Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

I wondered whose heart Sarafine had meant.

Maybe it was her own.

11.24

More Wrong Than Right

It was Thanksgiving Day, which meant two things.

A visit from my Aunt Caroline.

And the annual bake-off between Amma’s pecan pie, Amma’s apple pie, and Amma’s pumpkin pie. Amma always won, but the competition was fierce, and the judging the subject of lots of noise around the table.

I was looking forward to it more than usual this year. It was the first time Amma had baked a pie in months, and part of me suspected the only reason she’d done it today was so no one else would notice. But I didn’t care. Between my dad dressed in his sport coat instead of pajamas like last year, Aunt Caroline and Marian playing Scrabble with the Sisters, and the smell of pies in the oven, I almost forgot about the lubbers and the heat, and my great-aunt missing from the table. The hard part was that it reminded me of all the other things I’d been forgetting lately—the things I hadn’t meant to forget. I wondered how much longer I would be able to remember.

There was only one person I could think of who might know the answer to that question.

I stood in front of Amma’s bedroom door for a good minute before I knocked. Getting answers out of Amma was like pulling teeth, if the teeth belonged to a gator. She had always kept secrets. It was as much a part of her as her Red Hots and crossword puzzles, her tool apron and her superstitions. Maybe it was part of being a Seer, too. But this was different.

I’d never seen her walk away from the stove on Thanksgiving while her pies were still baking, or skip making Uncle Abner’s lemon meringue altogether. It was time to grow those kneecaps.

I reached up to knock.

“You gonna come in already or wear a hole in the carpet?” Amma called from inside her room.

I opened the door, prepared to see the rows of shelves lined with mason jars, full of everything from rock salt to graveyard dirt. Bookshelves crammed with cracked volumes that had been handed down, and notebooks with Amma’s recipes. It wasn’t long ago that I realized those recipes might not have anything to do with cooking. Amma’s room had always reminded me of an apothecary, brimming with mystery and the cure for whatever ailed you, like Amma herself.

Not today. Her room was torn apart, the way mine was after I’d dumped the contents of twenty shoe boxes all over my floor. Like she was looking for something she couldn’t find.

The bottles that were usually lined up neatly on the shelves, labels facing out, were pushed together on top of her dresser. Books were stacked on the floor, on her bed, everywhere but on the shelves. Some of them were open—old diaries handwritten in Gullah, the language of her ancestors. There were other things I had never seen in here before—black feathers, branches, and a bucket of rocks.

Amma was sitting in the middle of the mess.

I stepped inside. “What happened in here?”

She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. “Nothin’s what happened. I’m cleanin’ up. Would do you some good to try it in that mess you call a room.” Amma tried to shoo me out, but I didn’t move. “Go on, now. Pies are almost done.”

She pushed past me. In a second, she’d be out in the hall and on her way to the kitchen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I blurted it out, and Amma stopped dead in her tracks. For a second, she didn’t say a word.

“You’re seventeen. I expect there’s more wrong with you than right.” She didn’t turn around.

“You mean like writing with the wrong hand and hating chocolate milk and your scrambled eggs all of a sudden? Forgetting the names of people I’ve known my whole life? Is that the kind of stuff you’re talking about?”

Amma turned around slowly, her brown eyes shining. Her hands were shaking, and she pushed them into the pockets of her apron so I wouldn’t notice.

Whatever was happening to me, Amma knew what it was.

She took a deep breath. Maybe she was finally going to tell me. “I don’t know about any a that. But I’m—lookin’ into it. Might have something to do with all this heat and these darn bugs, the problems the Casters are havin’.”

She was lying. It was the first time Amma had ever given what sounded like a straight answer in her life. Which made it even more crooked.

“Amma, what aren’t you telling me? What do you know?”

“ ‘I know that my Redeemer lives.’ ” She looked at me, defiant. It was a line from a hymn I grew up hearing in church, while making spitballs and trying not to fall asleep.

“Amma.”