Marian put her teacup down on the table. “Teenagers—everything is so apocalyptic.”
Amma shook her head. “Some things are meant to be and some take some doin’. This one isn’t done just yet.”
I could feel Lena’s hand shaking in mine. “They’re right, L. Everything’s going to be okay.”
She yanked her hand away. “Everything’s going to be okay? My mother, a Cataclyst, is trying to kill me. A vision from a hundred years ago just clarified that my whole family has been cursed since the Civil War. My sixteenth birthday is in two months, and that’s the best you can do?”
I took her hand again, gently, because she let me. “I saw the same vision you did. The Book chooses who it takes. Maybe it won’t choose you.” I was clutching at straws, but they were all I had.
Amma looked at Marian, slamming her saucer on the table. The cup rattled against it.
“The Book?” Macon’s eyes drilled down on me.
I tried to look him in the eye, but I couldn’t do it. “The Book in the vision.”
Don’t say another word, Ethan.
We should tell them. We can’t do this alone.
“It’s nothing, Uncle M. We don’t even know what the visions mean.” Lena wasn’t going to give in, but after tonight I felt like I had to. We had to. Everything was spiraling out of control. I felt like I was drowning and I couldn’t even save myself, let alone Lena.
“Maybe the visions mean not everyone in your family goes Dark when they’re Claimed. What about Aunt Del? Reece? Think cute little Ryan is going to the dark side when she can heal people?” I said, moving closer to her.
Lena shrank back into her chair. “You don’t know anything about my family.”
“But he’s not wrong, Lena.” Macon looked at her, exasperated.
“You’re not Ridley. And you’re not your mother,” I said, as convincingly as I could.
“How do you know? You’ve never even met my mother. And by the way, neither have I, except in psychic attacks that no one can seem to prevent.”
Macon tried to sound reassuring. “We were unprepared for these sorts of attacks. I didn’t know she could Travel. I didn’t know she shared some of my powers. It is not a gift afforded to Casters.”
“Nobody seems to know anything about my mother, or me.”
“That’s why we need the Book.” This time, I looked right at Macon as I said it.
“What is this book you keep talking about?” Macon was losing his patience.
Don’t tell him, Ethan.
We have to.
“The Book that cursed Genevieve.” Macon and Amma looked at each other. They already knew what I was going to say. “The Book of Moons. If that’s how the curse was Cast, something in it should tell us how to break it. Right?” The room fell silent.
Marian looked at Macon. “Macon—”
“Marian. Stay out of this. You’ve interfered more than enough already, and the sun will rise just minutes from now.” Marian knew. She knew where to find The Book of Moons, and Macon wanted to make sure she kept her mouth shut.
“Aunt Marian, where’s the Book?” I looked her in the eye. “You have to help us. My mom would’ve helped us, and you’re not supposed to take sides, right?” I wasn’t playing fair, but it was true.
Amma raised her hands, then dropped them into her lap. A rare sign of surrender. “What’s done is done. They’ve already started pullin’ the thread, Melchizedek. That old sweater’s bound to unravel, anyhow.”
“Macon, there are protocols. If they ask, I’m Bound to tell them,” Marian said. Then she looked up at me. “The Book of Moons isn’t in the Lunae Libri.”
“How do you know?”
Macon stood to leave, turning to both of us. His jaw was clenched, his eyes dark and angry. When he finally spoke, his voice echoed over the chamber, over all of us. “Because that’s the book for which this archive was named. It is the most powerful book from here to the Otherworld. It is also the book that cursed our family, for eternity. And it’s been missing for over a hundred years.”
12.01
It Rhymes with Witch
On Monday morning, Link and I drove down Route 9, stopping at the fork in the road to pick up Lena. Link liked Lena, but there was no way he was driving up to Ravenwood Manor. It was still the Haunted Mansion to him.
If he only knew. Thanksgiving break had only been a long weekend, but it felt a lot longer, considering that Twilight Zone of a Thanksgiving dinner, the vases flying between Macon and Lena, and our journey to the center of the earth, all without leaving the Gatlin city limits. Unlike Link, who had spent the weekend watching football, beating up his cousins, and trying to determine whether or not the cheese ball had onions in it this year.
But according to Link, there was trouble of another kind brewing, and this morning it sounded equally dangerous. Link’s mom had been burning up the lines for the last twenty-four hours, whispering on the phone with the long cord and the kitchen door closed. Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Asher had shown up after dinner, and the three of them had disappeared into the kitchen—the War Room. When Link went in, pretending to grab a Mountain Dew, he didn’t catch much. But it was enough to figure out his mom’s end game. “We’ll get her outta our school, one way or another.” And her little dog, too.
It wasn’t much, but if I knew Mrs. Lincoln, I knew enough to be worried. You could never underestimate the lengths women like Mrs. Lincoln would go to protect their children and their town from the one thing they hated most—anyone different from them. I should know. My mom had told me the stories about the first few years she’d lived here. The way she told it, she was such a criminal even the most God-fearing church ladies got bored of reporting on her; she did the marketing on Sunday, dropped by any church she liked or none at all, was a feminist (which Mrs. Asher sometimes confused with communist), a Democrat (which Mrs. Lincoln pointed out practically had “demon” in the word itself), and worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow). Beyond that, beyond not being a member of the right church or the DAR or the National Rifle Association, was the fact that my mom was an outsider.
But my dad had grown up here and was considered one of Gatlin’s sons. So when my mom died, all the same women who had been so judgmental of her when she was alive dropped off cream-of-something casseroles and crock pot roasts and chili-ghetti with a vengeance. Like they were finally getting the last word. My mom would have hated it, and they knew it. That was the first time my dad went into his study and locked the door for days. Amma and I had let the casseroles pile up on the porch until they took them away and went back to judging us, like they always had.
They always got the last word. Link and I both knew it, even if Lena didn’t.
Lena was sandwiched between Link and me in the front seat of the Beater, writing on her hand. I could just make out the words shattered like everything else. She wrote all the time, the way some people chewed gum or twirled their hair; I don’t even think she realized it. I wondered if she would ever let me read one of her poems, if any of them were about me.
Link glanced down. “When are you gonna write me a song?”
“Right after I finish the one I’m writing for Bob Dylan.”
“Holy crap.” Link slammed on the brakes at the front entrance of the parking lot. I couldn’t blame him. The sight of his mother in the parking lot before eight in the morning was terrifying. And there she was.
The parking lot was crowded with people, way more than usual. And parents; other than after the window incident, there hadn’t been a parent in the parking lot since Jocelyn Walker’s mom came to yank her out of school during the film about the reproductive cycle in Human Development.
Something was definitely going on.
Link’s mom handed a box to Emily, who had the whole cheerleading squad—Varsity and JV—papering every car in the parking lot with some kind of neon flyer. Some were flapping in the wind, but I could make out a few from the relative safety of the Beater. It was like they were running some kind of campaign, only without a candidate.
SAY NO TO VIOLENCE AT JACKSON!
ZERO TOLERANCE!
Link turned bright red. “Sorry. You guys gotta get out.” He crouched down in the driver’s seat, so low it looked like nobody was driving the car. “I don’t want my mom to beat the crap outta me in front a the whole cheerleadin’ squad.”
I slunk down, reaching across the seat to open the door for Lena. “We’ll see you inside, man.”
I grabbed Lena’s hand and squeezed it.
Ready?
As ready as I’m going to be.
We ducked down between the cars around the side of the lot. We couldn’t see Emily, but we could hear her voice from behind Emory’s pickup.
“Know the signs!” Emily was approaching Carrie Jensen’s window. “We’re formin’ a new club at school, the Jackson High Guardian Angels. We’re goin’ to help keep our school safe by reportin’ acts a violence or any unusual behavior we see around school. Personally, I think it’s the responsibility a every student at Jackson to keep our school safe. If you want to join, we’re havin’ a meetin’ in the cafeteria after eighth period.” As Emily’s voice faded in the distance, Lena’s hand tightened around mine.
What does that even mean?
I have no idea. But they’ve totally lost it. Come on.
I tried to pull her up, but she pulled me back down. She shrunk back next to the tire. “I just need a minute.”
“Are you okay?”
“Look at them. They think I’m a monster. They formed a club.”
“They just can’t stand outsiders, and you’re the new girl. A window broke. They need someone to blame. This is just a—”
“Witch hunt.”
I wasn’t going to say that.
But you were thinking it.
I squeezed her hand and my hair stood on end.
You don’t have to do this.
Yes I do. I let people like them run me out of my last school. I’m not going to let it happen again.
As we stepped out from the last row of cars, there they were. Mrs. Asher and Emily were packing the extra boxes of flyers into the back of their minivan. Eden and Savannah were handing out flyers to the cheerleaders and any guy who wanted to see a little of Savannah’s legs or her cl**vage. Mrs. Lincoln was a few feet away talking to the other mothers, most likely promising to add their houses to the Southern Heritage Tour if they made a couple of phone calls to Principal Harper. She handed Earl Petty’s mom a clipboard with a pen attached to it. It took me a minute to realize what it was—there was no way.
It looked like a petition.
Mrs. Lincoln noticed us standing there and zeroed in on us. The other mothers followed her gaze. For a second, they didn’t say anything. I thought maybe they felt bad for me and they were going to put down their flyers, pack up their minivans and station wagons, and go home. Mrs. Lincoln, whose house I’d slept at almost as many times as my own. Mrs. Snow, who was technically my third cousin to some degree removed. Mrs. Asher, who bandaged my hand after I sliced it open on a fishing hook when I was ten. Miss Ellery, who gave me my first real haircut. These women knew me. They’d known me since I was a kid. There was no way they were going to do this, not to me. They were going to back down.