Free The Fallen Sequence by Lauren Kate

and seemed to raise his eyes to exactly where the shadow hovered, but he didn’t start the way she had.
    Of course, he couldn’t see them. His focus settled calmly outside the window.
    The heat inside her grew stronger. She was close enough now that she felt like he must be able to feel it coming off her skin.
    As quietly as she could, Luce tried to peer over his shoulder at his sketchpad. For just a second, her mind saw the curve of her own bare neck sketched in pencil on the page. But then she blinked, and when her eyes settled back on the paper, she had to swallow hard.
    It was a landscape. Daniel was drawing the view of the cemetery out the window in almost perfect detail. Luce had never seen anything that made her quite so sad.
    She didn’t know why. It was crazy—even for her—to have expected her bizarre intuition to come true. Therewas no reason for Daniel to draw her. She knew that. Just like she knew he’d had no reason to flip her off this morning. But he had.
    “What are you doing over here?” he asked. He’d closed his sketchbook and was looking at her solemnly. His full lips were set in a straight line and his gray eyes looked dull. He didn’t look angry, for a change; he looked exhausted.
    “I came to check out a book from Special Collections,” she said in a wobbly voice. But as she looked around, she quickly realized her mistake. Special Collections wasn’t a section of books—it was an open area in the library for an art display about the Civil War. She and Daniel were standing in a tiny gallery of bronze busts of war heroes, glass cases filled with old promissory notes and Confederate maps. It was the only section of the library where there wasn’t a single book to check out.
    “Good luck with that,” Daniel said, opening up his sketchbook again, as if to say, preemptively, goodbye .
    Luce was tongue-tied and embarrassed and what she would have liked to do was escape. But then, there were the shadows, still lurking nearby, and for some reason Luce felt better about them when she was next to Daniel. It made no sense—like there was anything he could do to protect her from them.
    She was stuck, rooted to her spot. He glanced up at her and sighed.
    “Let me ask you, do you like being sneaked up on?”
    Luce thought about the shadows and what they were doing to her right now. Without thinking, she shook her head roughly.
    “Okay, that makes two of us.” He cleared his throat and stared at her, driving home the point that she was the intruder.
    Maybe she could explain that she was feeling a little light-headed and just needed to sit down for a minute. She started to say, “Look, can I—”
    But Daniel picked up his sketchbook and got to his feet. “I came here to get away,” he said, cutting her off. “If you’re not going to leave, I will.”
    He shoved his sketchbook into his backpack. When he pushed past, his shoulder brushed hers. Even as brief as the touch was, even through their layers of clothes, Luce felt a shock of static.
    For a second, Daniel stood still, too. They turned their heads to look back at each other, and Luce opened her mouth. But before she could speak, Daniel had turned on his heel and was walking quickly toward the door. Luce watched as the shadows crept over his head, swirled in a circle, then rushed out the window into the night.
    She shivered in the chill of their wake, and for a long time after that, stood in the special collections area, touching her shoulder where Daniel had, feeling the heat cool down.

FOUR

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT
    A hhh, Tuesday. Waffle day . For as long as Luce could remember, summer Tuesdays meant fresh coffee, brimming bowls of raspberries and whipped cream, and an unending stack of crispy golden brown waffles. Even this summer, when her parents started acting a little scared of her, waffle day was one thing she could count on. She could roll over in bed on a Tuesday morning, and before she was aware of anything else, she knew