Passion by Lauren Kate

warm and lazy summer evening in Helston. Out on the streets, ladies in bonnets and lace-trimmed gowns spoke in low, polite voices to the linen-suited men whose arms they held. Couples paused in front of shop windows. They lingered to speak with their neighbors.
    They stopped on street corners and took ten minutes to say goodbye.
    Everything about these people, from their at ire to the pace of their strol ing, was so infuriatingly slow. Daniel could not have felt more at odds with the passersby on the street.
    His wings, hidden beneath his coat, burned with his impatience as he waded through the people. There was one fail-safe place where he knew he could nd Lucinda—she visited the gazebo in his patron’s back garden most evenings just after dusk. But where he might nd Luce—the one hopping in and out of Announcers, the one he needed to find—that, there was no way of knowing.
    The other two lives Luce had stumbled into made some sense to Daniel. In the grand scheme, they were … anomalies. Past moments when she had come close to unraveling the truth of their curse just before she died. But he couldn’t gure out why her Announcer had brought her here.
    Helston had been a mostly peaceful time for them. In this life, their love had grown slowly, natural y. Even her death had been private, between just the two of them. Once, Gabbe had used the word respectable to describe Lucinda’s end in Helston. That death, at least, had been theirs alone to suf er.
    No, nothing made sense about the accident of her revisiting this life—which meant she could be anywhere in the hamlet.
    “Why, Mr. Grigori,” a tril ing voice cal ed out on the street. “What a wonderful surprise to find you here in town.” A blond woman in a long pat erned blue dress stood before Daniel, taking him ut erly by surprise. She held the hand of a pudgy, freckled eight-year-old boy, who looked miserable in a cream-colored jacket with a stain underneath the col ar.
    At last it dawned on Daniel: Mrs. Holcombe and her talentless son Edward, whom he’d given drawing lessons to for a few painful weeks while in Helston.
    “Hel o, Edward.” Daniel leaned down to shake the lit le boy’s hand, then bowed to his mother. “Mrs. Holcombe.” Until that moment, Daniel had given lit le thought to his wardrobe as he moved through time. He didn’t care what someone on the street thought of his modern gray slacks or whether the cut of his white oxford shirt looked odd compared to any other man’s in town. But if he was going to run into people he’d actual y known nearly two hundred years ago wearing the clothes he’d worn two days ago to Luce’s parents’ Thanksgiving, word might begin to travel around.
    Daniel didn’t want to draw any at ention to himself. Nothing could stand in the way of nding Luce. He would simply have to nd something else to wear. Not that the Holcombes noticed. Luckily Daniel had returned to a time when he’d been known as an “eccentric” artist.
    “Edward, show Mr. Grigori what Mama just bought you,” Mrs. Holcombe said, smoothing her son’s unruly hair.
    The boy reluctantly produced a smal paint kit from a satchel. Five glass pots of oil paint and a long red wooden-handled brush.
    Daniel made the requisite compliments—about how Edward was a very lucky lit le boy, one whose talent now had the proper tools—
    while trying not to be obvious about looking past the pair for the quickest way out of the conversation.
    “Edward’s such a gifted child,” Mrs. Holcombe insisted, taking hold of Daniel’s arm. “Trouble is, he nds your drawing lessons just a lit le less thril ing than a boy his age expects. It’s why I thought a proper paint set might al ow him to real y come into his own. As an artiste. You understand, Mr. Grigori?”
    “Yes, yes, of course.” Daniel cut her of . “Give him whatever makes him want to paint. Bril iant plan—” A coldness spread through him and froze his words in his throat.
    Cam had just