email you, okay?" Callie hung up before Luce could even respond.
This was not good. Luce ipped the phone shut. She shouldn't have felt like Callie was intruding by inviting herself to Thanksgiving. She should have felt great that her friend still wanted to see her. But all she felt was helpless, homesick, and guilty for perpetuating this stupid cycle of lies.
Was it even possible to just be normal and happy anymore? What on earth--or beyond it--would it take for Luce to be as content with her life as someone like Miles seemed to be? Her mind kept circling around Daniel. And she had her answer: The only way she could be carefree again would be to have never met Daniel. To have never known true love.
Something rustled in the treetops. A frigid wind assailed her skin. She hadn't been concentrating on an Announcer speci cally, but she realized --just as Steven had told her--that her wish for answers must have summoned one.
No, not one.
She shivered, looking up into the tangle of branches. Hundreds of stealthy, murky, foul-smelling shadows.
They owed together in the high redwood branches over her head. Like someone in the clouds had tipped over a giant pot of black ink that had They owed together in the high redwood branches over her head. Like someone in the clouds had tipped over a giant pot of black ink that had spread across the sky and dripped down into the canopy of the trees, bleeding one branch into another until the forest was a solid wash of blackness. At rst it was almost impossible to tell where one shadow stopped and the next one began, which shadow was real and which an Announcer.
But soon they began to morph and make themselves obvious--slyly at rst, as if they were moving innocently in the fading light of the day--but then more boldly. They pinched themselves free from the branches they'd been occupying, wrenching their tendrils of blackness down, down, close to Luce's head. Beckoning or threatening her? She steeled herself but couldn't catch her breath. There were too many. It was too much. She gasped for air, trying not to panic, knowing it was already too late.
She ran.
She started south, back toward the dorm. But the swirling black abyss in the treetops just moved with her, hissing along the lower branches of the redwoods, drawing closer. She felt the icy pinpricks of their touch on her shoulders. She yelped as they groped for her, swatting them away with her bare hands.
She changed course, swung herself around in the opposite direction, toward the Nephilim lodge to the north. She would nd Miles or Shelby or even Francesca. But the Announcers wouldn't let her go. Immediately, they slithered ahead, swelling out in front of her, swallowing the light and blocking the path to the lodge. Their hissing drowned out the distant murmurs of the Nephilim camp re, making Luce's friends seem impossibly far away.
Luce forced herself to stop and take a deep breath. She knew more about the Announcers than she ever had before. She should be less afraid of them. What was her problem? Maybe she knew she was getting closer to something, some memory or information that could alter the course of her life. And her relationship with Daniel. The truth was, she wasn't just terri ed of the Announcers. She was terri ed of what she might see within them.
Or hear.
Yesterday, Steven's mention of tuning out the Announcers' noise had nally clicked--she could listen in on her past lives. She could cut through the static and focus on what she wanted to know. What she needed to know. Steven must have meant to give her this clue, must have known she would listen and take her new knowledge straight to the Announcers.
She turned and stepped back into the dark solitude of the trees. The whooshing sounds from the Announcers quieted and settled.
The darkness under the branches engulfed her in cold and the peaty smell of decomposing leaves. In the twilight, the Announcers crept forward, settling into the dimness all around her, camou aging themselves again among the natural shadows. Some of them moved swiftly and sti y, like soldiers; others had a nimble grace. Luce wondered whether their appearances re ected anything about the messages they contained.
So much about the Announcers still felt impenetrable. Tuning them in wasn't intuitive, like ddling with an old radio dial. What she'd heard yesterday--that one voice among the riot of voices--had come to her by