Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

The bugs got hungrier, the heat got hotter, and the whole town got crazier. But more than anything, it was still the heat we all noticed. It was proof that no matter who was scoring or dating or lying in a bed at County Care—underneath everything, from the minute you woke up in the morning to the minute you fell asleep, and all the minutes in between—something was wrong and it wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse.

But I didn’t need to feel the heat outside to prove it to me. I had all the proof I needed inside—in our kitchen. Amma was practically connected to our old stove on a cellular level, and when something was going on in her head, it found its way into the kitchen. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with her, and she sure wasn’t going to tell me. I could only piece it together from the few clues she left, in the language she used the most—cooking.

Clue number one: rubbery chicken. Rubbery chicken was useful, mostly in terms of establishing a state of mind and a timeline, like rigor mortis on a cop show. For Amma, who was famous in three counties for her chicken ’n’ dumplings, rubbery chicken meant two things: a) she was distracted, and b) she was busy. She didn’t just forget to take the chicken out of the oven. She didn’t have time to deal with it once it was out. So the chicken sat too long in the heat, and even longer on the cooling rack. Waiting for Amma to come around, like the rest of us. I wanted to know where she was and what she was up to all that time.

Clue number two: a general lack of pie. Pie was gone, and when it wasn’t, there was no sign of Amma’s famous lemon meringue. Which meant a) she wasn’t speaking to the Greats, and b) she definitely wasn’t speaking to Uncle Abner. I hadn’t checked the liquor cabinet, but a lack of Jack Daniels would seal the deal for Uncle Abner, too.

I wondered if her little trip to the bokor had anything to do with that.

Clue number three: the sweet tea was unspeakably sweet, which meant a) the Sisters were sneaking into the kitchen and dumping sugar in the pitcher, the way they did with salt in the gravy, b) Amma was so out of it she couldn’t keep track of how many cups of sugar she was dumping in, or c) something was wrong with me.

Maybe all three, but Amma was up to something, and I was determined to find out what. Even if I had to ask that bokor myself.

Then there was the song. With every passing day, I heard it with greater frequency, like one of those Top 40 songs that plays on the radio so much that it’s always stuck in your head.

Eighteen Moons, eighteen fears,

The cries of Mortals fade, appear,

Those unknown and those unseen

Crushed in the hands of the Demon Queen…

The Demon Queen? Seriously? After the literal translation of the Vex verse, I didn’t want to imagine what a run-in with a Demon Queen could mean. I hoped my mom had confused it with homecoming queen.

But the songs were never wrong.

I tried not to think about the cries of Mortals or the hands of the Demon Queen. But the thoughts I refused to think, the conversations that remained unspoken, the fears I never confessed, the dread building inside me—I couldn’t escape them. Especially not at night, when I was safe in my room.

Safe, and the most vulnerable.

I wasn’t the only one.

Even within the Bound walls of Ravenwood, Lena was just as vulnerable. Because she had something from her mother, too. And I knew she was touching one of the things in that dented metal box when I saw the orange glow of the flames—

The fire ignited, flames curling around the gas burner one by one, until they created a single, beautiful blazing circle on the stovetop. Sarafine watched, fascinated. She forgot about the pot of water on the counter. She forgot about dinner most nights now. She couldn’t think about anything but the flames. Fire had energy—power that defied even the laws of science. It was impossible to control, leveling miles of forest in minutes.

Sarafine had been studying fire for months. Watching theoretical ones on the science channel, and real ones on the news. The television was on all the time. The second there was a mention of a fire, she would stop whatever she was doing and rush to watch. But that wasn’t the worst part. She had started using her powers to set small fires. Nothing dangerous, only tiny ones in the woods. They were like campfires. Harmless.

Her fascination with fire had started around the same time as the voices. Maybe the voices drove her to watch things burn; it was impossible to know. The first time Sarafine heard the low voice in her mind, she had been doing the laundry.

This is a miserable, worthless life—a life equal to death. A waste of the greatest gift the Caster world has to offer. The power to kill and destroy, to use the very air we breathe to fuel your weapon. The Dark Fire offers itself. It offers freedom.

The laundry basket dropped, and clothes spilled out onto the floor. Sarafine knew the voice wasn’t her own. It didn’t sound like her, and the thoughts were not her own. Yet they were in her mind.

The greatest gift the Caster world has to offer. The gifts of a Cataclyst—that’s what it meant. It’s what happened when a Natural went Dark. And no matter how much Sarafine wanted to pretend it wasn’t true, she was Dark. Her yellow eyes reminded her every time she looked in the mirror. Which wasn’t often. She couldn’t stand the sight of herself, or the possibility that John might see those eyes again.

Sarafine wore dark sunglasses all the time, even though John didn’t care what color her eyes were. “Maybe they’ll brighten up this dump,” he said one day, looking around the tiny apartment. It was a dump—peeling paint and broken tiles, heat that never worked and electricity that shorted out all the time. But Sarafine would never admit it, because it was her fault they were living there. Nice places didn’t rent to teenagers who were obviously runaways.

They could’ve afforded a better place. John always came up with plenty of money. It wasn’t hard to find things to pawn, when you could make objects disappear right out of people’s pockets or store windows. He was an Evanescent, like most of history’s great magicians—and thieves. But he was also Light, using his gift in this vile way to keep them alive.

To keep her alive.

The voices reminded her of that every day.

If you leave, he can use his parlor tricks to impress Mortal girls, and you can do what you were born for.

She shook the voices out of her head, but the words left a shadow, a phantom image that never entirely disappeared. The voices were the strongest when she was watching things burn—the way she was now.