Beautiful Darkness

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Lena’s eyes. The stunt at the fair. Running away with John Breed. The words found their way out, even as I tried to hold them in.

  “She’s going Dark because of me.”

  “If Lena’s going Dark, it’s not because a that Book. The Book made a different kinda trade.” Amma stopped, as if she couldn’t bear to tell me the rest.

  “What kind of trade?”

  “It gave one life but took another. We knew there’d be consequences.” The words caught in her throat. “We just didn’t know it would be Melchizedek.”

  Macon.

  It couldn’t be true.

  It gave one life but took another. A different kind of trade.

  My life for Macon’s.

  It all made sense. The way Lena had been acting the past few months. The way she had been pulling away from me, from everyone. The way she had been blaming herself for Macon’s death.

  It was true. She had killed him.

  To save me.

  I thought about her notebook and the Charmed page I’d found. What had the words said? Amma? Sarafine? Macon? The Book? It was the real story of that night. I remembered the poems written on her wall. Nobody the Dead and Nobody the Living. Two sides of the same coin. Macon and me.

  Nothing green can stay. Months ago, I believed she’d gotten the Frost poem wrong. But of course, she hadn’t. She was talking about herself.

  I thought about how it seemed painful for her to look at me. No wonder she felt guilty. No wonder she ran. I wondered if she could ever stand to look at me again. Lena had done it all because of me. It wasn’t her fault.

  It was mine.

  * * *

  No one said anything. There was no turning back now, not for any of us. What Lena and Amma had done that night couldn’t be undone. I shouldn’t be here, but I was.

  “It’s da Order, and you can’t stop da Order.” Twyla closed her eyes, as if she could hear something I couldn’t.

  Amma pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I’m not sorry we did it. It was the only way.”

  “You don’t understand. Lena thinks she’s going Dark. She ran away with some kind of Dark Caster, or Incubus. She’s in danger because of me.”

  “Nonsense. That girl did what she had to do because she loves you.”

  Arelia collected their offerings from the ground—the bones, the sparrow, the moonstones.

  “Nothing can make Lena go Dark, Ethan. She has to choose it.”

  “But she thinks she’s Dark because she killed Macon. She thinks she’s already chosen.”

  “But she hasn’t,” Liv said. She was standing a few feet away, to give us some privacy.

  Link was sitting on an old stone bench, a few steps behind her. “Then we have to find her and tell her.” He didn’t act like he just found out that I’d died and been brought back to life. He acted like everything was the same. I went over and sat down on the bench next to Link.

  Liv looked over at me. “Are you all right?”

  Liv. I couldn’t look at her. I’d been jealous and hurt, and I had dragged Liv into the middle of my own broken mess of a life. All because I thought Lena didn’t love me anymore. But I was stupid, and I was wrong. Lena loved me so much, she was willing to risk everything to save me.

  I had given up on Lena, after she had refused to give up on me. I owed her my life. It was as simple as that.

  My fingers touched something carved into the edge of the bench. Words.

  IN THE COOL, COOL, COOL

  OF THE EVENING

  It was the song that was playing at Ravenwood the first night I met Macon. The coincidence was too much, especially for a world with no coincidences. It had to be some kind of sign.

  Sign of what? What I had done to Macon? I couldn’t even think about how Lena must have felt, realizing she had lost him in my place. What if I had lost my mom that way? Would I have been able to look at Lena alive without seeing my mother dead?

  “Just a minute.” I pushed off the bench and took off down the path through the trees, the way we had come. I breathed the night air deep into my lungs, because I could still breathe. When I finally stopped running, I stared up at the stars and the sky.

  Was Lena staring at the same sky, or one I could never see? Were our moons really so different?

  I reached into my pocket for the Arclight, so it could show me how to find her, but it didn’t. Instead, it showed me something else—

  Macon had never been like his father, Silas, and they both knew it. He had always been more like his mother, Arelia. A powerful Light Caster, who his father had fallen deeply in love with while he was away at college in New Orleans. Not unlike the way he and Jane had met and fallen in love when he was studying at Duke. And like Macon, his father had fallen in love with his mother before the Transformation. Before his grandfather had convinced Silas a relationship with a Light Caster was an abomination against their kind.

  It had taken Macon’s grandfather years to tear his mother and father apart. By that time, he and Hunting and Leah were born. His mother had been forced to use her powers as a Diviner to escape Silas’ rage and his uncontrollable urge to feed. She had fled to New Orleans with Leah. His father would never have let her take his sons.

  His mother was the only one Macon could turn to now. The only one who would understand that he had fallen in love with a Mortal. The greatest act of sacrilege against his kind, the Blood Incubus.

  The Demon Soldier.

  Macon hadn’t told his mother he was coming, but she would be expecting him. He climbed up from the Tunnels into the sweet heat of a New Orleans summer night. Fireflies blinked in the darkness, and the smell of magnolias was overpowering. She was waiting for him on the porch, tatting lace in an old wooden rocking chair. It had been a long time.

  “Mamma, I need your help.”

  She put down her needle and hoop and rose from the chair. “I know. Everything’s ready, cher.”

  There was only one thing powerful enough to stop an Incubus, aside from one of its own kind.

  An Arclight.

  They were considered medieval devices, weapons created to control and imprison the most powerful of the Harmers, the Incubus. Macon had never seen one before. There were very few left, and they were almost impossible to find.

  But his mother had one, and he needed it.

  Macon followed her into the kitchen. She opened a small cabinet that served as an altar to the spirits. She unwrapped a small wooden box with Niadic script, the ancient Caster language, around the perimeter.

  THE ONE WHO SEEKS IT SHALL FIND

  IT THE HOUSE OF THE UNHOLY

  THE KEY TO THE TRUTH

  “Your father gave this to me before the Transformation. It was passed down in the Ravenwood family for generations. Your granddaddy claimed it belonged to Abraham himself, and I believe it did. It’s marked by his hatred and bigotry.”

  She opened the box, revealing the ebony sphere. Macon could feel the energy, even without touching it—the grisly possibility of an eternity within its glistening walls.

  “Macon, you must understand. Once an Incubus is trapped inside the Arclight, there is no way out from within. You must be released. If you give this to someone, you have to be sure with all certainty that you can trust them, because you will be putting more than your life in their hands. You will be giving them a thousand lives. That’s what an eternity would feel like in there.”

  She held the box higher so he could see it, as if he could imagine the confines just by looking at it.

  “I understand, Mamma. I can trust Jane. She’s the most honest and principled person I’ve ever met, and she loves me. Despite what I am.”

  Arelia touched Macon’s cheek. “There is nothing wrong with who you are, cher. If there were, it would be my fault. I doomed you to this fate.”

  Macon bent down and kissed her forehead. “I love you, Mamma. None of this is your fault. It??
?s his.”

  His father.

  Silas was possibly a greater threat to Jane than he was. His father was a slave to the doctrine of the first Ravenwood Blood Incubus. Abraham.

  “It’s not his fault, Macon. You don’t know what your grandfather was like. How he bullied your father into believing his twisted brand of superiority—that Mortals were beneath Casters and Incubuses alike, simply a source of blood to satisfy their lust. Your father was indoctrinated, like his father before him.”

  Macon didn’t care. He stopped feeling sorry for his father long ago, stopped wondering what it was about Silas his mother could have loved.

  “Tell me how to use it.” Macon reached out tentatively. “Can I touch it?”

  “Yes. The person who touches you with it must have intent, and even then it’s harmless without the Carmen Defixionis.”

  His mother removed a small pouch, a gris-gris bag, the strongest protection voodoo could offer, from the door of the cellar and disappeared down the dark stairs. When she returned, she was carrying something wrapped in a dusty piece of burlap. She laid it on the table and unwrapped it.

  The Responsum.

  Literally translated, it meant “the Answer.”

  It was written in Niadic. It contained all the laws that governed his kind.

  It was the oldest of books. There were only a few copies in the world. His mother turned the brittle pages carefully, until she reached the right one.

  “Carcer.”

  The Prison.

  The sketch of the Arclight looked exactly like the one resting in the velvet-lined box sitting on his mother’s kitchen table, next to her uneaten étouffée.

  “How does it work?”

  “It’s rather simple. A person need only touch the Arclight and the Incubus they wish to imprison and speak the Carmen, at the same moment. The Arclight will do the rest.”

  “Is the Carmen in the book?”

  “No, it’s much too powerful to be trusted to the written word. You must learn the Carmen from someone who knows it, and commit it to memory.”

  She lowered her voice as if she was afraid someone might be listening. Then she whispered the words that could condemn him to an eternity of misery.

  “Comprehende, Liga, Cruci Fige.

  Capture, Cage, and Crucify.”

  Arelia closed the lid of the box and handed it to Macon. “Be careful. In the Arc there is power, and in the power there is Night.”

  Macon kissed her forehead. “I promise.”

  He turned to leave, but his mother’s voice called him back. “You’ll need this.” She scrawled several lines on a piece of parchment.

  “What’s this?”

  “The only key to that door.” She gestured to the box tucked under his arm. “The only way to get you back out.”

  I opened my eyes. I was on my back in the dirt, staring up at the stars. The Arclight was Macon’s, as Marian had said. I didn’t know where he was, the Otherworld or some kind of Caster heaven. I didn’t know why he was showing me all this, but if I had learned anything tonight, I knew everything happened for a reason.

  I had to figure out the reason before it was too late.

  We were still standing in Bonaventure Cemetery, although now we were near the entrance. I didn’t bother to tell Amma I wasn’t coming back with her. She seemed to know.

  “We better take off.” I hugged Amma.

  She grabbed my hands and gave them a squeeze, hard. “One step at a time, Ethan Wate. Your mamma may say this is somethin’ you hafta do, but I’ll be watchin’ every step a the way.” I knew how hard it was for her to let me go, instead of grounding me and sending me straight to my room, for the rest of my life.

  Things were as bad as they seemed. This was proof.

  Arelia stepped forward and pressed something into my hand, a small doll like the ones Amma made. It was a voodoo charm. “I had faith in your mother, and I have faith in you, Ethan. This is my way of saying good luck, because this isn’t going to be easy.”

  “The right thing and the easy thing are never the same.” I repeated the words my mother had said to me a hundred times. I was channeling her, in my own way.

  Twyla touched my cheek with her bony finger. “Da truth in both da worlds. Have to lose to gain. We’re not here long, cher.” It was a warning, almost like she knew something I didn’t. After what I’d seen tonight, I was sure she did.

  Amma threw her skinny arms around me in one last bone-crushing hug. “I’m gonna make you some luck, my way,” she whispered, and turned to Link. “Wesley Jefferson Lincoln, you best come back in one piece, or I’ll tell your mamma what you were doin’ in my basement when you were nine years old, you hear me?”

  Link smiled at the familiar threat. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Amma didn’t say anything to Liv—just a quick nod in her direction. It was her way of showing where her loyalties lay. Now that I knew what Lena had done for me, I had no doubt about how Amma felt about her.

  Amma cleared her throat. “The guards are gone, but Twyla can’t hold them off forever. You’d best get on.”

  I pushed open the wrought iron gate, with Link and Liv behind me.

  I’m coming, L. Whether you want me to or not.

  6.19

  Down Below

  Nobody said a word as we walked along the edge of the road toward the park and the Savannah Doorwell. We decided not to risk going back to Aunt Caroline’s, since Aunt Del would be there and wasn’t likely to let us keep going without her. Beyond that, there didn’t seem to be anything worth saying. Link tried to get his hair to stick up without the aid of industrial strength hair gel, and Liv checked her selenometer and scribbled in her tiny red notebook once or twice.

  The same old things.

  Only the same old things weren’t the same this morning, in the gloomy darkness before dawn. My mind was reeling, and I stumbled more than a few times. This night was worse than a nightmare. I couldn’t wake up. I didn’t even have to shut my eyes to see the dream, Sarafine and the knife—Lena crying out for me.

  I had died.

  I was dead, for who knows how long.

  Minutes?

  Hours?

  If it wasn’t for Lena, I would be lying in the dirt in His Garden of Perpetual Peace right now. The second sealed cedar box in our family plot.

  Had I felt things? Seen things? Had it changed me? I touched the hard line of the scar beneath my shirt. Was it really my scar? Or was it the memory of something that happened to the other Ethan Wate, the one who didn’t come back?

  It was all a confusing blur, like the dreams Lena and I shared, or the difference between the two skies Liv had shown me, the night the Southern Star disappeared. Which part was real? Had I unconsciously known what Lena had done? Had I sensed it somewhere below everything else that had happened between us?

  If she had known what she was choosing, would she have chosen differently?

  I owed my life to her, but I didn’t feel happy. All I felt was brokenness. The fear of dirt and nothingness and being alone. The loss of my mom and Macon and, in a way, Lena. And something else.

  The crippling sadness and the incredible guilt of being the one who lived.

  Forsyth Park was eerie at dawn. I had never seen it when it wasn’t teeming with people. Without them, I almost didn’t recognize the door to the Tunnels. No trolley bells, no sightseers. No miniature dogs or gardeners trimming azaleas. I thought of all the living, breathing people who would wander through the park today.

  “You didn’t see it.” Liv pulled on my arm.

  “What?”

  “The door. You walked right by it.”

  She was right. We had walked past the archway before I recognized it. I almost forgot how subtly the Caster world worked, always hidden in plain sight. You couldn’t have seen the Outer Door in the park unless you were looking for it, and the archway kept it in perpetual shadow, probably a Cast of its own. Link went to work, ratcheting his shears into the crack between the door a
nd the frame as quickly as possible, prying it open with a groan. The dim recesses of the tunnel were even darker than the summer dawn.

  “I can’t believe that works.” I shook my head.

  “I’ve been thinking about it since we left Gatlin,” Liv said. “I think it makes loads of sense.”

  “It makes sense that a crappy pair of garden shears can open a Caster door?”

  “That’s the beauty of the Order of Things. I told you, there’s the magical universe and the material universe.” Liv stared up at the sky.

  My eyes followed hers. “Like the two skies.”

  “Exactly. One isn’t any more real than the other. They coexist.”

  “So rusty metal scissors can take on a magic portal?” I don’t know why I was surprised.

  “Not always. But where the two universes meet, there will always be some sort of seam. Right?” It made perfect sense to Liv.

  I nodded.

  “I wonder if a strength in one universe corresponds to a weakness in the other.” She was talking to herself as much as to me.

  “You mean, the door is easy for Link to open because it’s impossible for a Caster?” Link had been having a suspiciously easy time with the Doorwells. On the other hand, Liv didn’t know Link had been picking locks since his mom gave him his first curfew, in about sixth grade.

  “Possibly. It might account for what’s happening with the Arclight.”

  “Or what about this? The Caster doors keep on openin’ because I’m a ragin’ stud.” Link flexed.

  “Or the Casters who built these Tunnels hundreds of years ago weren’t thinking about garden shears,” I said.

  “Because they were thinkin’ about my extreme studliness, in both universes.” He stuck the shears back in his belt. “Ladies first.”

  Liv climbed down into the tunnel. “As if I should be surprised.”

  We followed the stairs back down into the still air of the tunnel. It was completely quiet, without even an echo from our footsteps. The silence settled over us, thick and heavy. The air beneath the Mortal world had none of the weightlessness of the air above.