“But what is the first relic? Do we even know?” Luce leaned over the book and saw a drawing sketched in pen in the margin.
Daniel studied it now, too, shaking his head slightly at the image he’d drawn hundreds of years ago. It looked almost like a serving tray, the kind her mom was always looking for at antique shops. “This was what I was able to glean from my study of the pseudepigrapha—the dismissed scriptural writings of the early church.” It was egg-shaped with a glass bottom, which Daniel cleverly had depicted by sketching the ground on the other side of the clear base. The tray, or whatever the relic was, had what looked like small chipped handles on either side. Daniel had even drawn a scale below it, and according to his sketch, the artifact was big—about eighty by one hundred centimeters.
“I barely remember drawing this.” Daniel sounded disappointed in himself. “I don’t know what it is any more than you do.”
“I’m sure that once you get there, you’ll be able to figure it out,” Gabbe said, trying hard to be encouraging.
“We will,” Luce said. “I’m sure we will.” Gabbe blinked, smiled, and went on. “Roland, Annabelle, and Arriane—you three will go to Vienna. That leaves—” Her mouth twitched as she realized what she was about to say, but she put on a brave face anyway.
“Molly, Cam, and I will take Avalon.”
Cam rolled back his shoulders and let out his as-toundingly golden wings with a great rush, slamming into Molly’s face with his right wing tip and sending her lunging back five feet.
“Do that again and I will wreck you,” Molly spat, glaring at a carpet burn on her elbow. “In fact—” She started to go for Cam with her fist raised but Gabbe in-tervened.
She wrenched Cam and Molly apart with a put-upon sigh. “Speaking of wrecking, I would really rather not have to wreck the next one of you who provokes the other”—she smiled sweetly at her two demon companions—“but I will. This is going to be a very long nine days.”
“Let’s hope it’s long,” Daniel muttered under his breath.
Luce turned to him. The Venice in her mind was out of a guidebook: postcard pictures of boats jostling down canals, sunsets over tall cathedral spires, and dark-haired girls licking gelato. That wasn’t the trip they were about to take. Not with the end of the world reaching out for them with razor claws.
“And once we find all three of the relics?” Luce said.
“We’ll meet at Mount Sinai,” Daniel said, “unite the relics—”
“And say a little prayer that they shed any light what-soever on where we landed when we fell,” Cam muttered darkly, rubbing his forehead. “At which point, all that’s left is somehow coaxing the psychopathic hell-hound holding our entire existence in his jaw that he should just abandon his silly scheme for universal domination. What could be simpler? I think we have every reason to feel optimistic.”
Daniel glanced out the open window. The sun was passing over the dormitory now; Luce had to squint to look outside. “We need to leave as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” Luce said. “I have to go home, then, pack, get my passport. . . .” Her mind whirled in a hundred directions as she started making a mental to-do list. Her parents would be at the mall for at least another couple of hours, enough time for her to dash in and get her things together. . . .
“Oh, cute.” Annabelle laughed, flitting over to them, her feet inches off the ground. Her wings were muscular and dark silver like a thundercloud, protruding through the invisible slits in her hot-pink T-shirt. “Sorry to butt in but . . . you’ve never traveled with an angel before, have you?”
Sure she had. The feeling of Daniel’s wings soaring her body through the air was as natural as anything.
Maybe her flights had been brief, but they’d been unfor-gettable. They were when Luce felt closest to him: his arms threaded around her waist, his heart beating close to hers, his white wings protecting them, making Luce feel unconditionally and impossibly loved.
She had flown with Daniel dozens of times in dreams, but only three times in her waking hours: once over the hidden lake behind Sword & Cross, another time along the coast at Shoreline, and down from the clouds to the cabin just the previous night.
“I guess we’ve never flown that far together,” she said at last.
“Just getting to first base seems to be a problem for you two,” Cam couldn’t resist saying.
Daniel ignored him. “Under normal circumstances, I think you’d enjoy the trip.” His expression turned stormy. “But we don’t have room for normal for the next nine days.”
Luce felt his hands on the back of her shoulders, gathering her hair and lifting it off her neck. He kissed her along the neckline of her sweater as he wrapped his arms around her waist. Luce closed her eyes. She knew what was coming next. The most beautiful sound there was—that elegant whoosh of the love of her life letting out his driven-snow-white wings.
The world on the other side of Luce’s eyelids darkened slightly under the shadow of his wings, and warmth welled in her heart. When she opened her eyes, there they were, as magnificent as ever. She leaned back a little, cozying into the wall of Daniel’s chest as he pivoted toward the window.
“This is only a temporary separation,” Daniel announced to the others. “Good luck and wingspeed.” With each long beat of Daniel’s wings they gained a thousand feet. The air, once cool and thick with Georgia humidity, turned cold and brittle in Luce’s lungs as they climbed. Wind tore at her ears. Her eyes began to tear.
The ground below grew distant, and the world that it contained blended and shrank into a staggering canvas of green. Sword & Cross was the size of a thumbprint.
Then it was gone.
A first glimpse of the ocean made Luce dizzy, delighted as they flew away from the sun, toward the darkness on the horizon.
Flying with Daniel was more thrilling, more intense than her memory could ever do justice to. And yet something had shifted: Luce had the hang of it by now. She felt at ease, in sync with Daniel, relaxed into the shape of his arms. Her legs were crossed lightly at the ankles, the toes of her boots kissing the toes of his. Their bodies swayed in unison, responding to the motion of his wings, which arched over their heads and blocked out the sun, then throttled backward to complete another mighty stroke.
They passed the cloud line and vanished into the mist. There was nothing all around them but wispy white and the nebulous caress of moisture. Another beat of wings. Another surge into the sky. Luce didn’t pause to wonder how she would breathe up here at the limits of the atmosphere. She was with Daniel. She was fine. They were off to save the world.
Soon Daniel leveled off, flying less like a rocket and more like an unfathomably powerful bird. They did not slow—if anything, their velocity increased—but with their bodies parallel to the ground, the wind’s roar smoothed, and the world seemed bright white and startlingly quiet, as peaceful as if it had just come into existence and no one had yet experimented with sound.
“Are you all right?” His voice cocooned her, making her feel as if anything in the world that wasn’t all right could be made so by love’s concern.
She tilted her head to the left to look at him. His face was calm, lips softly smiling. His eyes poured out a violet light so rich it alone could have kept her aloft.
“You’re freezing,” he murmured into her ear, strok-ing her fingers to warm them up, sending licks of heat through Luce’s body.
“Better now,” she said.
They broke through the blanket of clouds: It was like that moment on an airplane when the view out the blurry oval window goes from monochrome gray to an infinite palate of color. The difference was that the window and the plane had fallen away, leaving nothing between her skin and the seashell pinks of evening-reaching clouds in the east, the garish indigo of high-altitude sky.
The cloudscape presented itself, foreign and arrest-ing. As ever, it found Luce unprepared. This was another world she and Daniel alone inhabited, a high world, the tips of the tallest minarets of love.