Just east of the riverbed, a small group of tents stood clustered together, facing a larger square structure made of white stones, with a latticed wooden roof. The blast of the shofar must have come from that temple.
A line of women in colorful cloaks that fell to their ankles moved in and out of the temple. They carried clay jugs and bronze trays of food, as if in preparation for a feast.
“Oh,” Daniel said aloud, feeling a profound melancholy settle over him.
“Oh what?” Shelby asked.
Daniel gripped the hood of Shelby’s camouflage sweatshirt. “If you’re looking for Luce here, you won’t find her. She’s dead. She died a month ago.”
Miles nearly choked.
“You mean the Luce from this lifetime,” Shelby said. “Not our Luce. Right?”
“Our Luce—my Luce—isn’t here, either. She never knew this place existed, so her Announcers wouldn’t bring her here. Yours wouldn’t have, either.”
Shelby and Miles shared a glance. “You say you’re looking for Luce,” Shelby said, “but if you know she isn’t here, why are you still hanging around?”
Daniel stared past them, at the valley below. “Unfinished business.”
“Who is that?” Miles asked, pointing at a woman in a long white dress. She was tall and willowy, with red hair that shimmered in the sunlight. Her dress was cut low, showing off a lot of golden skin. She was singing something soft and lovely, a tease of a song they could barely hear.
“That’s Lilith,” Daniel said slowly. “She’s supposed to be married today.”
Miles took a few steps along a path leading down from the olive tree toward the valley where the temple stood, about a hundred feet below them, as if to get a better look.
“Miles, wait!” Shelby scrambled after him. “This isn’t like when we were in Vegas. This is some freaking … other time or whatever. You can’t just see a hot girl and go strolling in like you own the place.” She turned to look at Daniel for help.
“Stay low,” Daniel instructed them. “Keep under the grass line. And stop when I say stop.”
Carefully, they wound down the path, stopping at last near the bank of the river, downstream from the temple. All the tents in the small community had been strewn with garlands of marigolds and cassis flowers. They were in earshot of the voices of Lilith and the girls who were helping prepare her for the wedding. The girls laughed and joined in Lilith’s song as they braided her long red hair into a wreath around her head.
Shelby turned to Miles. “Doesn’t she look kind of like Lilith from our class at Shoreline?”
“No,” Miles said instantly. He studied the bride for a moment. “Okay, maybe a little bit. Weird.”
“Luce probably never mentioned her,” Shelby explained to Daniel. “She’s a total bitch from Hell.”
“It makes sense,” Daniel said. “Your Lilith might come from the same long line of evil women. They’re all descendants of the original mother Lilith. She was Adam’s first wife.”
“Adam had more than one wife?” Shelby gaped. “What about Eve?”
“Before Eve.”
“Pre-Eve? No way.”
Daniel nodded. “They weren’t married very long when Lilith left him. It broke his heart. He waited for her a long time, but eventually, he met Eve. And Lilith never forgave Adam for getting over her. She spent the rest of her days wandering the earth and cursing the family Adam had with Eve. And her descendants—sometimes they start out all right, but eventually, well, the apple never really falls far from the tree.”
“That’s messed up,” Miles said, despite seeming hypnotized by Lilith’s beauty.
“You’re telling me that Lilith Clout, the girl who set my hair on fire in ninth grade, could be literally a bitch from Hell? That all my voodoo toward her might have been justified?”
“I guess so.” Daniel shrugged.
“I’ve never felt so vindicated.” Shelby laughed. “Why wasn’t this in any of our angelology books at Shoreline?”
“Shhh.” Miles pointed toward the temple. Lilith had left her maidens to complete the decorations for the wedding—strewing yellow and white poppies near the entrance to the temple, weaving ribbons and small chimes made of silver into the low branches of the oak trees—and walked away from them, west, toward the river, toward where Daniel, Shelby, and Miles were hiding.
She carried a bouquet of white lilies. When she reached the riverbank, she plucked a few petals and scattered them over the water, still singing softly under her breath. Then she turned to walk north along the bank, toward a huge old carob tree with branches that drooped into the river.
A boy sat beneath it, staring into the current. His long legs were propped up close to his chest, with one arm draped over them. The other arm was skipping stones into the water. His green eyes sparkled against his tan skin. His jet-black hair was a little shaggy, and damp from a recent swim.
“Oh my god, that’s—” Shelby’s cry was cut off by Daniel’s hand clamping over her mouth.
This was the moment he’d been afraid of. “Yes, it’s Cam, but it’s not the Cam you know. This is an earlier Cam. We are thousands of years in the past.”
Miles narrowed his eyes. “But he’s still evil.”
“No,” Daniel said. “He’s not.”
“Huh?” Shelby asked.
“There was a time when we were all part of one family. Cam was my brother. He was not evil, not yet. Maybe not even now.”
Physically, the only difference between this Cam and the one Shelby and Miles knew was that his neck was bare of the sunburst tattoo he’d gotten from Satan when he’d thrown in his lot with Hell. Otherwise, Cam looked exactly as he did now.
Except that this long-ago Cam’s face was stiff with worry. It was an expression Daniel hadn’t seen on Cam in millennia. Probably not since this very moment.
Lilith stopped behind Cam and wrapped her arms around his neck so that her hands rested just over his heart. Without turning or saying a word, Cam reached up and cupped her hands in his. Both of them closed their eyes, content.
“This seems really private,” Shelby said. “Should we be—I mean, I feel weird.”
“Then leave,” Daniel said slowly. “Don’t make a scene on your way out—”
Daniel broke off. Someone was walking toward Cam and Lilith.
The young man was tall and tanned, dressed in a long white robe, and carrying a thick scroll of parchment. His blond head was down, but it was obviously Daniel.
“I’m not leaving.” Miles’s eyes locked on Daniel’s past self.
“Wait, I thought we just sent that guy back into the Announcers,” Shelby said, confused.
“That was a later early version of myself,” Daniel said.
“A later early version of myself, he says!” Shelby snorted. “Exactly how many Daniels are there?”
“He came from two thousand years in the future beyond the moment where we are right now, which is still one thousand years in the true past. That Daniel shouldn’t have been here.”
“We’re three thousand years in the past right now?” Miles asked.
“Yes, and you really shouldn’t be.” Daniel stared Miles down. “But that past version of me”—he pointed at the boy who had stopped next to Cam and Lilith—“belongs here.”
Across the river, Lilith smiled. “How are you, Dani?”
They watched as Dani knelt down next to the couple and unrolled the scroll of parchment. Daniel remembered: It was their marriage license. He’d inscribed the whole thing himself in Aramaic. He was supposed to perform the ceremony. Cam had asked him months before.
Lilith and Cam read over the document. They were good together, Daniel remembered. She wrote songs for him and spent hours picking wildflowers, weaving them into his clothes. He gave all of himself to her. He listened to her dreams and made her laugh when she was sad. Both of them had their volatile sides, and when they argued, the whole tribe heard about it—but neither one of them was yet the dark thing they would become after they split up.