Torment - Lauren Kate [118]
Everyone? Luce couldn’t group them together without seeing a glaring missing piece. Where was Daniel in all of this?
“Besides.” Arriane smiled proudly. “We’re in the presence of a master. Ro’s one of the very best Announcer travelers.” And then, in a whispered aside to Roland, “Don’t let it go to your head.”
Roland swung open the Announcer’s door. It groaned and creaked on shadow hinges and swung open onto a dank, yawning pit of emptiness.
“Um … what is it again that makes traveling by Announcer so dangerous?” Miles asked.
Arriane pointed around the room, at the shadow under the desk lamp, behind Shelby’s yoga mat. All of the shadows were quivering. “An untrained eye might not know which Announcer to step through. And believe us, there are always uninvited lurkers, waiting for someone to accidentally open them.”
Luce remembered the sickly brown shadow she’d tripped over. The uninvited lurker that had given her the nightmarish glimpse of Cam and Daniel on the beach.
“If you pick the wrong Announcer, it’s very easy to get lost,” Roland explained. “To not have any idea where—or when—you’re stepping through to. But as long as you stick with us, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
Nervously, Luce pointed into the belly of the Announcer. She didn’t remember the other shadows they’d stepped through looking quite so murky and dark. Or maybe she just hadn’t known the consequences until now. “We’re not just going to pop up in the middle of my parents’ kitchen, are we? Because I think my mom might pass out from the shock—”
“Please.” Arriane clucked her tongue, guiding Luce, then Miles, and then Shelby to stand before the Announcer. “Have a little faith.”
It was like pushing through a murky wet fog, clammy and unpleasant. It slid and coiled over Luce’s skin and stuck in her lungs when she breathed. An echo of ceaseless white noise filled up the tunnel like a waterfall. The two other times Luce had traveled by Announcer, she’d felt lumbering and hurried, catapulting though darkness to come out somewhere light. This was different. She’d lost track of where and when she was, even of who she was and where she was going.
Then there was a strong hand yanking her out.
When Roland let her go, the echoing waterfall trickled to a drip, and a whiff of chlorine filled her nose. A diving board. A familiar one, under a lofty arched ceiling lined with broken stained-glass panels. The sun had passed over the high windows, but its light still cast faint colored prisms onto the surface of an Olympic-size pool. Along the walls, candles flickered in stone recesses, throwing off a dim, useless light. She’d recognize this church-gymnasium anywhere.
“Oh my God,” Luce whispered. “We’re back at Sword and Cross.”
Arriane scanned the room quickly and without affection. “As far as your parents are concerned when they pick us up tomorrow morning, you’ve been here all along. Got it?”
Arriane acted as if returning to Sword & Cross for the night was no different than checking into a nondescript motel. The jolt back to this part of her life, however, hit Luce like a slap across the face. She hadn’t liked it here. Sword & Cross was a miserable place, but it was a place where things had happened to her. She’d fallen in love here, had watched a close friend die. More than anywhere else, this was a place where she had changed.
She closed her eyes and laughed bitterly. She’d known nothing then compared to what she knew now. And yet she’d felt surer of herself and her emotions than she could imagine ever feeling again.
“What the hell is this place?” Shelby asked.
“My last school,” Luce said, glancing at Miles. He seemed uneasy, huddling next to Shelby against the wall. Luce remembered: They were good kids—and though she’d never talked much about her time here, the Nephilim rumor mill could easily have filled their minds with enough vivid details to paint one scary night at Sword & Cross.
“Ahem,” Arriane said, looking at Shelby and Miles. “And when Luce’s parents ask, you guys go here too.