Fallen - Lauren Kate [118]
Penn came to a panting stop next to Luce and the two of them exchanged a bewildered look. Sweat beaded Penn’s upper lip, and her purple glasses kept slipping down in the moist heat.
“She’s losing it,” Penn whispered, jerking her thumb at Miss Sophia.
“No.” Luce shook her head. “She knows things. And if Miss Sophia’s scared, you shouldn’t be here, Penn.”
“Me?” Penn asked, bewildered, probably because ever since the first day of school, she had been the one guiding Luce. “I don’t think either of us should be here.”
Luce’s chest stung with a pain similar to what she’d felt when she had to say goodbye to Callie. She looked away from Penn. There was a split between them now, a deep division cutting them apart, because of Luce’s past. She hated to own up to it, to call Penn’s attention to it, too, but she knew it would be better, safer, if they parted ways.
“I have to stay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I have to find Daniel. You should go back to the dorm, Penn. Please.”
“But you and me,” Penn said hoarsely. “We were the only ones—”
Before Luce could hear the end of the sentence, she took off toward the cemetery’s center. Toward the mausoleum where she’d seen Daniel brooding on the evening of Parents’ Day. She bounded over the last of the tombstones, then skidded down a slope of dank, rotting mulch until the ground finally evened out. She came to a stop in front of the giant oak in the basin at the cemetery’s center.
Hot and frustrated and terrified all at once, she leaned against the tree trunk.
Then, through the branches of the tree, she saw him.
Daniel.
She let out all the air in her lungs and felt weak in the knees. One look at his distant, dark profile, so beautiful and majestic, told her that everything Daniel had hinted at—even the one big thing she’d figured out on her own—everything was true.
He was standing atop the mausoleum, arms crossed, looking up where the roiling cloud of locusts had just passed overhead. The thin moonlight threw his shadow in a crescent of darkness that dipped off the crypt’s wide, flat roof. She ran toward him, weaving through the dangling Spanish moss and the tilted old statues.
“Luce!” He spied her as she neared the base of the mausoleum. “What are you doing here?” His voice showed no happiness to see her—more like shock and horror.
It’s my fault, she wanted to cry as she approached the base of the mausoleum. And I believe it, I believe our story. Forgive me for ever leaving you, I never will again. There was one more thing she wanted to tell him. But he was far above her, and the shadows’ horrible din was too loud, and the air was too soupy to try to make him hear her from where she stood below him.
The tomb was solid marble. But there was a big chip in one of the bas-relief sculptures of a peacock, and Luce used it as a toehold. The usually cool stone was warm to the touch. Her sweaty palms slipped a few times as she strained to reach the top. To reach Daniel, who had to forgive her.
She’d only scaled a few feet of the wall when someone tapped her shoulder. She spun around and gasped when she saw that it was Daniel, and lost her grip. He caught her, his arms circling her waist, before she could slide to the ground. But he’d just been a full story overhead a second earlier.
She buried her face in his shoulder. And while the truth still scared her, being in his arms made her feel like the sea finding its shore, like a traveler returning after a long, hard, distant trip—finally returning home.
“You picked a fine time to come back,” he said. He smiled, but his smile was weighed down with worry. His eyes kept looking beyond her, into the sky.
“You see it, too?” she asked.
Daniel just looked at her, unable to respond. His lip quivered.
“Of course you do,” she whispered, because everything was coming together. The shadows, his story, their past. A choking cry welled up inside her. “How can you love me?” she sobbed. “How can you even stand me?”
He took her face in his hand. “What are you talking about? How can you