Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles 1)

10.31

Hallow E’en

The only days of the year that the Gatlin County Library was closed were bank holidays—like Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Easter. As a result, these were the only days the Gatlin County Caster Library was open, which apparently wasn’t something Marian could control.

“Take it up with the county. Like I said, I don’t make the rules.” I wondered what county she was talking about—the one I had lived in my whole life, or the one that had been hidden from me for just as long.

Still, Lena seemed almost hopeful. For the first time, it was as if she actually believed there might be a way to prevent what she had considered the inevitable. Marian couldn’t give us any answers, but she anchored us in the absence of the two people we relied on most, who hadn’t gone anywhere, but seemed far away just the same. I didn’t say anything to Lena, but without Amma I was lost. And without Macon, I knew Lena couldn’t even find her way to lost.

Marian did give us something, Ethan and Genevieve’s letters, so old and delicate they were almost transparent, and everything she and my mother had collected about the two of them. A whole stack of papers in a dusty brown box, with cardboard printed to look like wood paneling on the sides. Although Lena loved poring over the prose—“the days without you bleed together until time is nothing more than another obstacle we must overcome,”—all it seemed to amount to was a love story with a really bad, and really Black ending. But it was all we had.

Now all we had to do was figure out what we were looking for. The needle in the haystack, or in this case, the cardboard box. So we did the only thing we could do. We started looking.

After two weeks, I’d spent more time with Lena on the locket papers than I would have thought possible. The more we read through the papers, the more it seemed like we were reading about ourselves. At night, we stayed up late trying to solve the mystery of Ethan and Genevieve, a Mortal and a Caster, desperate to find a way to be together, against impossible odds. At school, we faced some steep odds ourselves, just getting through another eight hours at Jackson, and it was only getting harder. Every day, there was another scheme to drive Lena away, or us apart. Especially if that day was Halloween.

Halloween was generally a pretty loaded holiday at Jackson. For a guy, anything involving costumes was an accident waiting to happen. And then, there

was always the stress of whether or not you made the guest list to Savannah Snow’s annual blowout. But Halloween took on a whole new level of stress when the girl you were crazy about was a Caster.

I had no idea what to expect when Lena picked me up for school, a couple of blocks from my house, safely around the corner from the eyes in the back of Amma’s head.

“You’re not dressed up,” I said, surprised.

“What are you talking about?”

“I thought you’d be wearing a costume or something.” I knew I sounded like an idiot the second the words came out of my mouth.

“Oh, you think Casters dress up on Halloween and fly around on brooms?” She laughed.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Sorry to disappoint you. We just dress for dinner like we do on any other holiday.”

“So it’s a holiday for you guys, too.”

“It’s the most sacred night of the year, and the most dangerous—the most important of the four High Holidays. It’s our version of New Year’s Eve, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.”

“What do you mean by dangerous?”

“My gramma says it’s the night when the veil between this world and the Otherworld, the world of spirits, is the thinnest. It’s a night of power and a night of remembrance.”

“The Otherworld? Is that like the afterlife?”

“Sort of. It’s the realm of spirits.”

“So Halloween really is all about spirits and ghosts.” She rolled her eyes.

“We remember the Casters who were persecuted for their differences. Men and women who were burned for using their gifts.”

“Are you talking about the Salem Witch Trials?’

“I guess that’s what you call them. There were Witch Trials all along the eastern seaboard, not just in Salem. All over the world, even. The Salem Witch Trials are just the ones your textbooks mention.” She said “your” like it was a dirty word, and today of all days, maybe it was.

We drove past the Stop & Steal. Boo was sitting by the stop sign at the corner. Waiting. He saw the hearse and loped slowly after the car. “We should just give that dog a ride already. He must be tired, following you around day and night.”

Lena glanced in her rearview mirror. “He’d never get in.”

I knew she was right. But as I turned back to look at him, I could have sworn he nodded.