Passion Read Free

She couldn’t tel .
    In the end, when the Outcast had approached her, Daniel and the others had stared at Luce like she was the one who owed them something.
    You are our entrance into Heaven, the Outcast had told her. The price. What had that meant? Until a couple of weeks ago she hadn’t even known the Outcasts existed. And yet, they wanted something from her—badly enough to bat le Daniel for it. It must have had to do with the curse, the one that kept Luce reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. But what did they think Luce could do?
    Was the answer buried somewhere here?
    Her stomach lurched as she tumbled senselessly through the cold shadow, deep inside the chasm of the dark Announcer.
    Luce—
    The voices began to fade and grow dimmer. Soon they were barely whispers. Almost like they had given up. Until—
    They started to grow louder again. Louder and clearer.
    Luce—
    No. She clamped her eyes shut to try to block them out.
    Lucinda—
    Lucy—
    Lucia—
    Luschka—
    She was cold and she was tired and she didn’t want to hear them. For once, she wanted to be left alone.
    Luschka! Luschka! Luschka!
    Her feet hit something with a thwump.
    Something very, very cold.
    She was standing on solid ground. She knew she wasn’t tumbling anymore, though she couldn’t see anything in front of her except for the blanket of blackness. Then she looked down at her Converse sneakers.
    And gulped.
    They were planted in a blanket of snow that reached midway up her calves. The dank coolness that she was used to—the shadowy tunnel she’d been traveling through, out of her backyard, into the past—was giving way to something else. Something blustery and absolutely frigid.
    The rst time Luce had stepped through an Announcer—from her Shoreline dorm room to Las Vegas—she’d been with her friends Shelby and Miles. At the end of the passage they’d met a barrier: a dark, shadowy curtain between them and the city. Because Miles was the only one who’d read the texts on stepping through, he’d started swiping the Announcer with a circular motion until the murky black shadow flaked away. Luce hadn’t known until now that he’d been troubleshooting.
    This time, there was no barrier. Maybe because she was traveling alone, through an Announcer summoned of her own erce wil . But the way out was so easy. Almost too easy. The veil of blackness simply parted.
    A blast of cold tore into her, making her knees lock with the chil . Her ribs stif ened and her eyes teared in the sharp, sudden wind.
    Where was she?
    Luce already regret ed her panicked jump through time. Yes, she needed an escape, and yes, she wanted to trace her past, to save her former selves from al the pain, to understand what kind of love she’d had with Daniel al those other times. To feel it instead of being told about it. To understand—and then fix—whatever curse had been inflicted on Daniel and her.
    But not like this. Frozen, alone, and completely unprepared for wherever, whenever she was.
    She could see a snowy street in front of her, a steel-gray sky above white buildings. She could hear something rumbling in the distance. But she didn’t want to think about what any of it meant.
    “Wait,” she whispered to the Announcer.
    The shadow drifted hazily a foot or so beyond her ngertips. She tried to grasp it, but the Announcer eluded her, icking farther away. She leaped for it, and caught a tiny damp piece of it between her fingers—
    But then, in an instant, the Announcer shat ered into soft black fragments on the snow. They faded, then were gone.
    “Great,” she mut ered. “Now what?”
    “Great,” she mut ered. “Now what?”
    In the distance, the narrow road curved left to meet a shadowy intersection. The sidewalks were piled high with shoveled snow, which had been packed against two long banks of white stone buildings. They were striking, unlike anything Luce had ever seen, a few stories tal , with their entire façades carved into rows of bright white