Torment - Lauren Kate [38]
A few minutes past the half hour, the number five bus pulled up to the stop.
The bus was old and gray and rickety, as was the driver who heaved the levered door open to let Luce board. She took an empty seat near the front. The bus smelled like cobwebs, or a rarely used attic. She had to clutch the cheap leatherette seat cushion as the bus barreled around the curves at fifty miles an hour, as if just inches beyond the road, the cliff didn’t drop a mile straight down into the jagged gray ocean.
It was raining by the time they got to town, a steady sideways drizzle just shy of a real downpour. Most of the businesses on the main street were already closed up for the night, and the town looked wet and a little desolate. Not exactly the scene she’d had in mind for a happy makeup conversation.
Climbing down from the bus, Luce pulled the ski cap out of her backpack and tugged it over her head. She could feel the chill of the rain on her nose and her fingertips. She spotted a bent green metal sign and followed its arrow toward Noyo Point.
The point was a wide peninsula of land, not lush green like the terrain on Shoreline’s campus, but a mix of patchy grass and scabs of wet gray sand. The trees thinned out here, their leaves stripped away by the fitful ocean wind. There was one lone bench on a patch of mud all the way at the edge, about a hundred yards from the road. That must have been where Daniel meant for them to meet. But Luce could see from where she stood that he wasn’t there yet. She looked down at her watch. She was five minutes late.
Daniel was never late.
The rain seemed to settle on the tips of her hair instead of soaking into it the way rain usually did. Not even Mother Nature knew what to do with a dyed-blond Luce. She didn’t feel like waiting for Daniel out in the open. There was a row of shops on the main street. Luce hung back there, standing on a long wooden porch under a rusty metal awning. FRED’S FISH, the closed shop’s sign read in faded blue letters.
Fort Bragg wasn’t quaint like Mendocino, the town where she and Daniel had stopped before he’d flown her up the shoreline. It was more industrial, a real old-fashioned fishing village with rotting docks fitted into a curved inlet where the land tapered down toward the water. While Luce waited, a boatful of fishermen were stepping ashore. She watched the line of rail-thin, hardened men in their soaking-wet slickers come up the rocky stairs from the docks below.
When they reached the street level, they walked alone or in silent clusters, past the empty bench and the sad slanted trees, past the shut-up storefronts to a gravel parking lot at the south edge of Noyo Point. They climbed into beat-up old trucks, turned over the engines, and drove away, the sea of grim-set faces thinning until one stood out—and he wasn’t coming off any schooner. In fact, he seemed to have appeared suddenly out of the fog. Luce jumped back against the metal shutter of the fish store and tried to catch her breath.
Cam.
He was walking west along the gravel road right in front of her, flanked by two dark-clad fishermen who didn’t seem to notice his presence. He was dressed in slim black jeans and a black leather jacket. His dark hair was shorter than when she’d last seen him, shining in the rain. A hint of the black sunburst tattoo was visible on the side of his neck. Against the colorless backdrop of the sky, his eyes were as intensely green as they had ever been.
The last time she’d seen him, Cam had been standing at the front of a sickening black army of demons, so callous and cruel and just plain … evil. It had made her blood run cold. She had a string of curses and accusations ready to fling at him, but it would be better still if she could just avoid him altogether.
Too late. Cam’s green gaze fell on her—and she froze. Not because he turned