Luce took one look at the shuddering light at the base of the cemetery and started racing toward it. She hurtled down past the broken headstones, leaving Penn and Miss Sophia far behind. She didn’t care that the sharp, twisting limbs of the live oak trees scratched her arms and face as she ran, or that clumps of thick-rooted weeds tripped up her feet.

She had to get down there.

Because…she knows what it is?  Because…the same mysterious compelling feelings she’s had this whole book told her to.  Because…she’s actually a pyromaniac and wants to see stuff catch on fire?  Because…reasons?

Alright.  Because reasons, then.

Seems that there’s one of her shadow monsters in with all that poorly-described ‘flickering light.’  You know, for a book that spends so many words describing shit, you’d think we’d have a better sense of what all this vague ‘light’ is.

The shadows had been warning her, she realized, for days.

…you know, book, you can’t just retroactively declare things like that.

Well, you can, but it’s awful.  If the shadows had been warning her, we should have seen them warning her.  Or at least seen them doing something suspicious.  The problem, though, is that the shadows were so poorly handled and so fucking boring that it was hard to know what to do with them as a reader.  I couldn’t find anything they did suspicious, because I didn’t have a good understanding of their normal behavior.  What activity they did possess was so random and confusing that it didn’t have a chance of being mysterious, because they were too all over the place.  I was too befuddled to realize there was anything to figure out, much less what it was.  The only thing that the shadows subplot told me was that Daniel could see them, too, and Luce has done jack-diddly to try and deal with them until she randomly poked one in this book.

What does Luce even think the shadows were warning her of?

Also, while running around, Luce randomly realizes that Daniel is an angel.  Without technically using the word, of course, because I don’t know why.

Penn and Miss Sophia follow her, with Sophia knowing what’s going on (ish) and yelling, and Penn..being dead weight.  Luce leaves them both behind to find Daniel instead.  I mean, he’s only immortal and possibly possessing superpowers, of course he needs Luce’s help more than her normal-human friend who keeps stumbling after Luce.

She finds Daniel.  Also, there’s lots of running around and black shadows of various varieties, giving the impression that it’s a tense moment and such, but there’s still not…anything happening.  Okay, there’s weird black shadows.  Are they doing anything?  Nope, just…there.  Being dark.  And stuff.

Which actually makes it hard to tell what’s going on, because I keep thinking something must be happening to justify all the frantic narration, but nope, but maybe? but nope. but I don’t know.

It’s my fault, she wanted to cry as she approached the base of the mausoleum. And I believe it, I believe our story. Forgive me for ever leaving you, I never will again.

Well…that’s disgusting.

First of all, we don’t know what’s going on for Luce to be guilty of, and second of all GOD DAMNIT BOOKS STOP BLAMING WOMEN FOR JUST WANTING A BIT OF FUCKING SPACE, ALL SHE DID WAS ASK TO GO PROCESS INFORMATION FOR A MINUTE, THAT’S NOT “LEAVING” AND EVEN IF IT WAS SHE’S ALLOWED TO LEAVE HIS ASS BEHIND WITHOUT BRINGING DOWN THE APOCALYPSE OR WHATEVER THIS IS.

she strained to reach the top. To reach Daniel, who had to forgive her.

He has to forgive her?  For WHAT?

NO, REALLY, I WANT TO KNOW, FOR WHAT?  Knowing this book, it’s probably something stupid, but I want to be able to rage about the right thing.

She finally meets up with him and tells him she knows he’s an angel.  She spends a long time telling him she knows, because filling us in on the weird shadow thing is less important than romance padding.  

Also she manages to bring it around to “woe, for I am so unworthy of your love–” no.  No, just stop it, I AM SICK OF THIS LINE, TOO.

And you know what?  Why are angels so special?  I mean, in this book.  This one here.  Why the fuck would Luce, who is agnostic anyway and who knows next to nothing about angels except that they have wings and graceful movements, think that he’s actually so far above her?  There’s not actually any evidence so far that angels in this book are any kind of morally superior or holy or fuck it anything besides immortal.  They’re just a random-ass group of X-men, and Luce doesn’t even have any holdovers from her upbringing to ascribe to the idea of angels.

And I’m still pissed off about the lack of God going on here.

The more they talk about his angel-ness (without really saying much informative), the…louder? the shadows get, which makes Daniel freak out.

He kissed her hair. “The shadows you see are called Announcers. They look bad, but they can’t hurt you. All they do is scope out a situation and report back to someone else. Gossips. The demonic version of a clique of high school girls.”

I am even less scared of these things than ever before.

But then he says some of the other shadows around are here for a battle.  Just, not yet.  Because we’ve got less than three chapters left in this book, but that means there’s still time for some padding.

Todays flavor of padding involves kissing.  *sigh*

And she at last heard what he had said when they were looking at the shadows: that she had done nothing wrong. That there was no reason to feel guilty. Could it be true? Was she innocent of Trevor’s death, of Todd’s, as she’d always believed?

So…she always believed she was innocent, but also she believed she was guilty?

Also, when did she ever feel guilty?  She’s always been scared of her shadows and assumed they were after her, but she’s never come off as particularly feeling responsible for them.  We got a little bit of that with the deaths, but she always framed it as being more guilty-by-accident than by design.  I never got the sense that she thought she was sinful.  Then again, I got very little sense from Luce at all…

They get all gooey and Luce says she loves him and Penn and Miss Sophie and Cam all pop out of the woodwork at various different points in all that padding.  Cam is, of course, cackling like the cartoon villain that this book has reduced him to.

Cam then…turns into a giant mecha made of shadow monsters…

…

… …

I…I just don’t even care anymore.  He’s an anime composite monster, sure, why not.  And he’s going to fight Daniel over Luce, because she’s just that fucking special.  I really, really don’t care.  It’s gotten too stupid to care.  Every comment I could possibly make would just be eclipsed by the stupidity of what’s going on here.

Arriane and Gabbe show up out of nowhere, and they all start talking about how “it” is different this time because Luce is different.  They go on talking about how some cycle could be broken, for the better or worse depending on who wins, and then angel lights show up.  I…I don’t know.  Angel lights show up.  They’re pretty and make Luce feel good.  

And apparently Cam is just sitting by, playing cards with his demon shadow mecha while all this goes on, patiently waiting for the story to remember him again.

God, now all I can think about is a Gundam Wing crackfic. Which was far more entertaining than this here.

Miss Sophia offers to take Luce (and Penn) ‘someplace safe’ while the others stick around for their big final showdown.  They go running off through the cemetery, until Penn gets hit with some…magic…demon…shrapnel?  Miss Sophia reveals her superpowers by carrying Penn the rest of the way with one arm.

Sophia takes them to a secret room in the chapel, where Luce promptly begins to angst over Penn.  Finally, something has distracted her from boy troubles.

I mean, even as they were running away from an apocalyptic battle, all she was thinking about was “oh, but I don’t want to be apart from my Daniel!”  

After Luce had seen what Arriane and Gabbe and Cam were capable of, few things made sense. But one did: Penn was the only kid at Sword & Cross like her.

…okay, but, technically, that’s because Penn is the only human character to show interest in her.  All the angelic characters (Cam, Arriane, Gabbe, I think Molly is one, too) have approached her, presumably, because she’s so flippin special, and Penn approached her out of the blue, but Luce has never approached anyone else.  She hasn’t been rejected by any of them.  Roland seemed perfectly cordial to her, and Todd, but she was always either wrapped up in talking to her angel friends or hiding in her room.  Complaining about the rest of the school ‘not liking’ her is like complaining that random people you pass on the street aren’t your best friend.

Sophia puts a stop to all that and straight-up murders Penn because she’s just dead weight.  I feel like I should care more, but I don’t.  Penn is dead weight.  She hasn’t had a personality this whole book.  She’s…more like the missing part of Luce’s personality.  She’s Luce’s agency and curiosity, which explains why she revolves around the other girl.  Having her killed her doesn’t phase me, because I simply don’t care.

And that’s when Luce realizes that Sophia has effectively locked her in a secret room of the chapel where no one can find her.

All I’m thinking is “well, should have paid more attention to all that suspicious-as-fuck stuff she was doing earlier in the book.”