Torment - Lauren Kate [63]
She looked up from the bowl at Shelby. “Thanks for the soup.”
“Don’t let Steven thwart your plans,” Shelby huffed. “We should totally keep working on the Announcers. I am just so sick of these angels and demons and their power trips. ‘Oooh, we know better than you because we’re full-on angels and you’re just the bastard child of some angel who got his rocks off.’ ”
Luce laughed, but she was thinking that Steven’s mini-lecture on Plato and giving her The Republic tonight was the opposite of a power trip. Of course, there was no telling Shelby that now, not when she’d dropped into her usual I’m-on-a-tirade-against-Shoreline routine on Luce’s bottom bunk.
“I mean, I know you have whatever going on with Daniel,” Shelby continued, “but seriously, what good has an angel ever done for me?”
Luce shrugged apologetically.
“I’ll tell you: nothing. Nothing besides knock up my mom and then totally ditch both of us before I was born. Real celestial behavior.” Shelby snorted. “The kicker is, my whole life, my mom’s telling me I should be grateful. For what? These watered-down powers and this enormous forehead I inherited from my dad? No thanks.” She kicked the top bunk glumly. “I’d give anything to just be normal.”
“Really?” Luce had spent the whole week feeling inferior to her Nephilim classmates. She knew the grass was always greener, but this she couldn’t believe. What advantage could Shelby possibly see in not having her Nephilim powers?
“Wait,” Luce said, “the sorry-ass ex-boyfriend. Did he …”
Shelby looked away. “We were meditating together, and, I don’t know, somehow during the mantra, I accidentally levitated. It wasn’t even a big deal, I was, like, two inches off the floor. But Phil wouldn’t let it go. He started bugging me about what else I could do, and asking all these weird questions.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Shelby said. “Some stuff about you, actually. He wanted to know if you’d taught me to levitate. Whether you could levitate too.”
“Why me?”
“Probably more of his pervy roommate fantasies. Anyway, you should have seen the look on his face that day. Like I was some sort of circus freak. I had no choice but to break things off.”
“That’s awful.” Luce squeezed Shelby’s hand. “But it sounds like his problem, not yours. I know the rest of the kids at Shoreline look at the Nephilim funny, but I’ve been to a lot of high schools, and I’m starting to think that’s just the way most kids’ faces naturally bend. Besides, no one’s ‘normal.’ Phil must have had something freakish about him.”
“Actually, there was something about his eyes. They were blue, but faded, almost washed out. He had to wear these special contacts so people wouldn’t stare at him.” Shelby tossed her head to the side. “Plus, you know, that third nipple.” She burst out laughing, was red in the face by the time Luce joined in and practically in tears when a light tapping on the windowpane shut both of them up.
“That better not be him.” Shelby’s voice instantly sobered as she hopped up from the bed and flung open the window, knocking over a potted yucca in her haste.
“It’s for you,” she said, almost numbly.
Luce was at the window in a heartbeat, because by then, she could feel him. Bracing her palms on the sill, she leaned forward into the brisk night air.
She was face to face, lip to lip, with Daniel.
For the briefest moment, she thought he was looking past her, into the room, at Shelby, but then he was kissing her, cupping the back of her head with his soft hands and pulling her to him, taking her breath away. A week’s worth of warmth flowed through her, along with an unspoken apology for the harsh words they’d said the other night on the beach.
“Hello,” he whispered.
“Hello.”
Daniel was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She could see the cowlick in his hair. His tremendous pearl-white