I was pretty sure I had passed out, but I was fuzzy on the details. The last thing I remembered was the freezing cold moving up my body, my throat closing up, and Lena’s voice. I thought she had said something about me being her boyfriend, but since I was about to pass out at the time and nothing had really happened between us, that was doubtful. Wishful thinking, I guessed.
“Ethan!” She jumped out of the chair and onto the bed next to me, although she seemed careful not to touch me. “Are you okay? Ridley wouldn’t let go of you, and I didn’t know what to do. You looked like you were in so much pain, and I just reacted.”
“You mean that tornado in the middle of your dining room?”
She looked away, miserable. “That’s what happens. I feel things, I get angry or scared and then… things just happen.”
I reached over and put my hand over hers, feeling the warmth move up my arm. “Things like windows breaking?”
She looked back at me, and I curled my hand around hers until I was holding it in mine. A random crack in the old plaster in the corner behind her seemed to grow, until it curled its way across the ceiling, circled the frosted chandelier, and swirled its way back down. It looked like a heart. A giant, looping, girly heart had just appeared in the cracking plaster of her bedroom ceiling.
“Lena.”
“Yeah?”
“Is your ceiling about to fall in on our heads?”
She turned and looked at the crack. When she saw it, she bit her lip, and her cheeks turned pink. “I don’t think so. It’s just a crack in the plaster.”
“Were you trying to do that?”
“No.” A creeping pink spread across her nose and cheeks. She looked away.
I wanted to ask her what it was she’d been thinking, but I didn’t want to embarrass her. I just hoped it had something to do with me, with her hand nestled in mine. With the word I thought I heard her say, the moment before I blacked out.
I looked dubiously at the crack. A lot was riding on that crack in the plaster.
“Can you undo them? These things that just… happen?”
Lena sighed, relieved to talk about something else. “Sometimes. It depends. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I can’t control it and I can’t fix it, not even after. I don’t think I could have put the glass back into that window at school. I don’t think I could have stopped the storm from coming, the day we met.”
“I don’t think that one was your fault. You can’t blame yourself for every storm that rolls through Gatlin County. Hurricane season isn’t even over yet.”
She flipped over onto her stomach and looked me right in the eye. She didn’t let go, and neither did I. My whole body was buzzing with the warmth of her touch. “Didn’t you see what happened tonight?”
“Maybe sometimes a hurricane is just a hurricane, Lena.”
“As long as I’m around, I am hurricane season in Gatlin County.” She tried to pull her hand away, but that only made me hold on more tightly.
“That’s funny. You seem more like a girl to me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not. I’m a whole storm system, out of control. Most Casters can control their gifts by the time they’re my age, but half the time it feels more like mine control me.” She pointed to her own reflection in the mirror on the wall. The Sharpie writing scribbled itself across the reflection as we watched. Who is this girl? “I’m still trying to figure it all out, but sometimes it seems like I never will.”
“Do all Casters have the same powers, gifts, whatever?”
“No. We can all do simple things like move objects, but each Caster also has more specific abilities related to their gifts.”
Right about now, I wished there was some kind of class I could take so I’d be able to follow these conversations, Caster 101, I don’t know, because I was always sort of lost. The only person I knew who had any special abilities was Amma. Reading futures and warding off evil spirits had to count for something, right? And for all I knew, maybe Amma could move objects with her mind; she could sure get my butt moving with just a look. “What about Aunt Del? What can she do?”
“She’s a Palimpsest. She reads time.”
“Reads time?”
“Like, you and I walk into a room and see the present. Aunt Del sees different points in the past and the present, all at once. She can walk into a room and see it as it is today and as it was ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago, at the same time. Kind of like when we touch the locket. That’s why she’s always so confused. She never knows exactly when or even where she is.”
I thought about how I felt after one of the visions, and what it would be like to feel that way all of the time. “No kidding. How about Ridley?”
“Ridley’s a Siren. Her gift is the Power of Persuasion. She can put any idea into anyone’s head, get them to tell her anything, do anything. If she used her power on you, and she told you to jump off a cliff—you’d jump.” I remembered how it felt in the car with her, like I would’ve told her almost anything.