Beautiful Darkness

  “Holy crap, she’s here.” Link was slowly absorbing it. He hadn’t seen Ridley since the night of Lena’s birthday, when he had talked Ridley out of killing my dad. But he didn’t need to see her to think about her. It was pretty clear he’d been thinking about her a lot, based on every song he’d written since she left. “She’s with that guy? Do you think he’s, you know, like her?” A Dark Caster. He couldn’t say it.

  “Doubt it. His eyes aren’t yellow.” But he was something. I just didn’t know what.

  “They’re comin’ over here.” Link looked down at his freeze, and Ridley was on us.

  “Well, if it isn’t two of my favorite people. Fancy meeting you here. John and I were dying for a drink.” Ridley tossed her blond and pink strands over her shoulder. She slid into the booth across from us and motioned for the guy to sit down. He didn’t.

  “John Breed.” He said it like it was one name, looking right at me. His eyes were as green as Lena’s used to be. What would a Light Caster be doing with Ridley?

  Ridley smiled at him. “This is Lena’s, you know, the one I was telling you about.” She dismissed me with a wave of her purple-polished fingers.

  “I’m Lena’s boyfriend, Ethan.”

  John looked confused, but only for a second. He was the kind of guy who looked relaxed, as if he knew everything would go his way eventually. “Lena never told me she had a boyfriend.”

  Every muscle in my body tightened. He knew Lena, but I didn’t know him. He had seen her since the funeral, at least talked to her. When had that happened, and why hadn’t she told me?

  “How exactly do you know my girlfriend?” My voice was too loud, and I could feel the eyes on us.

  “Relax, Short Straw. We were in the neighborhood.” Ridley looked across at Link. “How ya been, Hot Rod?”

  Link cleared his throat awkwardly. “Good.” His voice came out kind of squeaky. “I’ve been real good. Thought you left town.” Ridley didn’t answer.

  I was still looking at John, and he was staring right back, sizing me up. Probably figuring out a thousand ways to get rid of me. Because he was after something—or someone—and I was in his way. Ridley wouldn’t just show up here with this guy now, not after four months.

  I kept my eyes on him. “Ridley, you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Boyfriend. We’re just passin’ through, on our way back from Ravenwood.” She said it casually, like it wasn’t a big deal.

  I laughed. “Ravenwood? They wouldn’t let you in the door. Lena would burn the house down first.” Ridley and Lena had grown up together, like sisters, until Ridley went Dark. Ridley had helped Sarafine find Lena on her birthday, which almost got us all, including my father, killed. There was no way Lena would hang out with her.

  She smiled. “Times have changed, Short Straw. I’m not on the best terms with the rest of my family, but Lena and I have worked things out. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “You’re lying.”

  Ridley unwrapped a cherry lollipop, which looked innocent enough but was the ultimate weapon in her hands. “You clearly have trust issues. I’d love to help you with that, but we’ve gotta get going. Have to fill up John’s bike before that hick gas station of yours runs out of gas.” I was holding the side of the table, and my knuckles went white.

  His bike.

  It was sitting out front right now, and I bet it was a Harley. The same bike I had seen in the photograph on the wall of Lena’s room. John Breed had picked up Lena from Lake Moultrie. And before he said another word, I knew John Breed wasn’t about to disappear. He’d be waiting on the corner the next time Lena needed a ride.

  I stood up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but Link was. He slid out of the booth and shoved me toward the door. “Let’s get outta here, man.”

  Ridley called after us. “I really did miss you, Shrinky Dink.” She tried to make it sound sarcastic, like one of her jokes. But the sarcasm stuck in her throat, and it came out sounding more like the truth. I slammed my palm against the door, sending it flying open.

  But before it swung shut, I heard John’s voice. “Nice to meet you, Ethan. Say hi to Lena for me.” My hands were shaking, and I heard Ridley laugh. She didn’t have to lie to hurt me today. She had the truth.

  We didn’t talk on the way to Ravenwood. Neither one of us knew what to say. Girls can do that to you, especially Caster girls. When we reached the top of the long drive leading to Ravenwood Manor, the gates were closed, something I’d never seen before. The ivy had grown over the twisting metal, as if it had always been there. I got out of the car and shook the gate to see if it would swing open, knowing it wouldn’t. I looked up at the house behind it. The windows were dark, and the sky over the house looked even darker.

  What had happened? I could’ve handled Lena’s freak-out at the lake and feeling like she had to take off. But why him? Why the Caster boy with the Harley? How long had she been hanging out with him without telling me? And what did Ridley have to do with it?

  I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out.

  “You okay, man?” Link slammed the driver’s side door.

  “No.” I looked down the long driveway ahead of us.

  “Me neither.” Link tossed the key through the Fastback’s open window, and we headed down the hill.

  We hitched back to town, Link turning every few minutes to check the stretch of road behind us for a Harley. But I didn’t think we’d see it. That particular Harley wouldn’t be headed into town. For all I knew, it could be inside those gates already.

  I didn’t come down for dinner, which was my first mistake. My second was opening the black Converse shoe box. I shook it open, the contents spilling across my bed. A note Lena had written me on the back of a wrinkled Snickers wrapper, a ticket stub from the movie we saw on our first date, a faded receipt from the Dar-ee Keen, and a highlighted page ripped out of a book that had reminded me of her. It was the box where I stashed all our memories—my version of Lena’s necklace. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing a guy should do, so I didn’t let on that I did it, not even to her.

  I picked up the crumpled photo from the winter formal, taken the second before we were doused with liquid snow by my so-called friends. The picture was blurry, but we were captured in a kiss, so happy it was hard to look at now. Remembering that night, even though I knew the next moment was going to be awful, it felt like part of me was still back there kissing her.

  “Ethan Wate, is that you?”

  I tried to shove everything back into the box when I heard my door opening, and the box fell, scattering everything onto the floor.

  “You feelin’ all right?” Amma came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed. She hadn’t done that since I’d had stomach flu in sixth grade. Not that she didn’t love me. We just had things worked out in a way that didn’t include sitting on beds.

  “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  She looked at the mess on the floor. “You look lower than a catfish at the bottom a the river. And a perfectly good pork chop’s lookin’ as sorry as you are, down in my kitchen. That’s two kinds a sorry.” She leaned forward and brushed my brown hair out of my eyes. She was always after me to cut my hair.

  “I know, I know. The eyes are the window to the soul, and I need a haircut.”

  “You need a good sight more than a haircut.” She looked sad and grabbed my chin as if she could lift me up by it. Given the right circumstances, I bet she could. “You’re not right.”

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re not, and you’re my boy, and it’s my fault.”

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t understand and she didn’t elaborate, which was generally how our conversations went.

  “She’s not right either, you kno
w.” Amma spoke softly, looking out my window. “Not bein’ right isn’t always somebody’s fault. Sometimes it’s just a fact, like the cards you pull.” With Amma, everything came down to fate, the cards in her tarot deck, the bones in the graveyard, the universe she could read.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked into my eyes, and I could see hers shining. “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem, and even a Seer can’t tell what’s comin’.” She took my hand and dropped something into it. A red string with tiny beads knotted into it, one of her charms. “Tie it ’round your wrist.”

  “Amma, guys don’t wear bracelets.”

  “Since when do I make jewelry? That’s for women with too much time and not enough sense.” She yanked on her apron, straightening it. “A red string’s a tie to the Otherworld, offers the kinda protection I can’t. Go on, put it on.”

  I knew better than to argue when Amma had that look on her face. It was a mixture of fear and sadness, and she wore it like a burden too heavy for her to carry. I held out my arm and let her tie the string around my wrist. Before I could say anything else, she was at my window, pouring a handful of salt from her apron pocket all along the sill.

  “Everything’s gonna be okay, Amma. Don’t worry.”

  Amma stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, rubbing the shine out of her eyes. “Been choppin’ onions all afternoon.”

  Something wasn’t right, like Amma said. But I had a feeling it wasn’t me. “You know anything about a guy named John Breed?”

  She stiffened. “Ethan Wate, don’t you make me give that pork chop to Lucille.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Amma knew something, and it wasn’t good, and she wasn’t talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn’t have a single onion in it.

  6.14

  Bookworm

  If it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it’s good enough for me.” Marian winked at me as she pulled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head.

  Lucille was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library’s no-pets rule since the place was full of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn’t speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn’t being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn’t know if he even still had one—all in the space of the two longest days of his life.

  I still hadn’t talked to Lena. I told myself it was because I was too angry, but that was one of those lies you tell when you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing. The truth was, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to ask the questions, and I was scared to hear the answers. Besides, I wasn’t the one who ran off with some guy on a motorcycle.

  “It’s chaos. Dewey decimal is mocking you. I can’t even find one almanac on the history of the moon’s orbital pattern.” The voice from the stacks startled me.

  “Now, Olivia…” Marian smiled to herself as she examined the bindings of the books in her hands. It was hard to believe she was old enough to be my mother. With not a streak of gray in her short hair, and not a wrinkle in her golden-brown skin, she didn’t look more than thirty.

  “Professor Ashcroft, this isn’t 1876. Times do change.” It was a girl’s voice. She had an accent—British, I think. I’d only heard people talk that way in James Bond movies.

  “So has the Dewey decimal system. Twenty-two times, to be exact.” Marian shelved a stray book.

  “What about the Library of Congress?” The voice sounded exasperated.

  “Give me a hundred more years.”

  “The Universal Decimal Classification?” Now irritated.

  “This is South Carolina, not Belgium.”

  “Perhaps the Harvard-Yenching system?”

  “Nobody in this county speaks Chinese, Olivia.”

  A blond, lanky girl poked her head out from behind the stacks. “Not true, Professor Ashcroft. At least, not for the summer holidays.”

  “You speak Chinese?” I couldn’t help myself. When Marian had mentioned her summer research assistant, she hadn’t told me the girl would be a teenage version of herself. Except for the streaky, honey-colored hair, the pale skin, and the accent, they could have been mother and daughter. Even at first glance, the girl had a vague degree of Marian-ness that was hard to describe and that you wouldn’t find in anyone else in town.

  The girl looked at me. “You don’t?” She poked me in the ribs. “That was a joke. In my opinion, people in this country barely speak English.” She smiled and held out her hand. She was tall, but I was taller, and she looked up at me as if she was already confident we were great friends. “Olivia Durand. Liv, to my friends. You must be Ethan Wate, which I find hard to believe, actually. The way Professor Ashcroft talks about you, I was expecting more of a swashbuckler, with a bayonet.”

  Marian laughed, and I turned red. “What has she been telling you?”

  “Only that you’re incredibly brilliant and brave and virtuous, quite the save-the-day sort. Every bit the son you would expect of the beloved Lila Evers Wate. And that you’ll be my lowly assistant this summer, so I can boss you around all I like.” She smiled at me, and I blanked.

  She was nothing like Lena, but nothing like the girls in Gatlin either. Which was in itself more than confusing. Everything she was wearing had a weathered look, from her faded jeans and the random bits of string and beads around her wrists, to her holey silver high-tops, held together with duct tape, and her ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt. She had a big, black plastic watch with crazy-looking dials on the face, caught between the bits of string. I was too embarrassed to say anything.

  Marian swooped in to rescue me. “Don’t mind Liv. She’s teasing. ‘Even the gods love jokes,’ Ethan.”

  “Plato. And stop showing off.” Liv laughed.

  “I will.” Marian smiled, impressed.

  “He’s not laughing.” Liv pointed at me, suddenly serious. “‘Hollow laughter in marble halls.’ ”

  “Shakespeare?” I looked at her.

  Liv winked and yanked on her T-shirt. “Pink Floyd. I can see you’ve got a lot to learn.” A teenage Marian, and not at all what I expected when I signed on for a summer job in the library.

  “Now, children.” Marian held out her hand, and I pulled her up from the floor. Even on a hot day like today, she still managed to look cool. Not a hair was out of place. Her patterned blouse rustled as she walked in front of me. “I’ll leave the stacks to you, Olivia. I have a special project for Ethan in the archive.”

  “Right, of course. The highly trained history student sorts out the stacks, while the unschooled slacker is promoted to the archive. How very American.” She rolled her eyes and picked up a box of books.

  The archive hadn’t changed since last month, when I came to ask Marian about a summer job but stayed to talk about Lena and my dad and Macon. She had been sympathetic, the way she always was. There were piles of old Civil War registries on the shelf above my mother’s desk, and her collection of antique glass paperweights. A glistening, black sphere sat next to the misshapen clay apple I made for her in first grade. My mom’s and Marian’s books and notes were still stacked across the desk, over yellowed maps of Ravenwood and Greenbrier spread open on the tables. Every scribbled scrap of paper I saw made it feel like she was here. Even though everything in my life seemed to be going wrong, I always felt better in this place. It was like I was with my mom, and she was the one person who always knew how to fix things, or at least make me believe there was a way to fix them.

  But something else was on my mind. “That’s your summer intern?”

  “Of course.”

  “You didn’t tell me she’d be like that.”

  “Like what, Ethan?”

  “Like you.”

  “Is that what’s bothering y
ou? The brains, or is it perhaps the long blond hair? Is there a certain way a librarian should look? Big glasses and hair in a graying bun? I would have thought between your mother and me, we would have disabused you of at least that notion.” She was right. My mom and Marian had always been two of the most beautiful women in Gatlin. “Liv won’t be here very long, and she’s not much older than you are. I was thinking the least you could do would be to show her around town, introduce her to some people your age.”

  “Like who? Link? To improve his vocabulary and kill off a few thousand of her brain cells?” I didn’t mention that Link would spend most of his time trying to hook up with her, which I didn’t see happening.

  “I was thinking of Lena.” The silence in the room was embarrassing, even to me. Of course she had been thinking of Lena. The question was, why hadn’t I? Marian looked at me evenly. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind today?”

  “What is it you need me to do in here, Aunt Marian?” I didn’t feel like talking about it.

  She sighed and turned back to the archive. “I thought maybe you could help me sort through some of this. Obviously a great deal of the material in here relates to the locket and Ethan and Genevieve. Now that we know the end of that story, we might want to make some room for the next one.”

  “What’s the next one?” I picked up the old photo of Genevieve wearing the locket. I remembered the first time I looked at it with Lena. It felt like years since then, instead of months.

  “It would seem to me that it’s yours and Lena’s. The events on her birthday raised a number of questions, most of which I can’t answer. I’ve never heard of an incident when a Caster didn’t have to choose Light or Dark on the night of their Claiming—except in the case of Lena’s family, when the choice is made for them. Now that we don’t have Macon to help us, I’m afraid we’re going to have to search out the answers ourselves.” Lucille jumped up onto my mother’s chair, her ears perking up.