Beautiful Darkness

  She was worse than I thought.

  “Ethan! What are you doing?”

  I pulled my hand away, and Lena grabbed the book.

  “I’m sorry, L.”

  She was furious.

  “I thought it was just a book. I mean, it looks like a book. I didn’t think you would leave your notebook lying around where anyone could read it.”

  She wouldn’t look at me, clutching the book to her chest.

  “Why aren’t you writing anymore? I thought you loved to write.”

  She rolled her eyes and opened the notebook to show me. “I do.”

  She fluttered the blank pages, and now they were covered with line upon line of tiny scribbled words, crossed out again and again, revised and rewritten and revisited a thousand times.

  “You Charmed it?”

  “I Shifted the words out of Mortal reality. Unless I choose to show them to someone, only a Caster can read them.”

  “That’s brilliant. Since Reece, the person most likely to read it, happens to be one.” Reece was as nosy as she was bossy.

  “She doesn’t need to. She can read everything in my face.” It was true. As a Sybil, Reece could see your thoughts and secrets, even things you were planning to do, just by looking you in the eye. Which was why I generally avoided her.

  “So, what’s with all the secrecy?” I flopped down on Lena’s futon. She sat next to me, balancing on her crisscrossed legs. Things were less comfortable than I was pretending they were.

  “I don’t know. I still feel like writing all the time. Maybe I just feel less like being understood, or less like I can be.”

  My jaw tightened. “By me.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What other Mortals would be reading your notebook?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Some of it, maybe.”

  “I would understand all of it if you’d let me.”

  “There’s no letting, Ethan. I can’t explain it.”

  “Let me see it.” I held out my hand for her notebook.

  She raised an eyebrow, handing it to me. “You won’t be able to read it.”

  I opened it and looked at it. I didn’t know if it was Lena, or the book itself, but the words appeared on the page in front of me slowly, one at a time. It wasn’t one of Lena’s poems, and it wasn’t song lyrics. There weren’t many words, just strange drawings, shapes and swirls snaking up and down the page like some collection of tribal designs.

  At the bottom of the page, there was a list.

  what i remember

  mother

  ethan

  macon

  hunting

  the fire

  the wind

  the rain

  the crypt

  the me who is not me

  the me who would kill

  two bodies

  the rain

  the book

  the ring

  amma’s charm

  the moon

  Lena grabbed the book out of my hand. There were a few more lines on the page, but I never got to read them. “Stop it!”

  I looked at her. “What was that?”

  “Nothing, it’s private. You shouldn’t have been able to see that.”

  “Then why could I?”

  “I must have done the Verbum Celatum Cast wrong. The Hidden Word.” She looked at me anxiously, her eyes softening. “It doesn’t matter. I was trying to remember that night. The night Macon… disappeared.”

  “Died, L. The night Macon died.”

  “I know he died. Of course he died. I just don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “I know you’re probably depressed. It’s normal.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the next stage.”

  Lena’s eyes flashed. “I know your mom died, and my uncle died. But I have my own stages of grief. This isn’t my feelings journal. I’m not your dad, and I’m not you, Ethan. We aren’t as much alike as you think.”

  We looked at each other in a way we hadn’t in a long time, maybe ever. There was a nameless moment. I realized we’d been speaking out loud since I got there, without Kelting a word. For the first time, I didn’t know what she was thinking, and it was pretty clear she didn’t know how I felt either.

  But then she did. She held out her arms and drew me into them because, for the first time, I was the one who was crying.

  When I got home, all the lights were out, but I still didn’t go inside. I sat down on the porch and watched the fireflies blinking in the dark. I didn’t want to see anyone. I wanted to think, and I had a feeling Lena wouldn’t be listening. There’s something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are. The stars look like they’re so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can’t. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are.

  I stared into the darkness for so long that I thought I saw something move by the old oak in our front yard. For a second, my pulse quickened. Most people in Gatlin didn’t even lock their doors, but I knew there were plenty of things that could get past a deadbolt. I saw the air shift again, almost imperceptibly, like a heat wave. I realized it wasn’t something trying to break into my house. It was something that had broken out from another one.

  Lucille, the Sisters’ cat. I could see her blue eyes shining in the darkness as she stalked onto the porch.

  “I told everyone you’d find your way back to the house sooner or later. You just found the wrong house.” Lucille cocked her head to the side. “You know the Sisters are never gonna let you off that clothesline again after this.”

  Lucille stared back at me as if she understood perfectly. As if she had known the consequences when she took off but, for whatever reason, she left anyway. A firefly blinked in front of me, and Lucille leaped off the step.

  It flew higher, but that dumb cat kept reaching for it. She didn’t seem to know how far away it really was. Like the stars. Like a lot of things.

  6.12

  The Girl of My Dreams

  Darkness.

  I couldn’t see a thing, but I could feel the air draining out of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. The air was filled with smoke, and I was coughing, choking.

  Ethan!

  I could hear her voice, but it was distant and faraway.

  The air around me was hot. It smelled like ash and death.

  Ethan, no!

  I saw the glint of a knife, over my head, and I heard the sinister laughter. Sarafine. Only I couldn’t see her face.

  As the knife plunged into my stomach, I knew where I was.

  I was at Greenbrier, on top of the crypt, and I was about to die.

  I tried to scream, but I couldn’t make a sound. Sarafine threw back her head and laughed, her hands on the knife in my stomach. I was dying, and she was laughing. The blood was running all around me, rushing into my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. It had a distinct taste, like copper or salt.

  My lungs felt like two heaving sacks of cement. When the rush of blood in my ears drowned out her voice, I was overwhelmed with the familiar feeling of loss. Green and gold. Lemons and rosemary. I could smell it through the blood, the smoke, and the ashes. Lena.

  I always thought I couldn’t live without her. Now I wasn’t going to have to.

  “Ethan Wate! Why don’t I hear that shower runnin’ yet?” I bolted upright in bed, drenched in sweat. I ran my hand under my T-shirt, over my skin. There was no blood, but I could feel the raised impression where the knife had cut me in the dream. I pulled up my shirt and stared at the jagged pink line. A scar cut across my lower abdomen, like a stab wound. It had appeared out of nowhere, an injury from a dream.

  Only it was real, and it hurt. I hadn’t had one of the dreams since Lena’s birthday, and I didn’t know why they were coming back now, like this. I was used to waking up with mud in my bed or smoke in my lungs, but this was the first time I had ever wo
ken up in pain. I tried to shake it off, telling myself it didn’t really happen. But my stomach throbbed. I stared at my open window, wishing Macon was around to steal the end of this dream. I wished he was around for a lot of reasons.

  I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, to see if Lena was there. But I already knew she wouldn’t be. I could feel when she had pulled away, which was most of the time, lately.

  Amma called up the stairs again. “If you’re fixin’ to be late for your last examination, you’ll be sittin’ on your sweet corncakes in that room a yours all summer. That’s a promise.”

  Lucille Ball was staring at me from the foot of my bed, the way she did most mornings now. After Lucille showed up on our porch, I took her back home to Aunt Mercy, but the next day she was sitting on our porch again. After that, Aunt Prue convinced her sisters that Lucille was a deserter, and the cat moved in with us. I was pretty surprised when Amma opened the door and let Lucille wander in, but she had her reasons. “Nothin’ wrong with havin’ a cat in the house. They can see what most people can’t, like the folks in the Otherworld when they cross back over—the good ones and the bad. And they get rid a mice.” I guess you could say Lucille was the animal kingdom’s version of Amma.

  By the time I made it into the shower, the hot water rolled off me, pushing everything away. Everything except the scar. I turned it up even hotter, but I couldn’t keep my mind in the shower. It was tangled up in the dreams, the knife, the laughter—

  My English final.

  Crap.

  I’d fallen asleep before I finished studying. If I failed the test, I would fail the class, Good-Eye Side or not. My grades were not stellar this semester, and by that I mean I was running neck and neck with Link. I wasn’t my usual don’t-study-and-get-by self. I was already close to failing history, since Lena and I had ditched the mandatory Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill on her birthday. If I failed English, I’d be spending all summer in a school so old it didn’t even have air conditioning, or I’d be looking at sophomore year all over again. It was the particularly penetrating problem a person with a pulse should be prepared to ponder today. Assonance, right? Or was it consonance? I was screwed.

  This was day five of supersized breakfasts. We’d had finals all week, and Amma believed there was a direct correlation between how much I ate and how well I would do. I had eaten my weight in bacon and eggs since Monday. No wonder my stomach was killing me and I was having nightmares. Or at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself.

  I poked at the fried eggs with my fork. “More eggs?”

  Amma squinted at me suspiciously. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m in no mood for it.” She slid another egg onto my plate. “Don’t try my patience today, Ethan Wate.”

  I wasn’t about to argue with her. I had enough problems of my own.

  My dad wandered into the kitchen and opened the cupboard, searching for his Shredded Wheat. “Don’t tease Amma. You know she doesn’t like it.” He looked up at her, shaking his spoon. “That boy of mine is downright S. C. A. B. R. O. U. S. As in…”

  Amma glared at him, slamming the cupboard doors shut. “Mitchell Wate, I’ll give you a scab or two all your own if you don’t stop messin’ with my pantry.” He laughed, and a second later I could have sworn she was smiling, and I watched as my own crazy father started turning Amma back into Amma again. The moment vanished, popping like a soap bubble, but I knew what I’d seen. Things were changing.

  I still wasn’t used to the sight of my dad walking around during the day, pouring cereal and making small talk. It seemed unbelievable that four months ago my aunt had checked him into Blue Horizons. Although he wasn’t exactly a new man, as Aunt Caroline professed, I had to admit I barely recognized him. He wasn’t making me chicken salad sandwiches, but these days he was out of the study more and more, and sometimes even out of the house. Marian scored my dad a position at the University of Charleston as a guest lecturer in the English department. Even though the bus ride turned a forty-minute commute into two hours, there was no letting my dad operate heavy machinery, not yet. He seemed almost happy. I mean, relatively speaking, for a guy who was previously holed up in his study for months scribbling like a madman. The bar was pretty low.

  If things could change that much for my dad, if Amma was smiling, maybe they could change for Lena, too.

  Couldn’t they?

  But the moment was over. Amma was back on the warpath. I could see it in her face. My dad sat down next to me and poured milk over his cereal. Amma wiped her hands on her tool apron. “Mitchell, you best have some a those eggs. Cereal isn’t any kind a breakfast.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Amma.” He smiled at her, the way I bet he did when he was a kid.

  She squinted at him and slammed a glass of chocolate milk next to my plate, even though I barely drank it anymore.

  “Doesn’t look so good to me.” She sniffed and started pushing a massive amount of bacon onto my plate. To Amma, I would always be six years old. “You look like the livin’ dead. What you need is some brain food, to pass those examinations a yours.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I chugged the glass of water Amma had poured for my dad. She held up her infamous wooden spoon with the hole in the middle, the One-Eyed Menace—that’s what I called it. When I was a kid, she used to chase me around the house with it if I sassed her, even though she never actually hit me with it. I ducked, to play along.

  “And you better pass every single one. I won’t have you hangin’ around that school all summer like the Pettys’ kids. You’re gonna get a job, like you said you would.” She sniffed, waving the spoon. “Free time means free trouble, and you got heaps of that already.”

  My dad smiled and stifled a laugh. I bet Amma had said exactly the same thing to him when he was my age.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I heard a car honk, and the sound of way too much Beater bass, and grabbed my backpack. All I saw was the blur of the spoon behind me.

  I slid into the Beater and rolled down the window. Gramma had gotten her way, and Lena had come back to school a week ago, for the end of the year. I had driven all the way out to Ravenwood to take her to school on her first day back, even stopping at the Stop & Steal to get her one of their famous sticky buns, but by the time I got there Lena was already gone. Ever since then, she had been driving herself to school, so Link and I were back in the Beater.

  Link turned down the music, which was blasting through the car, out the windows, and down the block.

  “Don’t you embarrass me over at that school a yours, Ethan Wate. And you turn down that music, Wesley Jefferson Lincoln! You’re goin’ to knock over my whole row a rutabagas with that ruckus.” Link honked back at her. Amma knocked her spoon against the post, put her hands on her hips, and then softened. “You do well on those tests a yours, and maybe I’ll bake you a pie.”

  “That wouldn’t be Gatlin peach, would it, ma’am?”

  Amma sniffed and nodded her head. “Just might be.”

  She would never admit it, but Amma had finally developed a soft spot for Link, after all these years. Link thought it was because Amma felt sorry for his mom after her invasion-of-the-body-snatchers experience with Sarafine, but that wasn’t it. She felt bad for Link. “Can’t believe that boy has to live in the house with that woman. He’d be better off if he was bein’ raised by wolves.” That’s what she’d said last week before she packed up a pecan pie for him.

  Link looked at me and grinned. “Best thing that ever happened to me, Lena’s mom gettin’ mixed up with my mom. Never had so much a Amma’s pie in my life.” It was about as much as he ever said about Lena’s nightmare of a birthday anymore. He floored it, and the Beater went skidding down the road. It almost wasn’t worth mentioning that we were late, as usual.

  “Did you study for English?” It wasn’t really a question. I knew Link hadn’t cracked a book since seventh grade.

  “Nah. I’m gonna copy offa someone.”

 
“Who?”

  “What do you care? Somebody smarter than you.”

  “Yeah? Last time you copied off Jenny Masterson, and you both got D’s.”

  “I didn’t have time to study. I was writin’ a song. We might play it at the county fair. Check it out.” Link sang along with the song, which sounded weird because he was singing along to a recording of his own voice. “Lollipop Girl, took off without a word, was callin’ out your name, but you never heard.”

  Great. Another song about Ridley. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, since he hadn’t written a song about anything but Ridley for four months now. I was beginning to think he would always be hung up on Lena’s cousin, who was nothing like her. Ridley was a Siren, who used her Power of Persuasion to get what she wanted with one lick of a lollipop. Which, for a while, was Link. Even though she had used him and disappeared, he hadn’t forgotten her. But I couldn’t blame him. It was probably tough being in love with a Dark Caster. It was pretty tough sometimes with a Light one, too.

  I was still thinking about Lena, despite the deafening roar in my ears, until Link’s voice was drowned out altogether, and I heard Seventeen Moons. Only now the words had changed.

  Seventeen moons, seventeen turns,

  Eyes so dark and bright it burns,

  Time is high but one is higher,

  Draws the moon into the fire…

  Time is high? What did that even mean? It wasn’t going to be Lena’s Seventeenth Moon for eight more months. Why was time high now? And who was the one, and what was the fire?

  I felt Link smack the side of my head, and the song disappeared. He was shouting over his demo tape. “If I can get the backbeat down, it’ll be a pretty rockin’ tune.” I stared at him, and he knocked me in the head again. “Shake it off, man. It’s just an exam. You look as crazy as Miss Luney, the hot-lunch lady.”

  Thing is, he wasn’t that far off.

  When the Beater pulled into the Jackson High parking lot, it still didn’t feel like the last day of school. For the seniors, it wasn’t. They would have graduation tomorrow, and a party that lasted all night and usually gave more than a few people a brush with alcohol poisoning. But for us sophomores and juniors, we had one more exam until we were free.