Powerful? Do you even have to ask?
Not to mention powerfully hot. Third Degree Burns hot, if you want to get technical. Ask my sort-of-ex-boyfriend, Link. He’s been burned more than anyone.
I should know. I’m usually the one holding the match.
It’s all a matter of perspective, and here’s mine: I’ve been called a lot of things, but no matter what, I’m a survivor—and while there are more than a few stupid Supernaturals, there are zero stupid survivors.
Consider my record. I outlasted some of the Darkest Casters and creatures alive. I withstood whole months of Stonewall Jackson High School. Beyond that, I survived a thousand terrible love songs written by a clueless Mortal boy who became an equally clueless quarter Incubus—and, by the way, not the most gifted musician.
For a while, I survived wanting to write him a love song of my own.
That was harder.
This Siren gig is meant to be a one-way street. Ask Odysseus and two thousand years’ worth of dead sailors if you don’t believe me.
We didn’t choose for it to be that way. It’s the hand we were dealt, and you won’t hear me whining about it. I’m not my cousin Lena.
She was meant to be Light. I was meant to be Dark. Respect the teams, people. At least learn the rules.
Let’s get something straight: I’m supposed to be the bad guy. I will always disappoint you. Your parents will hate me. You should not root for me. I am not your role model.
I don’t know why everyone seems to forget that. I never do.
My own parents disowned me after the Dark Claimed me as a Siren on my Sixteenth Moon. Since then, nothing rattles me—nothing and no one.
I always knew my incarceration in the sanitarium that my Uncle Macon called Ravenwood Manor was a temporary pit stop on the way to bigger and better, my two favorite words. Actually, that’s a lie.
My two favorite words are my name, Ridley Duchannes.
Why wouldn’t they be?
Sure, Lena gets all the credit, being the most powerful Caster of all time—aka Queen of Perfectland. It doesn’t make me any less excellent. Neither does her too-good-to-be-true Mortal boyfriend, Ethan “the Wayward” Wate, who, like, defeats Darkness in the name of true love every day of the week.
There’s a shocker.
They should have their own Caster talk show. They could cohost interventions and turn Dark hearts to good instead of evil, and they’d be every bit as popular as Oprah.
And that gag-fest is why my name is my favorite two words in the whole language.
So what?
I was never going for perfect. I think that should be clear by now.
Crystal.
I’ve done my part, played the game, even thrown in my hand when I had to. I’ve bet what I didn’t have and bluffed until I had it. Link once said, Ridley Duchannes is always playing a game. I never told him, but he was right.
What’s so bad about that? I always knew I’d rather play than watch from the sidelines.
Except once.
There was one game I regretted. At least, one that I regretted losing. And one Dark Caster I regretted losing to.
Lennox Gates.
Two markers.
That’s all I owed him, and it was enough to change everything. But I’m getting ahead of myself.