Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

What kind of crappy birthday is that?

The thick sweetness of the air grew worse, and I glanced through an open doorway that led into some kind of hallway kitchen. Cases of Ensure, liquid food, were piled from floor to ceiling. That was the smell—the food that wasn’t food. For these lives that weren’t lives.

For my Aunt Prue, who had slipped away into the vast unknown when she was supposed to be asleep in her bed. My Aunt Prue, who had charted unknown Caster Tunnels with the precision of Amma working on one of her crossword puzzles.

It was all too horrible to be real. But it was. All of it was happening, and not in some Tunnel where space and time was different than in the Mortal world. This was happening in Greater Gatlin County. It was happening in my own hometown, to my own family.

I didn’t know if I could face it. I didn’t want to see Aunt Prue this way. I didn’t want to remember her like this.

Sad doorways and an open can of Ensure, in a puke-peach hall.

I almost turned around, and I would have—but then I reached the other side of the doorway, and the smell of the air changed. We were there. I knew because the doorway was open, and the particular scent of the Sisters crept out. Rose water and lavender, from those little bundles the Sisters kept in their drawers. It was distinctive, that smell, the one I hadn’t paid much attention to all the times I listened to their stories.

“Ethan.” Lena stepped in front of me. I could hear the distant hum of machines beyond her, in the room.

“Come on.” I stepped toward her, but she put her hands on my shoulders.

“You know, she might not be—there.”

I tried to listen, but I was distracted by the sounds of the unknown machines, doing unknown things to my entirely known aunt.

“What are you talking about? Of course she’s there. It says her name, ri

ght there on the door.” Which it did, on the kind of whiteboard you’d find in a college dorm, in faded black dry-erase marker.

STATHAM, PRUDENCE.

“I know her body is there. But even if she’s there, your Aunt Prue, with all the things that make her your Aunt Prue—she might not be there.”

I knew what she was saying, even if I didn’t want to. Which, a thousand times more than anything, I didn’t.

I put my hand on the door. “Are you saying you can tell? The way Link could smell her blood and hear her heart? Would you be able to—find her?”

“Find what? Her soul?”

“Is that something a Natural can do?” I could hear the hope in my voice.

“I don’t know.” Lena looked like she was about to cry. “I’m not sure. I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to do. But I don’t know what.”

She looked away, down to the other end of the hall. I could see a watery streak work its way down the side of her jaw.

“You’re not supposed to know, L. It’s not your fault. This whole thing is my fault. Abraham came looking for me.”

“He didn’t come for you. He came for John.” She didn’t say it, but I heard the rest. Because of me. Because of my Claiming. She changed the subject before I had a chance to say anything. “I asked Uncle Macon what happens to people when they’re in a coma.”

I held my breath, in spite of all the things I did or didn’t believe. “And?”

She shrugged. “He wasn’t sure. But Casters believe the spirit can leave the body under certain circumstances, like Traveling. Uncle M described it as a kind of freedom, like being a Sheer.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad, I guess.” I thought back to the teenage boy, mindlessly writing, and the elderly man with the yo-yo. They weren’t Traveling. They weren’t Sheers. They were stuck in the most Mortal of all conditions. Trapped in broken-down bodies.

No matter what, I couldn’t handle that. Not for Aunt Prue. Especially not for my Aunt Prue.

Without another word, I stepped past Lena and into my aunt’s room.

My Aunt Prudence was the smallest person in the world. As she liked to put it, she bent with every passing year and shrunk with every passing husband—and so she barely came up to my chest, even if she could stand up straight in her thick-soled Red Cross shoes.

But lying there, smack in the middle of that big hospital bed, with every possible kind of tube snaking in and out of her, Aunt Prue looked even smaller. She barely made a dent in the mattress. Slits of light broke through the plastic blinds on one side of her room, painting bars across her motionless face and body. The combined effect looked like a prison hospital ward. I couldn’t look at her face. Not at first.