Fallen 2. Torment(74)
"Probably not," Miles offered. "I mean, you know how she and Jasmine are.
They're just flighty."
"But it was her party," Luce said. "She wouldn't miss her own party."
"That was what Jasmine kept saying," Miles offered. "She didn't come to the
room last night, and wasn't at mess this morning, so finally Frankie and Steven instructed
us all to go back to the dorms, but--"
"Twenty bucks says Dawn's mugging down with some non-Neph greaseball in the
woods around here." Shelby rolled her eyes.
"No." Luce had a bad feeling about this. Dawn had been so excited about the
campfire. She'd ordered T-shirts online even though there was no way in the world she'd
be able to convince any of the Nephilim kids to wear them. She wouldn't just disappear-not of her own volition. "How long has she been gone?"
When the three of them came out of the woods, Luce was even more shaken up.
And not just about Dawn. She was shaken by what she'd seen in the Announcer.
Watching death close in on her former self was agony, and this was the first time she had
seen it. Daniel, on the other hand, had had to watch it hundreds of times. Only now could
she understand why he'd been so cold to her when they first met: to save them both the
trauma of going through another gruesome death. The reality of Daniel's plight began to
overwhelm her, and she was desperate to see him.
Crossing the lawn to the dorm, Luce had to shade her eyes. Powerful flashlights
were sweeping over the campus. A helicopter droned in the distance, its searchlight
tracing the shoreline, sweeping back and forth along the beach. A wide line of men in
dark uniforms walked along the path from the Nephilim lodge to the mess hall, slowly
scanning the ground.
Miles said, "That's standard formation for search parties. Form a line and leave no
inch of ground uncovered."
"Oh God," Luce said under her breath.
"She really is missing." Shelby winced. "Not good karma."
Luce broke into a jog toward the Nephilim lodge. Miles and Shelby followed. The
path, decked with flowers and so pretty in the daylight, now looked overgrown with
shadow. Ahead of them, the campfire in the pit had faded to glowing embers, but all the
lights were on at the lodge, inside each of the two stories, and all around the deck. The
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great A-frame building was ablaze and looked formidable in the dark night.
Luce could see the scared faces of a lot of the Nephilim kids who were sitting on
the benches around the deck. Jasmine was crying, her red knit cap tugged low on her
head. She was holding Lilith's stiff hand for support as two cops with notebooks ran
through a bunch of questions. Luce's heart went out to the girl. She knew how horrific
that process could be.
The cops swarmed around the deck, passing out blown-up black-and-white
photocopies of a recent photograph of Dawn that someone had printed off the Internet.
Glancing down at the low-resolution image, Luce was surprised to see how much Dawn
did resemble her--at least, before she'd dyed her hair. She remembered talking the
morning after she'd done it, how Dawn kept joking about their not being Twinkies
anymore.
Luce covered her gasp with her hand. Her head hurt as she began to add up so
many things that hadn't made sense. Until now.
The awful moment on the life raft. Steven's harsh warning about keeping it a
secret. Daniel's paranoia about "dangers" he'd never explained to Luce. The Outcast
who'd lured her off campus, the threat that Cam had destroyed in the forest. The way
Dawn looked so much like her in the fuzzy black-and-white photograph.
Whoever took Dawn had been mistaken. It was Luce they wanted.
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TWELVE
SEVEN DAYS
Friday morning, Luce's eyes blinked open and fell on the clock. Seven-thirty a.m.
She'd barely gotten any sleep--she was a mess, worried sick about Dawn and still angry
about the past life she'd witnessed the day before via the Announcer. It was so eerie to
have seen the moments leading up to her death. Would they all have been like that? Her
mind kept running up against the same roadblock over and over again:
If it hadn't been for Daniel ...
Would she have had a shot at a normal life, a relationship with someone else,
getting married, having kids, and growing old like the rest of the world? If it hadn't been
for Daniel falling in love with her ages ago, would Dawn be missing right now?
These questions were all detours, which eventually flowed back to the most
important one: Would love be different with someone else? Was love even possible with
someone else? Love was supposed to be easy, wasn't it? Then why did she feel so
tormented?
Shelby's head swung down from the top bunk, her thick blond ponytail dropping