Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“No, ma’am.”

Amma knew something, and it wasn’t good, and she wasn’t talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn’t have a single onion in it.

6.14

Bookworm

If it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it’s good enough for me.” Marian winked at me as she pulled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head.

Lucille was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library’s no-pets rule since the place was full of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn’t speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn’t being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn’t know if he even still had one—all in the space of the two longest days of his life.

I still hadn’t talked to Lena. I told myself it was because I was too angry, but that was one of those lies you tell when you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing. The truth was, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to ask the questions, and I was scared to hear the answers. Besides, I wasn’t the one who ran off with some guy on a motorcycle.

“It’s chaos. Dewey decimal is mocking you. I can’t even find one almanac on the history of the moon’s orbital pattern.” The voice from the stacks startled me.

“Now, Olivia…” Marian smiled to herself as she examined the bindings of the books in her hands. It was hard to believe she was old enough to be my mother. With not a streak of gray in her short hair, and not a wrinkle in her golden-brown skin, she didn’t look more than thirty.

“Professor Ashcroft, this isn’t 1876. Times do change.” It was a girl’s voice. She had an accent—British, I think. I’d only heard people talk that way in James Bond movies.

“So has the Dewey decimal system. Twenty-two times, to be exact.” Marian shelved a stray book.

“What about the Library of Congress?” The voice sounded exasperated.

“Give me a hundred more years.”

“The Universal Decimal Classification?” Now irritated.

“This is South Carolina, not Belgium.”

“Perhaps the Harvard-Yenching system?”

“Nobody in this county speaks Chinese, Olivia.”

A blond, lanky girl poked her head out from behind the stacks. “Not true, Professor Ashcroft. At least, not for the summer holidays.”

“You speak Chinese?” I couldn’t help myself. When Marian had mentioned her summer research assistant, she hadn’t told me the girl would be a teenage version of herself. Except for the streaky, honey-colored hair, the pale skin, and the accent, they could have been mother and daughter. Even at first glance, the girl had a vague degree of Marian-ness that was hard to describe and that you wouldn’t find in anyone else in town.

The girl looked at me. “You don’t?” She poked me in the ribs. “That was a joke. In my opinion, people in this country barely speak English.” She smiled and held out her hand. She was tall, but I was taller, and she looked up at me as if she was already confident we were great friends. “Olivia Durand. Liv, to my friends. You must be Ethan Wate, which I find hard to believe, actually. The way Professor Ashcroft talks about you, I was expecting more of a swashbuckler, with a bayonet.”

Marian laughed, and I turned red. “What has she been telling you?”

“Only that you’re incredibly brilliant and brave and virtuous, quite the save-the-day sort. Every bit the son you would expect of the beloved Lila Evers Wate. And that you’ll be my lowly assistant this summer, so I can boss you around all I like.” She smiled at me, and I blanked.

She was nothing like Lena, but nothing like the girls in Gatlin either. Which was in itself more than confusing. Everything she was wearing had a weathered look, from her faded jeans and the random bits of string and beads around her wrists, to her holey silver high-tops, held together with duct tape, and her ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt. She had a big, black plastic watch with crazy-looking dials on the face, caught between the bits of string. I was too embarrassed to say anything.

Marian swooped in to rescue me. “Don’t mind Liv. She’s teasing. ‘Even the gods love jokes,’ Ethan.”

“Plato. And stop showing off.” Liv laughed.

“I will.” Marian smiled, impressed.

“He’s not laughing.” Liv pointed at me, suddenly serious. “‘Hollow laughter in marble halls.’ ”

“Shakespeare?” I looked at her.

Liv winked and yanked on her T-shirt. “Pink Floyd. I can see you’ve got a lot to learn.” A teenage Marian, and not at all what I expected when I signed on for a summer job in the library.

“Now, children.” Marian held out her hand, and I pulled her up from the floor. Even on a hot day like today, she still managed to look cool. Not a hair was out of place. Her patterned blouse rustled as she walked in front of me. “I’ll leave the stacks to you, Olivia. I have a special project for Ethan in the archive.”