Beautiful Darkness

  Was she?

  “What are you, Lucille?”

  The cat looked me in the eye and cocked her head to the side.

  “Ethan?” Liv was watching me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” I shot Lucille a meaningful look. She ignored me, sniffing the tip of her tail gracefully.

  “You realize she’s a cat.” Liv was still staring at me curiously.

  “I know.”

  “Just checking.”

  Great. Not only was I talking to a cat, but now I was talking about talking to a cat. “We should get going.”

  Liv took a deep breath. “Yes, about that. I’m afraid we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Liv motioned me over to where all of Aunt Prue’s maps were laid out on the smooth dirt. “You see this mark here? That’s the nearest Doorwell. It took me a while, but I’ve figured out loads of things about this map. Your aunt wasn’t kidding. She must have spent years marking it up.”

  “The Doorwells are marked?”

  “Looks that way on the map. See these red D’s, with the little circles around them?” They were everywhere. “And these thin red lines? I believe they’re closer to the surface. There’s a pattern. It seems the darker the color gets, the deeper underground.”

  I pointed to a grid of black lines. “You’re saying these would be the deepest.”

  Liv nodded. “Possibly also the Darkest. The concept of Dark and Light territories within the Underground—it’s groundbreaking, really. Certainly not widely known.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “This.” She pointed to two words scribbled across the southernmost edge of the largest page. L O C A S I L E N T I A.

  I remembered the second word. It sounded like the one Lena said when she laid the Cast to keep me from telling her family she was leaving Gatlin. “You’re saying the map is too quiet?”

  Liv shook her head. “This is where the map falls silent, I’m afraid. Because we’re at the end. We’ve reached the southern shore, which means we’re off the map. Terra incognita.” She shrugged. “You know what they say. Hic dracones sunt.”

  “Yeah, I hear that one a lot.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “‘Here be dragons.’ It’s what sailors used to write on maps five hundred years ago, when the map ended but the ocean didn’t.”

  “I’d rather face dragons than Sarafine.” I looked at the place where Liv was tapping her finger. The web of Tunnels we had come from was as complex as any highway system. “So what now?”

  “I’m out of ideas. I’ve done nothing but stare at this map since your aunt gave it to us, and I still don’t know how to get to the Great Barrier. And I don’t even know if I believe it’s a real place.” We stared at the map together. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve let you down—everyone, really.”

  I traced the outline of the coast with my finger until I came to Savannah, where the Arclight had stopped working. The red mark for the Savannah Doorwell lay just beneath the first L in L O C A S I L E N T I A. As I stared at the letters and the red marks around them, the missing pattern slowly surfaced. It reminded me of the Bermuda Triangle, some kind of void where everything magically disappeared. “Loca silentia doesn’t mean ‘where the map falls silent.’ ”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “I think it means something more like radio silence, for a Caster anyway. Think about it. When did the Arclight stop working the first time?”

  Liv thought back. “Savannah. Right after we”—she looked at me, blushing—“found everything in the attic.”

  “Exactly. Once we entered the territory marked Loca silentia, the Arclight stopped guiding us. I think we’ve been in a sort of supernatural no-fly zone, like the Bermuda Triangle, since we moved south of there.”

  Liv looked slowly from the map to me, working it out in her mind. When she finally spoke, she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “The seam. We’re at the seam. That’s what the Great Barrier is.”

  “The seam of what?”

  “The place where two universes meet.” Liv looked at the dial on her wrist. “The Arclight could’ve been on some kind of magical overload this whole time.”

  I thought about Aunt Prue showing up when she did—and where she did. “I bet Aunt Prue knew we needed the maps. We had just entered the Loca silentia when she gave them to us.”

  “But the map stops, and the Great Barrier isn’t on it. So how is anyone supposed to find it?” Liv sighed.

  “My mom could. She knew how to find it without the star.” I wished she were here right now, even a ghostly vision of her made from smoke and graveyard dirt and chicken bones.

  “Did you read that in her papers?”

  “No. It was something John said to Lena.” I didn’t want to think about it, even if the information was useful. “Where are we again, according to the map?”

  She pointed. “Right there.” We had reached the long curving line that followed the inlets of the southern shore. Caster connections wove their way together and apart until they met at the edge of the water like nerve endings.

  “What are these little shapes? Islands?” Liv chewed on the end of her pen.

  “Those are the Sea Islands.”

  Liv leaned over me. “Why do they look so familiar?”

  “I’ve been wondering that, too. I thought it was from staring at the map for so long.”

  It was true. I knew those shapes, curving in and out like a group of lopsided clouds. Where had I seen them before?

  I pulled a handful of papers—my mother’s papers—out of my back pocket. There it was, tucked between pages. The sheet of vellum covered with a strange Caster design that looked like weird clouds.

  She knew how to find it, without the star.

  “Hold on—” I slid the vellum on top of the map. It was like tracing paper, thin as an onion skin on Amma’s cutting board.

  “I wonder…” I slipped the translucent sheet into place over the map, the outlines of each shape on the vellum lining up perfectly with the shape on the chart beneath it. Except for one, which materialized in a sort of ghostly silhouette, only appearing when the partial outline of the map grid met the partial outline of the vellum. Without both the vellum and the map, the lines looked like meaningless scribbles.

  But when you held them just right, it all came together, and you could see the island.

  Like two halves of a Caster key, or two universes stitched together for one common purpose.

  The Great Barrier was hidden in the middle of a Mortal coastal chain. Of course it was.

  I stared at the ink on the page, and beneath it.

  There it was. The most powerful place in the Caster world, appearing through pen and paper as if by magic.

  Hidden in plain sight.

  6.20

  No One’s Son

  The door itself wasn’t that unusual.

  Neither was the Doorwell leading up to it, or the curving passage we had followed to find our way here. Twist after turn through corridors built from crumbling rocks and dirt and splintering wood. This is what tunnels were supposed to feel like—damp and dark and tight. It was almost like the day Link and I followed a stray dog into one of the runoff tunnels in Summerville.

  I guess the strangest thing was how ordinary everything seemed, now that we had figured out the secret to the map. Following it was the easy part.

  Until now.

  “That’s it. It has to be.” Liv looked up from the map. I stared past her to where a wooden staircase led up to streaks of light, forming the outline of a door in the darkness.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded and slid the map into her pocket.

  “Then let’s see what’s out there.” I climbed the steps to the door.

  “Not so fast, Short Straw. What do you think is on the other side of that door?” Ridley was stalling. She looked as nervous as I felt.

  Liv studied the door. “According to the legends, old magic, neit
her Light or Dark.”

  Ridley shook her head. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Keeper. Old magic is wild. It’s infinite. Chaos in its purest form. Not exactly the combination for a happy ending to your little quest.”

  I moved closer to the door. Liv and Link were right behind me. “Come on, Rid. You want to help Lena or not?” Link’s voice echoed off the walls.

  “I was just saying…” I could hear the fear in Ridley’s voice. I tried not to think about the last time she sounded this scared, when she faced Sarafine in the woods.

  I pushed the door and it creaked, the worn wood bending and straining. Another try and it would open. We would be there, wherever there was. The Great Barrier.

  I wasn’t scared. I don’t know why. But I wasn’t thinking about entering a magical universe when I forced the door open. I was thinking about home. The wooden panel wasn’t all that different from the Outer Door we found at the fairgrounds, under the Tunnel of Love. Maybe it was a sign—something from the beginning reappearing at the end. I wondered if it was a good omen or a bad one.

  It didn’t matter what was on the other side of the door. Lena was waiting. She needed me, whether she knew it or not.

  There was no turning back.

  I leaned against the panel, and it swung open. The crack of light opened into a blinding field of white.

  I stepped into the harsh light, the darkness behind me now. I could barely see the steps below me. I breathed in the air, heavy with salt and sour with brine.

  Loca silentia. Now I understood. The moment we emerged from the darkness of the Tunnels into the broad, flat reflection of the water, there was only light and silence.

  Slowly, my eyes began to adjust. We were on what looked like a rocky Lowcountry beach, covered in a spread of gray and white oyster shells, framed by an uneven row of palmettos. A splintered wooden walkway stretched along the perimeter of the shoreline facing the islands. We stood there now, the four of us, listening to what should have been the waves or the wind or even a gull in the sky. But the silence was so thick, it stopped us in our tracks.

  The scene was perfectly ordinary and incredibly surreal, as vivid as any dream. The colors were too bright, the light too light. And in the far shadows beyond the shore, the dark was too dark. But everything was somehow beautiful here. Even the darkness. It was how the moment felt that silenced us. Magic was unfolding between us, encircling us like a rope, tying us to one another.

  As I started toward the walkway, the rounded shores of the Sea Islands emerged in the distance. Beyond that was only dense, flat fog. Tufts of swamp grass rose from the water to form long, shallow banks rising in and out of the coastal mud. Along the beach, weathered wooden docks stretched out into the unbroken blue water until they disappeared into the black deep. The docks faded down the coast like weathered wooden fingers. Bridges to nowhere.

  I looked up at the sky. Not a star in sight. Liv looked down at the selenometer whirring on her wrist, and tapped it. “None of these numbers mean anything anymore. We’re on our own now.” She unfastened her watch and slid it into her pocket.

  “Guess so.”

  “What now?” Link bent to pick up a shell with his good arm and chucked it into the distance. The water swallowed it without a sound. Ridley stood next to him, streaks of pink hair whipping in the wind. On the far edge of the dock in front of us, the flag of South Carolina—with the silhouette of a palmetto and a crescent moon on a field of midnight blue—looked like a Caster flag as it fluttered from a spindly flagpole. When I looked at the flag more closely, I realized it had changed. This one had a seven-pointed star in the sky, next to the familiar crescent moon and palmetto silhouette. The Southern Star, right there on the flag, as if it had fallen out of the sky.

  If this really was the seam where the Mortal and the magical touched, there was no sign of it here. I don’t know what I was hoping for. All I had now were one too many stars on the state flag and a feeling of magic as thick as the salt in the air.

  I joined the others at the far edge of the walkway. The wind had picked up, and the flag was whipping around the pole. It didn’t make a sound.

  Liv consulted the folded map. “If we’re in the right place, it has to be between that island, beyond the buoy, and where we’re standing.”

  “I think we’re in the right place.” I was sure of it.

  “How do you know?”

  “Remember that Southern Star you were telling me about?” I pointed to the flag. “Think about it. If you followed the star the whole way here, the star on the flag is exactly what you would be looking for. Some kind of sign you’re at the right spot.”

  “Of course. The seven-pointed star.” She examined the flag, touching the fabric as if she was allowing herself to believe it for the very first time.

  There wasn’t time for that. I knew we had to keep moving. “So what are we even looking for? Land? Or something man-made?”

  “You mean this isn’t it?” Link looked disappointed and shoved his garden shears back into his belt.

  “I think we still have to cross over the water. It makes sense, really. Like crossing the river Styx to get to Hades.” Liv flattened the map against her palm. “According to the map, we’re looking for some kind of connector that will take us across the water to the Great Barrier itself. Like a sandbar or a bridge.” She held the vellum over the map, and we all looked.

  Link took them out of her hands. “Yeah, I see it. Kinda cool.” He flipped the vellum up and down across the map. “Now you see it, now you don’t.” He dropped the map, and it fluttered into a mess of pages on the sand.

  Liv bent to pick it up. “Careful with that! Are you completely mental?”

  “You mean, like a genius?” Sometimes there was no point in Link and Liv talking at all. Liv pocketed Aunt Prue’s map, and we started walking again.

  Ridley picked up Lucille Ball. She hadn’t said much since we left the Tunnels. Maybe now that she had been declawed, she preferred Lucille’s company. Or maybe she was scared. She probably knew better than the rest of us the dangers that lay ahead.

  I could feel the Arclight burning in my pocket. My heart began to pound, and my head began to spin.

  What was it doing to me? Since we crossed over into the no man’s land the map called Loca silentia, the light had stopped illuminating our path and started illuminating the past. Macon’s past. It had become a conduit for the visions, a direct line I couldn’t control. The visions were coming intermittently, interrupting the present with fragmented bits and pieces of Macon’s past.

  An old palmetto frond snapped loudly under one of Ridley’s shoes. Then something else, and I felt myself slipping away—

  Macon could feel it immediately when his shoulder snapped—the intense pain of his bones cracking. His skin tightened, as if it could no longer hold whatever was lurking inside him. The breath was sucked from his lungs, like he was being crushed. His vision began to blur, and he had the sensation he was falling, even though he could feel the rocks tearing at his flesh as his body seized on the ground.

  The Transformation.

  From this moment forth, he would not be able to walk among Mortals in the daylight. The sun would singe the flesh from his body. He wouldn’t be able to ignore the urge to feed on the blood of Mortals. He was one of them now—another Blood Incubus in the long line of killers on the Ravenwood Family Tree. A predator walking among his prey, waiting to feed.

  I was back again, as suddenly as I had gone.

  I stumbled toward Liv, my head reeling. “We’ve got to get going. Things are getting out of control.”

  “What things?”

  “The Arclight—the things in my head,” I said, unable to explain it any better than that.

  She nodded. “I thought it might get bad for you. I wasn’t sure if a Wayward would react more strongly to an intensely powerful place, being as sensitive to the pull of certain Casters as you are. I mean, if you really are…” If I really was a Wayward. She didn??
?t have to say it.

  “So you’re saying you finally believe the Great Barrier is real?”

  “No. Unless…” She pointed out past the farthest dock on the horizon, where the skinniest, most splintered dock extended past the others, so far that we couldn’t see where it ended, except that it disappeared into fog. “That could be the bridge we’re looking for.”

  “Not much of a bridge.” Link looked skeptical.

  “Only one way to find out.” I walked ahead of them.

  As we picked our way across rotting boards and oyster shells, I found myself slipping over and over. I was there, and I wasn’t. In and out. One minute, I could hear Ridley’s and Link’s voices echoing as they bickered. The next, the fog blurred around the edges, and I was pulled back into visions of Macon’s past. I knew there was something I was supposed to gain from the visions, but they were coming so quickly now it was impossible to figure out.

  I thought about Amma. She would have said, “Everythin’ means somethin’.” I tried to imagine what she would have said next.

  P. O. R. T. E. N. D. Seven down. As in, you be sure to pay attention to the what now, Ethan Wate, because that’s gonna point the way to the what’s next.

  She was right, as usual—everything did mean something, didn’t it? All the changes in Lena would have added up to the truth, if I had been able to see it. Even now, I tried to piece together my glimpses of the visions, to find the story they were trying to tell.

  I didn’t have time, though, because as we reached the bridge, I felt another surge, the walkway started to sway, and Ridley’s and Link’s voices faded—

  The room was dark, but Macon didn’t need light to see. The shelves were lined with books, as he had imagined they would be. Volumes on every aspect of American history, particularly the wars that had shaped this country—the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Macon ran his fingers over the leather spines. These books were of no use to him now.

  This was a different kind of war. A war among the Casters, waged within his own family.

  He could hear footsteps above, the sound of the crescent key fitting into the lock. The door creaked, a slice of light escaping as the hatch in the ceiling opened. He wanted to reach out, offer his hand to help her down, but he didn’t dare.