Fallen - Lauren Kate [123]
“Go,” Daniel said. “I’ll find you as soon as I can. Just promise me you’ll run from here, and that you won’t look back.”
Luce had so many questions. “I don’t want to leave you.”
Arriane stepped between them and gave Luce a final, rough shove toward the gates. “Sorry, Luce,” she said. “Time to leave this fight to us. We’re kind of professionals.”
Luce felt Penn’s hand slide into hers, and soon they were running. Pounding up toward the gates of the cemetery as quickly as she’d bounded down on her way to find Daniel. Back up the slippery mulch slide. Back through the jagged live oak branches and the ramshackle stacks of broken headstones. They hurdled the stones and jogged up the slope, making for the distant ironwork arch of the gates. Hot wind blew her hair, and the swampy air still lay thick in her lungs. She couldn’t find the moon to guide them, and the light in the cemetery’s center was gone now. She didn’t understand what was happening. At all. And she didn’t like it at all that everyone else did.
A bolt of blackness struck the ground in front of her, cracking the earth and opening up a jagged gorge. Luce and Penn skidded to a halt just in time. The gash was as wide as Luce was tall, as deep as … well, she couldn’t see down to the dark bottom. The edges of it sizzled and foamed.
Penn gasped. “Luce. I’m scared.”
“Follow me, girls,” Miss Sophia called.
She led them to the right, winding among the dark graves while blast after blast rang out behind them. “Just the sounds of battle,” she huffed, like some sort of strange tour guide. “That will go on for some while, I fear.”
Luce winced at every crash, but she kept pushing forward until her calves were burning, until behind her, Penn let out a wail. Luce turned and saw her friend stumble, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“Penn!” Luce screamed, reaching out to catch her just before she fell. Tenderly, Luce lowered her to the ground and rolled her over. She almost wished she hadn’t. Penn’s shoulder had been sliced through by something black and jagged. It had bit into her skin, leaving a charred line of flesh that smelled like burning meat.
“Is it bad?” Penn whispered hoarsely. She blinked rapidly, clearly frustrated at being unable to lift her head up to see for herself.
“No,” Luce lied, shaking her head. “Just a cut.” She gulped, trying to swallow the nausea rising in her as she tugged Penn’s frayed black sleeve together. “Am I hurting you?”
“I don’t know,” Penn wheezed. “I can’t feel anything.”
“Girls, what is the holdup?” Miss Sophia had doubled back.
Luce looked up at Miss Sophia, willing her not to say how bad Penn’s injury looked.
She didn’t. She gave Luce a swift nod, then stretched her arms beneath Penn and lifted her up like a parent carrying a child to bed. “I’ve got you,” she said. “It won’t be long now.”
“Hey.” Luce followed Miss Sophia, who carried Penn’s weight like she was a bag of feathers. “How did you—”
“No questions, not until we’re far away from all of this,” Miss Sophia said.
Far away. Luce wanted nothing less than to be far away from Daniel. And then, after they’d crossed the threshold of the cemetery and were standing on the flat ground of the school commons, she couldn’t help herself. She looked back. And instantly understood why Daniel had told her not to.
A twisting silver-gold pillar of fire burst forth from the dark center of the cemetery. It was as wide as the cemetery itself, a braid of light rising hundreds of feet up into the air and boiling away the clouds. The black shadows picked at the light, occasionally tearing tendrils free and carrying them off, shrieking, into the night. As the coiling strands shifted, now more silver, now more gold, a single chord of sound began to fill the air, full and unending, loud as a mighty waterfall. Low notes thundered in the night. High notes chimed to fill the space around them. It was the grandest, most perfectly balanced celestial harmony ever heard on earth. It was beautiful, and