Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“You mean not Lena? Or not me?”

“You matter, whether you like it or not, and so does Lena. That’s not a choice.” She pushed the hair out of my eyes, the way my mom used to. “The truth is the truth. ‘Rarely pure and never simple,’ as Oscar Wilde would say.”

“I don’t understand.”

“‘All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.’ ”

“More Oscar Wilde?”

“Gali

leo, the father of modern astronomy. Another man who rejected his place in the Order of Things—the idea that the sun didn’t revolve around the Earth. He knew, perhaps better than anyone, that we don’t get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.”

I took the box, because deep down I knew what she was saying, even if I didn’t know anything about Galileo and knew even less about Oscar Wilde. I was part of all this, whether I wanted to be or not. I couldn’t run from it, any more than I could stop the visions.

Now I had to decide what to do about it.

6.17

Jump

When I crawled into bed that night, I was dreading my dreams. They say you dream about the last thing you were thinking about before you fell asleep, but the more I tried to not think about Macon and my mom, the more I thought about them. Exhausted from all that thinking about not thinking, it was only a matter of time before I sunk through the mattress into the blackness, and my bed became a boat.…

The willows were waving over my head.

I could feel myself rocking back and forth. The sky was blue, cloudless, surreal. I turned my head and looked to the side. Splintery wood, painted a peeling shade of blue that looked a lot like the ceiling in my bedroom. I was in a dinghy or a rowboat, floating along the river.

I sat up and the boat rocked. A small white hand fell to the side, dragging a slender finger through the water. I stared at the ripples disturbing the reflection of the perfect sky, otherwise cool and calm as glass.

Lena was lying across from me at the end of the boat. She wore a white dress, the kind you saw in old movies, where everything is shot in black and white. Lace and ribbon and tiny pearl buttons. She was holding a black parasol, and her hair, her nails, even her lips, were black. She lay curled on her side, slumped against the dinghy, her hand dragging along behind us as we floated.

“Lena?”

She didn’t open her eyes, but she smiled. “I’m cold, Ethan.”

I looked at her hand, which was now up to her wrist in the water. “It’s summer. The water’s warm.” I tried to crawl over to her, but the boat rocked, and she slumped farther over the edge, exposing the black Chucks beneath her dress.

I couldn’t move.

Now the water was up to her arm, and I could see strands of her hair beginning to float on the surface.

“Sit up, L! You’re going to fall in!”

She laughed and dropped the parasol. It floated, spinning, in the ripples of water behind us. I lurched toward her, and the boat rocked violently.

“Didn’t they tell you? I’ve already fallen.”

I lunged for her. This couldn’t be happening, but it was. I knew because I was waiting for the sound of the splash.

When I hit the edge of the boat, I opened my eyes. The world was rocking, and she was gone. I looked down, and all I could see was the murky greenish-brown water of the Santee and her dark hair. I reached into the water. I couldn’t think.

Jump or stay in the boat.

The hair floated downward, unruly, quiet, breathtaking, like some kind of mythical sea creature. There was a white face, blurred by the depths of the river. Trapped beneath the glass.

“Mom?”

I sat up in bed, drenched and coughing. Moonlight was streaming into my window. It was open again. I walked to the bathroom and drank water out of my hand until the coughing subsided. I stared into the mirror. It was dark, and I could barely make out my features. I tried to find my eyes within the shadows. But instead I saw something else… a light in the distance.