Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

“What—what is it?” I barely choked out the words. “How do I get rid of it?”

The bokor walked over to the terrarium filled with writhing snakes, and lifted the lid. “That’s two questions again. I can only answer one.”

“What’s watching me?” My voice was shaking, and my hands—every part of me.

The bokor lifted a snake, its body ringed in black, red, and white. The snake coiled around his arm, but the bokor held its head as if he knew it might strike.

“I’ll show you.”

He led us to the center of the room, close to the source of the nauseating smoke, a huge pillar that resembled a candle. It looked like it had been made by hand. Lucille crouched under a nearby table, trying to avoid the fumes—or maybe the snake or the crazy guy carrying what looked like eggshells over to a bowl at our feet. He crushed the shells with one hand, careful to keep his other hand on the head of the snake.

“The ti-bon-age is meant to be one. Never separated.” He closed his eyes. “I will call Kalfu. We need the help of a powerful spirit.”

Link elbowed me. “I don’t know if I like the sound a that.”

The bokor closed his eyes and started to speak. I recognized traces of Twyla’s French Creole, but it was mixed with a language I’d never heard before. The words were muffled, as if the bokor was talking to someone close enough to hear him whisper.

I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to see, but it couldn’t be any weirder than Aunt Prue outside her body or the Lilum inside Mrs. English’s.

The smoke started to swirl slowly, growing denser. I watched as it curved and began to take shape.

The bokor was chanting louder now.

The smoke started to change from black to gray, and the snake hissed. Something was forming from the smoke. I’d seen this before, in Bonaventure Cemetery, when Twyla called my mother’s Sheer.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the smoke. The body formed from the bottom up, just as my mom’s had. The feet and the legs.

“What the hell?” Link tried to back up, but he tripped.

The torso and the arms.

The face was the final element to emerge.

It stared back at me.

A face I would have known anywhere.

My own.

I jumped away, scrambling backward.

“Holy crap!” Link shouted, but his voice seemed far away.

Panic gripped me like two hands wrapping themselves around my neck. The figure started to fade.

But before it did, the Sheer spoke. “I’m waiting.”

Then it was gone.

The bokor stopped chanting, the sickening candle blew out, and it was over.

“What was that?” I was staring at the bokor. “Why is there a Sheer that looks like me?”

He walked back to the terrarium and dropped the snake inside with the others. “It doesn’t look like you. It’s your ti-bon-age. The other half a your soul.”

“What did you say?”

The bokor took a match and relit the candle. “Half your soul is with the livin’, and half’s with the dead. You left it behind.”