Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

I heard Amma whisper

. “My boy.”

I turned toward Ethan. He was bathed in gold light, just like everything else. He was still motionless. I looked at Amma in panic. “It didn’t work.”

She leaned against the stone altar, closing her eyes.

I screamed, “It didn’t work!”

I stumbled away from the Book, into the mud. I looked up. The moon was there again. I raised my arms above my head, toward the heavens. Heat burned through my veins where there should have been blood. The anger welled inside me, with nowhere to go. I could feel it eating away at me. I knew if I didn’t find a way to release it, it would destroy me.

Hunting. Larkin. Sarafine.

The predator, the coward, and my murderous mother, who lived to destroy her own child. The gnarled branches of my Caster family tree.

How could I Claim myself when they had already claimed the only thing that mattered to me? The heat surged up through my hands, as if it had a will of its own. Lightning streaked across the sky. I knew where it was going even before it hit.

Three points on a compass, with no North to guide me.

The lightning exploded into flame, striking its three targets simultaneously—the ones who had taken everything from me tonight. I should have wanted to look away, but I didn’t. The statue that had been my mother a moment before was strangely beautiful, engulfed in flame, in the moonlight.

I lowered my arms, wiping the dirt and ash and grief from my eyes, but when I looked back she was gone.

They were all gone.

The rain began to fall, and my blurred vision sharpened until I could see the sheets of rain hitting the smoking oaks, the fields, the thickets. I could see clearly for the first time in a long time, maybe ever. I made my way back toward the crypt, toward Ethan.

But Ethan was gone.

Where Ethan’s body had been lying moments before, now there was someone else. Uncle Macon.

I didn’t understand. I turned to Amma for answers. Her eyes were enormous, frightened. “Amma, where’s Ethan? What happened?”

But she didn’t answer me. For the first time ever, Amma was speechless. She was staring at Uncle Macon’s body, dazed. “Never thought it would end like this, Melchizedek. After all those years, holdin’ the weight a the world on our shoulders together.” She was talking to him as if he could hear her, even though her voice was tinier than I had ever heard it. “How am I gonna hold it up on my own?”

I grabbed her shoulders, her sharp bones digging into my palms. “Amma, what’s going on?”

She raised her eyes to meet mine, her voice barely a whisper. “You can’t get somethin’ from the Book, without givin’ somethin’ in return.” A tear rolled down her wrinkled cheek.

It couldn’t be true. I knelt next to Uncle Macon and slowly reached out to touch his perfectly shaven face. Usually, I would find the misleading warmth associated with a human being, fueled by the energy of the hopes and dreams of Mortals, but not today. Today, his skin was ice cold. Like Ridley’s. Like the dead.

Without giving something in return.

“No… please no.” I had killed Uncle Macon. And I hadn’t even Claimed myself. I hadn’t even chosen to go Light, and I had still killed him.

The rage began to well up inside me again, the wind whipping up around us, swirling and churning like my emotions. It was beginning to feel familiar, like an old friend. The Book had made some kind of horrible trade, one I didn’t ask for. Then I realized.

A trade.

If Uncle Macon was here, where Ethan had been lying dead, could that mean that maybe Ethan was out there alive?

I was on my feet, running toward the crypt. The frozen landscape tinted in that golden light. I could see Ethan, lying in the grass in the distance next to Boo, where Uncle Macon had been just moments ago. I made my way over to him. I reached for Ethan’s hand, but it was cold. Ethan was still dead and now Uncle Macon was gone, too.

What had I done? I had lost them both. Kneeling in the mud, I buried my head in Ethan’s chest and wept. I held his hand against my cheek. I thought of all the times he had refused to accept my fate, refused to give up, to say good-bye.

Now it was my turn. “I won’t say good-bye. I won’t say it.” It had come to this, just a whisper in a field of smoldering weeds.

Then I felt it. Ethan’s fingers began to curl and uncurl, searching for mine.