I heard the words coming out of my mouth, and I wanted to take them back as soon as I said them. They had sounded a lot better in my head. She looked back at me, trying to see if I was serious. I was, but I couldn’t say that. Instead, I changed the subject. “So what’s Reece’s superpower?”
“She’s a Sybil, she reads faces. She can see what you’ve seen, who you’ve seen, what you’ve done, just by looking into your eyes. She can open up your face and literally read it, like a book.” Lena was still studying my face.
“Yeah, who was that? That other woman Ridley turned into for a second, when Reece was staring at her? Did you see that?”
Lena nodded. “Macon wouldn’t tell me, but it had to be someone Dark. Someone powerful.”
I kept asking. I had to know. It was like finding out I’d just had dinner with a bunch of aliens. “What can Larkin do? Charm snakes?”
“Larkin’s an Illusionist. It’s like a Shifter. But Uncle Barclay’s the only Shifter in the family.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Larkin can Spellcast, or make anything look like anything he wants, for a spell—people, things, places. He creates illusions, but they’re not real. Uncle Barclay can Shiftcast, which means he can actually change any object into another object, for as long as he wants.”
“So your cousin changes how things seem, and your uncle changes how they are?”
“Yeah. Mostly, Gramma says their powers are too close. It happens sometimes with parents and their children. They’re too much alike, so they’re always fighting.” I knew what she was thinking, that she would never know that for herself. Her face clouded over, and I made a stupid attempt to lighten the mood.
“Ryan? What’s her power? Dog fashion designer?”
“Too soon to tell. She’s only ten.”
“And Macon?”
“He’s just… Uncle Macon. There’s nothing Uncle Macon can’t do, or wouldn’t do for me. I spent a lot of time with him growing up.” She looked away, avoiding the question. She was holding something back, but with Lena, it was impossible to know what. “He’s like my father, or how I imagine my father.” She didn’t have to say anything else. I knew what it was like to lose someone. I wondered if it was worse to never have them at all.
“What about you? What’s your gift?”
As if she had just one. As if I hadn’t seen them in action since the first day of school. As if I hadn’t been trying to get up the nerve to ask her this question since the night she sat on my porch in her purple pajamas.
She paused for a minute, collecting her thoughts, or deciding if she was going to tell me; it was impossible to know which. Then she looked at me, with her endless green eyes. “I’m a Natural. At least Uncle Macon and Aunt Del think I am.”
A Natural. I was relieved. It didn’t sound as bad as a Siren. I didn’t think I could have handled that. “What exactly does that mean?”
“I don’t even know. It’s not really one thing. I mean, supposedly a Natural can do a lot more than other Casters.” She said it quickly, almost like she was hoping I wouldn’t hear, but I did.
More than other Casters.
More. I wasn’t sure how I felt about more. Less, I could have handled less. Less would’ve been good.
“But as you saw tonight, I don’t even know what I can do.” She picked at the quilt between us, nervous. I pulled on her hand until she was lying on the bed next to me, propped up on one elbow.
“I don’t care about any of that. I like you just the way you are.”
“Ethan, you barely know anything about me.”
The drowsy warmth was washing through my body, and to be honest, I couldn’t have cared less what she was saying. It felt so good just to be near her, holding her hand, with only the white quilt between us. “That’s not true. I know you write poetry and I know about the raven on your necklace and I know you love orange soda and your grandma and Milk Duds mixed into your popcorn.”
For a second, I thought she might smile. “That’s hardly anything.”
“It’s a start.”
She looked me right in the eye, her green eyes searching my blue ones. “You don’t even know my name.”
“Your name is Lena Duchannes.”
“Okay, well, for starters, it’s not.”
I pushed myself all the way up, and let go of her hand. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not my name. Ridley wasn’t lying about that.” Some of the conversation from earlier started to come back to me. I remembered Ridley saying something about Lena not knowing her real name, but I didn’t think she had meant literally.
“Well, what is it then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that some kind of Caster thing?”
“Not really. Most Casters know their real names, but my family’s different. In my family, we don’t learn our birth names until we turn sixteen. Until then, we have other names. Ridley’s was Julia. Reece’s was Annabel. Mine is Lena.”
“So who’s Lena Duchannes?”
“I’m a Duchannes, that much I know. But Lena, that’s just a name my gramma started calling me, because she thought I was skinny as a string bean. Lena Beana.”
I didn’t say anything for a second. I was trying to take it all in. “Okay, so you don’t know your first name. You’ll know in a couple of months.”
“It’s not that simple. I don’t know anything about myself. That’s why I’m so crazy all the time. I don’t know my name and I don’t know what happened to my parents.”
“They died in an accident, right?”
“That’s what they told me, but nobody really talks about it. I can’t find any record of the accident, and I’ve never seen their graves or anything. How do I even know it’s true?”
“Who’s going to lie about something as creepy as that?”
“Have you met my family?”
“Right.”
“And that monster downstairs, that—witch, who almost killed you? Believe it or not, she used to be my best friend. Ridley and I grew up together living with my gramma. We moved around so much we shared the same suitcase.”
“That’s why you guys don’t have much of an accent. Most people would never believe you had lived in the South.”
“What’s your excuse?”
“Professor parents, and a jar full of quarters every time I dropped a G.” I rolled my eyes. “So Ridley didn’t live with Aunt Del?”
“No. Aunt Del just visits on the holidays. In my family, you don’t live with your parents. It’s too dangerous.” I stopped myself from asking my next fifty questions while Lena raced on, as if she’d been waiting to tell this story for about a hundred years. “Ridley and I were like sisters. We slept in the same room and we were home-schooled together. When we moved to Virginia, we convinced my gramma to let us to go to a regular school. We wanted to make friends, be normal. The only time we ever spoke to Mortals was when Gramma took us on one of her outings to museums, the opera, or lunch at Olde Pink House.”
“So what happened when you went to school?”
“It was a disaster. Our clothes were wrong, we didn’t have a TV, we turned in all our homework. We were total losers.”
“But you got to hang out with Mortals.”
She wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve never had a Mortal friend until I met you.”
“Really?”
“I only had Ridley. Things were just as bad for her, but she didn’t care. She was too busy making sure no one bothered me.”
I had a hard time imagining Ridley protecting anyone.
People change, Ethan.
Not that much. Not even Casters.
Especially Casters. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
She pulled her hand away from me. “Ridley started acting strange, and then the same guys who had ignored her started following her everywhere, waiting for her after school, fighting over who would walk her home.”
“Yeah, well. Some girls are just like that.”
“Ridley isn’t some girl. I told you, she’s a Siren. She could make people do things, things they wouldn’t normally want to do. And those boys were jumping off the cliff, one by one.” She twisted her necklace around her fingers and kept talking. “The night before Ridley’s sixteenth birthday, I followed her to the train station. She was scared out of her mind. She said she could tell she was going Dark, and she had to get away before she hurt someone she loved. Before she hurt me. I’m the only person Ridley ever really loved. She disappeared that night, and I never saw her again until today. I think after what you saw tonight, it’s pretty obvious she went Dark.”
“Wait a second, what are you talking about? What do you mean going Dark?”
Lena took a deep breath and hesitated, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to tell me the answer.
“You have to tell me, Lena.”
“In my family, when you turn sixteen, you’re Claimed. Your fate is chosen for you, and you become Light, like Aunt Del and Reece, or you become Dark, like Ridley. Dark or Light, Black or White. There’s no gray in my family. We can’t choose, and we can’t undo it once we’re Claimed.”
“What do you mean, you can’t choose?”
“We can’t decide if we want to be Light or Dark, good or evil, like Mortals and other Casters can. In my family, there’s no free will. It’s decided for us, on our sixteenth birthday.”
I tried to understand what she was saying, but it was too crazy. I’d lived with Amma long enough to know there was White and Black magic, but it was hard to believe that Lena had no choice about which one she was.
Who she was.
She was still talking. “That’s why we can’t live with our parents.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“It didn’t used to be that way. But when my gramma’s sister, Althea, went Dark, their mother couldn’t send Althea away. Back then, if a Caster went Dark, they were supposed to leave their home and their family, for obvious reasons. Althea’s mother thought she could help her fight it, but she couldn’t, and terrible things started happening in the town where they lived.”
“What kind of things?”
“Althea was an Evo. They’re incredibly powerful. They can influence people like Ridley can, but they can also Evolve, morph into other people, into anyone. Once she Turned, unexplained accidents started happening in town. People were injured and eventually a girl drowned. That’s when Althea’s mother finally sent her away.”
I thought we had problems in Gatlin. I couldn’t imagine a more powerful version of Ridley hanging around, full-time. “So now none of you can live with your parents?”
“Everyone decided it would be too hard for parents to turn their backs on their children if they went Dark. So ever since then, children live with other family members until they’re Claimed.”