Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

Ivy scooped something from inside the folds of her skirt and rubbed it across the face of the Book. The white crystals rolled down over the edges. Salt. The weapon of superstitious island women, who brought their own brand of power with them from the Sugar Islands, where their ancestors were born. They believed it warded off Demons, a belief that had always amused Abraham. “I’ll come for it, soon as I can. I swear.”

“I will keep it safe. You have my word.” Abraham brushed some of the salt from the Book’s cover so he could feel its heat against his skin. He turned back toward the woods. He would walk a few yards, for Ivy’s benefit. It always scared the Gullah women to see him Travel, to be reminded of what he was.

“Put it away, Mr. Ravenwood. Whatever you do, don’t open it. That book brings nothin’ but misery to anyone who messes with it. Don’t listen to it when it calls you. I’ll come for it.” But Ivy’s warning had come too late.

Abraham was already listening.

When I came to, I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at my ceiling. It was painted sky blue, like all the ceilings in our house, to fool the carpenter bees that nested there.

I sat up, dizzy. The box was beside me, the lid shut. I opened it, and the pages were inside. This time I didn’t touch them.

None of this made sense. Why was I having visions again? Why was I seeing Abraham Ravenwood, a man who folks in town had been suspicious of for generations because Ravenwood was the only plantation to survive the Great Burning? Not that I believed much of anything the folks in town had to say.

But when Genevieve’s locket triggered the visions, there had been a reason. Something Lena and I needed to figure out. What did Abraham Ravenwood have to do with us? The common thread was The Book of Moons. It was in the locket visions and in this one. But the Book was gone. The last time anyone had seen it was the night of Lena’s birthday, when it was lying on the table in the crypt, surrounded by fire. Like so many things, it was nothing but ashes now.

5.17

All That Remains

When I went to school the next day, I sat alone with Link and his four sloppy joes at the lunch table. While I ate my pizza, all I could think about was what Link said about Lena. He was right. She had changed, a little bit at a time, until I almost couldn’t remember how things used to be. If I had anyone to talk to about it, I knew they would say to give her time. I also knew that was just something people said when there was nothing left to say and nothing you could do.

Lena wasn’t coming out of it. She wasn’t coming back to herself or to me. If anything, she was drifting farther away from me than anyone else. More and more, I couldn’t reach her, not on the inside, not with Kelting or kissing or any of the other complicated or uncomplicated ways we used to touch. Now when I took her hand, all I could feel was the chill.

And when Emily Asher looked at me from across the lunchroom, there wasn’t anything left but pity in her eyes. Once again, I was someone to feel sorry for. I wasn’t Ethan Wate Whose Mamma Died Just Last Year. Now I was Ethan Wate Whose Girlfriend Went Psycho When Her Uncle Died. People knew there were complications, and they knew they hadn’t seen Lena in school with me.

Even if they didn’t like Lena, the miserable love to watch someone else’s misery. I had just about cornered the market on miserable. I was wo

rse than miserable, lower than a flattened sloppy joe left behind on a lunchroom tray. I was alone.

One morning about a week later, I kept hearing a strange sound, like a grating or a record scratching or a page tearing, in the back of my mind. I was in history class, and we were talking about the Reconstruction, which was the even more boring time after the Civil War when the United States had to put itself back together. In a Gatlin classroom, this chapter was even more embarrassing than it was depressing—a reminder South Carolina had been a slave state and that we had been on the wrong side of right. We all knew it, but our ancestors had left us with a permanent F on the nation’s moral report card. Cuts that run that deep leave scars, no matter what you try to do to heal them. Mr. Lee was still droning on, punctuating each sentence with a dramatic sigh.

I was trying not to listen, when I smelled something burning, maybe an overheating engine or a lighter. I looked around the room. It wasn’t coming from Mr. Lee, the most frequent source of any horrible smell in my history class. No one else seemed to notice it.

The noise grew louder, into a confusing blur of crashing—ripping, talking, yelling. Lena.

L?

No answer. Above the noise, I heard Lena mumbling lines of poetry, and not the kind you send someone for Valentine’s Day.

Not waving but drowning…

I recognized the poem, and it wasn’t good. Lena reading Stevie Smith was only one step up from the darkest Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar kind of day. It was Lena’s red flag, like Link listening to the Dead Kennedys or Amma chopping vegetables for spring rolls with her cleaver.

Hang on, L. I’m coming.

Something had changed, and before it could change back, I grabbed my books and took off running. I was out of the room before Mr. Lee’s next sigh.

Reece wouldn’t look at me when I walked through the door. She pointed to the stairs. Ryan, Lena’s youngest cousin, was sitting on the bottom step with Boo, looking sad. When I tousled her hair, she held her finger to her lips. “Lena’s having a nerve breakup. We’re supposed to be quiet until Gramma and Mamma get home.”

That was an understatement.

The door was open a crack, and when I pushed on it, the hinges creaked, like I was walking into a crime scene. It looked like the room had been tossed. The furniture was upside down or busted up or missing altogether. The entire room was covered with pages of books, pages torn and ripped and plastered all along the walls and ceiling and floor. Not a book was left on the shelf. It looked like a library had exploded. Some of the charred pages piled on the floor were still smoking. The only thing I didn’t see was Lena.

L? Where are you?

I scanned the room. The wall over her bed wasn’t covered with the remnants of the books Lena loved. It was covered in something else.

Nobody the dead man & Nobody the living