Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“Lena told me it’s not a hard one. Some kind of hiding spell Larkin Cast.”

“Ever wonder if it could be a trap?” The flashlight was shaking so badly, the light was barely shining on the grating.

“Only one way to find out.” I shut my eyes and stepped through. One minute I was standing in the overgrown bushes behind the DAR, and the next I was inside the stone stairwell leading down into the heart of the Lunae Libri. I shivered when I crossed the Charmed threshold into the library, but not because I felt anything supernatural. The shiver, the wrongness, came from not feeling anything different at all. Air was air on either side of the grate, even if it was pitch-black. I didn’t feel magical right now, not anywhere in Gatlin or beneath it. I felt bruised and angry but hopeful. I had been convinced Lena had feelings for John. But if there was a possibility I was wrong—that John and Ridley were influencing her—it was worth being on the wrong side of the grate again.

Link stumbled through the doorway after me and dropped his flashlight. It clattered down the stairwell in front of us, and we stood in the dark, until the torches lining the steep passageway lit themselves one by one. “Sorry. That thing always throws me off.”

“Link, if you don’t want to do this—” I couldn’t see his face in the shadows.

It took a second before I heard his voice in the dark. “Of course I don’t wanna do this, but I gotta do it. I mean, I’m not sayin’ Rid’s the love a my life. She’s not. That would be crazy. But what if Lena was tellin’ the truth, and Rid wants to change? What if Vampire Boy is doin’ somethin’ to her, too?” I doubted Ridley was under anyone’s influence except her own. But I didn’t say anything.

This wasn’t just about Lena and me. Ridley was still under Link’s skin, in a bad way. You don’t want to fall in love with a Siren. Falling for a Caster was rough enough.

I followed him down into the flickering, torch-lit darkness of the world beneath our town. We left Gatlin for the Caster world, a place where anything could happen. I tried not to think back to a time when that was all I wanted.

Whenever I stepped through the stone archway bearing the carved words DOMUS LUNAE LIBRI, I was entering another world, a parallel universe. By now, some parts of the world were familiar—the smell of the mossy stone, the musky scent of parchment dating back to the Civil War and beyond, the smoke drifting up from the torches hovering near the carved ceilings. I could smell the damp walls, hear the occasional drip of underground water making its way down to the patterns in the stone floor. But there were other parts that would never be familiar. The darkness at the edges of the stacks, the sections of the library no Mortal had ever seen. I wondered how much my mother had seen.

We reached th

e base of the stairs.

“What now?” Link found his flashlight and aimed it at the column next to him. A menacing stone griffin’s head snarled back. He pulled the flashlight away, and it flickered on a fanged gargoyle. “If this is a library, I’d hate to see a Caster prison.”

I heard the sound of the flames erupting into light. “Wait for it.”

One by one, the torches surrounding the rotunda burst into flame, and we could see the carved colonnade, with rows of fierce mythological creatures, some Caster, some Mortal, snaking around every pedestal.

Link cringed. “This place is messed up. Just sayin’.”

I touched a woman’s face twisted into carved agony in stone flames. Link ran his hand over another face, revealing massive rows of canines. “Check out the dog. It looks like Boo.” He looked again and realized the fangs were growing out of a man’s head. He yanked his hand away.

There was a swirl of carved rock that appeared to be made of both stone and smoke. A face emerged from the twists and folds of the column, and it looked familiar. It was hard to tell because there was so much rock around it. The face seemed to be fighting the stone, trying to push its way out toward me. For a second, I thought I saw the lips on the face move, as if it was trying to speak.

I backed away. “What the hell is that?”

“What’s what?” Link stood next to me, staring at the column, which was just a column swirled with curving waves and spirals again. The face had been swallowed back into the pattern, like a head disappearing under the sea’s waves. “The ocean, maybe? Smoke from a fire? Why do you care?”

“Forget it.” I couldn’t, even if I didn’t understand it. I knew that face in the stone. I had seen it somewhere before. This room was eerie, warning that the Caster world was a Dark place, no matter whose side you were on.

Another torch ignited, and the stacks of old books, manuscripts, and Caster Scrolls revealed themselves. They radiated out from the rotunda in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and disappeared into the darkness beyond. The last torch burst into flame, and I could see the curving mahogany desk where Marian should have been sitting.

It was empty. Though Marian always said the Lunae Libri was a place of old magic, neither Dark nor Light, without her the whole library felt pretty Dark.

“No one’s here.” Link sounded defeated.

I grabbed a torch off the wall and handed it to him, taking another for myself. “They’re down here.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

I plowed ahead into the stacks as if I knew where I was going. The air was thick with the smell of the bent and crumbling spines of old books and ancient scrolls, the dusty oak shelves straining under the weight of hundreds of years and centuries of words. I held my torch up to the nearest shelf. “Toes: to Caste Hair on Your Maiden’s. Tongues for Binding and Casting. Toffee: Casts Hidden Inside. We must be in the T’s.”

“Destruction of Mortal Life, Total. That should be in the D’s.” Link reached for the book.

“Don’t touch that. It’ll burn your hand.” I had learned the hard way, from The Book of Moons.

“Shouldn’t we at least hide it or something? Behind the Toffee one?” Link had a point.