Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“She meant Marian,” I said defensively.

I avoided her eyes and busied myself with my shovel. Lena and I were back to being, well, us. There wasn’t a second I didn’t think about the proximity of her hand to my hand, her face to mine. There wasn’t a moment when we were awake that I could bear to have her voice out of my head, after I’d lost it for so long. She was the last person I spoke to at night and the first person I reached for in the morning. After everything we had been through, I would’ve traded places with Boo if I could. That’s how badly I never wanted to let her out of my sight.

Amma had even started setting a place for Lena at the table. At Ravenwood, Aunt Del kept a pillow and a comforter folded next to the downstairs couch for me. Nobody said a word about curfews or rules or seeing too much of each other. Nobody expected us to trust the world with each other if we weren’t together.

The summer had gone beyond that. You couldn’t un-happen things. Liv had happened. John and Abraham had happened. Twyla and Larkin, Sarafine and Hunting—they weren’t people I could just forget. School would be the same if you ignored the fact that my best friend was an Incubus and the second hottest girl in school was a declawed Siren. General Lee and Principal Harper, Savannah Snow and Emily Asher, they would never change.

Lena and I would never be the same.

Link and Ridley were so supernaturally altered, they weren’t even in the same universe.

Liv was hidden in the library, happy to be safely tucked away in the stacks for a while. I had only seen her once since the night of the Seventeenth Moon. She was no longer training to be a Keeper, but she seemed okay with it.

“We both know I would never have been happy watching from the sidelines,” she’d said. I knew it was true. Liv was an astronomer, like Galileo; an explorer, like Vasco da Gama; a scholar, like Marian. Maybe even a mad scientist, like my mom.

I guess we all needed to start over.

Plus, I got the feeling Liv liked her new teacher as much as her old one. Liv’s education had been turned over to a certain former Incubus who spent his days out of sight—in Ravenwood or his favorite study, an old haunt in the Caster Tunnels—with Liv and the Head Caster Librarian as his only Mortal companions.

It wasn’t how I expected the summer to turn out. Then again, when it came to Gatlin, I never knew what was going to happen. At some point, I had stopped trying.

Stop thinking and start digging.

I dropped my shovel and pushed up against the side of the grave. Lena leaned over on her stomach, her ratty Converse kicking up behind her. I put my hands around her neck and pulled her mouth to mine until our kiss made the graveyard spin.

“Kids, kids. Keep it clean. We’re ready.” Link leaned on his shovel and stood back to survey his handiwork. Macon’s grave was open, not that there was a coffin down there.

“Well?” I wanted to get this over with. Ridley pulled a small bundle of black silk out of her pocket and held it in front of her.

Link pulled back as if she had shoved a torch in his face. “Watch it, Rid! Don’t get that thing anywhere near me. Incubus kryptonite, remember?”

“Sorry, Superman, I forgot.” Ridley climbed down into the hole, holding the bundle carefully with one hand, and placed it in the bottom of Macon Ravenwood’s empty grave. My mom may have saved Macon with the Arclight, but we saw it for what it was—dangerous. A supernatural prison I didn’t want to see my best friend trapped inside. Six feet under was where the Arclight belonged, and Macon’s grave was the safest place any of us could think of.

“Good riddance,” Link said as he pulled Ridley up out of the grave. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say when good defeats evil at the end of the movie?”

/> I looked at him. “Have you ever read a book, man?”

“Dig.” Ridley rubbed dirt off her hands. “At least, that’s what I say.”

Link piled shovelful after shovelful of dirt over the bundle while Ridley watched, without taking her eyes off the grave.

“Finish it,” I said.

Lena nodded, jamming her hands in her pockets. “Let’s get out of here.”

The sun began to rise over the magnolias in front of my mom’s grave. It didn’t bother me anymore, because I knew she wasn’t there. She was somewhere, everywhere else, still watching out for me. Macon’s hidden room. Marian’s archive. Our study at Wate’s Landing.

“Come on, L.” I pulled Lena by the arm. “I’m sick of the dark. Let’s go watch the sunrise.” We took off, running down the grassy hill like kids—past the graves and magnolias, past the palmettos and oaks tangled in Spanish moss, past the uneven rows of grave markers and weeping angels and the old stone bench. I could feel her shivering in the early morning air, but neither of us wanted to stop. So we didn’t, and by the time we reached the bottom of the hill, we were almost falling, almost flying. Almost happy.

We didn’t see the eerie golden glow pierce through small cracks and fissures in the dirt shoveled over Macon’s grave.

And I didn’t check the iPod in my pocket, where I might have noticed a new song in the playlist.

Eighteen Moons.

But I didn’t check, because I didn’t care. No one was listening. No one was watching. No one existed in the world but the two of us—

The two of us, and the old man in the white suit and string tie, who stood at the crest of the hill until the sun began to rise and the shadows fell back into their crypts.