“You know I’m right!” Cam shouted, not fighting back at all.

  Daniel froze. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know anything now.” His voice was ragged. He’d been gripping Cam by the lapel, but now he just slumped to the ground, burying his face in the grass.

  Luce wanted to go to him. To fall on him and tell him everything was going to be okay.

  Except it wasn’t.

  What she’d seen tonight was too much. She felt sick from watching herself—Miles’s mirror image of her—die from the starshot.

  Miles had saved her life. She couldn’t get over it.

  And the rest of them thought Cam had ended it.

  Her head swam as she stepped forward from the shadows of the shed, planning to tell the others not to worry, that she was still alive. But then she sensed the presence of something else.

  An Announcer was quivering in the doorway. Luce stepped out of the shed and approached it.

  Slowly, it broke free of a shadow cast by the moon. It slithered along the grass toward her for a few feet, picking up a dirty coat of dust left by the battle. When it reached Luce, it shuddered up and rose along her body, until it hovered blackly over her head.

  She closed her eyes and felt herself raising her hand to meet it. The darkness fell to rest in her palm. It made a cold sizzling sound.

  “What is that?” Daniel’s head snapped around at the noise. He raised himself from the ground. “Luce!”

  She stayed put as the others gasped at the sight of her standing in front of the shed. She didn’t want to glimpse an Announcer. She’d seen enough for one night. She didn’t even know why she was doing this—

  Until she did. She wasn’t looking for a vision, she was looking for a way out. Something far away enough to step through to. It had been too long since she’d had a moment to think on her own. What she needed was a break. From everything.

  “Time to go,” she said to herself.

  The shadow door that presented itself in front of her wasn’t perfect—it was jagged around the edges and it stank of sewage. But Luce parted its surface anyway.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, Luce!” Roland’s voice reached her at the edge of the doorway. “It could take you anywhere!”

  Daniel was on his feet, jogging toward her. “What are you doing?” She could hear the profound relief in his voice that she was still alive, and the sheer panic that she could manipulate the Announcer. His anxiety only spurred her on.

  She wanted to look back to apologize to Callie, to thank Miles for what he’d done, to tell Arriane and Gabbe not to worry the way she knew they were going to anyway, to leave word for her parents. To tell Daniel not to follow her, that she needed to do this for herself. But her chance to break free was closing. So she stepped forward and called over her shoulder to Roland, “Guess I’ll just have to figure it out.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daniel rushing toward her. Like he hadn’t believed until now that she would do it.

  She felt the words rising up in her throat. I love you. She did. She did forever. But if she and Daniel had forever, their love could wait until she figured out a few important things about herself. About her lives and the life she had ahead of her. Tonight there was only time to wave goodbye, take a deep breath, and leap into the dismal shadow.

  Into darkness.

  Into her past.

  EPILOGUE

  PANDEMONIUM

  “What just happened?”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Who taught her how to do that?”

  The frantic voices in the backyard sounded wobbly and distant to Daniel. He knew the other fallen angels were arguing, looking for Announcers in the shadows of the yard. Daniel was an island, closed off to everything but his own agony.

  He had failed her. He had failed.

  How could it be? For weeks he’d run himself ragged, his only goal to keep her safe until the moment when he could no longer offer her protection. Now that moment had come and gone—and so had Luce.

  Anything could happen to her. And she could be anywhere. He had never felt so hollow and ashamed.

  “Why can’t we just find the Announcer she stepped through, put it back together, and go after her?”

  The Nephilim boy. Miles. He was on his knees, combing the grass with his fingers. Like a moron.

  “They don’t work that way,” Daniel snarled at him. “When you step into time, you take the Announcer with you. That’s why you never do it unless …”

  Cam looked at Miles, almost pityingly. “Please tell me Luce knows more about Announcer travel than you do.”

  “Shut up,” Shelby said, standing over Miles protectively. “If he hadn’t thrown Luce’s reflection, Phil would have taken her.”

  Shelby looked guarded and afraid, out of place among the fallen angels. Years ago, she’d had a crush on Daniel—one he’d never requited, of course. But until tonight, he’d always thought well of the girl. Now she was just in the way.

  “You said yourself Luce would be better off dead than with the Outcasts,” she said, still defending Miles.

  “The Outcasts you all but invited here.” Arriane stepped into the conversation, turning on Shelby, whose face reddened.

  “Why would you assume some Nephilim child could detect the Outcast?” Molly challenged Arriane. “You were at that school. You should have noticed something.”

  “All of you: Quiet.” Daniel couldn’t think straight. The yard was crammed with angels, but Luce’s absence made it feel utterly empty.

  He could hardly stand to look at anyone else. Shelby, for walking straight into the Outcast’s easy trap. Miles, for thinking he had some stake in Luce’s future. Cam, for what he’d tried to do—

  Oh, that moment when Daniel thought he’d lost her to Cam’s starshot! His wings had felt too heavy to lift. Colder than death. In that instant, he’d given up all hope.

  But it was only a trick of the eye. A thrown reflection, nothing special under ordinary circumstances, but tonight the last thing Daniel had been expecting. It had given him a horrible shock. One that had nearly killed him. Until the joy of her resurrection.

  There was still hope.

  As long as he could find her.

  He’d been stunned, watching Luce open up the shadow. Awed and impressed and painfully attracted to her—but more than all of that, stunned. How many times had she done it before without his even knowing?

  “What do you think?” Cam asked, coming up beside him. Their wings drew toward each other, that old magnetic force, and Daniel was too drained to pull away.

  “I’m going after her,” he said.

  “Good plan.” Cam sneered. “Just ‘go after her.’ Anywhere in time and space across the several thousand years. Why should you need a strategy?”

  His sarcasm made Daniel want to tackle him a second time.

  “I’m not asking for your help or your advice, Cam.”

  Only two starshots remained in the yard: the one he’d picked up from the Outcast Molly had killed, and the one Cam had found on the beach at the beginning of the truce. There would have been a nice symmetry if Cam and Daniel had been working as enemies right now—two bows, two starshots, two immortal foes.

  But no. Not yet. They had to eliminate too many others before they could turn on each other again.

  “What Cam means”—Roland stood between them, speaking to Daniel in a low voice—“is that this might take some team effort. I’ve seen the way these kids flop through the Announcers. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, Daniel. She’s going to get into trouble pretty quick.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not a sign of weakness to let us help,” Roland said.

  “I can help,” Shelby called. She’d been whispering with Miles. “I think I might know where she is.”

  “You?” Daniel asked. “You’ve helped enough. Both of you.”

  “Daniel—”

  “I know Luce better than anyone in the world.” Daniel turned away from all of them, toward the dark, empty space in the yard where she’d stepped through. “Far better than any of you ever will. I don’t need your help.”

  “You know her past,” Shelby said, walking in front of him so that he had to look at her. “You don’t know what she’s been through these past few weeks. I’m the one who’s been around while she glimpsed her past lives. I’m the one who saw her face when she found the sister she lost when you kissed her and she …” Shelby trailed off. “I know you all hate me right now. But I swear to—Oh, whatever it is you guys believe in. You can trust me from here on out. Miles, too. We want to help. We’re going to help. Please.” She reached for Daniel. “Trust us.”

  Daniel wrested himself away from her. Trust as an activity had always made him uneasy. What he had with Luce was unshakable. There was never any need even to work on trust. Their love just was.

  But for all eternity, Daniel had never been able to find faith in anyone or anything else. And he didn’t want to start now.

  Down the street, a dog yipped. Then again, louder. Closer.

  Luce’s parents, coming back from their walk.

  In the dark yard, Daniel’s eyes found Gabbe’s. She was standing close to Callie, probably consoling her. She’d already retracted her wings.

  “Just go,” Gabbe mouthed to him in the desolate, dust-filled backyard. What she meant was Go get her. She would handle Luce’s parents. She would see that Callie got home. She would cover all the bases so that Daniel could go after what mattered. We’ll find you and help you as soon as we can.

  The moon drifted out from behind a mist of cloud. Daniel’s shadow lengthened on the grass at his feet. He watched it swell a little, then began to draw up the Announcer inside it. When the cool, damp darkness brushed against him, Daniel realized that he hadn’t stepped through time in ages. Looking back was not normally his style.

  But the motions were still in him, buried in his wings or his soul or his heart. He moved quickly, peeling the Announcer off his own shadow, giving it a quick pinch to separate it from the ground. Then he threw it, like a piece of potter’s clay, onto the air directly in front of him.

  It formed a clean, finite portal.

  He had been a part of every one of Luce’s past lives. There was no reason he wouldn’t be able to find her.

  He opened the door. No time to waste. His heart would take him to her.

  He had an innate sense that something bad was just around the bend, but a hope that something incredible was waiting in the distance.

  It had to be.

  His burning love for her coursed through him until he felt so full he didn’t know whether he would fit through the portal. He wrapped his wings close against his body and bounded into the Announcer.

  Behind him, in the yard, a distant commotion. Whispers and rustling and shouts.

  He didn’t care. He didn’t care about any of them, really.

  Only her.

  He whooped as he broke through.

  “Daniel.”

  Voices. Behind him, following, getting closer. Calling his name as he tunneled deeper and deeper into the past.

  Would he find her?

  Without question.

  Would he save her?

  Always.

  PROLOGUE

  NEVER TEAR US APART

  Cam’s boots touched down on the eaves of the old church beneath a cold and starry sky. He drew his wings close and gazed out at the landscape. Spanish moss, white in the moonlight, hung like icicles from antebellum trees. Cinder-block buildings framed a weedy field and a pair of splintery bleachers. Wind rustled in from the sea.

  Winter break at Sword & Cross Reform School. Not a soul on campus. What was he doing here?

  It was minutes after midnight, and he’d just flown in from Troy. He’d made the journey in a haze, an unknown force guiding his wings. He found himself humming a tune he hadn’t let himself remember for several thousand years. Maybe he’d come back here because this was where the fallen angels had met Luce in her last, cursed life. It had been her three hundred and twenty-fourth incarnation—and the three hundred and twenty-fourth time the fallen angels had flocked together to see how the curse would play out.

  The curse was broken now. Luce and Daniel were free.

  And dammit if Cam wasn’t jealous.

  His gaze swept across the cemetery. He would never have guessed he’d feel nostalgic for this junkyard, but there had been something thrilling about those early days at Sword & Cross. Lucinda’s spark had been brighter, keeping the angels guessing when they’d once believed they knew what to expect.

  For six millennia, each time she turned seventeen, they’d staged a variation of the same performance: the demons—Cam, Roland, and Molly—tried everything to sway Luce’s alliances to Lucifer, while the angels—Arriane and Gabbe and sometimes Annabelle—worked to usher Luce back into Heaven’s fold. Neither side had ever come close to winning her over.

  For every time Luce met Daniel—and she always met Daniel—nothing mattered as much as their love. Time and again, they fell for each other, and time and again, Luce died in a blaze of fire.

  Then, one night at Sword & Cross, everything changed. Daniel kissed Lucinda, and she lived. They all knew it then. Luce was finally going to be allowed to choose.

  A few weeks later they all flew to the site of their original fall, to Troy, where Lucinda chose her destiny. She and Daniel again refused to side with Heaven or with Hell. Instead, they chose each other. They gave up their immortality to spend one mortal lifetime together.

  Luce and Daniel were gone now, but they were still on Cam’s mind. Their triumphant love made him yearn for something he dared not put into words.

  He was humming again. That song. Even after all this time, he remembered it… .

  He closed his eyes and saw its singer: the back of her red hair woven loosely in a braid, her long fingers caressing the strings of a lyre as she leaned against a tree.

  He hadn’t let himself think of her in thousands of years. Why now?

  “This can’s busted,” a familiar voice said. “Toss me another?”

  Cam spun around. No one was there.

  He noticed a flicker of movement through the shattered stained-glass window on the roof. He edged forward and peered down through it, into the chapel Sophia Bliss had used as her office when she was the Sword & Cross librarian.

  Inside the chapel, Arriane’s iridescent wings flexed as she shook a can of spray paint and rose off the ground, aiming the nozzle at the wall.

  Her mural featured a girl in a glowing blue forest. She wore a tiered black dress and looked up at a blond boy who held out a white peony. Luce and Daniel 4ever Arriane sprayed in gothic silver letters over the bell of the girl’s skirt.

  Behind Arriane, a dark-skinned demon with dreadlocks was lighting a tall glass candle showing Santa Muerte, the goddess of death. Roland was making a shrine at the site where Sophia had murdered Luce’s friend Penn.

  Fallen angels couldn’t enter sanctuaries of God. As soon as they crossed the threshold, the whole place would go up in flames, incinerating every mortal inside. But this chapel had been desanctified when Miss Sophia had moved in.

  Cam spread his wings and dropped through the broken window, landing behind Arriane.

  “Cam.” Roland embraced his friend.

  “Take it easy,” Cam said, but he didn’t pull away.

  Roland tilted his head. “Quite a coincidence, finding you here.”

  “Is it?” Cam asked.

  “Not if you like carnitas,” Arriane said, tossing Cam a small foil-wrapped package. “Remember the taco truck on Lovington? I’ve been craving these ever since we fled this swamp.” She opened her own foil package and devoured her taco in two bites. “Delish.”

  “What are you doing here?” Roland asked Cam.

  Cam leaned against a cold marble pillar and shrugged. “I left my Les Paul in the dorm.”

  “All this way for a guitar?” Roland nodded. “I suppose we’ve all got to find new ways to fill our endless days, now that Luce and Daniel are gone.”

  Cam had always hated the force that pulled the fallen angels to the cursed lovers every seventeen years. He’d left battlefields and coronations. He’d left the arms of exquisite girls. Once he’d walked off a movie set. He’d dropped everything for Luce and Daniel. But now that the irresistible pull was gone, he missed it.

  His eternity was open wide. What was he going to do with it?

  “Did what happened in Troy give you, I don’t know …” Roland trailed off.

  “Hope?” Arriane grabbed Cam’s uneaten taco and downed it. “If, after all these thousands of years, Luce and Daniel can stand up to the Throne and seize a happy ending, why can’t anyone? Why can’t we?”

  Cam gazed through the shattered window. “Maybe I’m not that kind of guy.”

  “We all carry pieces of our journeys within us,” Roland said. “We all learn from our mistakes. Who’s to say we don’t deserve happiness?”

  “Listen to us.” Arriane touched the scars on her neck. “What do we three jaded birds of prey know about love?” She looked from Cam to Roland. “Right?”

  “Love’s not the exclusive property of Luce and Daniel,” Roland said. “We’ve all tasted it. Maybe we will again.”

  Roland’s optimism struck a dissonant chord with Cam. “Not me,” he said.

  Arriane sighed, arching her back to spread her wings and rise a few feet off the ground. A fluttering sound filled the empty church. With deft slashes of her can of white spray paint, she added the subtlest hint of wings above Lucinda’s shoulders.

  Before the Fall, angels’ wings were made of empyreal light, all of them perfect, one pair indistinguishable from the next. In the era since, their wings had become expressive of their personalities, their mistakes and impulses. The fallen angels who had given their allegiance to Lucifer bore golden wings. Those who had returned to the fold of Heaven bore the Throne’s hint of silver throughout their fibers.