Luce nodded, like she knew what that meant, and jotted in Jasmine’s name.
“Ooh, and I can levitate,” Dawn chirped, pointing to the top left corner of Luce’s page. “Not, like, a hundred percent of the time, but usually after I’ve had my coffee.”
“Wow.” Luce tried not to stare—it didn’t seem like Dawn was making a joke. She could levitate?
Trying not to show that she was feeling more and more inadequate, Luce searched the page for something, anything she knew anything about.
Has experience summoning the Announcers.
The shadows. Daniel had told her the proper name for them that last night at Sword & Cross. Though she’d never actually “summoned” them—they’d always just shown up—Luce did have some experience.
“You can write me in there.” She pointed to the bottom left corner of the paper. Both Jasmine and Dawn looked up at her, a little awed but not disbelieving, before moving on to fill in the rest of their sheets. Luce’s heart slowed down a little. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad.
In the next few minutes she met Lilith, a prim redhead who was one of three Nephilim triplets (“You can tell us apart by our vestigial tails,” she explained. “Mine’s curly”); Oliver, a deep-voiced, squat boy who had visited the outerworld on summer vacation last year (“So totally overrated I can’t even begin to tell you”); and Jack, who felt like he was on the cusp of being able to read minds and thought it would be all right if Luce wrote him down for that. (“I sense that you’re okay with that, am I right?” He made a gun out of his fingers and clicked his tongue.) She had three boxes left when Shelby tugged the paper out of her hands.
“I can do both of these,” she said, pointing at two of the boxes. “Which one do you want me for?”
Speaks more than eighteen languages or Has glimpsed a past life.
“Wait a minute,” Luce whispered. “You’ve … you can glimpse past lives?”
Shelby waggled her eyebrows at Luce and dashed her signature into the box, adding her name in the “eighteen languages” box for good measure. Luce stared at the paper, thinking about all her own past lives and how frustratingly off-limits they were to her. She had underestimated Shelby.
But her roommate was already gone. Standing in Shelby’s place was the boy she’d sat next to inside the classroom. He was a good half foot taller than Luce, with a bright, friendly smile, a splash of freckles on his nose, and clear blue eyes. Something about him, even the way he was chewing on his pen, looked … sturdy. Luce realized this was a strange word to describe someone she’d never spoken to, but she couldn’t help it.
“Oh, thank God.” He laughed, smacking his forehead. “The one thing I can do is the one thing you have left.”
“ ‘Can reflect a mirror image of self or others’?” Luce read slowly.
He tossed his head from side to side and wrote his name in the box. Miles Fisher. “Real impressive to someone like you, I’m sure.”
“Um. Yeah.” Luce turned away. Someone like her, who didn’t even know what that meant.
“Wait, hey, where are you going?” He tugged her sleeve. “Uh-oh. You didn’t catch the self-effacing joke?” When she shook her head, Miles’s face fell. “I just meant, compared to everyone else in the class, I’m barely hanging on. The only person I’ve ever been able to reflect other than myself was my mom. Freaked my dad out for about ten seconds, but then it faded.”
“Wait.” Luce blinked at Miles. “You made a mirror image of your mother?”
“By accident. They say it’s easy to do with the people you, like, love.” He blushed, the faintest rosy pink across his cheekbones. “Now you’re going to think I’m some kind of mama’s boy. I just mean ‘easy’ is about where my powers end. Whereas you—you’re the famous Lucinda Price.” He waved his hands in a very masculine version of spirit fingers.
“I wish everyone would stop saying that,” she snapped. Then, feeling rude, she sighed and leaned against the deck’s railing to look out at the water. It was just so hard to process all these hints that other people here knew more about her than she knew about herself. She didn’t mean to take it out on this guy. “I’m sorry, it’s just, I thought I was the only one barely hanging on. What’s your story?”
“Oh, I’m what they call ‘diluted,’ ” he said, making exaggerated air quotes. “Mom has angel in her blood a few generations back, but all my other relatives are mortal. My powers are embarrassingly low-grade. But I’m here because my parents endowed the school with, um, this deck you’re standing on.”
“Whoa.”
“It’s really not impressive. My family’s obsessed with me being at Shoreline. You should hear the pressure I get at home to date a ‘nice Nephilim girl for once.’ ” Luce laughed—one of the first real laughs she’d had in days. Miles rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “So, I saw you having breakfast with Shelby this morning. She your roommate?”
Luce nodded. “Speaking of nice Nephilim girls,” she joked.
“Well, I know she’s kind of, um …” Miles hissed and made a clawing motion with one hand, causing Luce to crack up again. “Anyway, I’m not the star student here or anything, but I’ve been around a while, and half the time I still think this place is pretty crazy. So if you ever want to have a very normal breakfast or something—”
Luce found herself bobbing her head. Normal. Music to her mortal ears.
“Like … tomorrow?” Miles asked.
“That sounds great.”
Miles grinned and waved goodbye, and Luce realized that all the other students had already gone back inside. Alone for the first time all morning, she looked down at the sheet of paper in her hand, unsure how to feel about the other kids at Shoreline. She missed Daniel, who could have decoded a lot of this for her if only he hadn’t been—where was he, anyway? She didn’t even know.
Too far away.
She pressed a finger to her lips, remembering his last kiss. The incredible embrace of his wings. She felt so cold without him, even in the California sunshine. But she was here because of him, accepted into this class of angels or whatever they were—complete with her bizarre new reputation—all thanks to him. In a weird way, it felt good to be connected to Daniel so inextricably.
Until he came for her, it was all she had to hold on to.
THREE
SIXTEEN DAYS
“Okay, hit me, what’s the weirdest thing about Shoreline so far?”
It was Wednesday morning before class, and Luce was seated at a sunny breakfast table on the terrace, sharing a pot of tea with Miles. He was wearing a vintage yellow T-shirt with a Sunkist logo on it, a baseball cap pulled down just above his blue eyes, flip-flops, and frayed jeans. Feeling inspired by the very relaxed dress code at Shoreline, Luce had swapped out her standard black getup. She was wearing a red sundress with a short white cardigan, which felt kind of like the first day of sunshine after a long stretch of rain.
She dropped a spoonful of sugar into her cup and laughed. “I don’t even know where to start. Maybe my roommate, who I think snuck in just before sunrise this morning and was gone again before I woke up. No, wait, it’s taking a class taught by a demon-and-angel couple. Or”—she swallowed—“the way kids here look at me like I’m some legendary freak. Anonymous freak, I got used to. But notorious freak—”