Lauren Kate: Rapture

For Jason—

Without your love, nothing is possible.

It is a wonderful thing to find one’s acknowledgments growing with every book. I am grateful to Michael Stearns and Ted Malawer for believing in me, for indulging me, for making me work so hard. To Wendy Loggia, Beverly Horowitz, Krista Vitola, and the excellent team at Delacorte Press—you have made Fallen soar from start to finish. To Angela Carlino, Bar-bara Perris, Chip Gibson, Judith Haut, Noreen Herits (I already miss you!), Roshan Nosari, and Dominique Cimina for how expertly you’ve turned my story into a book.

To Sandra Van Mook and my friends in Holland; to Ga-briella Ambrosini and Beatrice Masini in Italy; to Shirley Ng and the crew at MPH in Kuala Lumpur; to Rino Balatbat, Karla, Chad, the wonderful Ramos family, and my superb Filipino fans; to Dorothy Tonkin, Justin Ractliffe, and the brilliant group at Random House Australia; to Rebecca Simp-son in New Zealand; to Ana Lima and Cecilia Brandi and Record for a beautiful time in Brazil; to Lauren Kate Bennett and the lovely girls at RHUK; to Amy Fisher and Iris Barazani for inspiration in Jerusalem. What a wonderful year I had with you all—cheers to more!

To my readers, who show me the brightest side of life every single day. Thank you.

To my family, for your patience and trust and sense of humor. To my friends, who coax me out of my writing cave.

And, always, to Jason, who braves the cave when I can’t be coaxed. I’m lucky to have all of you in my life.

First there was silence—

In the space between Heaven and the Fall, deep in the unknowable distance, there was a moment when the glorious hum of Heaven disappeared and was replaced by a silence so profound that Daniel’s soul strained to make out any noise.

Then came the feeling of falling—a drop even his wings couldn’t prevent, as if the Throne had attached moons to them. They hardly beat, and when they did, it made no impact on his fall.

Where was he going? There was nothing before him and nothing behind. Nothing up and nothing down.

Only thick darkness, and the blurry outline of what was left of Daniel’s soul.

In the absence of sound, his imagination took over. It filled his head with something beyond sound, something inescapable: the haunting words of Lucinda’s curse.

She will die . . . She will never pass out of adolescence—will die again and again and again at precisely the moment when she remembers your choice.

You will never truly be together.

It was Lucifer’s foul imprecation, his embittered ad-dendum to the Throne’s sentence passed in the Heavenly Meadow. Now death was coming for his love. Could Daniel stop it? Would he even recognize it?

For what did an angel know of death? Daniel had witnessed it come peacefully to some of the new mortal breed called human, but death did not concern angels.

Death and adolescence: the two absolutes in Lucifer’s Curse. Neither meant a thing to Daniel. All he knew was that being separated from Lucinda was not a punishment he could endure. They had to be together.

“Lucinda!” he shouted.

His soul should have warmed at the very thought of her, but there was only aching absence, an abundance of what was not.

He should have been able to sense his brethren around him—all those who’d chosen wrongly or too late; who’d made no choice at all and been cast out for their indecision. He knew that he wasn’t truly alone; so many of them had plummeted when the cloudsoil beneath them opened up onto the void.

But he could neither see nor sense anyone else.

Before this moment, he had never been alone. Now he felt like the last angel in all the worlds.

Don’t think like that. You’ll lose yourself.

He tried to hold on . . . Lucinda, the Roll Call, Lucinda, the choice . . . but as he fell, it grew harder to remember. What, for instance, were the last words he’d heard spoken by the Throne—

The Gates of Heaven . . .

The Gates of Heaven are . . .

He could not remember what came next, could only dimly recall how the great light had flickered, and the harshest cold had swept over the Meadow, and the trees in the Orchard had tumbled into one another, causing waves of furious disturbance that were felt throughout the cosmos, tsunamis of cloudsoil that blinded the angels and crushed their glory. There had been something else, something just before the obliteration of the Meadow, something like a—

Twinning.

A bold bright angel had soared up during the Roll Call—said he was Daniel come back from the future.

There was a sadness in his eyes that had looked so . . .

old. Had this angel—this version of Daniel’s soul—

suffered deeply?

Had Lucinda?

A vast rage rose in Daniel. He would find Lucifer, the angel who lived at the dead end of all ideas. Daniel did not fear the traitor who had been the Morning Star.

Wherever, whenever they reached the end of this oblivion, Daniel would take his revenge. But first he would find Lucinda, for without her, nothing mattered. Without her love, nothing was possible.

Theirs was a love that made it inconceivable to choose Lucifer or the Throne. The only side he could ever choose was hers. So now Daniel would pay for that choice, but he did not yet understand the shape his punishment would take. Only that she was gone from the place she belonged: at his side.

The pain of separation from his soul mate coursed through Daniel suddenly, sharp and brutal. He moaned wordlessly, his mind clouded over, and suddenly, fright-eningly, he couldn’t remember why.

He tumbled onward, down through denser black-ness.

He could no longer see or feel or recall how he had ended up here, nowhere, hurtling through nothing-ness—toward where? For how long?

His memory sputtered and faded. It was harder and harder to recall those words spoken by the angel in the white meadow who had looked so much like . . .

Who had the angel resembled? And what had he said that was so important?

Daniel did not know, did not know anything anymore.

Only that he was tumbling through an endless void.

He was filled with an urge to find something . . . someone.

An urge to feel whole again . . .

But there was only darkness inside darkness—

Silence drowning out his thoughts—

A nothing that was everything.

Daniel fell.

“Good morning.”

A warm hand brushed Luce’s face and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

Rolling onto her side, she yawned and opened her eyes. She had been sleeping deeply, dreaming about Daniel.

“Oh,” she gasped, feeling her cheek. There he was.

Daniel was sitting next to her. He wore a black sweater and the same red scarf that had been knotted around his neck the first time she’d seen him at Sword & Cross. He looked better than a dream.

His weight made the edge of the cot sag a little and Luce drew up her legs to snuggle closer to him.

“You’re not a dream,” she said.

Daniel’s eyes were blearier than she was used to, but they still glowed the brightest violet as they gazed at her face, studying her features as if seeing her anew. He leaned down and pressed his lips to hers.

Luce folded into him, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck, happy to kiss him back. She didn’t care about her unbrushed teeth, about her bed head. She didn’t care about anything other than his kiss. They were together now and neither of them could stop grinning.