She didn't think it would be smart to be alone in a car with Cam, but she wasn't sure staying here on her own was any smarter. "Wait a minute," she said as he turned back toward Shoreline. "If these Outcasts aren't part of Heaven or Hell, whose side are they on?" she said as he turned back toward Shoreline. "If these Outcasts aren't part of Heaven or Hell, whose side are they on?"
"The Outcasts are a sickening shade of gray. In case you hadn't noticed, there are worse things out there than me."
Luce folded her hands on her lap, anxious to get back to her dorm room, where she could feel--or at least pretend to feel--safe. Why should she believe Cam? She'd fallen for his lies too many times before.
"There's nothing worse than you. What you want ... what you tried to do at Sword and Cross was horrible and wrong." She shook her head. "You're just trying to trick me again."
"I'm not." His voice had less argument in it than she would have expected. He seemed thoughtful, even glum. By then, he had pulled into Shoreline's long, arched driveway. "I never wanted to hurt you, Luce, never."
"Is that why you called all those shadows to battle when I was in the cemetery?"
"Good and evil aren't as clear-cut as you think." He looked out the window toward the Shoreline buildings, which appeared dark and uninhabited. "You're from the South, right? This time around, anyway. So you should understand the freedom that the victors have to rewrite history. Semantics, Luce. What you think of as evil--well, to my kind, it's a simple problem of connotation."
"Daniel doesn't think so." Luce wished she could have said she didn't think so, but she didn't know enough yet. She still felt like she was taking so much of Daniel's explanations on faith.
Cam parked the truck on a patch of grass behind her dorm, got out, and walked around to open the passenger door. "Daniel and I are two sides of the same coin." He o ered his hand to help her down; she ignored him. "It must pain you to hear that."
She wanted to say it couldn't possibly be true, that there were no similarities between Cam and Daniel no matter how Cam tried to whitewash things. But in the week she'd been at Shoreline, Luce had seen and heard things that con icted with what she'd once believed. She thought of Francesca and Steven. They were born of the same place: Once upon a time, before the war and the Fall, there had only been one side. Cam wasn't the only one who claimed that the pide between angels and demons wasn't entirely black and white.
The light was on in her window. Luce imagined Shelby on the orange area rug, her legs crossed in the lotus position, meditating. How could Luce go in and pretend she hadn't just seen an angel die? Or that everything that had happened this week hadn't left her riddled with doubts?
"Let's keep this evening's happenings between us, shall we?" Cam said. "And going forward, do us all a favor and stay on campus, where you won't get into trouble."
She pushed past him, out of the beam of the stolen truck's headlights and into the shadows cloaking the walls of her dorm.
Cam got back into the truck, revving the engine obnoxiously. But before he pulled away, he rolled down the window and called out to Luce, "You're welcome."
She turned around. "For what?"
He grinned and hit the gas. "For saving your life."
Chapter Six
THIRTEEN DAYS
"It's here," a loud voice sang outside Luce's door early the next morning. Someone was knocking. "It's nally here!"
The knocking grew more insistent. Luce didn't know what time it was, other than way too early for all the giggling she could hear on the other side of the door.
"Your friends," Shelby called from the top bunk.
Luce groaned and slid out of bed. She glanced up at Shelby, who was propped up on her stomach on the top bunk, already fully dressed in jeans and a pu y red vest, doing the Saturday crossword.
"Do you ever sleep?" Luce muttered, reaching into her closet to yank on the purple tartan robe her mother had sewn for her thirteenth birthday. It still t her--sort of.
She pressed her face against the peephole and saw the convex smiling faces of Dawn and Jasmine. They were geared up with bright scarves and fuzzy earmu s. Jasmine raised a