Fallen - Lauren Kate [30]
“Are you going to stay away from me?”
It almost sounded like he was flirting.
But Luce was completely out of sorts. Her brow was damp with sweat, and she squeezed her temples between two fingers, trying to regain possession of her body, trying to take it back from his control. She was totally unprepared to flirt back. That was, if what he was doing was actually flirting.
She took a step back. “I guess so.”
“Didn’t hear you,” he whispered, cocking an eyebrow and taking another step closer.
Luce backed up again, farther this time. She practically slammed into the base of the statue, and could feel the gritty stone foot of the angel scraping her back. A second, darker, colder shadow whooshed over them. She could have sworn Daniel shivered along with her.
And then the deep groan of something heavy startled them both. Luce gasped as the top of the marble statue teetered over them, like a tree branch swaying in the breeze. For a second, it seemed to hover in the air.
Luce and Daniel stood staring at the angel. Both of them knew it was on its way down. The angel’s head bowed slowly toward them, like it was praying—and then the whole statue picked up speed as it started hurtling down. Luce felt Daniel’s hand wrap around her waist instantly, tightly, like he knew exactly where she began and where she ended. His other hand covered her head and forced her down just as the statue toppled over them. Right where they’d been standing. It landed with a massive crash—headfirst in the mud, with its feet still resting on the plinth, leaving a little triangle underneath, where Daniel and Luce crouched.
They were panting, nose to nose, Daniel’s eyes scared. Between their bodies and the statue, there were only a few inches of space.
“Luce?” he whispered.
All she could do was nod.
His eyes narrowed. “What did you see?”
Then a hand appeared and Luce felt herself being pulled out of the space under the statue. There was a scraping against her back and then a waft of air. She saw the flicker of daylight again. The detention crew stood gaping, except for Ms. Tross, who was glaring, and Cam, who helped Luce to her feet.
“Are you okay?” Cam asked, running his eyes over her for scrapes and bruises and brushing some dirt from her shoulder. “I saw the statue coming down and I ran over to try and stop it, but it was already … You must have been so terrified.”
Luce didn’t respond. Terrified was only part of how she’d felt.
Daniel, already on his feet, didn’t even turn around to see whether she was okay or not. He just walked away.
Luce’s jaw dropped as she watched him go, as she watched everyone else seem not to care that he had bailed.
“What did you do?” Ms. Tross asked.
“I don’t know. One minute, we were standing there”—Luce glanced at Ms. Tross—“um, working. The next thing I knew, the statue just fell over.”
The Albatross bent down to examine the shattered angel. Its head had cracked straight down the middle. She started muttering something about forces of nature and old stones.
But it was the voice at Luce’s ear that stayed with her, even after everyone else had gone back to work. It was Molly, just inches behind her shoulder, who whispered, “Looks like someone should start listening when I give advice.”
FIVE
THE INNER CIRCLE
“Don’t ever scare me like that again!” Callie reprimanded Luce on Wednesday evening.
It was just before sundown and Luce was folded into the Sword & Cross phone cubby, a tiny beige confine in the middle of the front office area. It was far from private, but at least no one else was loafing around. Her arms were still sore from the graveyard shift at yesterday’s detention, her pride still wounded from Daniel’s fleeing the second they’d been pulled out from under the statue. But for fifteen minutes, Luce was trying hard to push all that out of her mind, to soak up every blissfully frantic word her best friend could spit out in the allotted time. It felt so good to hear Callie’s high-pitched voice, Luce almost didn’t care that she was being yelled at.
“We promised we wouldn’t go