Torment - Lauren Kate [84]
Crossing the lawn to the dorm, Luce had to shade her eyes. Powerful flashlights were sweeping over the campus. A helicopter droned in the distance, its searchlight tracing the shoreline, sweeping back and forth along the beach. A wide line of men in dark uniforms walked along the path from the Nephilim lodge to the mess hall, slowly scanning the ground.
Miles said, “That’s standard formation for search parties. Form a line and leave no inch of ground uncovered.”
“Oh God,” Luce said under her breath.
“She really is missing.” Shelby winced. “Not good karma.”
Luce broke into a jog toward the Nephilim lodge. Miles and Shelby followed. The path, decked with flowers and so pretty in the daylight, now looked overgrown with shadow. Ahead of them, the campfire in the pit had faded to glowing embers, but all the lights were on at the lodge, inside each of the two stories, and all around the deck. The great A-frame building was ablaze and looked formidable in the dark night.
Luce could see the scared faces of a lot of the Nephilim kids who were sitting on the benches around the deck. Jasmine was crying, her red knit cap tugged low on her head. She was holding Lilith’s stiff hand for support as two cops with notebooks ran through a bunch of questions. Luce’s heart went out to the girl. She knew how horrific that process could be.
The cops swarmed around the deck, passing out blown-up black-and-white photocopies of a recent photograph of Dawn that someone had printed off the Internet. Glancing down at the low-resolution image, Luce was surprised to see how much Dawn did resemble her—at least, before she’d dyed her hair. She remembered talking the morning after she’d done it, how Dawn kept joking about their not being Twinkies anymore.
Luce covered her gasp with her hand. Her head hurt as she began to add up so many things that hadn’t made sense. Until now.
The awful moment on the life raft. Steven’s harsh warning about keeping it a secret. Daniel’s paranoia about “dangers” he’d never explained to Luce. The Outcast who’d lured her off campus, the threat that Cam had destroyed in the forest. The way Dawn looked so much like her in the fuzzy black-and-white photograph.
Whoever took Dawn had been mistaken. It was Luce they wanted.
TWELVE
SEVEN DAYS
Friday morning, Luce’s eyes blinked open and fell on the clock. Seven-thirty a.m. She’d barely gotten any sleep—she was a mess, worried sick about Dawn and still angry about the past life she’d witnessed the day before via the Announcer. It was so eerie to have seen the moments leading up to her death. Would they all have been like that? Her mind kept running up against the same roadblock over and over again:
If it hadn’t been for Daniel …
Would she have had a shot at a normal life, a relationship with someone else, getting married, having kids, and growing old like the rest of the world? If it hadn’t been for Daniel falling in love with her ages ago, would Dawn be missing right now?
These questions were all detours, which eventually flowed back to the most important one: Would love be different with someone else? Was love even possible with someone else? Love was supposed to be easy, wasn’t it? Then why did she feel so tormented?
Shelby’s head swung down from the top bunk, her thick blond ponytail dropping behind her like a heavy rope. “Are you as freaked out by all this as I am?”
Luce patted the bed for Shelby to scoot down and sit next to her. Still in her thick red flannel pajamas, Shelby slid onto Luce’s bed, bringing two giant bars of dark chocolate with her.
Luce was going to say she couldn’t possibly eat, but as the scent of the chocolate wafted to her nose, she peeled back the bronze foil and gave Shelby a tiny smile.
“Hits the spot,” Shelby said. “You know that thing I said last night about Dawn making out with some greaseball? I feel really bad about it.”
Luce shook her head. “Oh, Shel, you didn’t know. You can’t feel bad about that.” She, on the other hand, had plenty of reason to feel sick over what had happened to Dawn.