Torment - Lauren Kate [132]
Luce watched him stiffen.
“You don’t want to go with the Outcasts,” he told Luce, “especially not tonight.”
“Don’t tell her what she does or doesn’t want.” Shelby butted in. “I’m not saying she should go with the albino freaks or anything. Just everybody quit babying her and let her do her own thing for once. It’s, like, enough already.”
Her voice boomed across the yard, making the Outcast girl jump. She turned to aim her arrow at Shelby.
Luce sucked in her breath. The silver arrow quivered in the Outcast’s hands. She pulled back on the bowstring. Luce held her breath. But before the girl could shoot, her glossy eyes widened. The bow tumbled from her hands. And her body disappeared in a dim gray flash of light.
Two feet behind where the Outcast girl had stood, Molly lowered a silver bow. She had shot the girl cleanly in the back.
“What?” Molly barked as the whole group turned to gape at her. “I like that Nephilim. She reminds me of someone I know.”
She jerked an arm to gesture at Shelby, who said, “Thanks. Seriously. That was cool.”
Molly shrugged, oblivious to the towering dark presence rising up behind her. The Outcast boy Miles had beaten to the ground with the kayak. Phil.
He swung the kayak behind his body, as if it were a baseball bat, and batted Molly clear across the lawn. She landed with a grunt on the grass. Tossing the kayak aside, the Outcast reached into his trench coat for one last shining arrow.
His dead eyes were the only expressionless part of his face. The rest of him—his snarl, his brow, even his cheekbones—looked utterly ferocious. His white skin seemed stretched across his bony skull. His hands looked more like claws. Anger and desperation had changed him from a pale and strange but good-looking guy into an actual monster. He raised his silver bow and took aim at Luce.
“I’ve been patiently waiting for my chance with you for weeks. Now, I don’t mind being a little more forceful than my sister,” he growled. “You will come with us.”
On either side of Luce, silver bows were raised. Cam brought his out from inside his coat once again, and Daniel scrambled to the ground to pick up the bow that the Outcast girl had just dropped. Phil seemed to expect this. His face twisted into a dark smile.
“Do I need to kill your lover to get you to join me?” he asked, pointing his arrow now at Daniel. “Or do I need to kill them all?”
Luce stared at the strange, flat tip of the silver arrow, less than ten feet from Daniel’s chest. No chance Phil would miss from this range. She’d seen the arrows extinguish a dozen angels tonight with that paltry flash of light. But she’d also seen an arrow glance off Callie’s skin, like it was nothing more than the dull stick it appeared to be.
The silver arrows killed angels, she suddenly realized, not humans.
She leaped in front of Daniel. “I won’t let you hurt him. And your arrows can’t hurt me.”
A sound escaped from Daniel, a weird half-laugh, half-sob. She turned to him, wide-eyed. He looked afraid, but more than that, he looked guilty.
She thought of the conversation they’d had under the gnarled peach tree at Sword & Cross, the first time he’d told her about her reincarnations. She remembered sitting with him on the beach in Mendocino when he talked of his place in Heaven before her. What a struggle it had been to get him to open up about those early days. She still felt like there was more. There had to be more.
The creak of the bowstring snapped her attention back to the Outcast, who was pulling back the silver arrow. Now it was aimed at Miles. “Enough talk,” he said. “I’ll take your friends out one at a time until you surrender to me.”
In her mind, Luce saw a bright blink of light, a swirl of color, and a whirling montage of her lives flashing before her eyes—her mom and dad and Andrew. The parents she’d seen in Mount Shasta. Vera ice-skating on the frozen pond. The girl she’d been, swimming under the waterfall in a yellow halter-top