Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

She unlocked a door marked private archive. “Did I say that?”

Like Amma, Marian always seemed to have the answer. Like any good librarian.

Like my mom.

I’d never been in Marian’s private archive, the back room. Come to think of it, I didn’t know anyone who had ever been back there, except for my mom. It was the space they shared, the place they wrote and researched and who knows what else. Not even my dad was allowed in. I can remember Marian stopping him in the doorway, when my mother was examining a historical document inside. “Private means private.”

“It’s a library, Marian. Libraries were created to democratize knowledge and make it public.”

“Around here, libraries were created so that Alcoholics Anonymous would have somewhere to meet when the Baptists kicked them out.”

“Marian, don’t be ridiculous. It’s just an archive.”

“Don’t think of me as a librarian. Think of me as a mad scientist; this is my secret laboratory.”

“You’re crazy. You two are just looking at some crumbling old papers.”

“‘If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.’”

“Khalil Gibran.” He fired back.

“‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”

“Benjamin Franklin.”

Eventually even my father had given up trying to get into their archive. We’d gone home and eaten rocky road ice cream, and after that, I had always thought of my mother and Marian as an unstoppable force of nature. Two mad scientists, as Marian had said, chained to each other in the lab. They had churned out book after book, even once making the short-list for the Voice of the South Award, the Southern equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. My dad was fiercely proud of my mom, of both of them, even if we were just along for the ride. “Lively of the mind.” That’s how he used to describe my mom, especially when she was in the middle of a project. That was when she was the most absent, and yet somehow, when he seemed to love her best.

And now here I was, in the private archive, without my dad or my mom, or even a bowl of rocky road ice cream, in sight. Things were changing pretty quickly around here, for a town that never changed at all.

The room was paneled and dark, the most secluded, airless, windowless room of the third-oldest building in Gatlin. Four long oak tables stood in parallel lines down the center of the room. Every inch of every wall was crammed with books. Civil War Artillery and Munitions. King Cotton: White Gold of the South. Flat metal shelving drawers held manuscripts, and overflowing file cabinets lined a smaller room attached to the back of the archive.

Marian busied herself with her teapot and hotplate. Lena walked up to a wall of framed maps of Gatlin County, crumbling behind glass, old as the Sisters themselves.

“Look—Ravenwood.” Lena moved her finger across the glass. “And there’s Greenbrier. You can see the property line a lot better on this map.”

I walked to the far corner of the room, where a lone table stood, covered with a fine layer of dust and the occasional cobweb. An old Historical Society charter lay open, with circled names, a pencil still stuck in the spine. A map made out of tracing paper, tacked to a map of modern-day Gatlin, seemed like someone was trying to mentally excavate the old town from beneath the new. And lying on top of all of it was a photo of the painting in Macon Ravenwood’s entry.

The woman with the locket.

Genevieve. It has to be Genevieve. We have to tell her, L. We have to ask.

We can’t. We can’t trust anyone. We don’t even know why we’re seeing the visions.

Lena. Trust me.

“What’s all this stuff over here, Aunt Marian?”

She looked at me, her face briefly clouding over. “That’s our last project. Your mom’s and mine.”

Why did my mom have a picture of the painting at Ravenwood?

I don’t know.

Lena walked over to the table, and picked up the photo of the painting. “Marian, what were you guys doing with this painting?”

Marian handed each of us a proper cup of tea, with a saucer. That was another thing about Gatlin. You used a saucer, at all times, no matter what.

“You should recognize that painting, Lena. It belongs to your Uncle Macon. In fact, he sent me that photo himself.”