Beautiful Redemption (Caster Chronicles 4)

I put my head in my hands. At that particular moment, I would have been plenty fine with bad pie in a box. “And where can a guy learn to catch a catfish around here?”

There was no answer.

I looked up to see Aunt Prue dozing in her rocking chair, the folded paper she’d been fanning herself with resting in her lap. There was no waking Aunt Prue from one of her naps. Not before, and probably not now.

I sighed, gently taking the makeshift fan out of her hand. It unfolded partway, revealing the edge of a drawing. It looked like one of her maps, only half-drawn, more of a doodle than anything else. Aunt Prue couldn’t sit still long without starting to sketch out her whereabouts, even in the Otherworld.

Then I realized it wasn’t a map of His Garden of Perpetual Peace—or if it was, the graveyard world was bigger than I thought.

This wasn’t just any map.

It was a map of the Lunae Libri.

“How can there be a Lunae Libri in the Otherworld? It’s not a grave, right? Nobody died there?”

My mom didn’t look up from her copy of Dante. She hadn’t looked up when I swung open the front door either. She couldn’t hear a word anyone said when she was lost in those pages. Reading was her own version of Traveling.

I stuck my

hand between her face and the yellowed pages, wiggling my fingers. “Mom.”

“What?” My mom looked as startled as a person could look when you hadn’t actually snuck up on them.

“Let me save you some time. I saw the movie. The office building catches fire.” I closed the book and held out Aunt Prue’s folded paper. My mom took it, smoothing it out in her hands.

“I knew Dante was ahead of his time.” She smiled, turning over the paper.

“Why was Aunt Prue drawing this?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. She just kept staring at the paper.

“If you’re going to start asking yourself why your aunt does anything, you’ll be busy for the rest of eternity.”

“Why did she need a map?” I asked.

“What your aunt needs is to find someone else to talk to besides you.”

That was all she said. Then she gave up, standing and slipping her arm around my shoulders. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

I followed my mom right down the street that wasn’t a street, until we came to a plot that wasn’t just a plot, and a familiar grave that wasn’t even a grave. I stopped walking as soon as I saw where we were.

My mom laid her hand on Macon’s gravestone, a wistful smile creeping across her face. She pushed on the stone, and it swung open. Ravenwood’s front hall stood there, ghostly and deserted, as if nothing had changed except that Lena’s family had gone to Barbados or something.

“So?” I couldn’t bring myself to step inside. What use was Ravenwood without Lena or her family? It almost made me feel worse to be here in her home and still so far away.

My mom sighed. “So. You’re the one who wanted to go to the Lunae Libri.”

“You mean the secret stairway into the Tunnels? Will it lead into the Lunae Libri?”

“Well, I don’t mean the Gatlin County Library.” My mom smiled.

I pushed past her into the hallway and took off running. By the time she caught up to me, I had made it all the way to Macon’s old room. I flipped up the carpet and yanked open the trapdoor.

There they were.

The invisible stairs leading down into the Caster darkness.

And beyond, the Caster Library.

CHAPTER 5