Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“Nonsense. That girl did what she had to do because she loves you.”

Arelia collected their offerings from the ground—the bones, the sparrow, the moonstones.

“Nothing can make Lena go Dark, Ethan. She has to choose it.”

“But she thinks she’s Dark because she killed Macon. She thinks she’s already chosen.”

“But she hasn’t,” Liv said. She was standing a few feet away, to give us some privacy.

Link was sitting on an old stone bench, a few steps behind her. “Then we have to find her and tell her.” He didn’t act like he just found out that I’d died and been brought back to life. He acted like everything was the same. I went over and sat down on the bench next to Link.

Liv looked over at me. “Are you all right?”

Liv. I couldn’t look at her. I’d been jealous and hurt, and I had dragged Liv into the middle of my own broken mess of a life. All because I thought Lena didn’t love me anymore. But I was stupid, and I was wrong. Lena loved me so much, she was willing to risk everything to save me.

I had given up on Lena, after she had refused to give up on me. I owed her my life. It was as simple as that.

My fingers touched something carved into the edge of the bench. Words.

IN THE COOL, COOL, COOL

OF THE EVENING

It was the song that was playing at Ravenwood the first night I met Macon. The coincidence was too much, especially for a world with no coincidences. It had to be some kind of sign.

Sign of what? What I had done to Macon? I couldn’t even think about how Lena must have felt, realizing she had lost him in my place. What if I had lost my mom that way? Would I have been able to look at Lena alive without seeing my mother dead?

“Just a minute.” I pushed off the bench and took off down the path through the trees, the way we had come. I breathed the night air deep into my lungs, because I could still breathe. When I finally stopped running, I stared up at the stars and the sky.

Was Lena staring at the same sky, or one I could never see? Were our moons really so different?

I reached into my pocket for the Arclight, so it could show me how to find her, but it didn’t. Instead, it showed me something else—

Macon had never been like his father, Silas, and they both knew it. He had always been more like his mother, Arelia. A powerful Light Caster, who his father had fallen deeply in love with while he was away at college in New Orleans. Not unlike the way he and Jane had met and fallen in love when he was studying at Duke. And like Macon, his father had fallen in love with his mother before the Transformation. Before his grandfather had convinced Silas a relationship with a Light Caster was an abomination against their kind.

It had taken Macon’s grandfather years to tear his mother and father apart. By that time, he and Hunting and Leah were born. His mother had been forced to use her powers as a Diviner to escape Silas’ rage and his uncontrollable urge to feed. She had fled to New Orleans with Leah. His father would never have let her take his sons.

His mother was the only one Macon could turn to now. The only one who would understand that he had fallen in love with a Mortal. The greatest act of sacrilege against his kind, the Blood Incubus.

The Demon Soldier.

Macon hadn’t told his mother he was coming, but she would be expecting him. He climbed up from the Tunnels into the sweet heat of a New Orleans summer night. Fireflies blinked in the darkness, and the smell of magnolias was overpowering. She was waiting for him on the porch, tatting lace in an old wooden rocking chair. It had been a long time.

“Mamma, I need your help.”

She put down her needle and hoop and rose from the chair. “I know. Everything’s ready, cher.”

There was only one thing powerful enough to stop an Incubus, aside from one of its own kind.

An Arclight.

They were considered medieval devices, weapons created to control and imprison the most powerful of the Harmers, the Incubus. Macon had never seen one before. There were very few left, and they were almost impossible to find.

But his mother had one, and he needed it.

Macon followed her into the kitchen. She opened a small cabinet that served as an altar to the spirits. She unwrapped a small wooden box with Niadic script, the ancient Caster language, around the perimeter.

THE ONE WHO SEEKS IT SHALL FIND