Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

That, and Lucille lying rolled up beneath it, the light hitting her fur as it blinked. She yawned to see us, slowly pulling herself up one paw at a time.

“You’re gettin’ to be a tease, Lucille.” Link squatted on his heels to scratch her ears. Lucille meowed, or growled, depending on how you looked at it. “Aw, I forgive you.” Everything was a compliment to Link.

“What now?” I faced the crossroads.

“Stairway to hell, or the Yellow Brick Road? Why don’t you give your 8 Ball a shake and see if it’s ready to play again.” Link stood up.

I took the Arclight out of my pocket. It was still glowing, flashing on and off, but the emerald color that led us to Savannah was gone. Now it had turned a deep blue, like one of those satellite photos of the Earth.

Liv touched the sphere, the color deepening under her fingertip. “The blue is so much more intense than the green. I think it’s getting stronger.”

“Or your superpowers are getting stronger.” Link gave me a shove, and I almost dropped the Arclight.

“And you wonder why this thing stopped working?” I pulled it away from him, annoyed.

Link checked me with his shoulder. “Try to read my mind. Wait, no. Try to fly.”

“Stop messing around,” Liv snapped. “You heard Ethan’s mom. We don’t have much time. The Arclight will work or it won’t. Either way, we need an answer.”

Link straightened up. The weight of what we had seen at the graveyard was on all our shoulders now. The strain was beginning to show.

“Shh. Listen—” I took a few steps forward, in the direction of the tunnel carpeted in tall grass. You could actually hear the birds chirping now.

I raised the Arclight and held my breath. I wouldn’t have minded if it went black and sent us down the other path, the one with the shadows, the rusty fire escapes crawling down the sides of dark buildings, the unmarked doors. As long as it gave us an answer.

Not this time.

“Try the other way,” Liv said, never taking her eyes off the light. I retraced my steps.

No change.

No Arclight, and no Wayward. Because deep down I knew that without the Arclight, I wouldn’t have been able to find my way out of a paper bag, especially not in the Tunnels.

“I guess that’s the answer. We’re screwed.” I pocketed the ball.

“Great.” Link started down the sunlit path without another thought.

“Where are you going?”

“No offense, but unless you have some kinda secret Wayward clue about where to go, I’m not goin’ down there.” He looked back at the darker path. “The way I see it, we’re lost no matter what, right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Or if you look at it the other way, we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of gettin’ things right half the time.” I didn’t try to correct his math. “So I figure we take our chances on Oz and tell ourselves things are finally lookin’ up. ’Cause what do we have to lose?” It was hard to argue with Link’s twisted logic when he tried to be logical.

“Got a better idea?”

Liv shook her head. “Shockingly, no.”

We headed for Oz.

The tunnel really was right out of a page of one of my mom’s tattered old L. Frank Baum books. Willows stretched over the dusty path, and the underground sky was open and endless and blue.

The scene was calm, which had the opposite effect on me. I was used to the shadows. This path seemed too idyllic. I expected a Vex to fly down over the hills in the distance any second.

Or a house to drop on my head when I least expected it.

My life had taken a stranger turn than I could’ve ever imagined. What was I doing on this path? Where was I headed really? Who was I to take on a battle between powers I didn’t understand—armed with a runaway cat, a uniquely bad drummer, a pair of garden shears, and an Ovaltine-drinking teen Galileo?