Tormen - By Lauren Kate Page 0,43

urgent task he'd ever performed. Luce crouched down where the girl had fallen. She traced the rough gravel with her nger, ba ed and more terri ed than she'd been a moment before. There was no sign that anyone had ever been there.

Cam returned to Luce's side with three arrows in one hand and the silver bow in the other. Instinctively, Luce reached out to touch one. She'd never seen anything like it. For some reason, it sent a strange ripple of fascination through her. Goose bumps rose on her skin. Her head swam.

Cam jerked the arrows away. "Don't. They're deadly."

They didn't look deadly. In fact, the arrows didn't even have heads. They were just silver sticks that dead-ended in a at tip. And yet one had made that girl disappear.

Luce blinked a few times. "What just happened, Cam?" Her voice felt heavy. "Who was she?"

"She was an Outcast." Cam wasn't looking at her. He was xated on the silver bow in his hands.

"A what?"

"The worst kind of angel. They sided with Satan during the revolt but wouldn't actually set foot in the underworld."

"Why not?"

"You know the type. Like those girls who want to be invited to the party but don't actually plan to show up." He grimaced. "As soon as the battle ended, they tried to backpedal up to Heaven pretty fast, but it was already too late. You only get one shot at those clouds." He glanced at Luce. "Most of us do, anyway."

"So, if they're not with Heaven ..." She was still getting used to talking concretely about these things. "Are they ... with Hell?"

"Hardly. Though I remember when they came crawling back." Cam gave a sinister laugh. "Usually, we'll take just about anyone we can get, but even Satan has his limits. He cast them out permanently, struck them blind to add injury to insult."

"But that girl wasn't blind," Luce whispered, recalling the way her bow had followed Cam's every move. The only reason she hadn't hit him was because he'd moved so fast. And yet Luce had known there was something o about that girl.

"She was. She just uses other senses to feel her way through the world. She can see after a fashion. It has its limitations and its bene ts."

His eyes never stopped combing the tree line. Luce clammed up at the thought of more Outcasts nested in the forest. More of those silver bows and arrows.

"Well, what happened to her? Where is she now?"

Cam stared at her. "She's dead, Luce. Poof. Gone."

Dead? Luce looked at the place on the ground where it had happened, now just as empty as the rest of the lot. She dropped her head, feeling dizzy. "I ... I thought you couldn't kill angels."

"Only for lack of a good weapon." He ashed the arrows at Luce one last time before wrapping them up in a cloth he pulled from his pocket and tucking them inside his leather jacket. "These things are hard to come by. Oh, stop trembling, I'm not going to kill you." He turned away and started testing the doors of the cars in the lot, smirking when he spotted the rolled-down driver's-side window of a gray-and-yellow truck. He reached inside and ipped the lock. "Be thankful you don't have to walk back to school. Come on, get in."

When Cam popped open the passenger-side door, Luce's jaw dropped. She peered in through the open window and watched him jimmying the ignition. "You think I'm just going to get in some hot-wired car with you right after I watched you murder someone?"

"If I hadn't killed her"--he fumbled around beneath the steering wheel--"she would have killed you, okay? Who do you think sent you that note? You were lured out of school to be murdered. Does that make it go down any easier?"

Luce leaned against the hood of the truck, not knowing what to do. She thought back to the conversation she'd had with Daniel, Arriane, and Gabbe right before she'd left Sword & Cross. They'd said Miss Sophia and the others in her sect might come after her. "But she didn't look like--are the Outcasts part of the Elders?"

By then Cam had the engine running. He quickly hopped out, walked around, and hustled Luce into the passenger seat. "Move along, chop-chop. This is like herding a cat." Finally he had her sitting and pulled her seat belt around her. "Unfortunately, Luce, you've got more than one kind of enemy. Which is why I'm taking you back to

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