyes.
What would Nora say?
“Luce,” she finally managed. “Lucinda.”
“Cool.” He smiled again. “Like Lucinda Williams.
The singer.”
“How did you know that?” No one ever guessed Lucinda Williams. “My parents met at a Lucinda Williams concert in Austin. Texas,” she added. “Where I’m from.”
“Essence is my favorite of her albums. I listened to it for half the drive out here from California. Texas, eh?
Big adjustment coming to Emerald?”
“Total culture shock.” It felt like the most honest thing she’d said all week.
“You get used to it. I did after two years, anyway.” He reached out and touched her shoulder when he noticed her panicked expression. “I’m kidding. You look much more adaptable than I am. I’ll see you next week and you’ll be completely settled in, wearing a sweatshirt with a big ‘E’ on it.”
She was looking at his hand on her arm. But more than that, she was experiencing a thousand tiny explosions inside her, like the finale of a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. He laughed and then she laughed and she didn’t know why.
“Do you”—she couldn’t believe she was about to say this to a model-gorgeous upperclassman from California—“want to sit down?”
“Yeah,” he said instantly, then glanced up at the window where the lights were on and the party was happening. “You wouldn’t happen to know about a soccer party going on somewhere in there?”
Luce pointed, slightly crestfallen. “I was just there.
It’s right up the stairs.”
“No fun?”
“It was fun,” she said. “I just—”
“Thought you’d catch your breath?”
She nodded.
“I was supposed to meet a friend.” Daniel shrugged, looking up at the window, where Nora was flirting with someone they couldn’t see. “But maybe I already have.” He squinted at her and she wondered, horrified, if she’d been talking to him with flower pollen dusting her nose. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“Are you taking cell biology this quarter?” he asked.
“No way. I barely got out of there alive in high school.” She looked at him, at his eyes, which were most definitely a shade of violet. They glowed when she said,
“Why do you ask?”
Daniel shook his head, as if he’d been thinking something that he didn’t want to say aloud. “You just—you look so familiar. I could have sworn we’d met somewhere before.”
EPILOGUE
THE STARS IN THEIR EYES
“I love this part!” Arriane squealed.
Three angels and two Nephilim were sitting on the forward edge of a low gray cloud above a U-shaped dormitory in central Connecticut.
Roland grinned at her. “Don’t tell me you’ve seen this one before?”
His marbled gold wings were extended and folded flat so that Miles and Shelby could sit on them and stay aloft, like a picnic blanket at a drive-through in the sky.
The Nephilim had not seen the angels in more than a dozen years. Though Roland, Arriane, and Annabelle bore no physical signs of this passage of time, the Nephilim had aged. They wore matching wedding bands, and the sides of their eyes were creased with the laugh lines made by years of happy marriage. Under his very faded blue baseball cap, Miles’s hair was slightly gray around the temples. His hand rested on Shelby’s belly, which protruded with a baby due the following month.
She rubbed her head like she’d narrowly escaped a concussion. “But Luce doesn’t eat pepperoni. She’s a vege-tarian!”
“That’s what you took away from this scene?” Annabelle rolled her eyes. “Luce is different now. She’s the same girl with different details. She doesn’t see Announcers, and she hasn’t been to every shrink on the eastern seaboard. She’s much more ‘normal,’ which bores her to tears, but”—Annabelle grinned—“I think, in the long run, she’s going to be really happy.”
“Does this popcorn taste burnt to you?” Miles asked, chewing loudly.
“Don’t eat that,” Roland said, plucking the popcorn from Miles’s palm. “Arriane got it out of the trash after Luce set the dorm room kitchen on fire.” Miles began spitting frantically, leaning over the edge of Roland’s wings.
“It was my way of connecting with Luce.” Arriane shrugged. “But here, if you must, have some Milk Duds.”
“Is it weird that we’re watching the two of them like a movie?” Shelby asked. “We should imagine them like a novel, or a poem, or a song. Sometimes I feel oppressed by how reductive the filmic medium is.”
“Hey. Roland didn’t have to fly you out here, Nephilim. So don’t act smart, just watch. Look.” Arriane clapped. “He’s totally staring at her hair. I bet he goes home and sketches it tonight. How cuuute!”
“Arriane, you got way too good at being a teenager,” Roland said. “How long are we going to watch for? I mean, don’t you think they’ve earned a little privacy?”