“Lies. Lies are da place where darkness grows. You tell da boy. Tell him now.”
“What are you talking about?” I looked from Twyla to Arelia. Amma shot them a look that Twyla answered with a shake of her beaded braids.
“Listen to me, Ethan Wate.” Amma’s voice was uneven and shaky. “You didn’t fall from the top of the crypt, at least not the way we told you.”
“What?” She wasn’t making any sense. Why was she talking about Lena’s birthday after I had just seen the ghost of my dead mother?
“You didn’t fall, see?” she repeated.
“What are you talking about? Of course I fell. I woke up on the ground, flat on my back.”
“That’s not how you got there.” Amma hesitated. “It was Lena’s mamma. Sarafine stabbed you with a knife.” Amma looked right into my eyes. “She killed you. You were dead, and we brought you back.”
She killed you.
I repeated the words to myself, the pieces snapping together so fast I could barely make sense of them. Instead, they made sense of me—
the dream that wasn’t a dream, but a memory of not breathing and not feeling and not thinking and not seeing—
the dirt and flames that carried my body away as my life flowed out—
“Ethan! You all right?” I could hear Amma, but she was far away, as far as she was that night when I was on the ground.
I could be in the ground now, like my mom and Macon.
I should be.
“Ethan?” Link was shaking me.
My body filled with sensations I couldn’t control and didn’t want to remember. Blood in my mouth, blood roaring into my ears—
“He’s passing out.” Liv was holding my head.
There had been pain and noise and something else. Voices. Shapes. People.
I had died.
I reached under my shirt, running my hand over the scar on my stomach. The scar from where Sarafine had stabbed me with a real knife. I barely noticed it anymore, but now it would be a constant reminder of the night I died. I remembered how Lena reacted when she saw it.
“You’re still the same person, and Lena still loves you. Her love is the reason you’re here now.” Arelia’s voice was gentle, knowing. I opened my eyes, letting the blur of shapes become people as I settled back into myself again.
My thoughts were so jumbled. Even now, nothing was making any sense. “What do you mean, her love is the reason I’m here now?”
Amma spoke quietly, and I had to strain to hear he
r. “Lena’s the one who brought you back. I helped her, me and your mamma.”
The words didn’t fit together, so I tried unrolling them out again for myself. Lena and Amma brought me back from the dead, together. And together they had kept it from me until now. I rubbed the scar on my skin. It felt like the truth.
“Since when does Lena know how to raise the dead? If she did, don’t you think she would’ve brought Macon back by now?”
Amma looked at me. I had never seen her so scared. “She didn’t do it on her own. She used the Binding Spell from The Book a Moons. Binds death to life.”
Lena had used The Book of Moons.
The Book that had cursed Genevieve and Lena’s whole family for generations, Claiming all the children in Lena’s family for Light or Dark on their sixteenth birthdays. The Book Genevieve had used to bring Ethan Carter Wate back from the dead for only a second—an act she spent the rest of her life paying for.
I couldn’t think. My mind started caving in on itself again, and I couldn’t follow my own thoughts. Genevieve. Lena. The price.