Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“Lila knows I would do no such thing.” She squeezed me tighter. “I really only came out here to see you.”

“Thanks, Aunt Marian. It’s been a rough couple of days.”

“Olivia told me. A Caster bar, an Incubus, and a Vex, all in the same night. I’m afraid Amma will never let you visit me again.” She didn’t mention the trouble I imagined Liv was in today.

“There’s something else.” Lena. I couldn’t bring myself to say her name.

Marian pushed my hair out of my eyes. “I heard, and I’m sorry. But I brought you something.” She opened her bag and took out a small wooden box with a worn design carved into its surface. “As I said, I really came here to see you and give you this.” She held out the box. “It was your mother’s, one of her most valuable possessions. It’s older than the rest of her collection. I think she would want you to have it.”

I took it. The box was heavier than it looked.

“Be careful. It’s delicate.”

I lifted the lid gently, expecting to find another one of my mother’s treasured Civil War relics—a scrap of a flag, a bullet, a piece of lace. Something marked by history and time. But when I opened the box, it was something else, marked by a different kind of history and time. I knew what it was, the second I saw it.

The Arclight, from the visions.

The Arclight Macon Ravenwood gave to the girl he loved.

Lila Jane Evers.

I had seen it stitched on an old pillow once that belonged to my mom when she was little. Jane. My Aunt Caroline said only my grandmother called her that, but my grandmother died before I was born, so I’d never heard it myself. Aunt Caroline was wrong. My grandmother wasn’t the only one who had called her Jane.

Which meant—

My mom was the girl in the visions.

And Macon Ravenwood was the love of my mother’s life.

6.17

The Arclight

My mom and Macon Ravenwood. I dropped the Arclight as if it had stung me. The box fell, and the ball rolled harmlessly across the grass, like a child’s toy instead of some kind of supernatural prison.

“Ethan? What is it?” It was obvious Marian had no idea I recognized the Arclight. I had never mentioned it when I told her about the visions. I hadn’t thought much about it. It was another little detail about the Caster world I didn’t understand.

But this one little detail mattered.

If this was the Arclight from the vision, then my mother had loved Macon the way I loved Lena. The way my father had loved her.

I needed to know if Marian knew where my mother had gotten it, or who had given it to her. “Did you know?”

She bent down and picked up the sphere, its dark surface gleaming in the sunlight. She slid it back into the box. “Did I know what? Ethan, you aren’t making any sense.”

The questions were coming faster than my mind could process them. How did my mother meet Macon Ravenwood? How long were they together? Who else knew? And the biggest one…

What about my dad?

“Did you know my mom was in love with Macon Ravenwood?”

Marian’s face crumbled, which told me everything. She had only meant to give away a gift from my mom, not my mother’s deepest secret. “Who told you that?”

“You did. When you handed me the Arclight Macon gave to the girl he loved. My mother.”

Marian’s eyes filled with tears, but they didn’t fall. “The visions. They were about Macon and your mother.” She was figuring it out, piecing it together.

I remembered the night when I first met Macon. Lila Evers, he had said. Lila Evers Wate, I had corrected.