Passion

FIVE OFF THE STRAIGHT PATH

Łuce rocketed into the Announcer like a car speeding out of control.

She bounced and jostled against its shadowy sides, feeling as if she’d been thrown down a garbage chute. She didn’t know where she was going or what she would find once she arrived, only that this Announcer seemed narrower and less pliable than the last one, and was filled by a wet, whipping wind that drove her ever deeper into the dark tunnel.

Her throat was dry and her body was weary from not having slept in the hospital. With every turn, she felt more lost and unsure.

What was she doing in this Announcer?

She closed her eyes and tried to fill her mind with thoughts of Daniel: the strong grasp of his hands, the burning intensity of his eyes, the way his whole face changed when she entered a room. The soft comfort of being wrapped in his wings, soaring high, the world and its worries far away.

How foolish she had been to run! That night in her backyard, stepping through the Announcer had seemed like the right thing to do—the only thing to do. But why? Why had she done it? What stupid idea had made that seem like a smart move? And now she was far away from Daniel, from everyone she cared about, from anyone at all. And it was all her fault.

“You’re an idiot!” she cried into the dark.

“Hey, now,” a voice called out. It was raspy and blunt and seemed to come from right beside her. “No need to be insulting!”

Luce went rigid. There couldn’t be anyone inside the utter darkness of her Announcer. Right? She must be hearing things. She pushed forward, faster.

“Slow down, will ya?”

She caught her breath. Whoever it was didn’t sound garbled or distant, like someone was speaking through the shadow. No, someone was in here. With her.

“Hello?” she called, swallowing hard.

No answer.

The whipping wind in the Announcer grew louder, howling in her ears. She stumbled forward in the dark, more and more afraid, until at last the noise of the air blowing past died out and was replaced by another sound—a staticky roar. Something like waves crashing in the distance.

No, the sound was too steady to be waves, Luce thought. A waterfall.

“I said slow down.”

Luce flinched. The voice was back. Inches from her ear—and keeping pace with her as she ran. This time, it sounded annoyed.

“You’re not going to learn anything if you keep zipping around like that.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” she shouted. “Oof!”

Her cheek collided with something cold and hard. The rush of a waterfall filled her ears, close enough that she could feel cool drops of spray on her skin. “Where am I?”

“You’re here. You’re … on Pause. Ever heard of stopping to smell the peonies?”

“You mean roses.” Luce felt around in the darkness, taking in a pungent mineral smell that wasn’t unpleasant or unfamiliar, just confusing. She realized then that she hadn’t yet stepped out of the Announcer and back into the middle of a life, which could only mean—

She was still inside.

It was very dark, but her eyes began to adjust. The Announcer had taken on the form of some sort of small cave. There was a wall behind her made of the same cool stone as the floor, with a depression cut into it where a stream of water trickled down. The waterfall she heard was somewhere above.

And below her? Ten feet or so of stone ledge—and then nothing. Beyond that was blackness.

“I had no idea you could do this,” Luce whispered to herself.

“What?” the hoarse voice said.

“Stop inside an Announcer,” she said. She hadn’t been talking to him and she still couldn’t see him, and the fact that she’d ended up stalled wherever she was with whoever he was—well, it was definitely cause for alarm. But still she couldn’t help marveling at her surroundings. “I didn’t know a place like this existed. An in-between place.”

A phlegmy snort. “You could fill a book with all the things you don’t know, girl. In fact—I think someone may have already written it. But that’s neither here nor there.” A rattling cough. “And I did mean peonies, by the way.”

“Who are you?” Luce sat up and leaned back against the wall. She hoped whoever the voice belonged to couldn’t see her legs trembling.

“Who? Me?” he asked. “I’m just … me. I’m here a lot.”

“Okay.… Doing what?”

“Oh, you know, hanging out.” He cleared his throat, and it sounded like someone gargling with rocks. “I like it here. Nice and calm. Some of these Announcers can be such zoos. But not yours, Luce. Not yet, anyway.”

“I’m confused.” More than confused, Luce was afraid. Should she even be talking to this stranger? How did he know her name?

“For the most part, I’m just your average casual observer, but sometimes I keep an ear out for travelers.” His voice came closer, causing Luce to shiver. “Like yourself. See, I’ve been around awhile, and sometimes travelers, they need a smidge of advice. You been up by the waterfall yet? Very scenic. A-plus, as far as waterfalls go.”

Luce shook her head. “But you said—this is my Announcer? A message of my past. So why would you be—”

“Well! Sor-reee!” The voice grew louder, indignant. “But may I just raise a question: If the channels to your past are so precious, why’d you leave your Announcers wide open for all the world to jump inside? Hmm? Why didn’t you just lock them?”

“I didn’t, um …” Luce had no idea she’d left anything wide open. And no idea Announcers could even be locked.

She heard a small whoomp, like clothes or shoes being thrown into a suitcase, but she still couldn’t see a thing. “I see I’ve overstayed my welcome. I won’t waste your time.” The voice sounded suddenly choked up. And then more softly, from a distance: “Goodbye.”

The voice vanished into the darkness. It was nearly silent inside the Announcer again. Just the soft cascade of the waterfall above. Just the desperate beat of Luce’s heart.

For just a moment, she hadn’t been alone. With that voice there, she’d been nervous, alarmed, on edge … but she hadn’t been alone.

“Wait!” she called, pushing herself to her feet.

“Yes?” The voice was right back at her side.

“I didn’t mean to kick you out,” she said. For some reason, she wasn’t ready for the voice to just disappear. There was something about him. He knew her. He had called her by name. “I just wanted to know who you were.”

“Oh, hell,” he said, a little giddy. “You can call me … Bill.”

“Bill,” she repeated, squinting to see more than the dim cave walls around her. “Are you invisible?”

“Sometimes. Not always. Certainly don’t have to be. Why? You’d prefer to see me?”

“It might make things a little bit less weird.”

“Doesn’t that depend on what I look like?”

“Well—” Luce started to say.

“So”—his voice sounded as if he were smiling—“what do you want me to look like?”

“I don’t know.” Luce shifted her weight. Her left side was damp from the spray of the waterfall. “Is it really up to me? What do you look like when you’re just being yourself?”

“I have a range. You’d probably want me to start with something cute. Am I right?”

“I guess.…”

“Okay,” the voice muttered. “Huminah huminah huminah hummm.”

“What are you doing?” Luce asked.

“Putting on my face.”

There was a flash of light. A blast that would have sent Luce tumbling backward if the wall hadn’t been right behind her. The flash died down into a tiny ball of cool white light. By its illumination she could see the rough expanse of a gray stone floor beneath her feet. A stone wall stretched up behind her, water trickling down its face. And something more:

There on the floor in front of her stood a small gargoyle.

“Ta-da!” he said.

He was about a foot tall, crouched low with his arms crossed and his elbows resting on his knees. His skin was the color of stone—he was stone—but when he waved at her, she could see he was limber enough to be made of flesh and muscle. He looked like the sort of statue you’d find capping the roof of a Catholic church. His fingernails and toenails were long and pointed, like little claws. His ears were pointed, too—and pierced with small stone hoops. He had two little hornlike nubs protruding from the top of a forehead that was fleshy and wrinkled. His large lips were pursed in a grimace that made him look like a very old baby.

“So you’re Bill?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’m Bill.”

Bill was an odd-looking thing, but certainly not someone to be afraid of. Luce circled him and noticed the ridged vertebrae protruding from his spine. And the small pair of gray wings tucked behind his back so that the two tips were twined together.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Great,” she said flatly. One look at any other pair of wings—even Bill’s—made her miss Daniel so much her stomach hurt.

Bill stood up; it was strange to see the arms and legs that were made of stone move like muscle.

“You don’t like the way I look. I can do better,” he said, disappearing in another flash of light. “Hold on.”

Flash.

Daniel stood before her, cloaked in a shining aura of violet light. His unfurled wings were glorious and massive, beckoning her to step inside them. He held out a hand and she sucked in her breath. She knew something was strange about his being there, that she’d been in the middle of doing something else—only she couldn’t recall what or with whom. Her mind felt hazy, her memory obscured. But none of that mattered. Daniel was here. She wanted to cry with happiness. She stepped toward him and put her hand in his.

“There,” he said softly. “Now, that’s the reaction I was after.”

“What?” Luce whispered, confused. Something was rising to the forefront of her mind, telling her to pull away. But Daniel’s eyes overrode that hesitation and she let herself be pulled in, forgetting everything but the taste of his lips.

“Kiss me.” His voice was a raspy croak. Bill’s.

Luce screamed and jumped back. Her mind felt jolted as if from a deep sleep. What had happened? How had she thought she’d seen Daniel in—

Bill. He’d tricked her. She jerked her hand away from his, or maybe he dropped hers during the flash when he changed into a large, warty toad. He croaked out two ribbits, then hopped over to the spring of water dripping down the cave wall. His tongue shot out into the stream.

Luce was breathing hard and trying not to show how devastated she felt. “Stop it,” she said sharply. “Just go back to the gargoyle. Please.”

“As you wish.”

Flash.

Bill was back, crouched low with his arms crossed over his knees. Still as stone.

“I thought you’d come around,” he said.

Luce looked away, embarrassed that he had gotten a rise out of her, angry that he seemed to have enjoyed it.

“Now that that’s all settled,” he said, scurrying around so he was standing where she could see him again, “what would you like to learn first?”

“From you? Nothing. I have no idea what you’re even doing here.”

“I’ve upset you,” Bill said, snapping his stone fingers. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to learn your tastes. You know—likes: Daniel Grigori and cute little gargoyles.” He listed on his fingers. “Dislikes: frogs. I think I’ve got it now. No more of that funny business from me.” He spread his wings and flitted up to sit on her shoulder. He was heavy. “Just the tricks of the trade,” he whispered.

“I don’t need any tricks.”

“Come now. You don’t even know how to lock an Announcer to keep out the bad guys. Don’t you want to at least know that?”

Luce raised an eyebrow at him. “Why would you help me?”

“You’re not the first to skip around the past, you know, and everybody needs a guide. Lucky you, you chanced upon me. You could have gotten stuck with Virgil—”

“Virgil?” Luce asked, having a flashback to sophomore English. “As in the guy who led Dante through the nine circles of Hell?”

“That’s the one. He’s so by the book, it’s a snooze. Anyway, you and I aren’t sojourning through Hell right now,” he explained with a shrug. “Tourist season.”

Luce thought back to the moment she’d seen Luschka burst into flames in Moscow, to the raw pain she’d felt when Lucia had told her Daniel had disappeared from the hospital in Milan.

“Sometimes it feels like Hell,” she said.

“That’s only because it took us this long to be introduced.” Bill extended his stony little hand toward hers.

Luce stalled. “So what, um, side are you on?”

Bill whistled. “Hasn’t anyone told you it’s more complicated than that? That the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have been blurred by millennia of free will?”

“I know all that, but—”

“Look, if it makes you feel any better, have you ever heard of the Scale?”

Luce shook her head.

“Sorta like hall monitors within Announcers who make sure travelers get where they’re going. Members of the Scale are impartial, so there’s no siding with Heaven or with Hell. Okay?”

“Okay.” Luce nodded. “So you’re in the Scale?”

Bill winked. “Now, we’re almost there, so—”

“Almost where?”

“To the next life you’re traveling to, the one that cast this shadow we’re in.”

Luce ran her hand through the water running down the wall. “This shadow—this Announcer—is different.”

“If it is, it’s only because that’s what you want it to be. If you want a rest-stop–type cave inside an Announcer, it appears for you.”

“I didn’t want a rest stop.”

“No, but you needed one. Announcers can pick up on that. Also, I was here helping out, wanting it on your behalf.” The little gargoyle shrugged, and Luce heard a sound like boulders knocking against each other. “The inside of an Announcer isn’t anyplace at all. It’s a neverwhere, the dark echo cast by something in the past. Each one is different, adapting to the needs of its travelers, so long as they’re inside.”

There was something wild about the idea of this echo of Luce’s past knowing what she wanted or needed better than she did. “So how long do people stay inside?” she asked. “Days? Weeks?”

“No time. Not the way you’re thinking. Within Announcers, real time doesn’t pass at all. But still, you don’t want to hang around here too long. You could forget where you’re going, get lost forever. Become a hoverer. And that’s ugly business. These are portals, remember, not destinations.”

Luce rested her head against the damp stone wall. She didn’t know what to make of Bill. “This is your job. Serving as a guide to, uh, travelers like me?”

“Sure, exactly.” Bill snapped his fingers, the friction sending up a spark. “You nailed it.”

“How’d a gargoyle like you get stuck doing this?”

“Excuse me, I take pride in my work.”

“I mean, who hired you?”

Bill thought for a moment, his marble eyes rolling back and forth in their sockets. “Think of it as a volunteer position. I’m good at Announcer travel, is all. No reason not to spread my expertise around.” He turned to her with his palm cupping his stony chin. “When are we going to, anyway?”

“When are we …?” Luce stared at him, confused.

“You have no idea, do you?” He slapped his forehead. “You’re telling me that you dove out of the present without any fundamental knowledge about stepping through? That how you end up when you end up is a complete mystery to you?”

“How was I supposed to learn?” Luce said. “No one told me anything!”

Bill fluttered down from her shoulder and paced along the ledge. “You’re right, you’re right. We’ll just go back to basics.” He stopped in front of Luce, tiny hands on his thick hips. “So. Here we go: What is it that you want?”

“I want … to be with Daniel,” she said slowly. There was more, but she wasn’t sure how to explain it.

“Huh!” Bill looked even more dubious than his heavy brow, stone lips, and hooked nose made him look naturally. “The hole in your argument there, Counselor, is that Daniel was already right there beside you when you skipped out of your own time. Was he not?”

Luce slid down the wall and sat, feeling another strong rush of regret. “I had to leave. He wouldn’t tell me anything about our past, so I had to go find out for myself.”

She expected Bill to argue with her more, but he simply said, “So, you’re telling me you’re on a quest.”

Luce felt a faint smile cross her lips. A quest. She liked the sound of that.

“So you do want something. See?” Bill clapped. “Okay, first thing you ought to know is that the Announcers are summoned to you based upon what’s going on in here.” He thumped his stony fist against his chest. “They’re kind of like little sharks, drawn by your deepest desires.”

“Right.” Luce remembered the shadows at Shoreline, how it was almost as though the specific Announcers had chosen her and not the other way around.

“So when you step through, the Announcers that seem to quiver before you, begging you to pick them up? They funnel you to the place your soul longs to be.”

“So the girl I was in Moscow, and in Milan—and all the other lives I glimpsed before I knew how to step through—I wanted to visit them?”

“Precisely,” Bill said. “You just didn’t know it. The Announcers knew it for you. You’ll get better at this, too. Soon you should begin to feel yourself sharing their knowledge. As strange as it may feel, they’re a part of you.”

Each one of those cold, dark shadows, a part of her? It made sudden, unexpected sense. It explained how even from the beginning, even when it scared her, Luce hadn’t been able to stop herself from stepping through them. Even when Roland warned her they were dangerous. Even when Daniel gaped at her like she’d committed some horrible crime. The Announcers always felt like a door opening. Was it possible that they really were?

Her past, once so unknowable, was out there, and all she had to do was step through into the right doorways? She could see who she’d been, what had drawn Daniel to her, why their love had been damned, how it had grown and changed over time. And, most importantly, what they could be in the future.

“We’re already well on our way somewhere,” Bill said, “but now that you know what you and your Announcers are capable of, the next time you go stepping through, you need to think about what you want. And don’t think place or time, think overall quest.”

“Okay.” Luce was working to tidy the jumble of emotions inside her into words that might make any sense out loud.

“Why not try it out now?” Bill said. “Just for practice. Might give us a heads-up about what we’re going to walk into. Think about what it is you’re after.”

“Understanding,” she said slowly.

“Good,” Bill said. “What else?”

A nervous energy was coursing through her, as if she was on the brink of something important. “I want to find out why Daniel and I were cursed. And I want to break that curse. I want to stop love from killing me so that we can finally be together—for real.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Bill started waving his hands like a man stranded on the side of a dark road. “Let’s not get crazy. This is a very long-standing damnation you’re up against here. You and Daniel, it’s like … I don’t know, you can’t just snap your pretty little fingers and break out of that. You gotta start small.”

“Right,” Luce said. “Okay. Then I should start by getting to know one of my past selves. Get up close and see her relationship with Daniel unfold. See if she feels the same things I feel.”

Bill was nodding, a wacky smile spreading across his full lips. He led her to the edge of the ledge. “I think you’re ready. Let’s go.”

Let’s go? The gargoyle was coming with her? Out of the Announcer and into another past? Yes, Luce could use some company, but she barely knew this guy.

“You’re wondering why you should trust me, aren’t you?” Bill asked.

“No, I—”

“I get it,” he said, hovering in the air in front of her. “I’m an acquired taste. Especially compared to the company you’re used to keeping. I’m certainly no angel.” He snorted. “But I can help make this journey worth your while. We can make a deal, if you want. You get sick of me—just say so. I’ll be on my way.” He held out his long clawed hand.

Luce shuddered. Bill’s hand was crusty with rocky cysts and scabs of lichen, like a ruined statue. The last thing she wanted to do was take it in her own hand. But if she didn’t, if she sent him on his way right now …

She might be better off with him than without him.

She glanced down at her feet. The short wet ledge beneath them ended where she was standing, dropped off into nothing. Between her shoes, something caught her eye, a shimmer in the rock that made her blink. The ground was shifting … softening … swaying under her feet.

Luce looked behind her. The slab of rock was crumbling, all the way to the wall of the cave. She stumbled, teetering at the edge. The ledge jerked beneath her—harder—as the particles that held the rock together began to break apart. The ledge disappeared around her, faster and faster, until fresh air brushed the backs of her heels and she jumped—

And sank her right hand into Bill’s extended claw. They shook in the air.

“How do we get out of here?” she cried, grasping tight to him now for fear of falling into the abyss she couldn’t see.

“Follow your heart.” Bill was beaming, calm. “It won’t mislead you.”

Luce closed her eyes and thought of Daniel. A feeling of weightlessness overcame her, and she caught her breath. When she opened her eyes, she was somehow soaring through static-filled darkness. The stone cave shifted and pulled in on itself into a small golden orb of light that shrank and was gone.

Luce glanced over, and Bill was right there with her.

“What was the first thing I ever told you?” he asked.

Luce recalled how his voice had seemed to reach all the way inside her.

“You said to slow down. That I’d never learn anything zipping around my past so quickly.”

“And?”

“It was exactly what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know I wanted it.”

“Maybe that’s why you found me when you did,” Bill shouted over the wind, his gray wings bristling as they sped along. “And maybe that’s why we’ve ended up … right … here.”

The wind stopped. The static crackling smoothed to silence.

Luce’s feet slammed onto the ground, a sensation like flying off a swing set and landing on a grassy lawn. She was out of the Announcer and somewhere else. The air was warm and a little humid. The light around her feet told her it was dusk.

They were sunk deep in a field of thick, soft, brilliant green grass, as high as her calves. Here and there the grass was dotted with tiny bright-red fruit—wild strawberries. Ahead, a thin row of silver birch trees marked the edge of the manicured lawn of an estate. Some distance beyond that stood an enormous house.

From here she could make out a white stone flight of stairs that led to the back entrance of the large, Tudor-style mansion. An acre of pruned yellow rosebushes bordered the lawn’s north side, and a miniature hedge maze filled the area near the iron gate on the east. In the center lay a bountiful vegetable garden, beans climbing high along their poles. A pebble trail cut the yard in half and led to a large whitewashed gazebo.

Goose bumps rose on Luce’s arms. This was the place. She had a visceral sense that she had been here before. This was no ordinary déjà vu. She was staring at a place that had meant something to her and Daniel. She half expected to see the two of them there right now, wrapped in each other’s arms.

But the gazebo was empty, filled only with the orange light of the setting sun.

Someone whistled, making her jump.

Bill.

She’d forgotten he was with her. He hovered in the air so that their heads were on the same level. Outside the Announcer, he was somewhat more repulsive than he’d seemed at first. In the light, his flesh was dry and scaly, and he smelled pretty strongly of mildew. Flies buzzed around his head. Luce edged away from him a little, almost wishing he’d go back to being invisible.

“Sure beats a war zone,” he said, eyeing the grounds.

“How did you know where I was before?”

“I’m … Bill.” He shrugged. “I know things.”

“Okay, then, where are we now?”

“Helston, England”—he pointed a claw tip toward his head and closed his eyes—“in what you’d call 1854.” Then he clasped his stone claws together in front of his chest like a gnomey sort of schoolboy reciting a history report. “A sleepy southern town in the county of Cornwall, granted charter by King John himself. Corn’s a few feet tall, so I’d say it’s probably midsummer. Pity we missed the month of May—they have a Flora Day festival here like you wouldn’t believe. Or maybe you would! Your past self was the belle of the ball the last two years in a row. Her father’s very rich, see. Got in at the ground level of the copper trade—”

“Sounds terrific.” Luce cut him off and started tramping across the grass. “I’m going in there. I want to talk to her.”

“Hold up.” Bill flew past her, then looped back, fluttering a few inches in front of her face. “Now, this? This won’t do at all.”

He waved a finger in a circle, and Luce realized he was talking about her clothes. She was still in the Italian nurse’s uniform she’d worn during the First World War.

He grabbed the hem of her long white skirt and lifted it to her ankles. “What do you have on under there? Are those Converse? You’ve gotta be kidding me with those.” He clucked his tongue. “How you ever survived those other lifetimes without me …”

“I got along fine, thank you.”

“You’ll need to do more than ‘get along’ if you want to spend some time here.” Bill flew back up to eye level with Luce, then zipped around her three times. When she turned to look for him, he was gone.

But then, a second later, she heard his voice—though it sounded as if it was coming from a great distance. “Yes! Brilliant, Bill!”

A gray dot appeared in the air near the house, growing larger, then larger, until Bill’s stone wrinkles became clear. He was flying toward her now, and carrying a dark bundle in his arms.

When he reached her, he simply plucked at her side, and the baggy white nurse’s uniform split down its seam and slid right off her body. Luce flung her arms around her bare body modestly, but it seemed like only a second later that a series of petticoats was being tugged over her head.

Bill scrambled around her like a rabid seamstress, binding her waist into a tight corset, until sharp boning poked her skin in all sorts of uncomfortable places. There was so much taffeta in her petticoats that even standing still in a bit of a breeze, she rustled.

She thought she looked pretty good for the era—until she recognized the white apron tied around her waist, over her long black dress. Her hand went to her hair and yanked off a white servant’s headpiece.

“I’m a maid?” she asked.

“Yes, Einstein, you’re a maid.”

Luce knew it was dumb, but she felt a little disappointed. The estate was so grand and the gardens so lovely and she knew she was on a quest and all that, but couldn’t she have just strolled around the grounds here like a real Victorian lady?

“I thought you said my family was rich.”

“Your past self’s family was rich. Filthy rich. You’ll see when you meet her. She goes by Lucinda and thinks your nickname is an absolute abomination, by the way.” Bill pinched his nose and lifted it high in the air, giving a pretty laughable imitation of a snob. “She’s rich, yes, but you, my dear, are a time-traveling intruder who knows not the ways of this high society. So unless you want to stick out like a Manchester seamstress and get shown the door before you even get to have a chat with Lucinda, you need to go undercover. You’re a scullery maid. Serving girl. Chamber-pot changer. It’s really up to you. Don’t worry, I’ll stay out of your way. I can disappear in the blink of an eye.”

Luce groaned. “And I just go in and pretend like I work here?”

“No.” Bill rolled his flinty eyes. “Go up and introduce yourself to the lady of the house, Mrs. Constance. Tell her your last placement moved to the Continent and you’re looking for new employment. She’s an evil old harridan and a stickler for references. Lucky for you, I’m one step ahead of her. You’ll find yours inside your apron pocket.”

Luce slipped her hand inside the pocket of her white linen apron and pulled out a thick envelope. The back was stamped shut with a red wax seal; when she turned it over, she read Mrs. Melville Constance, scrawled in black ink. “You’re kind of a know-it-all, aren’t you?”

“Thank you.” Bill bowed graciously; then, when he realized Luce had already started toward the house, he flew ahead, beating his wings so rapidly they became two stone-colored blurs on either side of his body.

By then they had passed the silver birches and were crossing the manicured lawn. Luce was about to start up the pebble path to the house, but hung back when she noticed figures in the gazebo. A man and a woman, walking toward the house. Toward Luce.

“Get down,” she whispered. She wasn’t ready to be seen by anyone in Helston, especially not with Bill buzzing around her like some oversized insect.

“You get down,” he said. “Just because I made an invisibility exception for your benefit doesn’t mean just any mere mortal can see me. I’m perfectly discreet where I am. Matter of fact, the only eyes I have to be watchful about are—Whoa, hey.” Bill’s stone eyebrows shot up suddenly, making a heavy dragging noise. “I’m out,” he said, ducking down behind the tomato vines.

Angels, Luce filled in. They must be the only other souls who could see Bill in this form. She guessed this because she could finally make out the man and woman, the ones who’d prompted Bill to take cover. Gaping through the thick, prickly leaves of the tomato vine, Luce couldn’t tear her eyes away from them.

Away from Daniel, really.

The rest of the garden grew very still. The birds’ evening songs quieted, and all she could hear were two pairs of feet walking slowly up the gravel path. The last rays of the sun all seemed to fall upon Daniel, throwing a halo of gold around him. His head was tipped toward the woman and he was nodding as he walked. The woman who was not Luce.

She was older than Lucinda could have been—in her twenties, most likely, and very beautiful, with dark, silken curls under a broad straw hat. Her long muslin dress was the color of a dandelion and looked like it must have been very expensive.

“Have you come to like our little hamlet much at all, Mr. Grigori?” the woman was saying. Her voice was high and bright and full of natural confidence.

“Perhaps too much, Margaret.” Luce’s stomach tied up in a jealous knot as she watched Daniel smile at the woman. “It’s hard to believe it’s been a week since I arrived in Helston. I could stay on longer even than I’d planned.” He paused. “Everyone here has been very kind.”

Margaret blushed, and Luce seethed. Even Margaret’s blushing was lovely. “We only hope that will come through in your work,” she said. “Mother’s thrilled, of course, to have an artist staying with us. Everyone is.”

Luce crawled along after them as they walked. Past the vegetable garden, she crouched down behind the overgrown rosebushes, planting her hands on the ground and leaning forward to keep the couple in earshot.

Then Luce gasped. She’d pricked her thumb on a thorn. It was bleeding.

She sucked on the wound and shook her hand, trying not to get blood on her apron, but by the time the bleeding had stopped, she realized she’d missed part of the conversation. Margaret was looking up at Daniel expectantly.

“I asked you if you’ll be at the solstice festivities later this week.” Her tone was a bit pleading. “Mother always makes a big to-do.”

Daniel murmured something like yes, he wouldn’t miss it, but he was clearly distracted. He kept looking away from the woman. His eyes darted around the lawn, as if he sensed Luce behind the roses.

When his gaze swept over the bushes where she crouched, they flashed the most intense shade of violet.