“But can it help us?”
“I don’t know. We don’t even really know what we’re looking for.” She frowned, suddenly less enthusiastic. “Besides, Spoken Casting isn’t as easy as it looks, and I’ve never done it before. Things can go wrong.” Was she kidding?
“Things can go wrong? Things worse than turning into a Dark Caster on your sixteenth birthday?” I grabbed the Book out of her hands, burning the daisies off the tips of the gloves. “Why did we dig up a grave to find this thing and waste weeks trying to figure out what it says, if we aren’t even going to try?” I held the Book up until one of the gloves started to smoke.
Lena shook her head. “Give me that.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll try, but I have no idea what will happen. This isn’t usually how I do it.”
“It?”
“You know, the way I use my powers, all the Natural stuff. I mean, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be natural. I don’t even know what I’m doing, half the time.”
“Okay, so this time you do, and I’ll help. What do I need to do? Draw a circle? Light some candles?”
Lena rolled her eyes. “How about sit over there.” She pointed to a spot a few feet away. “Just in case.”
I was expecting a little bit more preparation, but I was just a Mortal. What did I know? I ignored Lena’s order to put some distance between myself and her first Spoken Cast, but I did take a few steps back. Lena held the Book in one hand, which was a feat in itself because it was incred-ibly heavy, and took a deep breath. Her eyes ran slowly down the page as she read.
“‘Unravel the tie, twist and wind
Cast this Bind
So I may find
That which I yearn for…’”
She looked up and spoke the last line, clear and strong.
“‘That which I seek.’”
For a second, nothing happened. The clouds still lingered overhead, the air was still cold. It didn’t work. Lena shrugged her shoulders. I knew she was thinking the same thing. Until we both heard it, a sound like a rush of air echoing through a tunnel. The tree behind me caught fire. It actually ignited, from the bottom up. Flames raced up the trunk, roaring, spreading out to every branch. I had never seen anything catch fire that quickly.
The wood started to smoke immediately. I pulled Lena away from the fire, coughing. “Are you okay?” She was coughing, too. I pushed her black curls away from her face. “Well, obviously that didn’t work. Unless you were looking to toast some really big marshmallows.”
Lena smiled weakly. “I told you things could go wrong.”
“That’s an understatement.”
We stared up at the burning cypress. That was five days and counting.
Four days and counting, the storm clouds rolled in, and Lena stayed home sick. The Santee flooded and the roads were washed out north of town. The local news chalked it up to global warming, but I knew better. As I sat in Algebra II, Lena and I argued about the Book, which wasn’t going to help my grade on the pop quiz.
Forget about the Book, Ethan. I’m sick of it. It’s not helping.
We can’t forget about it. It’s your only chance. You heard your uncle. It’s the most powerful book in the Caster world.
It’s also the Book that cursed my whole family.
Don’t give up. The answer has to be somewhere in the Book.
I was losing her, she wouldn’t listen to me, and I was about to fail my third quiz of the semester. Great.
By the way, can you simplify 7x – 2(4x – 6)?
I knew she could. She was already in Trig.
What does that have to do with anything?
Nothing. But I’m failing this quiz.
She sighed.
A Caster girlfriend had some perks.
Three days and counting, the mudslides started and the upper field slid into the gym. The squad wouldn’t be cheering for a while, and the Disciplinary Committee was going to have to find a new place to hold their witch trials. Lena was still not back in school, but she was in my head the whole day. Her voice grew smaller, until I could barely hear it over the chaos of another day at Jackson High.
I sat alone in the lunchroom. I couldn’t eat. For the first time since I met Lena, I looked at everyone around me and felt a pang of, I don’t know, something. What was it? Jealousy? Their lives were so simple, so easy. Their problems were Mortal-sized, tiny. The way mine used to be. I caught Emily looking at me. Savannah bounced into Emily’s lap, and with Savannah came the familiar snarl. It wasn’t jealousy. I wouldn’t trade Lena for any of this.
I couldn’t imagine going back to such a tiny life.
Two days and counting, Lena wouldn’t even speak to me. Half the roof blew off the DAR headquarters when the high winds hit. The Member Registries Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Asher had spent years compiling, the family trees going back to the May-flower and the Revolution, were destroyed. The Gatlin County patriots would have to prove their blood was better than the rest of ours, all over again.
I drove to Ravenwood on my way to school and banged on the door as hard as I could. Lena wouldn’t come out of the house. When I finally got her to open the door, I could see why.
Ravenwood had changed again. Inside, it looked like a maximum-security prison. The windows had bars and the walls were smooth concrete, except for in the front hallway, where they were orange and padded. Lena was wearing an orange jumpsuit with the numbers 0211, her birthday, stamped on it, her hands covered in writing. She looked kind of cool, actually, her messy black hair falling around her. She could even make a prison jumpsuit look good.
“What’s going on, L?”
She followed my gaze over her shoulder. “Oh, this? Nothing. It’s a joke.”
“I didn’t know Macon joked.”
She pulled at a loose string on her sleeve. “He doesn’t. It’s my joke.”
“Since when can you control Ravenwood?”
She shrugged. “I just woke up yesterday and this is what it looked like. It must have been on my mind. The house just listened, I guess.”
“Let’s get out of here. Prison is only making you more depressed.”
“I could be Ridley in two days. It’s pretty depressing.” She shook her head sadly and sat down on the edge of the veranda. I sat down next to her. She didn’t look at me, but instead stared down at her prison-issue white sneakers. I wondered how she knew what prison sneakers looked like.
“Shoelaces. You got that part wrong.”
“What?”
I pointed. “They take away your shoelaces in real prisons.”
“You have to let go, Ethan. It’s over. I can’t stop my birthday from coming, or the curse. I can’t pretend I’m a regular girl anymore. I’m not like Savannah Snow or Emily Asher. I’m a Caster.”
I picked up a handful of pebbles from the bottom step of the veranda and chucked one as far as I could.
I won’t say good-bye, L. I can’t.
She took a pebble from my hand and threw it. Her fingers brushed against mine and I felt the tiny pulse of warmth. I tried to memorize it.
You won’t have a chance to. I’ll be gone, and I won’t even remember I cared about you.
I was stubborn. I couldn’t listen to this. This time, the pebble hit a tree. “Nothing will change the way we feel about each other. That’s the one thing I know for sure.”
“Ethan, I may not even be capable of feeling.”
“I don’t believe that.” I flung the rest of the stones out into the overgrown yard. I don’t know where they landed; they didn’t make a sound. But I stared out that way, as hard as I could, swallowing the lump in my throat.
Lena reached out toward me, then hesitated. She put her hand down without so much as a touch. “Don’t be mad at me. I didn’t ask for any of this.”
That’s when I snapped. “Maybe not, but what if tomorrow is our last day together? And I could be spending it with you, but instead you’re here, moping around like you’re already Claimed.”
She got up. “You don’t understand.” I heard the door slam behind me as she went back into the house, her cellblock, whatever.
I hadn’t had a girlfriend before so I wasn’t prepared to deal with all this—I didn’t even know what to call it. Especially not with a Caster girl. Not having a better idea of what to do, I stood up, gave up, and drove back to school—late, as usual.
Twenty-four hours and counting. A low-pressure system settled over Gatlin. You couldn’t tell if it was going to snow or hail, but the skies didn’t look right. Today anything could happen. I looked out the window during history and saw what looked like some kind of funeral procession, only for a funeral that hadn’t happened yet. It was Macon Ravenwood’s hearse followed by seven black Lincoln town cars. They drove past Jackson High as they made their way through town and out to Ravenwood. Nobody was listening to Mr. Lee drone on about the upcoming Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill—not the most well-known of Civil War battles, but it was the one the people of Gatlin County were most proud of.
“In 1864, Sherman ordered Union Major General John Hatch and his troops to cut off the Charleston and Savannah Railroad to keep Confederate soldiers from interferin’ with his ‘March to the Sea.’ But, due to several ‘navigational miscalculations,’ the Union forces were delayed.”
He smiled proudly, writing navigational miscalculations out on the chalkboard. Okay, the Union was stupid. We got it. That was the point of the Battle of Honey Hill, the point of the War Between the States, as it had been taught to all of us, since kindergarten. Neglecting, of course, the fact that the Union had actually won the war. In Gatlin, everyone kind of talked about it like a gentlemanly concession on the part of the more gentlemanly South. The South had taken, historically speaking, the high road, at least according to Mr. Lee.
But today, nobody was looking at the board. Everyone was staring out the windows. The black Lincolns followed the hearse in a convoy down the street, behind the athletic field. Now that Macon had come out, so to speak, he seemed to enjoy making a spectacle of himself. For a guy who only came out at night, he managed to command a lot of attention.
I felt a kick in my shin. Link was hunched over the desk, so Mr. Lee couldn’t see his face. “Dude. Who do you think is in all those cars?”
“Mr. Lincoln, would you like to tell us what happened next? Especially since your father will be commandin’ the Cavalry tomorrow?” Mr. Lee was staring at us with his arms crossed.
Link pretended to cough. Link’s dad, a browbeaten shell of a man, had the honor of commanding the Cavalry in the Reenactment since Big Earl Eaton died last year, which was the only way a reenactor ever advanced in rank. Someone had to die. It would have been a big deal in Savannah Snow’s family. Link, he wasn’t too big on the whole Living History scene.
“Let’s see, Mr. Lee. Wait, I got it. We, uh, won the battle and lost the war, or was it the other way around? ’Cause around here, it’s hard to tell sometimes.”