Fallen - By Lauren Kate Page 0,107

thin wrist giving way to an open palm in which a large, full peony rested.

Luce's fingers started to tremble. A lump rose in her throat, She didn't know why this, out of everything she'd seen and heard today, was beautiful enough - tragic enough - to finally bring her to tears. The shoulder, the knees, the wrist ... all were her own. And she knew - all of them had been drawn by Daniel's hand.

"Lucinda." Miss Sophia looked nervous, slowly inching her chair away from the table. "Are you - are you feeling quite all right?"

"Oh, Daniel," Luce whispered, desperate to be near him again, She wiped away a tear.

"He's damned, Lucinda," Miss Sophia said in a surprisingly cold voice. "You both are."

Damned. Daniel had spoken of being damned. That was his word for all of this. But he'd been referring to himself. Not her.

"Damned?" Luce repeated. Only, she didn't want to hear any more. All she wanted was to find him.

Miss Sophia snapped her fingers in front of Luce's face. Luce met her eyes, slowly, languidly, smiling dopily.

"You're still not awake," Miss Sophia murmured. She closed the book with a smack, catching Luce's attention, and laid her hands down on the table. "Has he told you anything? After the kiss, maybe?"

"He told me ...," Luce started. "It sounds crazy."

"These things often do."

"He said the two of us ... we're some kind of star-crossed lovers." Luce closed her eyes, remembering his long catalog of past lives. At first the idea had felt so foreign, but now that she was getting used to it, she thought it might just be the most romantic thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. "He talked about all the times we've fallen in love, in Rio, and Jerusalem, Tahiti - "

"That does sound rather crazy," Miss Sophia said. "So, of course, you don't believe him?"

"I didn't at first," Luce said, thinking back to their heated disagreement under the peach tree. "He started out by bringing up the Bible, which my instinct is to tune out - " She bit her tongue. "No offense. I mean, I think your class is really interesting."

"None taken. People often shy away from their religious upbringings around your age. You're nothing new, Lucinda."

"Oh." Luce cracked her knuckles. "But I didn't have a religious upbringing. My parents didn't believe in it, so - "

"Everyone believes in something. Surely you were baptized?"

"Not if you don't count the swimming pool built under the church pews over there," Luce said timidly, jerking her thumb toward Sword & Cross's gym.

Yeah, she celebrated Christmas, she'd been to church a handful of times, and even when her life made her and everyone around her miserable, she still had faith that there was someone or something up there worth believing in. That had always been enough for her.

Across the room, she heard a loud clatter. She looked up to see that Roland had fallen out of his chair.

The last time she'd glanced at him, he'd been leaning back on two legs, and now it looked like gravity had finally won.

As he stumbled to his feet, Arriane went to help him. She glanced over and offered a hurried wave. "He's okay!" she called cheerily. "Get up!" she whispered loudly to Roland.

Miss Sophia was sitting very still, with her hands in her lap under the table. She cleared her throat a few times, flipped back to the front cover of the book and ran her fingers over the photograph, then said, "Did he reveal anything more? Do you know who Daniel is?"

Slowly, sitting up very straight in her chair, Luce asked, "Do you?"

The librarian stiffened. "I study these things. I'm an academic. I don't get tangled up in trivial matters of the heart."

Those were the words she used - but everything from the pulsing vein along her neck, to the almost un-noticeably light sheen of sweat dotting her brow told Luce that the answer to her question was yes.

Over their heads, the giant black antique clock struck eleven. The minute hand trembled with the effort of snapping into its place, and the whole contraption gonged for so long it interrupted their conversation.

Luce had never noticed how loud the clock was. Now, each chime made her ache. She'd been away from Daniel for too long.

"Daniel thought ...," Luce started to say. "Last night, when we first kissed, he thought I was going to die."

Miss Sophia didn't look as surprised as Luce would have liked her to look.