Fallen - Lauren Kate [111]
Luce moved to the wall and flicked on her light switch, then squinted in the ugly fluorescent light. The book in her hands was one she’d never seen before. It was bound in the palest gray cloth, with frayed corners and brown glue crumbling at the bottom of the spine.
The Watchers: Myth in Medieval Europe.
Daniel’s ancestor’s book.
It was heavy and smelled faintly of smoke. She tugged out the note that was tucked inside the front cover.
Yes, I found a spare key and entered your room unlawfully. I’m sorry. But this is URGENT!!! And I couldn’t find you anywhere. Where are you? You need to look at this, and then we need to have a powwow. I’ll swing by in an hour. Proceed with caution.
xoxo,
Penn
Luce laid the note next to the flowers and took the book back to her bed. She sat down with her legs dangling over the edge. Just holding the book gave her a strange, warm buzzing sensation just below her skin. The book felt almost alive in her hands.
She cracked it open, expecting to have to decode some stiff academic table of contents or dig through an index at the back before she’d find anything even remotely related to Daniel.
She never got beyond the title page.
Pasted inside the front cover of the book was a sepia-toned photograph. It was a very old carte de visite-style picture, printed on yellowing albumen paper. Someone had scrawled in ink at the bottom: Helston, 1854.
Heat flashed across her skin. She yanked her black sweater over her head but still felt hot in her tank top.
The memory of Daniel’s voice sounded hollow in her mind. I get to live forever, he’d said. You come along every seventeen years. You fall in love with me, and I with you. And it kills you.
Her head throbbed.
You’re my love, Lucinda. For me, you’re all there is.
She fingered the outline of the picture glued inside the book. Luce’s dad, the aspiring photography guru, would have marveled over how well-preserved the image was, how valuable it must be.
Luce, on the other hand, was hung up on the people in the image. Because, unless every word out of Daniel’s mouth had been true, it made no sense at all.
A young man, with light cropped hair and lighter eyes, posed elegantly in a trim black coat. His raised chin and well-defined cheekbones made his fine attire look even more distinguished, but it was his lips that gave Luce such a start. The exact shape of his smile, combined with the look in those eyes … it added up to an expression that Luce had seen in every one of her dreams these last few weeks. And, over the last couple of days, in person.
This man was the spitting image of Daniel. The Daniel who had just told her that he loved her—and that she had been reincarnated dozens of times. The Daniel who had said so many other things Luce didn’t want to hear that she had run away. The Daniel whom she’d abandoned under the peach trees in the cemetery.
It could have been just a remarkable likeness. Some distant relative, the author of the book maybe, who’d funneled each one of his genes straight down the family tree right to Daniel.
Except that the young man in the picture was posed next to a young woman who also looked alarmingly familiar.
Luce held the book inches from her face and pored over the woman’s image. She wore a ruffled black silk ball gown that hugged her body to her waist before billowing out in wide black tiers. Black lace-up wristlets encased her hands, leaving her white fingers bare. Her small teeth showed between her lips, which were parted in an easy smile. She had clear skin a few tones lighter than the man’s. Deep-set eyes bordered by thick eyelashes. A black flood of hair that fell in thick waves to her waist.
It took a moment for Luce to remember how to breathe, and even then, she still couldn’t tear her strained eyes away from the book. The woman in the photograph?
It was her.
Either Luce had been right, and her memory of Daniel had come from a forgotten trip to a Savannah mall, where they’d posed for cheesy dress-up shots at Ye Old Photo Booth that she also couldn’t remember—or Daniel had been telling