Torment - Lauren Kate [41]
His eyes never stopped combing the tree line. Luce clammed up at the thought of more Outcasts nested in the forest. More of those silver bows and arrows.
“Well, what happened to her? Where is she now?”
Cam stared at her. “She’s dead, Luce. Poof. Gone.”
Dead? Luce looked at the place on the ground where it had happened, now just as empty as the rest of the lot. She dropped her head, feeling dizzy. “I … I thought you couldn’t kill angels.”
“Only for lack of a good weapon.” He flashed the arrows at Luce one last time before wrapping them up in a cloth he pulled from his pocket and tucking them inside his leather jacket. “These things are hard to come by. Oh, stop trembling, I’m not going to kill you.” He turned away and started testing the doors of the cars in the lot, smirking when he spotted the rolled-down driver’s-side window of a gray-and-yellow truck. He reached inside and flipped the lock. “Be thankful you don’t have to walk back to school. Come on, get in.”
When Cam popped open the passenger-side door, Luce’s jaw dropped. She peered in through the open window and watched him jimmying the ignition. “You think I’m just going to get in some hot-wired car with you right after I watched you murder someone?”
“If I hadn’t killed her”—he fumbled around beneath the steering wheel—“she would have killed you, okay? Who do you think sent you that note? You were lured out of school to be murdered. Does that make it go down any easier?”
Luce leaned against the hood of the truck, not knowing what to do. She thought back to the conversation she’d had with Daniel, Arriane, and Gabbe right before she’d left Sword & Cross. They’d said Miss Sophia and the others in her sect might come after her. “But she didn’t look like—are the Outcasts part of the Elders?”
By then Cam had the engine running. He quickly hopped out, walked around, and hustled Luce into the passenger seat. “Move along, chop-chop. This is like herding a cat.” Finally he had her sitting and pulled her seat belt around her. “Unfortunately, Luce, you’ve got more than one kind of enemy. Which is why I’m taking you back to school where it’s safe. Right. Now.”
She didn’t think it would be smart to be alone in a car with Cam, but she wasn’t sure staying here on her own was any smarter. “Wait a minute,” she said as he turned back toward Shoreline. “If these Outcasts aren’t part of Heaven or Hell, whose side are they on?”
“The Outcasts are a sickening shade of gray. In case you hadn’t noticed, there are worse things out there than me.”
Luce folded her hands on her lap, anxious to get back to her dorm room, where she could feel—or at least pretend to feel—safe. Why should she believe Cam? She’d fallen for his lies too many times before.
“There’s nothing worse than you. What you want … what you tried to do at Sword and Cross was horrible and wrong.” She shook her head. “You’re just trying to trick me again.”
“I’m not.” His voice had less argument in it than she would have expected. He seemed thoughtful, even glum. By then, he had pulled into Shoreline’s long, arched driveway. “I never wanted to hurt you, Luce, never.”
“Is that why you called all those shadows to battle when I was in the cemetery?”
“Good and evil aren’t as clear-cut as you think.” He looked out the window toward the Shoreline buildings, which appeared dark and uninhabited. “You’re from the South, right? This time around, anyway. So you should understand the freedom that the victors have to rewrite history. Semantics, Luce. What you think of as evil—well, to my kind, it’s a simple problem of connotation.”
“Daniel doesn’t think so.” Luce wished she could have said she didn’t think so, but she didn’t know enough yet. She still felt like she was taking so much of Daniel’s explanations on faith.
Cam parked the truck on a patch of grass behind her dorm, got out, and walked around to open the passenger door. “Daniel and I are two sides of the same coin.” He offered his hand to help her down; she ignored him. “It must pain you to hear that.”
She wanted