Fallen - By Lauren Kate Page 0,109

knowing eyes. The way one touch of his lips transported her far away from any darkness. For him, she'd suffer all of this, and more.

If only she knew how much more there was.

She and Miss Sophia jogged forward, past the creaking bleachers framing the commons, then past the soccer field, Miss Sophia really kept in shape. Luce would have worried about their pace if the woman hadn't been a few steps ahead of her.

Luce was dragging. Her fear of facing the shadows was like a hurricane-force headwind slowing her down. And yet she pressed on. An overwhelming nausea told her that she'd barely glimpsed what the dark things could accomplish.

At the cemetery gates, they stopped. Luce was trembling, hugging herself in a failed attempt to hide it. A girl was standing with her back to them, gazing into the graveyard below.

"Penn!" Luce called, so glad to see her friend.

When Penn turned to them, her face was ashen. She wore a black Windbreaker, despite the heat, and her glasses were fogging up from the humidity. She was trembling just as much as Luce was.

Luce gasped. "What happened?"

"I was coming to look for you," Penn said, "and then a bunch of the other kids ran this way. They went down there," She pointed toward the gates. "But I c-c-couldn't."

"What is it?" Luce asked. "What's down there?"

But even as she asked, she knew one thing that was down there, one thing that Penn would never be able to see. The curdling black shadow was coaxing Luce toward it, Luce alone.

Penn was blinking rapidly. She looked terrified. "Dunno," she said finally. "At first I thought fireworks.

But nothing ever made it to the sky." She shuddered. "Something bad's about to happen. I don't know what."
Chapter Eighteen
THE BURIED WAR

Luce took one look at the shuddering light at the base of the cemetery and started racing toward it. She hurtled down past the broken headstones, leaving Penn and Miss Sophia far behind. She didn't care that the sharp, twisting limbs of the live oak trees scratched her arms and face as she ran, or that clumps of thick-rooted weeds tripped up her feet.

She had to get down there.

The waning sliver of moon offered little light, but there was another source - coming from the bottom of the cemetery. Her destination. It looked like a monstrous, cloud- ridden lightning storm. Only it was happening on the ground.

The shadows had been warning her, she realized, for days. Now their dark show had turned into something even Penn could see. And the other students who'd run ahead must have noticed it, too. Luce didn't know what it could possibly mean. Only that if Daniel was down there with that sinister flickering

... it was all her fault.

Her lungs burned, but she was driven forward by the image of him standing under the peach trees. She wouldn't stop until she found him - because she'd been coming to find him anyway, to shove the book under his nose and cry out that she believed him, that part of her had believed him all along, but she'd been too scared to accept their unfathomable history. She would tell him that she wasn't going to let fear drive her away, not this time, not anymore. Because she knew something, understood something that had taken her far too long to piece together. Something wild and strange that made their past experiences together both more and less believable. She knew who - no, what Daniel was. Part of her had come to this realization on her own - that she might have lived before and loved him before. Only, she hadn't understood what it meant, what it all added up to - the pull she felt toward him, her dreams - until now.

But none of that mattered if she couldn't get down there in time to find some way to fend off the shadows.

None of it mattered if they got to Daniel before she could. She tore down the steep tiers of graves, but the basin at the center of the cemetery was still so far away.

Behind her, a thumping of footsteps. Then a shrill voice.

"Pennyweather!" It was Miss Sophia. She was gaining on Luce, calling back over her shoulder, where Luce could see Penn carefully working her way over a fallen tombstone. "You're slower than Christmas coming!"

"No!" Luce yelled. "Penn, Miss Sophia, don't come down here!" She wouldn't be responsible for putting anyone else in the shadows' path.

Miss Sophia froze on a toppled white tombstone