Lauren Kate: Rapture

Luce had recognized her soul inside Lu Xin from the moment she saw her. She could find herself here, too, even with bright souls shining all around her like city lights flung up in the air. She would find herself within the Fall.

That, she knew suddenly, was where she would find Lucifer.

She closed her eyes, beat her wings lightly, asked her soul to guide her to herself. She moved through millions, sliding over glowing tidal waves of angels. It took a small eternity. For nine days she and her friends had been racing time, thinking only of how to find the Fall. Now that they had found it, how long would it take Luce to locate the soul she needed, the needle in this haystack made of angels changing forms? How much time was left?

Then, in a galaxy of frozen angels, Luce froze.

Someone was singing.

It was a love song so beautiful it made her wings quiver.

She came to rest behind the fixed white orb of a falling angel called Ezekiel, and listened:

“My sea has found a shore . . . My burning has found a flame . . .”

Her soul swelled with a long-forgotten memory. She peered around Ezekeel, the Angel of the Clouds, to see who was singing in the clearing.

It was a boy, cradling a girl in his arms, his serenading voice soft and sweet as honey.

The slow rocking of his arms was the only motion in the entire frozen Fall.

Then Luce realized that girl was not simply a girl. She was a half-formed orb of light surrounding an angel in metamorphosis. She was the soul that used to be Lucinda.

The boy looked up, sensing a presence. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, and eyes the color of ice, radiant with dumb love.

But he was not a boy. He was an angel so devastat-ingly beautiful that Luce’s body clenched with a loneliness she didn’t want to remember.

He was Lucifer.

This was how he used to look in Heaven. But he was mobile, fully formed, unlike the millions of angels surrounding him—which assured Luce he was the demon of the present, the one who had cast his Announcer around the Fall to incite its second link with Earth. His own falling soul could be anywhere in here, just as paralyzed as the rest of them had been when the Throne cast them out of Heaven.

Luce had been right about her soul’s leading her to Lucifer. After he set this Fall in motion, he must have dipped through his own Announcer inside here.

And spent the past nine days doing what? Singing lul-labies and rocking back and forth while the world hung in the balance and armies of angels raced around the world to stop him?

Her wings burned. She knew this was all he’d done, because she knew that he loved her, that he still wanted her. Her betrayal of Lucifer was what this was all about.

“Who’s there?” he called.

Luce moved forward. She had not come here to hide from him. Besides, he had already sensed her soul’s glow behind Ezekeel. She heard the vexed recognition in his voice.

“Oh. It’s you.” He raised his arms slightly, holding out Luce’s falling self. “Have you met my love? I think you’d find her”—Lucifer looked above him, searching for a word—“refreshing.”

Luce edged closer, drawn equally to the radiant angel who had broken her heart and the strange, half-formed version of herself. This was the angel who would become the girl Luce had been on Earth. She watched her own face flicker into being inside the light in Lucifer’s arms.

Then it was gone.

She considered cleaving to this strange creature. She knew that she could do it: reach out and take possession of her oldest body, feel her stomach drop as she joined with her past, blink and find herself in Lucifer’s arms, in falling Lucinda’s mind, as she had done so many times before.

But she didn’t need to do that anymore. Bill had taught Luce how to cleave before she had known who she truly was, before she’d had access to the memories she did now. She didn’t have to cleave to her falling soul for help with what to say to Lucifer. Luce already knew the whole story.

She folded her hands in front of her. She thought of Daniel on the other side of the Announcer.

“The love you feel is not returned, Lucifer.” He offered Luce a bright, defiant smile. “Do you have any idea how rare a moment like this is?” Without thinking, Luce found herself drawing nearer.

“The two of you, together at once? The one who cannot leave me”—he caressed the metamorphosing body in his arms and looked up—“and the one who doesn’t know how to stay away.”

“She and I share the same soul,” Luce said. “And neither one of us loves you anymore.”

“And they say my heart has hardened!” Lucifer grimaced, all sweetness gone. His voice plunged downward through the registers, deeper than anything Luce had ever heard. “You disappointed me in Egypt. You shouldn’t have done that, and you shouldn’t be here now. I depos-ited you in the outer realm so that you could not interfere.”

His figure changed: the youthful, lovely face shriveled into wrinkles that splintered down his body in long craggy seams. Mighty wings burst from behind his shoulders. Claws shot from his fingers, long and curled and yellow. Luce winced as they dug into her falling half-formed body in his grip.

His eyes glowed from icy blue to red like molten lead and he swelled to ten times the size he’d been. Luce knew this was because he was indulging the rage he had sub-dued in order to appear as his lovely, former self. He seemed to fill all empty space, shrinking the expanse of suspended angels in an instant.

Luce flew up to his eye level and sighed.

“You might as well stop there,” she said.

“Built up a tolerance, have you?”

Luce shook her head and extended her wings as wide as they would go. They stretched to lengths that still astonished her.

“I know who I am, Lucifer. I know what I can do.

Neither of us is constrained by mortal bounds. I could become horrific, too. But what’s the point?” Steam rose off Lucifer’s head as he studied Luce’s wings. “Your wings always were breathtaking,” he said.

“But don’t get used to them. Time’s almost up and then—and then—”

He was watching her face for fear or agitation. She knew how he worked, from where he drew his energy and power. His grainy muscles flexed, and Luce watched the light of her falling body flicker, agitated but immobile, defenseless in his arms. It was like witnessing a loved one in grave danger, but Luce would not reveal that it bothered her.

“I am not afraid of you.”

His grunt was a cloud of mucus and smoke. “You will be, as you have been before, as you really are now. Fear is the only way to greet the devil.”

The swelling stopped. His eyes cooled back to their startling ice blue. His muscles relaxed into the sleek figure that had once made him the most gorgeous among Heaven’s host. There was a shimmer to his pale skin that Luce hadn’t remembered until now.

He was more beautiful even than Daniel.

Luce let herself remember. She had loved him. He had been her first true love. She had given him her whole heart. And Lucifer had loved her, too.

When his gaze fell on her, the entire history of their relationship played across his handsome face: the fire of their early romance, his desperate yearning to possess her, the anguish of love he’d said had inspired his rebellion against the Throne.

Her mind knew it was Great Deceiver’s first great lie—but her heart felt something different, in part because she knew Lucifer had come to believe his lie. It had a secret, spreading power, like a flood nobody saw.

She couldn’t help it: She softened. Lucifer’s eyes bore the same tenderness that Daniel’s did when he looked at her. She felt her eyes begin to return this tenderness to Lucifer.