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You knew it when I carried you two sweaty miles to the River Jordan after you got sick outside Jerusalem. I told you not to eat all those dates. You knew it when you were my nurse in that Italian hospital during the first World War, and before that when I hid in your cellar during the tsars purge of St.
Petersburg. When I scaled the turret of your castle in Scotland during the Reformation, and danced you around and around at the kings coronation ball at Versailles. You were the only woman dressed in black.
There was that artists colony in Quintana Roo, and the protest march in Cape Town where we both spent the night in the pen. The opening of the Globe Theatre in London. We had the best seats in the house.
And when my ship wrecked in Tahiti, you were there, as you were when I was a convict in Melbourne, and a pickpocket in eighteenth-century Nimes, and a monk in Tibet. You turn up everywhere, always, and sooner or later you sense all the things Ive just told you. But you wont let yourself accept what you feel might be the truth. "
Daniel stopped to catch his breath and looked past her, unseeing. Then he reached over, pressing his hand to her knee and sending that fire through her again.
She closed her eyes, and when shed opened them, Daniel was holding the most perfect white peony. It practically glowed. She turned to see where he had plucked it from, how she hadnt noticed it before.
There were only weeds and the rotting flesh of fallen fruit. They held the flower together.
"You knew it when you picked white peonies every day for a month that summer in Helston. Remember that?" he stared at her, like he was trying to see inside her. "No," he sighed after a moment. "Of course you dont. I envy you for that. "
But even as he said it, Luces skin began to feel warm, as if it were responding to the words her brain didnt know what to make of. Part of her wasnt sure of anything anymore.
"I do all of these things," Daniel said, leaning into her so that their foreheads touched, "because youre my love, Lucinda. For me, youre all there is. " Luces lower lip was trembling. Her hands went slack in his. The flowers petals sifted through their fingers to the ground.
"Then why do you look so sad?"
It was all too much to even begin to think about. She leaned away from Daniel and stood up, wiping the leaves and grass from her jeans. Her head was spinning. She had lived before?
"Luce. "
She waved him off. "I think I need to go somewhere, by myself, to lie down. " She leaned her weight on the peach tree. She felt weak.
"Youre not okay," he said, standing up and taking her hand.
"No. "
"Im so sorry. " Daniel sighed. "I dont know what I expected to happen, telling you. I shouldnt have . . . "
She would never have thought a moment could come when shed need a break from Daniel, but she had to get away. The way he was looking at her, she could tell he wanted her to say she would find him later, that they would talk about things more, but she was no longer sure that was a good idea. The more he said, the more she felt something waking up inside her - something she wasnt sure she was ready for.
She didnt feel crazy anymore - and she wasnt sure Daniel was, either. To anyone else, his explanation would have made less and less sense as it went along. To Luce . . . she wasnt sure yet, but what if Daniels words were answers that could make sense out of her whole life? She didnt know. She felt more afraid than she ever had before.
She shook his hand loose and started toward her dorm. A few strides away, she stopped and slowly turned.
Daniel hadnt moved. "What is it?" he asked, lifting his chin.
She stood where she was, at a distance from him. "I promised you Id stick around long enough to hear the good news. "
Chapter Seventeen
AN OPEN BOOK
Luce collapsed on her bed, giving the weary springs a jolt. After shed fled the cemetery - and Daniel -
shed practically sprinted up to her room. She hadnt even bothered to turn on a light, so shed tripped over her desk chair and stubbed her toe hard. Shed curled into a ball and gripped her throbbing foot. At least the pain was something real that she could cope with, something sane and of this world. She was so glad to finally be alone.
There was a knock on her door.
She could not catch a break.
Luce ignored the knock. She didnt want to see anyone, and whoever it was would get the hint. Another knock. Heavy breathing and a phlegmy, allergy-ridden throat-clearing sound.
Penn.
She couldnt see Penn right now. Shed either sound crazy if she tried to explain all that had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours, or shed go crazy trying to put on a normal face and keep it to herself.
Finally, Luce heard Penns footsteps treading away down the hallway. She breathed a sigh of relief, which turned into a long, lonely whimper.
She wanted to blame Daniel for unleashing this out-of-control feeling inside her, and for a second, she tried to imagine her life without him. Except that was impossible. Like trying to remember your first impression of a house after youve lived in it for years. That was how much he had gotten to her. And now she had to figure out a way to wade through all the strange things hed told her tonight.
But at the edge of her mind, she kept spiraling back to what hed said about the times theyd spent together in the past. Maybe Luce couldnt exactly remember the moments hed described or the places he mentioned, but in a strange way, his words werent shocking at all. It was all somehow familiar.
For example, she had always inexplicably hated dates. Even the sight of them made her feel queasy.
Shed started claiming she was allergic so her mom would stop trying to sneak them into things she baked. And shed been begging her parents to take her to Brazil practically her whole life, though she never could explain exactly why she wanted to go. The white peonies. Daniel had given her a bouquet after the fire in the library. There had always been something so unusual about them, yet so familiar.
The sky outside her window was a deep charcoal, with just a few puffs of white cloud. Her room was dark, but the pale full blooms of the flowers on her windowsill stood out in the dimness. Theyd sat in their vase for a week now, and not a single petal had withered.
Luce sat up and inhaled their sweetness.
She couldnt blame him. Yes, he sounded crazy, but he was also right - she was the one who had come to him again and again suggesting that they had some sort of history. And it wasnt only that. She was also the one who saw the shadows, the one who kept finding herself involved in the deaths of innocent people.
Shed been trying not to think about Trevor and Todd when Daniel started talking about her own deaths - how he had watched her die so many times. If there had been any way to fathom such a thing, Luce would have wanted to ask whether Daniel ever felt responsible. For the loss of her. Whether his reality was anything like the secret, ugly, overriding guilt she faced every day.
She sank onto the desk chair, which had somehow made its way to the middle of the room. Ouch. When she reached underneath her, hand groping for whatever hard object shed just plopped down on, she found a thick book.
Luce moved to the wall and flicked on her light switch, then squinted in the ugly fluorescent light. The book in her hands was one shed never seen before. It was bound in the palest gray cloth, with frayed corners and brown glue crumbling at the bottom of the spine.
The Watchers: Myth in Medieval Europe.
Daniels ancestors book.
It was heavy and smelled faintly of smoke. She tugged out the note that was tucked inside the front cover.
Yes, I found a spare key and entered your room unlawfully. Im sorry. But this is URGENT!!!
And I couldnt find you anywhere. Where are you? You need to look at this, and then we need to have a powwow. Ill swing by in an hour. Proceed with caution.
xoxo,
Penn
Luce laid the note next to the flowers and took the book back to he
r bed. She sat down with her legs dangling over the edge. Just holding the book gave her a strange, warm buzzing sensation just below her skin. The book felt almost alive in her hands.
She cracked it open, expecting to have to decode some stiff academic table of contents or dig through an index at the back before shed find anything even remotely related to Daniel.
She never got beyond the title page.
Pasted inside the front cover of the book was a sepia-toned photograph. It was a very old carte de visite-style picture, printed on yellowing albumen paper. Someone had scrawled in ink at the bottom: Helston, 1854.
Heat flashed across her skin. She yanked her black sweater over her head but still felt hot in her tank top.
The memory of Daniels voice sounded hollow in her mind. I get to live forever, hed said. You come along every seventeen years. You fall in love with me, and I with you. And it kills you.
Her head throbbed.
Youre my love, Lucinda. For me, youre all there is.
She fingered the outline of the picture glued inside the book. Luces dad, the aspiring photography guru, would have marveled over how well-preserved the image was, how valuable it must be.
Luce, on the other hand, was hung up on the people in the image. Because, unless every word out of Daniels mouth had been true, it made no sense at all.
A young man, with light cropped hair and lighter eyes, posed elegantly in a trim black coat. His raised chin and well-defined cheekbones made his fine attire look even more distinguished, but it was his lips that gave Luce such a start. The exact shape of his smile, combined with the look in those eyes . . . it added up to an expression that Luce had seen in every one of her dreams these last few weeks, And, over the last couple of days, in person.
This man was the spitting image of Daniel. The Daniel who had just told her that he loved her - and that she had been reincarnated dozens of times. The Daniel who had said so many other things Luce didnt want to hear that she had run away. The Daniel whom shed abandoned under the peach trees in the cemetery.
It could have been just a remarkable likeness. Some distant relative, the author of the book maybe, whod funneled each one of his genes straight down the family tree right to Daniel.
Except that the young man in the picture was posed next to a young woman who also looked alarmingly familiar.
Luce held the book inches from her face and pored over the womans image. She wore a ruffled black silk ball gown that hugged her body to her waist before billowing out in wide black tiers. Black lace-up wristlets encased her hands, leaving her white fingers bare. Her small teeth showed between her lips, which were parted in an easy smile. She had clear skin a few tones lighter than the mans. Deep-set eyes bordered by thick eyelashes. A black flood of hair that fell in thick waves to her waist.
It took a moment for Luce to remember how to breathe, and even then, she still couldnt tear her strained eyes away from the book. The woman in the photograph?
It was her.
Either Luce had been right, and her memory of Daniel had come from a forgotten trip to a Savannah mall, where theyd posed for cheesy dress-up shots at Ye Old Photo Booth that she also couldnt remember - or Daniel had been telling the truth.
Luce and Daniel did know one another.
From an altogether different time.
She could not catch her breath. Her whole life tossed in the roiling sea of her mind, everything came into question - the itchy dark shadows that haunted her, the gruesome death of Trevor, the dreams.