Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think it. I thought about the basketball playbook, the cafeteria menu, the green pea-soup-colored hallway I was about to walk down. Anything else. Instead, I cocked my head to the side. “Yeah. Girls say that to me all the time.” Idiot. The more nervous I got, the worse my jokes were.

She smiled, a wobbly, crooked smile. “Don’t try to cheer me up. It’s not going to work.” But it was.

I looked back at the front steps. “If you want to know what they’re saying, I can tell you.”

She looked at me, skeptically.

“How?”

“This is Gatlin. There’s nothing even close to a secret here.”

“How bad is it?” She looked away. “Do they think I’m crazy?”

“Pretty much.”

“A danger to the school?”

“Probably. We don’t take kindly to strangers around here. And it doesn’t get much stranger than Macon Ravenwood, no offense.” I smiled at her.

The first bell rang. She grabbed my sleeve, anxious. “Last night. I had a dream. Did you—”

I nodded. She didn’t have to say it. I knew she had been there in the dream with me. “Even had wet hair.”

“Me, too.” She held out her arm. There was a mark on her wrist, where I had tried to hold on. Before she had sunk down into the darkness. I hoped she hadn’t seen that part. Judging from her face, I was pretty sure she had. “I’m sorry, Lena.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I wish I knew why the dreams are so real.”

“I tried to warn you. You should stay away from me.”

“Whatever. I’ll consider myself warned.” Somehow I knew I couldn’t do that—stay away from her. Even though I was about to walk into school and face a huge load of crap, I didn’t care. It felt good to have someone I could talk to, without editing everything I said. And I could talk to Lena; at Greenbrier it felt like I could’ve sat there in the weeds and talked to her for days. Longer. As long as she was there to talk to.

“What is it about your birthday? Why did you say you might not be here after that?”

She quickly changed the subject. “What about the locket? Did you see what I saw? The burning? The other vision?”

“Yeah. I was sitting in the middle of church and almost fell out of the pew. But I found out some things from the Sisters. The initials ECW, they stand for Ethan Carter Wate. He was my great-great-great-great-uncle, and my three crazy aunts say I was named after him.”

“Then why didn’t you recognize the initials on the locket?”

“That’s the strange part. I’d never heard of him, and he’s conveniently missing from the family tree at my house.”

“What about GKD? It’s Genevieve, right?”

“They didn’t seem to know, but it has to be. She’s the one in the visions, and the D must stand for Duchannes. I was gonna ask Amma, but when I showed her the locket her eyes almost fell out of her head. Like it was triple hexed, soaked in a bucket of voodoo, and wrapped in a curse for good measure. And my dad’s study is off-limits, where he keeps all my mom’s old books about Gatlin and the War.” I was rambling. “You could talk to your uncle.”

“My uncle won’t know anything. Where’s the locket now?”

“In my pocket, wrapped in a pouch full of powder Amma dumped all over it when she saw it. She thinks I took it back to Greenbrier and buried it.”

“She must hate me.”

“No more than any of my girl, you know, friends. I mean, friends who are girls.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I sounded. “I think we’d better get to class before we get in even more trouble.”

“Actually, I was thinking about going home. I know I’m going to have to deal with them eventually, but I’d like to live in denial for one more day.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”