Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles 3)

he Prophet as the original. That’s when I realized what she had done.

It wasn’t a poem, not the way she had read it. It wasn’t even a hymn anymore.

It was a prophecy.

12.20

Hybrid

I was standing on the top of the white water tower, with my back to the sun. My headless shadow fell across the warm, painted metal, disappearing off the edge and into the sky.

I’M WAITING.

There he was. My other half. The dream staggered on like a movie I’d seen so many times that I started to cut and recut it myself, as it erupted into flashes—

Hard hitting.

Chucks kicking.

Deadweight.

Falling…

“Ethan!”

I rolled out of my bed and landed on my bedroom floor.

“No wonder Incubuses keep showing up in your room. You sleep like the dead.” John Breed was standing over me. From where I was lying, he looked twenty feet tall. He also looked like he could kick my ass better than I had been kicking my own in my dream.

It was a weird thought. But what came next was weirder.

“I need your help.”

John was sitting in the chair at my desk, which I had started to think of as the Incubus chair.

“I wish you guys could figure out some way to sleep.” I pulled my faded Harley Davidson shirt over my head. Ironic, considering I was sitting across from John.

“Yeah. That’s not really an option.” He stared up at my blue ceiling.

“Then I wish you could figure out that the rest of us need to—”

John cut me off. “It’s me.”

“What?”

“Liv told me everything. The One Who Is Two guy—it’s me.”

“Are you sure?” I wasn’t even sure I believed him.

“Yeah. I figured it out today at your aunt’s funeral.”

I glanced at the clock. He should have said yesterday, and I should’ve been asleep. “How?”

He got up and paced across the room. “I always knew it was me. I was born to be two things. But at the funeral, I knew this was something I had to do. I felt it, when the Seer was talking.”

“Amma?” I knew Aunt Prue’s funeral had been emotional for my family, the whole town really, but I hadn’t expected it to affect John. He wasn’t part of either of those things. “What do you mean, you always knew?”

“It’s my birthday tomorrow, right? My Eighteenth Moon.” He didn’t sound too happy about it, and I couldn’t blame him. Considering it was bringing on the end of the world and everything.