Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

“The weird thing is, I keep hearing that phrase—the Wheel of Fate. Aunt Prue mentioned it, too, when I fell asleep in her room. It must have something to do with the Eighteenth Moon, or my mom wouldn’t have brought it up.”

Lena stood up and held out her hand. “Come on.”

I got up after her. “What are you doing?”

“Leaving Ridley to solve her own problems. Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“To solve yours.”

10.09

Good-Eye Side

Apparently Lena believed the answer to my problems was waiting at the Gatlin County Library, because five minutes later we were there. A chain-link fence surrounded the building, which looked more like a construction site than a library now. The missing half of the roof was covered with enormous blue plastic tarps. The doorway was flanked by the carpet that had been ripped up from the concrete floor, destroyed as much by the water as the fire. We stepped over the charred boards and walked inside.

The opposite side of the library was sealed off with heavy plastic. It was the one that had burned. I didn’t want to know what it looked like over there. The side where we were standing was just as depressing. The stacks were gone, replaced by boxes of books that looked like they’d been sorted into piles.

The destroyed. The partly destroyed. The salvageable.

Only the card catalog sat there, untouched. We would never get rid of that thing.

“Aunt Marian! You here?” I wandered past the boxes, expecting to see Marian in her stocking feet, walking around with an open book.

Instead, I saw my dad, sitting on a box behind the card catalog, talking enthusiastically to a woman.

There was no way.

Lena stepped in front of me so they wouldn’t notice me looking like I was going to puke. “Mrs. English! What are you doing here? And Mr. Wate! I didn’t know that you knew our teacher.” She even managed a smile, as if running into them here was a pleasant coincidence.

I couldn’t stop staring.

What the hell is he doing here with her?

If my dad was flustered, it didn’t show. He looked excited—happy, even, which was worse. “Did you know Lilian knows almost as much about the history of this county as your mom did?”

Lilian? My mom?

Mrs. English looked up from the books scattered on the floor around her, and our eyes locked. For a second, her pupils looked slit-shaped, like a cat’s. Even the glass eye that wasn’t real.

L, did you see that?

See what?

But now there was nothing to see—only our English teacher blinking over her glass eye as she watched my father with her good one. Her hair was a graying mess that matched the lumpy gray sweater she was wearing over her shapeless

dress. She was the toughest teacher at Jackson, if you ignored the loophole most people chose to exploit—the Bad-Eye Side. I never imagined that she existed outside the classroom. But here she was, existing all over my dad. I felt sick.

My dad was still talking. “She’s helping me with my research for The Eighteenth Moon. My book, remember?” He turned back to Mrs. English, grinning. “They don’t hear a word we say anymore. Half my students are listening to their iPods or talking on their cell phones. They might as well be deaf.”

Mrs. English looked at him strangely and laughed. I realized I’d never heard her laugh before. The laugh itself wasn’t disturbing. Mrs. English laughing at my father’s jokes was. Disturbing and gross.

“That’s not entirely true, Mitchell.”

Mitchell?

It’s his name, Ethan. Don’t panic.