Torment - Lauren Kate [92]
A heartbeat later and Luce was a teenager herself, with a mess of curly shoulder-length black hair. Sprawled on Vera’s denim bedspread, the coarse fabric somehow a comfort, flipping through Vera’s secret diary. He loves me, Vera had scrawled again and again and again, her handwriting getting loopier and loopier. And then the pages pulled away, her sister’s angry face looming, the tracks of her tears clear. …
And then again, a different scene, Luce older still, maybe seventeen. She braced herself for what was coming.
Snow pouring from the sky like soft white static. Vera and a few friends ice-skating on the frozen pond behind their house, gliding in swift circles, happy and laughing, and at the frayed icy edge of the pond, Luce crouched down, the cold seeping through her thin clothes while she laced up her skates, in a hurry, as usual, to catch up with her sister. And beside her, a warmth she didn’t have to look at to identify, Daniel, who was silent, moody, his skates already tightly laced. She could feel the urge to kiss him—and yet no shadows were visible. The evening and everything about it were star-dotted and glittering, endlessly clear and full of possibility.
Luce searched for the shadows, then realized that their absence made sense. These were Vera’s memories. And the snow made everything harder to see. Still, Daniel must know, as he had known when he dove into that lake. He must have sensed it every single time. Did he ever care what became of people like Vera after Luce was killed?
There came a bursting sound from Luce’s side of the lake, like the letting out of a parachute. And then: A blooming shot of red-hot fire in the middle of a blizzard. A huge column of bright orange flames shooting into the sky at the edge of the pond. Where Luce had been. The other skaters rushed senselessly toward it, barreling across the pond. But the ice was melting, rapidly, catastrophically, sending their skates plunging through to the frigid water underneath. Vera’s scream echoed through the blue night, her frozen look of agony all that Luce could see.
In the casino, Vera yanked her hand back, shaking it as if she’d been burned. Her lips quivered a few times before they formed the words: “It’s you.” She shook her head. “But it can’t be.”
“Vera,” Luce whispered, reaching her hand out again to her sister. She wanted to hold her, to take all the pain Vera had ever been caused and transfer it to herself.
“No.” Vera shook her head, backing away and wagging a finger at Luce. “No, no, no.” She backed into the dealer at the table behind her, tripping over him and sending a giant stack of poker chips cascading off the table. The colored disks slid across the floor, causing a ripple of oohs and aahs from gamblers who leaped from their seats to scoop them up.
“Dammit, Vera!” a squat man bellowed over the din. As he waddled to their table in a cheap gray polyester suit and scuffed black shoes, Luce shared a worried glance with Miles and Shelby. Three underage kids wanted nothing to do with the pit boss. But he was still chewing Vera out, his lip curled up in disgust. “How many times—”
Vera had found her feet again but kept staring, terrified, at Luce, as if Luce were the devil instead of her sister a lifetime removed. Vera’s kohl-lined eyes were white with terror as she stammered, “She c-c-can’t be here.”
“Christ,” the pit boss muttered, checking out Luce and her friends, then speaking into a walkie-talkie. “Get me security. Got a coupla hoodlum kids.”
Luce shrank back between Miles and Shelby, who said through gritted teeth, “How about one of those step-throughs, Miles?”
Before Miles could reply, three men with enormous wrists and necks appeared and towered over them. The pit boss waved his hands. “Take them to the pen. See what other kind of trouble they’ve been in.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” a girl’s voice growled from behind the wall of security guards.
All heads whipped around to find