Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

The mausoleums and tombs had exploded, littering the ground with hunks of carved stone, bones, and body parts. There was a plastic fawn lying in the dust. It looked like someone had dug up every grave on the hill.

There was a corpse standing at the far end of what used to be the good side of the hill. You could tell it had been buried for a while by the state of decay. The corpse was staring at us, but it had no eyes. The sockets were completely empty. Something was inside it, animating what was left of the body—the way the Lilum had been inside Mrs. English.

Link put up his arm to keep us behind him.

The corpse cocked its head to one side, as if it was listening. Then a dark mist poured out of its eyes, nose, and mouth. The body went slack and dropped to the ground. The mist spiraled like a Vex, then shot across the sky and out of the graveyard.

“Was that a Sheer?” I asked.

Link answered before Lena. “No. It was some kinda Demon.”

“How do you know?” Lena whispered, as if she was afraid she might wake more of the dead.

Link looked away. “The same way a dog knows when it sees another dog.”

“It didn’t look like a dog to me.” I was trying to make him feel better, but we were way past that.

Link stared at the body lying on the ground where the Demon stood only moments ago. “Maybe my mom’s right and this is the End a Days. Maybe she’s gonna get a chance to use her wheat grinder and her gas masks and that inflatable raft after all.”

“A raft? Is that what’s strapped to the roof of your garage?”

Link nodded. “Yeah. For when the waters rise and the Lowcountry floods and God takes his vengeance on all us sinners.”

I shook my head. “Not God. Abraham Ravenwood.”

The ground had finally stopped shaking, but we didn’t notice.

The three of us were shaking so hard, it was impossible to tell.

12.17

Passing Strange

Sixteen bodies were lying in the county mortuary. According to the Shadowing Song from my mom, there should have been eighteen. I didn’t know why the earthquakes had stopped and Abraham’s army of Vexes had disappeared. Maybe destroying the town had lost its appeal once we were gone and the town was, well, destroyed. But if I knew anything about Abraham, there was a reason. All I knew was that this kind of broken math, the place where the rational met the supernatural, was what my life was like now.

And I knew without a doubt that two more bodies would join the sixteen. That’s how much I believed in the songs. Number seventeen and number eighteen. Those were the numbers I had in the back of my mind as I drove out to County Care. The power was out there, too.

And I had a terrible feeling I knew who number seventeen would be.

The backup generator was flickering on and off. I could tell by the way the safety lights were flashing. Bobby Murphy wasn’t at the front desk; in fact, nobody was. Today’s catastrophic events at His Garden of Perpetual Peace weren’t going to raise too many eyebrows at County Care, a place most people didn’t know about until tragedy struck. Sixteen. I wondered if there were even sixteen autopsy tables at the mortuary. I was pretty sure there weren’t.

But a trip to the mortuary was probably a regular event around here. There was more than one revolving door between the dead and the living as you made your way down these hallways. When you walked through the doors of County Care, your universe shrunk, smaller and smaller, until your whole world was your hallway, your nurse, and your eight-by-ten antiseptic peach of a room.

Once you walked in here, you didn’t care much about what happened out there. This place was a kind of in-between world. Especially since every time I took Aunt Prue’s hand, it felt like I ended up in another one.

Nothing seemed real anymore, which was ironic because outside these walls, things were more real than they’d ever been. And if I didn’t figure out what to do about a few of them—like a powerful Lilum from the Demon world, an unpaid blood debt that was destroying Gatlin, and a few larger worlds beyond—there weren’t going to be any antiseptic peaches left to call home.

I walked down the dark hallway toward Aunt Prue’s room. The safety lights flashed on, and I saw a figure in a hospital gown standing at the end of the hallway, holding an IV. Then the safety lights flashed off, and I couldn’t see anything. The lights came on again, and the figure was gone.

The thing is, I could have sworn it was my aunt.

“Aunt Prue?”

The lights went out again. I felt really alone—and not the peaceful kind of alone. I thought I saw something moving in the darkness, and then the safety lights flashed back on.

“What the—” I jumped back, spooked.

Aunt Prue was standing right in front of me, her face inches from mine. I could see every wrinkle, every mark from every tear, and every road, like a map of the Caster Tunnels. She beckoned me with one finger, like she wanted me to follow. Then she held her finger to her lips.