Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

I walked back over to the hole and reached into my pocket. I opened the handkerchief with the familiar initials, and lifted the locket up by its chain. Nothing. No visions, and something told me there weren’t going to be any more. The locket had led us here, showed us what we needed to see.

I held the locket over the grave. It seemed only right, a fair trade. I was about to drop it when I heard Genevieve’s voice again, softer this time.

No. It doesn’t belong with me.

I looked back at the headstone. Genevieve was there again, what was left of her breaking into nothingness each time the wind blew through her. She didn’t look as terrifying.

She looked broken. The way you would look if you lost the only person you ever loved.

I understood.

12.08

Waist Deep

There was only so much trouble you could get into before the th

reat of more trouble wasn’t even a threat anymore. At some point, you’d waded so far in you had no choice but to paddle through the middle, if you had any chance of making it to the other side. It was classic Link logic, but I was starting to see the genius in it. Maybe you can’t really understand it yourself until you’re waist deep in it.

By the next day, that’s where we were, Lena and me. Waist deep. It started with forging a note with one of Amma’s #2 pencils, then cutting school to read a stolen book we weren’t supposed to have in the first place, and ended with a pack of lies about an extra-credit “project” we were working on together. I was pretty sure Amma was going to catch on about two seconds after I said the words extra credit, but she had been on the phone with my Aunt Caroline discussing my dad’s “condition.”

I felt guilty about all the lying, not to mention the stealing, forging, and mind erasing, but we didn’t have time for school; we had too much actual studying to do.

Because we had The Book of Moons. It was real. I could hold it in my hands—

“Ouch!” It burned my hand, like I had touched a hot stove. The Book dropped to the floor of Lena’s bedroom. Boo Radley barked from somewhere in the house. I could hear his paws click their way up the stairs, toward us.

“Door.” Lena spoke without looking up from an old Latin dictionary. Her bedroom door slammed shut, just as Boo reached the landing. He protested with a resentful bark. “Stay out of my room, Boo. We’re not doing anything. I’m about to start practicing.”

I stared at the door, surprised. Another lesson from Macon, I guessed. Lena didn’t even react, as if she’d done it a thousand times. It was like the stunt she had pulled on Reece and Aunt Del last night. I was starting to think the closer we got to her birthday, the more the Caster was coming out in the girl.

I was trying not to notice. But the more I tried, the more I noticed.

She looked over at me, rubbing my hands on my jeans. They still hurt. “What part about ‘you can’t touch it if you’re not a Caster’ are you not getting?”

“Right. That part.”

She opened a battered black case and pulled out her viola. “It’s almost five. I’ve got to start practicing or Uncle Macon will know when he gets up. He always knows.”

“What? Now?” She smiled and sat on a chair in the corner of her room. Adjusting the instrument with her chin, she picked up a long bow and set it to the strings. For a moment she didn’t move, and closed her eyes like we were at a philharmonic, instead of sitting in her bedroom. And then she began to play. The music crawled up from her hands and out into the room, moving through the air like another one of her undiscovered powers. The sheer white curtains hanging at her window began to stir, and I heard the song—

Sixteen moons, sixteen years,

The Claiming Moon, the hour nears,

In these pages Darkness clears,

Powers Bind what fire sears…

As I watched, Lena slid herself out of the chair and carefully placed her viola back where she had been sitting. She wasn’t playing it anymore, but the music was still pouring out of it. She leaned the bow against the chair, and sat down next to me on the floor.

Shh.

That’s practicing?

“Uncle M doesn’t seem to know the difference. And look—” She pointed over to the door, where I could see a shadow, and hear a rhythmic thump. Boo’s tail. “He likes it, and I like to have him in front of my door. Think of it as a sort of an anti-adult alarm system.” She had a point.

Lena knelt by the Book and picked it up easily in her hands. When she opened the pages again, we saw the same thing we had been staring at all day. Hundreds of Casts, careful lists written in English, Latin, Gaelic, and other languages I didn’t recognize, one composed of strange curling letters I had never seen before. The thin brown pages were fragile, almost translucent. The parchment was covered with dark brown ink, in an ancient and delicate script. At least I hoped it was ink.