She sighed and rested her chin on her hands, remembering her forgotten response to Molly's note. It was folded in her hands. It seemed stupid now and rash. Better not to answer, for Molly not to know she'd even affected Luce.

A paper airplane came to rest on her left forearm. She looked to the far left corner of the class, where Arriane sat holding an exaggerated winking pose.

I take it you're not daydreaming about Satan. Where'd you and DG scurry off to Saturday afternoon?

Luce hadn't had a chance to talk to Arriane alone all day. But how would Arriane have known that Luce went off with Daniel? While Miss Sophia busied herself with a shadow-puppet-focused representation of the nine circles of Hell, Luce watched Arriane sail another perfectly aimed plane at her desk.

So did Molly.

She reached up just in time to snag the plane between her slick black-painted fingernails, but Luce was not going to let her win this one. She snatched the plane back from Molly's grip, ripping its wing loudly down the middle. Luce had exactly enough time to pocket the torn note before Miss Sophia whipped around.

"Lucinda and Molly," she said, pursing her lips and steadying her hands on the podium. "I would hope whatever you two feel the need to discuss in a disrespectful passing of notes could be said before the entire class."

Luce's mind raced. If she didn't come up with something fast, Molly would, and there was no telling how embarrassing that could be.

"M-Molly was just saying," Luce stammered, "that she disagrees with your view of how Hell is broken down. She has her own ideas."

"Well, Molly, if you have an alternate schema of the underworld, I'd certainly like to hear of it."

"What the hell," Molly muttered under her breath. She cleared her throat and stood up. "Well, you've described Lucifer's mouth as the lowest place in the inferno, which is why all the traitors end up there. But for me," she said, like she'd rehearsed the lines, "I think the most tortured place in Hell" — she took a long, sweeping look back at Luce—"should be reserved not for traitors, but for cowards. The weakest, most spineless losers. Because it seems to me that traitors? At least they made a choice. But cowards? They just run around biting their fingernails, totally afraid to do anything. Which is totally worse." She coughed out, "Lucinda!" and cleared her throat. "But that's just my opinion." She sat down.

"Thank you, Molly," Miss Sophia said carefully, "I'm sure we all feel very enlightened."

Luce didn't. She had stopped listening in the middle of Molly's rant, when she felt an eerie, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

The shadows. She sensed them before she saw them, bubbling up like tar from the ground. A tentacle of darkness curled around her wrist, and Luce looked down in terror. It was trying to weasel its way into her pocket. It was going for Arriane's paper plane. She hadn't even read it yet! She stuffed her fist deep into her pocket and used two fingers and all her willpower to pinch the shadow out as hard as she could.

An amazing thing happened: The shadow recoiled, rearing back like an injured dog. It was the first time Luce had ever been able to do that.

Across the room, she met Arriane's eye. Arriane's head was cocked to the side and her mouth was hanging open.

The note—she must still be waiting for Luce to read the note.

Miss Sophia flicked off the light box. "I think my arthritis has had enough Hell for one night." She chuckled, encouraging the brain-numbed students to chuckle with her. "If you'll all reread the seven critical essays I've assigned on Paradise Lost, I think you'll be more than prepared for tomorrow's exam."

As the other students rushed to pack up their bags and peel out of the room, Luce unfolded Arriane's note:

Tell me he didn't give you that lame "I've been burned before" bit.

Ouch. She definitely needed to talk to Arriane and find out exactly what she knew about Daniel. But first… He was standing before her. His silver belt buckle shone at eye level. She took a deep breath and looked up at his face.

Daniel's violet-flecked gray eyes looked rested. She hadn't spoken to him in two days, since he'd left her at the lake. It was as if the time he'd spent away from her had rejuvenated him.

Luce realized she still had Arriane's revealing note spread open on her desk. She swallowed hard and tucked it back into her pocket.

"I wanted to apologize for leaving so suddenly the other day," Daniel said, sounding oddly formal. Luce didn't know if she was supposed to accept his apology, but he didn't give her time to respond. "I take it you made it back to dry land okay?"

She tried a smile. It crossed her mind to tell Daniel about the dream she'd had, but luckily she realized that would be totally weird.

"What did you think of the review session?" Daniel seemed withdrawn, stiff, like they'd never spoken before. Maybe he was joking.

"It was torture," Luce answered. It had always annoyed Luce when smart girls pretended they weren't into something just because they assumed that was what a guy would want to hear. But Luce was not pretending; it really had been torture.

"Good," Daniel said, seeming pleased.

"You hated it, too?"

"No," he said cryptically, and Luce now wished she'd lied to sound more interested than she actually was.

"So… you liked it," she said, wanting to say something, anything to keep him there next to her, talking. "What did you like about it exactly?"

"Maybe 'like' isn't the right word." After a long pause, he said, "It's in my family… studying these things. I guess I can't help feeling a connection."

It took a moment for his words to fully register with Luce. Her mind traveled into the fusty old storage basement where she'd glimpsed Daniel's single-page file. The file that claimed that Daniel Grigori had spent most of his life in a Los Angeles County Orphanage.

"I didn't know you had any family," she said.

"Why would you?" Daniel scoffed.

"I don't know… So, I mean, you do?"

"The question is why you presume you know anything about my family—or me—at all?"

Luce felt her stomach plummet. She saw the Warning: Stalker Alert flash in Daniel's alarmed eyes. And she knew she'd botched things with him yet again.

"D." Roland came up from behind them and put his hand on Daniel's T-shirt-clad shoulder. "You want to stick around to see if there's another yearlong lecture, or are we going to roll?"

"Yeah," Daniel said softly, giving Luce a final sideways glance. "Let's get out of here."

Of course—obviously—she should have bolted several minutes ago. Like, at the first instinct to divulge any details of Daniel's file. A smart, normal person would have dodged the conversation, or changed the subject to something much less freakish, or at the very least, kept her big mouth shut.