Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

There it was again, a voice so quiet I could barely hear it. It was like it was coming from the back of my head.

Eden, Charlotte, and Emily kept firing away, and Lena didn’t even blink, like she could just block them out as long as she kept writing in that notebook of hers.

“Harper Lee seems to be saying that you can’t really get to know someone until you take a walk in his shoes. What do you make of that? Anyone?”

Harper Lee never lived in Gatlin.

I looked around, stifling a laugh. Emily looked at me like I was nuts.

Lena raised her hand. “I think it means you have to give people a chance. Before you automatically skip to the hating part. Don’t you think so, Emily?” She looked at Emily and smiled.

“You little freak,” Emily hissed under her breath.

You have no idea.

I stared more closely at Lena. She had given up on the notebook; now she was writing on her hand in black ink. I didn’t have to see it to know what it was. Another number. 151. I wondered what it meant, and why it couldn’t go in the notebook. I buried my head back in Silver Surfer.

“Let’s talk about Boo Radley. What would lead you to believe he is leaving gifts for the Finch children?”

“He’s just like Old Man Ravenwood. He’s probably tryin’ to lure those kids into his house so he can kill them,” Emily whispered, loud enough for Lena to hear, but quiet enough to keep Mrs. English from hearing. “Then he can put their bodies in his hearse and take them out to the middle a nowhere and bury them.”

Shut up.

I heard the voice in my head again, and something else. It was a creaking sound. Faint.

“And he has that crazy name like Boo Radley. What is it again?”

“You’re right, it’s that creepy Bible name nobody uses anymore.”

I stiffened. I knew they were talking about Old Man Ravenwood, but they were also talking about Lena. “Emily, why don’t you give it a rest,” I shot back.

She narrowed her eyes. “He’s a freak. They all are and everyone knows it.”

I said shut up.

The creaking was getting louder and started to sound more like splintering. I looked around. What was that noise? Even weirder, it didn’t seem like anyone else heard it—like the voice.

Lena was staring straight ahead, but her jaw was clenched and she was unnaturally focused on one point in the front of the room, like she couldn’t see anything but that spot. The room felt like it was getting smaller, closing in.

I heard Lena’s chair drag across the floor again. She got out of her seat, heading toward the bookcase under the window, on the side of the room. Most likely pretending to sharpen her pencil so she could escape the inescapable, Jackson’s judge and jury. The sharpener began to grind.

“Melchizedek, that’s it.”

Stop it.

I could still hear the grinding.

“My grandmamma says that’s an evil name.”

Stop it stop it stop it.

“Suits him, too.”

ENOUGH!

Now the voice was so loud, I grabbed my ears. The grinding stopped. Glass went flying, splintering into the air, as the window shattered out of nowhere—the window right across from our row in the classroom, right next to where Lena stood, sharpening her pencil. Right next to Charlotte, Eden, Emily, and me. They screamed and dove out of their seats. That’s when I realized what that creaking sound had been. Pressure. Tiny cracks in the glass, spreading out like fingers, until the window collapsed inward like it had been pulled by a thread.

It was chaos. The girls were screaming. Everyone in the class was scrambling out of their seats. Even I jumped.