Fallen 1 by Lauren Kate

Author:Lauren Kate
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-12-07T22:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

INTO DUST

In the hazy dusk over the cemetery, a vulture circled. Two days had passed since Todd’s death, and Luce hadn’t been able to eat or sleep. She was standing in a sleeveless black dress in the basin of the graveyard, where the whole of Sword & Cross had gathered to pay its respects to Todd. As if one unenthusiastic hourlong ceremony were enough. Especially since the campus’s only chapel had been turned into the natatorium, and the ceremony had to be held in the grim swampland of the cemetery.

Since the accident, the school had been on lockdown, and the faculty had been the definition of tight-lipped. Luce had spent the past two days avoiding the stares of the other students, who all eyed her with varying degrees of suspicion. The ones she didn’t know very well seemed to look at her with a faint hint of fear. Others, like Roland and Molly, ogled her in a different, much more shameless manner, as if there were something darkly fascinating about her survival. She endured the probing eyes as best she could during class, and was glad at night when Penn dropped by to bring her a steaming mug of ginger tea, or Arriane slipped a dirty Mad Libs under her door.

She was desperate for anything to take her mind off that uneasy, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling. Because she knew it was coming. In the form of a second visit either from the police, or from the shadows—or both.

That morning, a PA announcement had informed them that the evening’s Social would be canceled out of respect for Todd’s passing, and that classes would be dismissed an hour early so the students could have time to change and arrive at the cemetery at three o’clock. As if the whole school weren’t already dressed for a funeral all the time.

Luce had never seen so many people congregating in one place on the campus. Randy was parked at the center of the group in a calf-length pleated gray skirt and thick, rubber-soled black shoes. A misty-eyed Miss Sophia and a handkerchief-wielding Mr. Cole stood behind her in mourning clothes. Ms. Tross and Coach Diante stood in a black-clad cluster with a group of other faculty and administrators Luce had never seen before.

The students were seated in alphabetic rows. At the front, Luce could see Joel Bland, the kid who’d won the swimming race last week, blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief. Luce was in the nowhere land of P’s, but she could see Daniel, annoyingly positioned in the G’s right next to Gabbe, two rows ahead. He was dressed impeccably in a fitted black pinstriped blazer, but his head seemed to hang lower than everyone’s around him. Even from the back, Daniel managed to look devastatingly somber.

Luce thought about the white peonies he’d brought her. Randy hadn’t let her take the vase with her when she left the infirmary, so Luce had carried the flowers up to her room and gotten pretty inventive, cutting off the top of a plastic water bottle with a pair of manicure scissors.

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