In the open water, the spires’ protrusion was bizarre, suggesting a cavernous cathedral of the deep. Luce wondered how long ago the church had sunk, how deep it sat below.
The thought of diving down there in ridiculous goggles and mom-bought underwear made her shudder.
“This church must be huge,” she said. She meant I don’t think I can do this. I can’t breathe underwater. How are we going to find one small halo sunk in the middle of the sea?
“I can take you down as far as the chapel itself, but only that far. So long as you hold on to my hand.” Daniel extended a warm hand to help Luce stand up in the gondola. “Breathing will not be a problem. But the church will still be sanctified, which means I’ll need you to find the halo and bring it out to me.”
Daniel yanked his T-shirt off over his head, dropping it to the bench of the gondola. He stepped out of his pants quickly, perfectly balanced in the boat, then kicked off his tennis shoes. Luce watched, feeling something stir inside her until she realized she was supposed to be strip-ping down, too. She kicked off her boots, tugged off her socks, stepped out of her jeans as modestly as she could.
Daniel held her hand to help her balance; he was watching her but not the way she would have expected. He was worried about her, the goose bumps rising on her skin. He rubbed her arms when she slipped off her sweater and stood freezing in her sensible underwear in the gondola in the middle of the Venetian lagoon.
Again she shivered, cold and fear and indecipherable mass inside her. But her voice sounded brave when she tugged the goggles, which pinched, down over her eyes and said, “Okay, let’s swim.”
They held hands, just like they had the last time they’d swum together at Sword & Cross. As their feet lifted off the varnished floor of the gondola, Daniel’s hand tugged her upward, higher than she ever could have jumped herself—and then they dove.
Her body broke the surface of the sea, which wasn’t as cold as she’d expected. In fact, the closer she swam beside Daniel, the warmer the wake around them grew.
He was glowing.
Of course he was. She hadn’t wanted to voice her fears about how dark and impassible the church would be underwater, and now she realized, as ever, that Daniel was always looking out for her. Daniel would light her way to the halo with the same shimmery incandescence Luce had seen in many of the past lives she’d visited. His glow played off the murky water, folding Luce inside it, as lovely and surprising as a rainbow arching boldly in a black night sky.
They swam down, holding hands, bathed in violet light. The water was silky, silent as an empty tomb.
Within a dozen feet, the sea became darker, but Daniel’s light still illuminated the ocean for several feet around them. A dozen feet more and the façade of the church came into view.
It was beautiful. The ocean had preserved it, and the glow of Daniel’s glory cast a haunting violet sheen on its quiet old stones. The pair of spires above the surface punctuated a flat roof lined with stone sculptures of saints. There were panels of half-decayed mosaics depicting Jesus with some of the apostles. Everything was thick with moss and crawling with sea life: tiny silver fish flitting into and out of alcoves, sea anemones jutting out from the depictions of miracles, eels slipping out of crannies where ancient Venetian bodies used to be. Daniel stayed beside her, following her whim, lighting her way.
She swam around the right side of the church, peering through busted stained-glass windows, always eyeing the distance back up to the surface, to air.
At about the point that she’d expected, Luce’s lungs began to strain. But she wasn’t ready to go up yet. They’d only just made it down to where they could see what looked like the altar. She gritted her teeth and bore the burn a little longer.
Holding his hand, she peeked inside one of the windows near the church’s transept. Her head and shoulders ventured in and Daniel flattened as much as he could against the wall of the church to light the inside for her.
She saw nothing but rotting pews, a stone altar split in two. The rest was shadowed, and Daniel couldn’t get any closer to give her more light. She felt a tensing in her lungs and she panicked—but then, somehow, it released, and she felt as if she had a luxurious expanse of time before the tension and panic would return. It was as if there were breathing thresholds, and Luce could pass through a few of them before things would get really dire. Daniel watched her, nodding, as if he understood that she could go on a little longer.
She swam past one more former window, and something golden gleamed in a sunken corner of the church.
Daniel saw it, too. He swam to her side, careful not to press inside the church. He took her hand and pointed at it. Only the tip of the halo was visible. The statue itself looked as if it had sunk through a collapsed portion of the floor. Luce swam closer, clotting the air before her with bubbles, unsure how to wrest it free. She couldn’t wait any longer. Her lungs blazed. She gave Daniel the sign to go up.
He shook his head.
When she flinched in surprise, he pulled her fully outside the church and took her in his arms. He kissed her deeply, and it felt so good, but—
But no, he wasn’t just kissing her. He was breathing air into her lungs. She gasped in his kisses, felt the pure air flow into her, sustaining her lungs just when they felt like they would burst. It was as if he had an endless supply and Luce was greedy for as much as she could get.
Their hands searched each other’s almost naked bodies, as filled with passion as if they were kissing purely for pleasure. Luce didn’t want to stop. But they only had eight days. When at last she nodded that she was sati-ated, Daniel grinned and pulled away.
They returned to the tiny opening where the window used to be. Daniel swam to it and stopped, directing his body to face the opening so his glow would shine in to light her way. She squirmed slowly through the window, feeling instantly cold and senselessly claustrophobic inside the church. That was strange, because the cathedral was huge: Its ceilings were a hundred feet high, and Luce had the place all to herself.
Maybe that was the problem. On the other side of the window Daniel seemed too far away. At least she could see the angel up ahead—and Daniel’s glow just outside. She swam toward the golden halo, gripped it in her hands. She remembered Daniel’s instructions, and she turned the halo as if she were steering a Grey-hound bus.
It didn’t budge.
Luce gripped the slick halo harder. She rocked it back and forth, putting all the strength she had into it.
Ever so slowly, the halo creaked and shifted a centimeter to the left. She strained again to make it budge, sending out bubbles of exasperation. Just as she began to feel exhausted, the halo loosened, turned. Daniel’s face filled with pride as he watched her and she watched him, their gazes intertwined. She was barely even thinking about her breath as she strained to unscrew the halo.
It came off in her hands. She yelped with delight and admired its impressive heft. But when she looked up at Daniel, he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was gazing upward, far in the distance.
A second later, he was gone.
FOUR
BARGAINING BLIND
Alone in the darkness, Luce treaded water.
Where was he?
She swam closer to the crater in the floorboards where the angel had sunk through—where, only seconds before, Daniel’s glow had been with her, lighting her way.
Up. It was the only option.
The pressure in her lungs built rapidly and spread through the rest of her body, thrumming inside her head.
The surface was far away, and by now the air Daniel had breathed into her was gone. She could not see her hand before her face. She could not think. She could not panic.
Luce thrashed away from the rotted floorboards, somersaulting in the water to face where she thought the basement window she’d used to enter the cathedral should be. Her trembling hands probed the barnacled basement walls, groping for the narrow opening she had to fit back through.
There.
Her fingers reached outside the ruin and felt the warmer water beyond. In the darkness, the passage seemed even smaller and more impossible to pass through than it had when Daniel had been there, glowing, lighting her way. But it was the only way out.
With the halo tucked awkwardly under her chin, Luce thrust herself forward, jamming her elbows against the exterior of the building to pull her body through.
First her shoulders, then her waist, then—
Pain ripped through her hip.
Her left foot was stuck, snagged against something she couldn’t reach or see. Tears stung her eyes and she cried out in frustration. She watched the bubbles from her mouth float up—up where she needed to be—carrying with them more energy and oxygen than she had left in her.
With half her body through the window and half her body wedged within, Luce struggled, stiff with terror. If only Daniel were here . . .
But Daniel wasn’t here.
Holding the halo with one hand, she snaked the other back through the tight window, sliding it down against her body, trying to reach her foot. Her fingers met something cold and rubbery and unrecognizable. A piece of it came off in her hands, then crumbled into nothing. She squirmed in disgust as she tried to wrench her foot free from the grip of whatever it was. Her vision was starting to cloud and her fingernails snagged and tore and her ankle grew raw from all her straining to get free—then suddenly she was loose.
Her leg jerked forward and her knee struck the crumbling wall sharply enough that she knew she’d cut it, but no matter: She furiously shimmied the rest of her body through the window.
She had the halo. She was free.
But there was no way she had enough air in her lungs to make it to the surface. Her body was shaking badly, her legs barely responding to commands to swim, and a haze of black-red spots swarmed before her eyes.
She felt dull, like she was swimming through wet cement.
Then something amazing happened: The dark waters around her grew bright with a shimmery glow, and she was enveloped in warmth and light like summer dawn.
A hand appeared, extended toward her.
Daniel. She slipped the fingers of one hand inside his strong broad palm, hugging the halo close to her chest with the other hand.
Luce closed her eyes as she flew with Daniel upward, in underwater sky.
A second seemed to pass and they broke through the surface into blindingly bright sunlight. Instinctively, Luce gulped for the biggest lungful of air she could take in, startling herself with the raw groan her throat made, one hand around her neck to guide the air down, the other ripping off her goggles.
But—it was weird. Her body didn’t seem to need as much air as her mind told her it did. She felt dizzy, struck dumb by the sudden shocking sunlight, but strangely, she wasn’t on the verge of blacking out. Had she not been down there as long as she thought she had? Was she suddenly that much better at holding her breath? Luce let a surge of athletic pride complement her relief at having survived.
Daniel’s hands found hers underwater. “Are you all right?”
“What happened to you?” she cried. “I almost—”
“Luce,” he warned. “Shhh.”
His fingers traced over hers and wordlessly relieved her of the halo. She didn’t realize how heavy that thing was until she was free of it. But why was Daniel acting so strangely, slipping the halo away from her so stealthily, as if he had something to hide?
