I wriggled my fingers in front of him. “Maybe I can burn more than just paper. So don’t tempt me.”
Liv smiled at me sympathetically. As if the situation called for anything like a smile. “Well then, I suppose we have to think. Those are three rather specific words. So it seems the messages are changing.” She sounded precise and logical, like a British version of Marian, as she always did.
“And?” Link sounded irritated, like he always did lately.
“So what’s going on… over there?” Where Ethan is. Liv didn’t say it. Nobody wanted to. Liv pulled the three crossword puzzles out of her notebook. “At first, it seems like he just wants you to know he is…”
“Alive? Hate to break it to you—” Link said, but John kicked him under the table. Amma dropped a pan behind me, sending it clattering toward where Link sat on the floor. “Oww. You know what I meant.”
“Around,” John corrected him, looking from Amma to me. I nodded, feeling Amma’s hands slip down to rest on my shoulders.
I touched her hand with mine; her fingers curled tightly around it. Neither one of us wanted to let go. Especially now that it was possible Ethan wasn’t gone forever. It had been weeks since Ethan had started sending me messages through The Stars and Stripes. It didn’t matter what they said. They all said the same thing to me.
I’m here.
I’m still here.
You’re not alone.
I wished there was a way I could say it to him.
I squeezed Amma’s fingers harder. I tried to talk to her about it right after I found the first message, but she just muttered something about a fair trade and how it was her mess to sort out. How it was what she aimed to do, sooner or later.
But she didn’t doubt me. Neither did my uncle, not anymore. In fact, Uncle Macon and Amma were the only ones who really believed me. They understood what I was going through, because they had gone through it themselves. I didn’t know if Uncle Macon would ever get over losing Lila. And Amma seemed to be having as hard a time without Ethan as I was. They had seen the proof, too. Uncle Macon was there when I saw Ethan’s crossword for the first time. And Amma had all but seen Ethan standing in the kitchen of Wate’s Landing.
I said it out loud again to everyone, for the tenth time. “Of course he’s around. I told you, he’s going somewhere. He’s got some kind of plan. He’s not just sitting there, waiting in a grave full of dirt. He’s trying to get back to us. I’m sure of it.”
“How sure?” Link asked. “You’re not sure, Lena. Nothin’s sure, except death an’ taxes. And when they said it, I think they were talkin’ more about stayin’ dead, not comin’ back again.”
I didn’t know why Link was having so much trouble believing that Ethan was still there, that he could come home again. Wasn’t Link the one who was part Incubus? He knew as well as anyone that strange things happened around here all the time. Why was it so hard for him to believe that this particular strange thing could be happening?
Maybe losing Ethan was harder on Link than it was for the rest of them. Maybe he couldn’t let himself risk losing his best friend all over again, even if it was only the idea of him. No one knew what Link was going through.
Except me.
While Link and Liv returned to arguing about whether or not Ethan was actually gone, I felt myself slipping into the fog of nagging doubts that I worked so hard to push out of my mind.
They just kept coming.
What if this whole thing really was my imagination, like Reece and Gramma kept saying? What if they were right, and it was just too hard for me to accept my life without him? And it wasn’t just them—Uncle Macon wouldn’t try anything to bring him back either.
And if it was real—if Ethan could hear me—what would I say?
Come home.
I’m waiting.
I love you.
Nothing he didn’t already know.
Why bother?
I refused to write, but the words were hard to even think now.
words same as always
same as nothing
when nothing is the same
There was no point in saying it to myself.
John kicked Link again, and I tried to focus on the present. The kitchen and the conversation. All the things I could do for Ethan, rather than all the things I felt about him.
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Ethan is—around.” Liv looked at Link, who kept quiet this time. “Like I said, it seemed he spent all his energy trying to convince us of that a few weeks ago.”
“Right around the time you measured the energy spiking at Ravenwood,” John reminded her. Liv nodded, flipping pages in her notebook.
“Or maybe Reece was just usin’ the microwave,” Link muttered.
“Which was the same time Ethan moved the button at his grave,” I said obstinately.
“Or maybe it was just windy.” Link sighed.
“Something was definitely going on.” John moved his foot closer to Link, the threat of another good kick shutting Link up for a while. I thought about slapping a Silentium Cast on him, but it didn’t seem right. Plus, knowing Link, it would take more than magic to shut him up.
Liv went back to examining the papers in front of her. “But then, quite soon, his messages began to change. It’s like he figured something out. What he needed to do.”
“To come home,” I said.
“Lena, I know you want to think that’s what’s happenin’.” Amma’s voice was bleak. “And I felt my boy here, same as you. But we don’t know which end is up. There are no easy answers, not when it comes to gettin’ someone in or outta the Otherworld. Believe me, if there was an easy way, I would’ve already done it.”
She sounded so haggard and tired. I knew she had been working on getting Ethan home as hard as I had. And I’d tried everything at first—everything and everyone. The problem was trying to get Light Casters to talk about raising the dead. And I didn’t have quite the access to the Dark Casters that I used to. Uncle Macon had come for me the moment I’d set foot in Exile. I suspected he made some kind of deal with the bartender, a shifty-looking Blood Incubus who looked like he’d do anything if he was thirsty enough.
“But we don’t know that’s not it,” I said, looking at Liv.
“True. The logical assumption would be that wherever Ethan was, he would be trying to get back.” Liv carefully erased a small mark in the margin. “To where you are.” She didn’t look at me, but I knew what she meant. Liv and Ethan had a history of their own, and even though Liv had found something better for her with John, she was always very careful of how she spoke about Ethan, especially to me.
She tapped the pencil. “First the river rock. Now The Book of Moons. He must need them for something.”
John pulled the last puzzle toward him. “If he needs The Book of Moons, it’s a good sign. It has to be.”
“A mighty powerful book, on this side or the other. A book like that would be worth bargaining for.” Amma rubbed my shoulders as she spoke, and I felt a shiver go down my spine.
John looked at both of us. “Bargaining for what? Why?”
Amma said nothing. I suspected she knew more than she was saying, which was usually the case. Plus, she hadn’t even mentioned the Greats in weeks, which was unlike her. Especially now that Ethan was in their care, technically speaking. But I had no idea what Amma was up to any more than I knew what Ethan was planning.
I finally answered for both of us, because there was only one possible answer. “I don’t know. It’s not like I can ask him.”
“Why not? Can’t you Cast something?” John looked frustrated.
“It doesn’t work like that.” I wished it did.
“Some kind of Reveal Cast?”
“There’s nothing to Cast it on.”
“His grave?” John looked at Liv, but she shook her head. No one had an answer, because none of us had ever even contemplated anything like this before. A Cast on someone who wasn’t even on this pla
ne of existence? Short of raising the dead—which Genevieve had done to start this whole mess in the first place, and I had done again, more than a hundred years later—what could anyone do?
I shook my head. “What does it matter? Ethan wants it, and we have to get it to him. That’s the important thing.”
Amma chimed in. “Besides, only one kind a bargain my boy would be makin’ over there. Only one thing he wants bad enough. And that would be to get himself back home again, sure as the sunrise.”
“Amma’s right.” I looked at them. “We have to get him the Book.”
Link sat up. “Are you sure, Lena? Are you absolutely death-and-taxes sure it’s Ethan who’s even sendin’ us these messages? What if it’s Sarafine? Or even Colonel Sanders?” He shuddered.
I knew who Link meant. Abraham, in his rumpled white suit and his string tie. Satan himself, at least as far as Gatlin County was concerned.
That really would be the worst-case scenario.
“It’s not Sarafine. I’d know.”
“Would you really know if it was her?” Link rubbed his hair, which was sticking out in a thousand different directions. “How?”
Through the window, I watched as Mr. Wate’s Volvo pulled into the driveway. I knew the conversation was over, even before I felt Amma’s hands stiffen on my shoulders. “I just would.”
Wouldn’t I?
I stared at the stupid crossword puzzle as if it could give me some kind of answer, when all it could tell me was that I knew nothing at all.
The front door opened as the back door banged shut. John and Liv must have disappeared out the back. I braced for the inevitable.
“Afternoon, kids. You waitin’ for Ethan to get home?” Mr. Wate looked at Amma hopefully. Link scrambled to his feet, but I looked away. I couldn’t bear to answer.
More than anything. More than you know.
“Yes, sir. Waitin’s hardly the word. Bored outta my thick skull without Ethan around.” Link tried to smile, but even he looked like he was about to cry.
“Cheer up, Wesley. I miss him as much as you do.” Mr. Wate reached for Link’s spiked hair, rubbing it with one hand. Then he opened the pantry and looked inside. “You hear anything from our boy today, Amma?”
“Afraid not, Mitchell.”
Mr. Wate stopped short, frozen in place with a box of cereal in his hand. “I’ve half a mind to drive down to Savannah myself. It makes no sense, keeping a boy out of school this long. Something’s not right.” His face clouded over.
I focused my eyes on the tall, gaunt figure of Mitchell Wate, just as I had so often since Ethan died. Once he was fixed in my sight, I slowly began reciting the words of the Oblivio Cast that Gramma had taught me to repeat every time I saw Ethan’s dad.
He stared at me, curious. My eyes didn’t even flicker. Only my lips began to move, and I whispered the words as they formed in my mind.
“Oblivio, Oblivio, Non Abest.
Oblivion, Oblivion, He Is Not Gone.”
A bubble expanded inside my chest the moment I formed the Cast, pushing past me toward Ethan’s father, reaching right across the room and wrapping itself around him. The room seemed to stretch and contract, and I thought for a moment the bubble was about to pop.
Then I felt the air snap around us, and suddenly it was over, and the air was just air, and everything seemed normal again.
As normal as things could be.
Mr. Wate’s eyes brightened and glazed over. He shrugged, smiling at me, sticking one hand back inside the cereal box. “Ah well, what are you going to do? He’s a good kid. But if Ethan doesn’t get his tail home from Caroline’s soon, he’s going to be mighty behind when he gets back. At this rate, he’ll be doing homework all the way through spring break. You tell him that for me, will you?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell him.” I smiled, wiping at my eye before anything like a tear could fall. “I’ll tell him the next time I talk to him.”
That’s when Amma almost threw the pan of pork chops down on the burner. Link shook his head.
I turned and fled. I tried not to think, but the words followed me, like a curse, like a hex.
oblivion eyes on a cereal box,
the warm blinds of a father
lost and last to know
lost and last to love
last boy lost
you can’t see
even a bubble
once it’s
popped
I fought off the words.
But you couldn’t unpop a bubble.
Even I knew that.
CHAPTER 20
A Deal with the Devil
This is freakin’ nuts. We don’t even have the stupid Book a Moons. You sure The Stars and Sucks didn’t say anythin’ else?”
Link was sitting on the floor again, with only his feet sticking out from under the table—this time the one in Macon’s study. We’d made no progress, but here we were again. New table. Same people. Same problems.
Only the presence of my Uncle Macon, half-hidden in the flickering shadows of the fireplace, changed the conversation. That, and the fact that we’d left Amma back at Wate’s Landing to keep an eye on Ethan’s father.
“I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but maybe Link’s right. Even if we all agreed—even if we knew we had no choice but to get Ethan The Book of Moons—it still wouldn’t matter. We don’t know where it is, and we don’t know how to get it to him.” Liv said what we all were thinking.
I said nothing, twisting my charm necklace between my fingers.
It was Macon who finally answered. “Yes. Well. These things are difficulties, not impossibilities.”
Link sat up. “The whole death thing, yeah, I’d say that’s pretty difficult, sir. I mean, no offense, Mr. Ravenwood.”
“Finding The Book of Moons is not out of the question, Mr. Lincoln. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you where we last saw it and who last had it.”
“Abraham.” We all knew who he was talking about, but it was Liv who said it. “He had it with him at the Seventeenth Moon, in the cave. And he used it to bring up the Vexes, right before—”
“The Eighteenth Moon,” John said quietly. None of us ever wanted to talk about the night at the water tower.
All of which just set Link off more. “Oh well. That’s easy. Find the Book. How about we just find our way over to whatever backwoods swamp hole Colonel Sanders has been livin’ in for the last two hundred years, and ask him real nice if he wouldn’t mind handin’ over his creepy book? So our dead friend can use it for who knows what, over in who knows where.”
I flicked my wrist at Link, annoyed. A spark flew from the fire grating, singeing his leg.
He jerked away. “Cut it out!”
“Uncle Macon’s right. It’s not impossible,” I said.
Liv played with the rubber band holding her red notebook closed—an anxious habit that meant she was thinking. “And this time Sarafine’s dead. He won’t have her backing him up.”
Uncle Macon shook his head. “He never needed her, I’m afraid. Not really. You can’t rely on him being any weaker now than he ever was. Don’t underestimate Abraham.”
Liv looked somber. “What about Hunting and his pack?”
Macon stared into the fire. I watched the flames grow taller, deepening into purple and red and orange. I couldn’t tell if my uncle really believed me or not. I didn’t know if he thought for a minute there was a way to bring Ethan back.
I didn’t care what he thought, as long as he was willing to help me.
He looked at me as if he knew what I was thinking. “Hunting, though stupid, is a powerful Incubus. But Abraham alone is a formidable threat. If fear is going to stop us, we should concede failure right now.”
Link huffed from the floor behind him.
Macon looked at him over his shoulder. “That is, if you’re frightened.”
“Who said anything about that?” Link was indignant. “I just like a better set a odds when I throw mys
elf into a snake pit.”
“It’s me.” John sat up and announced it, as if he’d just figured out the answer to all our problems.
“What?” Liv pulled away from him.
“I’m the one thing Abraham wants. And the only thing he can’t have.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Link groaned. “You sound like his girlfriend.”
“I’m not stupid. I’m right. I thought I was the One Who Is Two, and I thought it was up to me to do… what Ethan did. But that wasn’t about me. This is.”
“Shut up,” Link snapped.
Macon’s face twisted into a frown, his green eyes darkening. I knew that expression too well.
Liv nodded. “I agree. Do as your brilliant Incubus brother says. Shut up.”
John put his arm gently around her, as if he was speaking only to Liv. But I was hanging on his every word, because everything he was saying was starting to make sense. “I can’t. Not this time. I’m not going to sit around and let Ethan take all the punches. For once, I’m going to get what’s coming to me. Or who.”
“And that is?” Liv wouldn’t look at him.
“Abraham. If you tell him you’ll make a trade, he’ll come for me. He’ll swap me for The Book of Moons.” John looked at Macon, who nodded.
Link looked skeptical. “How do you know?”
John smiled weakly. “He’ll come. Trust me.”
Macon sighed, finally turning from the fireplace toward us. “John, I appreciate your honor and your courage. You’re a fine young man, even if you have your own demons. We all do. But you should take some time to make certain this is a trade you’re willing to make. It’s a last course of action, nothing more.”
“I’m willing.” John stood up, like he was ready to enlist now.
“John!” Liv was furious.
Macon waved him into his seat. “Think it over. If Abraham does take you, it’s not likely we will be able to bring you home, not anytime soon. And as much as I want to bring Ethan back—” Uncle Macon glanced over at me before continuing. “I’m not certain trading one life for another is worth the risk Abraham poses, for any of us.”
Liv stepped in front of John, as if she wanted to protect him from everyone else in the room and everything else in the world. “He doesn’t need time to think about it. It’s a terrible plan. Absolutely horrid. The worst plan we’ve ever come up with. The worst plan in the history of plans.” Liv was pale and shaking, but when she saw me watching her, she stopped talking.