Fallen - Lauren Kate [69]
“Now lemme get this straight,” she said in a throaty, nasal voice. “You put the lime in the coconut and drink ’em both up—whoa, long faces. What am I interrupting?”
Arriane wheeled to a stop at the foot of Luce’s bed. She extended a coconut with a bobbing pink umbrella.
Gabbe jumped up and seized the coconut first, giving its contents a sniff. “Arriane, she has just been through a trauma,” she scolded. “And for your information, what you interrupted was the topic of Todd.”
Arriane tossed her shoulders back. “Precisely why she needs something with a kick,” she argued, holding the tray possessively while she and Gabbe engaged in a stare-down.
“Fine,” Arriane said, looking away from Gabbe. “I’ll give her your boring old drink.” She gave Luce the coconut with the blue straw.
Luce must have been in some kind of post-traumatic daze. Where would they have gotten any of this stuff? Coconut shells? Drink umbrellas? It was like she’d been conked out at reform school and woken up at Club Med.
“Where did you guys get all this stuff?” she asked. “I mean, thank you, but—”
“We pool our resources when we need to,” Arriane said. “Roland helped.”
The three of them sat slurping the frosty, sweet drinks for a moment, until Luce couldn’t take it anymore. “So back to Todd …?”
“Todd,” Gabbe said, clearing her throat. “Thing is … he just inhaled a lot more of that smoke than you did, honey—”
“He did not,” Arriane spat. “He broke his neck.”
Luce gasped, and Gabbe hit Arriane with her drink umbrella.
“What?” Arriane said. “Luce can handle it. If she’s going to find out eventually, why sugarcoat it?”
“The evidence is still inconclusive,” Gabbe said, stressing the words.
Arriane shrugged. “Luce was there, she must have seen—”
“I didn’t see what happened to him,” Luce said. “We were together and then somehow we were thrown apart. I had a bad feeling, but I didn’t know,” she whispered. “So he’s …”
“Gone from this world,” Gabbe said softly.
Luce closed her eyes. A chill spread through her that had nothing to do with the drink. She remembered Todd’s frenzied banging on the walls, his sweaty hand squeezing hers when the shadows roared down on them, the awful moment when the two of them had been split apart and she’d been too overcome to go to him.
He’d seen the shadows. Luce was certain of it now. And he’d died.
After Trevor died, not a week had gone by without a hate letter finding its way to Luce. Her parents started trying to vet the mail before she could read the poisonous stuff, but too much still reached her. Some letters were handwritten, some were typed, one had even been cut from magazine letters, ransom-note style. Murderer. Witch. They’d called her enough cruel names to fill a scrapbook, caused enough agony to keep her locked inside the house all summer.
She thought she’d done so much to move on from that nightmare: leaving her past behind when she came to Sword & Cross, focusing on her classes, making friends … oh God. She sucked in her breath. “What about Penn?” she asked, biting her lip.
“Penn’s fine,” Arriane said. “She’s all front-page-story, eyewitness-to-the-fire. She and Miss Sophia both got out, smelling like an East Georgia smoke pit, but no worse for the wear.”
Luce let out her breath. At least there was one piece of good news. But under the paper-thin infirmary sheets, she was trembling. Soon, surely the same types of people who’d come to her after Trevor’s death would come to her again. Not just the ones who wrote the angry letters. Dr. Sanford. Her parole officer. The police.
Just like before, she’d be expected to have the whole story pieced together. To remember every single detail. But of course, just like before, she wouldn’t be able to. One minute, he’d been at her side, just the two of them. The next—
“Luce!” Penn barged into the room, holding