Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“And they couldn’t be together. Like us.”

It was a dream, I was sure of it. Because we could speak these terrible truths with a strange remove, as if they were happening to other people. She rested her head on my chest, picking mud off my shirt with her fingers. How had my shirt gotten so muddy? I tried to remember but couldn’t.

“What are we going to do, L?”

“I don’t know, Ethan. I’m scared.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” she whispered.

“So why is it so hard?”

“We’re all wrong. Everything’s all wrong when I’m with you.”

“Does this feel wrong?” I held her tighter.

“No. But how I feel doesn’t matter anymore.” I felt her sigh against my chest.

“Who told you that?”

“No one had to tell me.” I stared into her eyes. They were still gold.

“You can’t go to the Great Barrier. You have to come back.”

“I can’t stop now. I have to see how it ends.”

I played with a strand of her curling black hair. “Why didn’t you have to see how it ended with us?”

She smiled and touched my face. “Because now I know how it ends with you.”

“How does it end?”

“Like this.” She bent over and kissed me, and her hair fell around my face like rain. I pulled up the covers, and she climbed beneath them, folding into my arms. As we kissed, I felt the heat of her touch. We tumbled in the bed. I was on top of her, then she was on top of me. The heat intensified to the point where I couldn’t breathe. I thought my skin was on fire, and when I broke away from her kiss, it was.

We were both on fire, surrounded by flames that rose higher than we could see, and the bed wasn’t a bed at all but a stone slab. It was burning all around us, the yellow flames of Sarafine’s fire.

Lena screamed and clung to me. I looked down from where we were, on top of the massive pyramid of splintered trees. There was a strange circle chiseled into the stone we were lying on, some kind of Dark Caster symbol.

“Lena, wake up! This isn’t you. You didn’t kill Macon. You’re not going Dark. It was the Book. Amma told me everything.”

The pyre had been for us, not Sarafine. I could hear her laughing—or was it Lena? I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. “L, listen to me! You don’t have to do this—”

Lena was screaming. She couldn’t stop screaming.

By the time I woke up, the flames had consumed us both.

“Ethan? Wake up. We have to get going.”

I sat up, breathing hard and dripping with sweat. I held out my hands. Nothing. Not a burn, not so much as a scratch. It was a nightmare. I looked around. Liv and Link were already up. I rubbed my face with my hands. My heart was still pounding, as if the dream was real and I had almost died. I wondered again if it was my dream or Lena’s. I wondered if that was really how it ended for us. Fire and death, just as Sarafine would want it.

Ridley was sitting on a rock, sucking on a lollipop, which was sort of pathetic. During the night, she seemed to have moved from a state of shock to one of denial. She was acting as if nothing happened. No one really knew what to say. She was like one of those war vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who come home and think they’re still on the battlefield.

She was staring at Link, tossing her hair and looking at him expectantly. “Why don’t you come on over here, Hot Rod?”

Link limped over to my backpack and pulled out a bottle of water. “I’ll pass.”

Ridley pushed her shades on top of her head and stared at him even more intently, which made it clear her powers were gone. In the light of day, Ridley’s eyes were as blue as Liv’s.