Torment - Lauren Kate [52]
“No promises,” Shelby said, “but I’ll give it a shot. You know how to track them down?”
“Not really, but how hard can it be? They’ve been haunting me all my life.”
Shelby cupped her hand over Luce’s on the rock. “I want to help you, Luce, but it’s weird. I’m scared. What if you see something you, you know, shouldn’t?”
“When you broke up with SAEB—”
“I thought I told you not to—”
“Just listen: Aren’t you glad you figured out whatever it was that made you break up with him, sooner rather than later? I mean, what if you got engaged or something and only then—”
“Blech!” Shelby put up a hand to stop Luce. “Point taken. Now, come on, find us a shadow.”
Luce led Shelby back across the beach and up the steep stone stairs, where dashes of battered red and yellow verbenas had pushed up through the wet, sandy soil. They crossed the neat green terrace, trying not to interrupt a group of non-Nephilim students in a game of ultimate Frisbee. They passed their third-story dorm room window and wound around the back of the building. At the edge of the forest of redwoods, Luce pointed to a space between the trees. “That’s where I found one the last time.”
Shelby marched into the forest ahead of Luce, shoving through the long, clawlike leaves of the vine maple trees among the redwoods and stopping under a giant fern.
It was dark under the redwoods, and Luce was glad of Shelby’s company. She thought back to the other day, how quickly time had passed while she was harassing that shadow, getting nowhere. Suddenly she felt overwhelmed.
“If we can find and catch an Announcer, and if we can even get a glimpsing to work,” she said, “what do you think the chances are that the Announcer will have anything to show about me and Daniel? What if we just get another awful Bible scene like we saw in class?”
Shelby shook her head. “Daniel I don’t know about. But if we can summon and then glimpse an Announcer, then it will have to do with you. They’re supposed to be summoner-specific—though you won’t always be interested in what they have to say. Like how you get junk mail mixed with your important mail, but it’s still addressed to you.”
“How can they be … summoner-specific? That would mean Francesca and Steven were at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Well, yeah. They have been around forever. Rumor has it their résumés are pretty impressive.” Shelby stared oddly at Luce. “Put your bug eyes back in your head. How else do you think they scored jobs at Shoreline? This is a really good school.”
Something dark and slippery moved over them: a heavy cloak of an Announcer stretching sleepily in the lengthening shadows from the limb of a redwood tree.
“There.” Luce pointed, not wasting any time. She swung herself up onto a low branch that stretched behind Shelby. Luce had to balance on one foot and lean out all the way to the left just to graze the Announcer with her fingertips. “I can’t reach it.”
Shelby picked up a pinecone and pitched it at the center of the shadow where it draped down from the branch.
“Don’t!” Luce whispered. “You’ll piss it off.”
“It’s pissing me off, being so coy. Just hold out your hand.”
Grimacing, Luce did as she was told.
She watched the pinecone ricochet off the shadow’s exposed side, then heard the soft swishing sound that used to fill her ears with dread. One side of the shadow was sliding, very slowly, away from the branch. It slipped off and landed across Luce’s shaking extended arm. She pinched its edges with her fingers.
Luce hopped off the branch where she’d been standing and approached Shelby, her cold, musty offering in her hands.
“Here,” Shelby said. “I’ll take half and you take half, just like we saw in class. Ew, it’s squishy. Okay … loosen your grip, he’s not going anywhere. Let him just kind of chill and take shape.”
It seemed like a long time passed before the shadow did anything at all. Luce felt almost like she was playing with the old Ouija board she’d had as a kid. An inexplicable energy on the tips of her fingers. The feeling