Lauren Kate - Torment

“It’s not for long. As soon as things are safer, I’ll come for you.”

His hot hand clasped her wrist and before she knew it, Luce was caught up in his embrace, drawn to his lips. She let everything else fall away, let her heart brim over. Maybe she couldn’t remember her former lives, but when Daniel kissed her, she felt close to the past. And the future.

The figure in the doorway was walking toward her, a woman in a short white dress.

The kiss Luce had shared with Daniel, too sweet to be so brief, left her just as out of breath as their kisses always did.

“Don’t go,” she whispered, her eyes closed. It was all happening too fast. She couldn’t give Daniel up. Not yet. She didn’t think she ever could.

She felt the rush of air that meant he’d already taken off. Her heart went after him as she opened her eyes and saw the last trace of his wings disappear inside a cloud, into the dark night.

Thwap .

Luce winced and rubbed her face. Her nose stung.

Thwap. Thwap .

Now it was her cheekbones. Her eyelids drifted open and, almost immediately, she scrunched up her face in surprise. A stocky dishwater-blond girl with a grimly set mouth and major eyebrows was leaning over her. Her hair was piled messily on top of her head. She wore yoga pants and a ribbed camouflage tank top that matched her green-flecked hazel eyes. She held a Ping-Pong ball between her fingers, poised to pelt.

Luce scrambled backward in her bedsheets and shielded her face. Her heart already hurt from missing Daniel. She didn’t need any more pain. She looked down, still trying to get her bearings, and remembered the bed she had indiscriminately collapsed into the night before.

The woman in white who had appeared in Daniel’s wake had introduced herself as Francesca, one of the teachers at Shoreline. Even in her stunned stupor, Luce could tell that the woman was beautiful. She was in her mid-thirties, with blond hair brushing her shoulders, round cheekbones, and large, soft features.

Angel , Luce decided almost instantly.

Francesca asked no questions on the way to Luce’s room. She must have been expecting the late night drop-off, and she must have sensed Luce’s utter exhaustion.

Now this stranger who’d pelted Luce back into consciousness looked ready to chuck another ball. “Good,” she said in a gravelly voice. “You’re awake.”

“Who are you?” Luce asked sleepily.

“Who are you , is more like it. Other than the stranger I wake to find squatting in my room. Other than the kid disrupting my morning mantra with her weirdly personal sleep-babbling. I’m Shelby. Enchantée. ”

Not an angel, Luce surmised. Just a Californian girl with a strong sense of entitlement.

Luce sat up in bed and looked around. The room was a little cramped, but it was nicely appointed, with light-colored hardwood floors; a working fireplace; a microwave; two deep, wide desks; and built-in bookshelves that doubled as a ladder to what Luce now realized was the top bunk.

She could see a private bathroom through a sliding wooden door. And—she had to blink a few times to be certain—an ocean view out the window. Not bad for a girl who had spent the past month gazing out at a rank old cemetery in a room more appropriate for a hospital than a school. But then, at least that rank cemetery and that room had meant she was with Daniel. She had barely begun getting comfortable at Sword & Cross. And now she was back to starting from scratch.

“Francesca didn’t mention anything about me having a roommate.” Luce knew instantly from the expression on Shelby’s face that this was the Wrong Thing to Say.

So she took a quick glance at Shelby’s décor instead. Luce had never trusted her own interior design instincts, or maybe she’d never had the chance to indulge them. She hadn’t stuck around Sword & Cross long enough to do much decorating, but even before that, her room at Dover had been white-walled and bare. Sterile chic, as Callie had once said.

This room, on the other hand—there was something about it that was strangely … groovy. Varieties of potted plants she’d never seen before lined the windowsill; prayer flags were strung across the ceiling. A patchwork quilt in muted colors was sliding off the top bunk, half obstructing Luce’s view of an astrology calendar taped over the mirror.

“What’d you think? They were going to clear out the dean’s quarters just because you’re Lucinda Price?”

“Um, no?” Luce shook her head. “That’s not what I meant at all. Wait, how did you know my name?”

“So you are Lucinda Price?” The girl’s green-flecked eyes seemed to fix on Luce’s ratty gray pajamas. “Lucky me.”

Luce was speechless.

“Sorry.” Shelby exhaled and adjusted her tone, parking herself on the edge of Luce’s bed. “I’m an only child. Leon—that’s my therapist—he’s trying to get me to be less harsh when I first meet people.”

“Is it working?” Luce was an only child too, but she wasn’t nasty to every stranger she came into contact with.

“What I mean is …” Shelby shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not used to sharing. Can we”—she tossed her head—“rewind?”

“That’d be nice.”

“Okay.” Shelby took a deep breath. “Frankie didn’t mention your having a roommate last night because then she would have had to either notice—or, if she had already noticed, disclose—that I wasn’t in bed when you arrived. I came in through that window”—she pointed—“around three.”

Out the window, Luce could see a wide ledge connecting to an angled portion of the roof. She pictured Shelby darting across a whole network of ledges on the roof to get back here in the middle of the night.

Shelby made a show of yawning. “See, when it comes to the Nephilim kids at Shoreline, the only thing the teachers are strict about is the pretense of discipline. Discipline itself doesn’t so much exist. Though, of course, Frankie’s not going to advertise that to the new girl. Especially not Lucinda Price.”

There it was again. That edge in Shelby’s voice when she said Luce’s name. Luce wanted to know what it meant. And where Shelby had been until three. And how she’d come in through the window in the dark without knocking over any of those plants. And who were the Nephilim kids?

Luce had sudden vivid flashbacks to the mental jungle gym Arriane had taken her through when they’d first met. Her Shoreline roommate’s tough exterior was a lot like Arriane’s, and Luce remembered a similar how-will-I-ever-be-friends-with-you feeling her first day at Sword & Cross.

But though Arriane had seemed intimidating and even a little dangerous, there had been something charmingly off-kilter about her from the start. Luce’s new roommate, on the other hand, just seemed annoying.

Shelby popped off the bed and lumbered into the bathroom to brush her teeth. After digging through her duffel bag to find her toothbrush, Luce followed her in and gestured sheepishly at the toothpaste.

“I forgot to pack mine.”

“No doubt the dazzle of your celebrity blinded you to the small necessities of life,” Shelby replied, but she picked up the tube and extended it toward Luce.

They brushed in silence for about ten seconds until Luce couldn’t take it anymore. She spat out a mouthful of froth. “Shelby?”

With her head in the belly of the porcelain sink, Shelby spat and said, “What?”

Instead of asking any of the questions that had been running through her head a minute before, Luce surprised herself and asked, “What was I saying in my sleep?”

This morning was the first in at least a month of vivid, complicated, Daniel-ridden dreams on which Luce had woken up unable to remember a single thing from her sleep.