Fallen - Lauren Kate [117]
Penn was blinking rapidly. She looked terrified. “Dunno,” she said finally. “At first I thought fireworks. But nothing ever made it to the sky.” She shuddered. “Something bad’s about to happen. I don’t know what.”
Luce breathed in and coughed on a deep whiff of sulfur. “How, Penn? How do you know?”
Penn’s arm shook as she pointed into the deep bowl in the middle of the cemetery. “See that?” she said. “Something’s flickering down there.”
EIGHTEEN
THE BURIED WAR
Luce took one look at the shuddering light at the base of the cemetery and started racing toward it. She hurtled down past the broken headstones, leaving Penn and Miss Sophia far behind. She didn’t care that the sharp, twisting limbs of the live oak trees scratched her arms and face as she ran, or that clumps of thick-rooted weeds tripped up her feet.
She had to get down there.
The waning sliver of moon offered little light, but there was another source—coming from the bottom of the cemetery. Her destination. It looked like a monstrous, cloud-ridden lightning storm. Only it was happening on the ground.
The shadows had been warning her, she realized, for days. Now their dark show had turned into something even Penn could see. And the other students who’d run ahead must have noticed it, too. Luce didn’t know what it could possibly mean. Only that if Daniel was down there with that sinister flickering … it was all her fault.
Her lungs burned, but she was driven forward by the image of him standing under the peach trees. She wouldn’t stop until she found him—because she’d been coming to find him anyway, to shove the book under his nose and cry out that she believed him, that part of her had believed him all along, but she’d been too scared to accept their unfathomable history. She would tell him that she wasn’t going to let fear drive her away, not this time, not anymore. Because she knew something, understood something that had taken her far too long to piece together. Something wild and strange that made their past experiences together both more and less believable. She knew who—no, what Daniel was. Part of her had come to this realization on her own—that she might have lived before and loved him before. Only, she hadn’t understood what it meant, what it all added up to—the pull she felt toward him, her dreams—until now.
But none of that mattered if she couldn’t get down there in time to find some way to fend off the shadows. None of it mattered if they got to Daniel before she could. She tore down the steep tiers of graves, but the basin at the center of the cemetery was still so far away.
Behind her, a thumping of footsteps. Then a shrill voice.
“Pennyweather!” It was Miss Sophia. She was gaining on Luce, calling back over her shoulder, where Luce could see Penn carefully working her way over a fallen tombstone. “You’re slower than Christmas coming!”
“No!” Luce yelled. “Penn, Miss Sophia, don’t come down here!” She wouldn’t be responsible for putting anyone else in the shadows’ path.
Miss Sophia froze on a toppled white tombstone and stared up at the sky like she hadn’t heard Luce at all. She raised her thin arms up in the air, as if to shield herself. Luce squinted into the night and sucked in her breath. Something was moving toward them, blowing in with the chill wind.
At first she thought it was the shadows, but this was something different and scarier, like a jagged, irregular veil full of dark pockets, letting flecks of sky filter through. This shadow was made of a million tiny black pieces. A rioting, fluttering storm of darkness stretching out in all directions.
“Locusts?” Penn cried.
Luce shuddered. The thick swarm was still at a distance, but its deep percussion grew louder with every passing second. Like the beating of a thousand birds’ wings. Like a hostile sweeping darkness scouring the earth. It was coming. It was going to lash out at her, maybe at all of them, tonight.
“This is not good!” Miss Sophia ranted