Fallen - Lauren Kate [59]
“Thank you, Molly,” Miss Sophia said carefully, “I’m sure we all feel very enlightened.”
Luce didn’t. She had stopped listening in the middle of Molly’s rant, when she felt an eerie, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
The shadows. She sensed them before she saw them, bubbling up like tar from the ground. A tentacle of darkness curled around her wrist, and Luce looked down in terror. It was trying to weasel its way into her pocket. It was going for Arriane’s paper plane. She hadn’t even read it yet! She stuffed her fist deep into her pocket and used two fingers and all her willpower to pinch the shadow out as hard as she could.
An amazing thing happened: The shadow recoiled, rearing back like an injured dog. It was the first time Luce had ever been able to do that.
Across the room, she met Arriane’s eye. Arriane’s head was cocked to the side and her mouth was hanging open.
The note—she must still be waiting for Luce to read the note.
Miss Sophia flicked off the light box. “I think my arthritis has had enough Hell for one night.” She chuckled, encouraging the brain-numbed students to chuckle with her. “If you’ll all reread the seven critical essays I’ve assigned on Paradise Lost, I think you’ll be more than prepared for tomorrow’s exam.”
As the other students rushed to pack up their bags and peel out of the room, Luce unfolded Arriane’s note:
Tell me he didn’t give you that lame “I’ve been burned before” bit.
Ouch. She definitely needed to talk to Arriane and find out exactly what she knew about Daniel. But first …
He was standing before her. His silver belt buckle shone at eye level. She took a deep breath and looked up at his face.
Daniel’s violet-flecked gray eyes looked rested. She hadn’t spoken to him in two days, since he’d left her at the lake. It was as if the time he’d spent away from her had rejuvenated him.
Luce realized she still had Arriane’s revealing note spread open on her desk. She swallowed hard and tucked it back into her pocket.
“I wanted to apologize for leaving so suddenly the other day,” Daniel said, sounding oddly formal. Luce didn’t know if she was supposed to accept his apology, but he didn’t give her time to respond. “I take it you made it back to dry land okay?”
She tried a smile. It crossed her mind to tell Daniel about the dream she’d had, but luckily she realized that would be totally weird.
“What did you think of the review session?” Daniel seemed withdrawn, stiff, like they’d never spoken before. Maybe he was joking.
“It was torture,” Luce answered. It had always annoyed Luce when smart girls pretended they weren’t into something just because they assumed that was what a guy would want to hear. But Luce was not pretending; it really had been torture.
“Good,” Daniel said, seeming pleased.
“You hated it, too?”
“No,” he said cryptically, and Luce now wished she’d lied to sound more interested than she actually was.
“So … you liked it,” she said, wanting to say something, anything to keep him there next to her, talking. “What did you like about it exactly?”
“Maybe ‘like’ isn’t the right word.” After a long pause, he said, “It’s in my family … studying these things. I guess I can’t help feeling a connection.”
It took a moment for his words to fully register with Luce. Her mind traveled into the fusty old storage basement where she’d glimpsed Daniel’s single-page file. The file that