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"There’s nothing to discuss" Daniel didn’t change his pitch "Splitting up is our only option" The others were quiet, probably thinking the sa Luce was Cam and Daniel behaved far too much like brothers for anyone else to dare come between theels were facing each other Her hands gripped the sill She felt a s made it back into the library without help Probably none of the angels would even notice She sighed and slid one leg inside That hen thebegan to shudder
The glass pane rattled, and the sill vibrated in her hands with such force she was al vibrations inside her, as if her heart and her soul were tre, too
"Earthquake," she whispered Her foot skirip on the sill loosened
"Lucinda!"
Daniel rushed to theHis hands found their way around hers Cam was there, too, one hand on the base of Luce’s shoulders, another on the back of her head The bookshelves rippled and the lights in the library flickered as the two angels pulled her through the rockingjust before the pane slipped fro and shattered into a thousand shards of glass
She looked to Daniel for a clue He was still gripping her wrists, but his eyes traveled past her, outside He atching the sky, which had turned angry and gray
Worse than all that was the lingering vibration inside Luce that made her feel as if she’d been electrocuted
The quaking felt like an eternity, but it lasted for five, h time for Luce, Cam, and Daniel to fall to the dusty wooden floor of the library with a thud
Then the trerew deathly quiet
"What the hell?" Arriane picked herself up off the ground "Did we step through to California without ia!"
Calass froht red blood trailed down his elbow, but his face showed no signs that he was in pain "That wasn’t an earthquake That was a seismic shift in time"
"A what?" Luce asked
"The first ofa white cumulus cloud roll across the now blue sky "The closer Lucifer gets, the stronger they’ll becolanced at Cam, who nodded
"Ticktock, people," Ca out
We need to fly"
TWO
PARTING WAYS
Gabbe stepped forward "Caht I’ve heard the Scale speak of these shifts" She was tugging on the sleeves of her pale yellow cashet warm "They’re called timequakes
They are ripples in our reality"
"And the closer he gets," Roland added, ever under-statedly wise, "the closer we are to the terminus of his Fall, and more frequent and thein preparation for rewriting itself"
"Like the way your computer freezes up more and more frequently before the hard drive crashes and erases your twenty-page term paper?" Miles said Everyone looked at hiels and demons don’t do homework?"
Luce sank into one of the wooden chairs at an empty table She felt hollow, as if the tinificant inside her and she’d lost it for good The angels’ bickering voices crisscrossed in heruseful They had to stop Lucifer, and she could see that none of them knew exactly how to do it
"Venice Vienna And Avalon" Daniel’s clear voice broke through the noise He sat down next to Luce and draped an arertips brushed her shoulder When he held out The Book of the Watchers so all of them could see, the others quieted
Everybody focused
Daniel pointed to a dense paragraph of text Luce hadn’t realized until then that the book ritten in Latin She recognized a feords from the years of Latin class she’d taken at Dover Daniel had underlined and circled several words and ins, but tiible
Arriane hovered over him "That’s some serious chicken scratch"
Daniel didn’t see was dark and elegant, and it gave Luce a war when she realized she’d seen it before She basked in every re and deep her and Daniel’s love affair had been, even if the re s for centuries, spelling out Daniel as hers
"A record of those early days after the Fall was created by the Heavenly host, by the unallied angels who’d been cast out of Heaven," he said slowly "But it’s a completely scattered history"
"A history?" Miles repeated "So we just find soo?"
"It’s not that simple," Daniel said "There weren’t books in any sense that woulddays So our history and our stories were recorded via other et tricky, isn’t it?"