Link felt my hand on his arm and stopped. It was starting to register with him, too; I could see it on his face. “Mom?”
“Ethan, get out of here! Larkin, Link, somebody, go get Uncle Macon!” Lena was screaming. She couldn’t stop. She looked more frightened than I’d ever seen her. I ran toward her.
I could hear the sound of a shell being released from a cannon. Then a sudden flurry of gunfire.
My back slammed into something, hard. I felt my head crack and everything sort of went out of focus for a second.
“Ethan!” I could hear Lena’s voice, but I couldn’t move. I’d been shot. I was sure of it. I fought to stay conscious.
After a few seconds, my eyes came back into focus. I was on the ground, my back against a massive oak. The gunshot must have thrown me backward into the tree. I felt around to see where I’d been hit, but there was no blood. I couldn’t find the bullet’s point of entry. Link was a few feet away, propped awkwardly against another tree. He looked just as out of it as I felt. I got to my feet, stumbling forward toward Lena, but my face slammed right into something and I ended up back on the ground. It felt just like the time I had walked into a sliding glass door at the Sisters’ house.
I hadn’t been shot; this was something else. I’d been hit by a different kind of weapon.
“Ethan!” Lena was screaming.
I got up again and stepped forward slowly. There was a sliding glass door there all right, except this one was some kind of invisible wall encircling the tree and me. I banged on it and my fist smacked against it but it didn’t make a sound. I slammed my palms against it over and over. What else could I do? That’s when I noticed Link banging on his own invisible cage.
Mrs. Lincoln smiled at me, with a smile more wicked than anything Ridley could muster on her best day.
“Let them go!” Lena shrieked.
Out of nowhere, the sky opened up and rain literally poured out of the clouds, like it was being dumped from a bucket. Lena. Her hair was waving wildly. The rain turned to sleet and fell sideways, attacking Mrs. Lincoln from every direction. In a matter of seconds, we were all soaked to the bone.
Mrs. Lincoln, or whoever she was, smiled. There was something about her smile. She looked almost proud. “I’m not going to hurt them. I just want to give us some time to talk.” Thunder rumbled in the sky over her head. “I was hoping I would get a chance to see some of your talents. How I’ve regretted I wasn’t there to help you hone your gifts.”
“Shut up, witch.” Lena was grim. I had never seen her green eyes like this, the steely way they were set on Mrs. Lincoln. Flint hard. Resolute. Full of hate and anger. She looked like she wanted to rip Mrs. Lincoln’s head off, and she looked like she could do it.
I finally understood what Lena had been so worried about all year. She had the power to destroy. I had only seen the power to love. When you discovered you had both, who could figure out what to do with that?
Mrs. Lincoln turned to Lena. “Wait until you realize what you can really do. How you can manipulate the elements. It’s the true gift of a Natural, something we have in common.”
Something they had in common.
Mrs. Lincoln looked up at the sky, the rain running down beside her as if she was holding an umbrella. “Right now you’re making rain showers, but soon you’ll learn to control fire as well. Let me show you. How I do like playing with fire.”
Rain showers? Was she kidding? We were in the middle of a monsoon.
Mrs. Lincoln held up her palm and lightning sliced through the clouds, electrifying the sky. She held up three fingers. Lightning erupted, with the flick of every manicured nail. Once. Lightning struck the ground, kicking up the dirt, two feet away from where Link was trapped. Twice. Lightning burned through the oak behind me, cleaving the trunk neatly in half. A third time. Lightning struck Lena, who simply held up her own outstretched hand. The flash of electricity ricocheted off her, landing instead at Mrs. Lincoln’s feet. The grass around her started to smolder and burn.
Mrs. Lincoln laughed and waved her hand. The fires in the grass died out. She looked at Lena with a glint of pride. “Not bad. I’m happy to see the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
It couldn’t be.
Lena glared at her and turned up both palms, a protective stance. “Yeah? What do they say about the bad apple?”
“Nothing. No one has ever lived to say it.” Then Mrs. Lincoln turned to Link and me in her calico dress and miles of petticoats, with her hair braided down her back. She looked right at us, her golden eyes blazing. “I’m so sorry, Ethan. I hoped our first meeting would be under different circumstances. It’s not every day that you meet your daughter’s first boyfriend.”
She turned to Lena. “Or your daughter.”
I was right. I knew who she was, and what we were dealing with.
Sarafine.
A moment later, Mrs. Lincoln’s face, her dress, her whole body literally started to split down the middle. You could see the skin on either side pulling away like the crumpled wrapper of a candy bar. As her body split down the center, it started to fall like a coat being shrugged from someone’s shoulders. Underneath was someone else.
“I don’t have a mother,” Lena shouted.
Sarafine winced, as if she was trying to look hurt because she was Lena’s mother. It was an undeniable genetic truth. She had the same long, black, curly hair as Lena. Except, where Lena was frighteningly beautiful, Sarafine was simply frightening. Like Lena, Sarafine had long, elegant features, but instead of Lena’s beautiful green eyes, she had the same glowing yellow eyes as Ridley and Genevieve. And the eyes made all the difference.
Sarafine was wearing a dark green corseted velvet dress, kind of modern and Gothic and turn-of-the-century, all at the same time, and tall black motorcycle boots. She literally stepped out of Mrs. Lincoln’s body, which fused back together within seconds, as if someone had sewn up the seam. Leaving the real Mrs. Lincoln collapsed in the grass with her hoopskirt flipped up, revealing her knee-high support hose and her petticoats.
Link was in shock.
Sarafine straightened, shaking free of the weight, shuddering. “Mortals. That body was just insufferable, so awkward and uncomfortable. Stuffing its face every five minutes. Disgusting creatures.”
“Mom! Mom, wake up!” Link pounded his fists against what was obviously some kind of force field. No matter what a dragon she was, Mrs. Lincoln was Link’s dragon, and it must have been hard to see her tossed aside like a piece of inconsequential human trash.
Sarafine waved her hand. Link’s mouth was still moving, but he wasn’t making a sound. “That’s better. You’re lucky I didn’t have to spend all my time in your mother’s body over the last few months. If I had, you’d be dead by now. I can’t tell you the number of times I nearly killed you out of boredom at the dinner table, droning on about your stupid band.”
It all made sense now. The crusade against Lena, the Jackson Disciplinary Committee meeting, the lies about Lena’s school records, even the weird brownies on Halloween. How long had Sarafine been masquerading as Mrs. Lincoln?
In Mrs. Lincoln.
I had never really understood what we were up against until now. The Darkest Caster living today. Ridley seemed so harmless in comparison. No wonder Lena had been dreading this day for so long.
Sarafine looked back at Lena. “You may think you don’t have a mother, Lena, but if that’s true, it’s only because your grandmother and your uncle took you from me. I’ve always loved you.” It was disconcerting how Sarafine could move so easily from one set of emotions to another, from sincerity and regret to disgust and contempt, each emotion as hollow as the next.
Lena’s eyes were bitter. “Is that why you’ve been trying to kill me, Mother?”
Sarafine tried to look concerned, or maybe surprised. It was hard to tell because her expression looked so unnatural, so forced. “Is that what they told you? I was simply trying to make contact—to talk to you. If it hadn’t been for all their Bindings, my attempts would never have put you in any danger, a fact they knew. Of course, I understand their concern. I am a Dark Caster, a Cataclyst. But Lena, you know as well as anyone, I had no choice in that matter. It was decided for me. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you, about my only daughter.”
“I don’t believe you!” Lena spat. But she looked unsure of herself, even as she said it, like she wasn’t sure what to believe.
I checked my cell phone. 9:59. Two hours until midnight.
Link slumped against the tree, his head in his hands. I couldn’t look away from Mrs. Lincoln, lifeless in the grass. Lena was looking at her, too.
“She’s not, you know. Is she?” I had to know, for Link’s sake.
Sarafine tried to look sympathetic. But I could tell she was losing interest in Link and me, which wasn’t good for either of us. “She’ll return to her previously unappealing state soon. Nauseating woman. I’m not interested in her or the boy. I was only trying to show my daughter the true nature of Mortals. How easily they can be influenced, how vindictive they are.” She turned to Lena. “Just a few words from Mrs. Lincoln and look how easily this whole town turned on you. You don’t belong in their world. You belong with me.”
Sarafine turned to Larkin. “Speaking of unappealing states, Larkin, why don’t you show us those baby blues, I mean yellows?”
Larkin smiled and squeezed his eyes shut, reaching his arms over his head like he was stretching after a long nap. But when he opened his eyes again, something was different. He blinked wildly, and with each blink his eyes began to change. You could almost see the molecules rearranging. Larkin transformed, and there standing in his place was a pile of snakes. The snakes began to coil and climb onto each other, until Larkin emerged once again from the twisting heap. He held out his two rattlesnake arms that hissed and crawled back into his leather jacket until they became his hands. Then he opened his eyes. But instead of the green eyes I was used to seeing, Larkin stared back at us with the same golden eyes as Sarafine and Ridley. “Green never was my color. One of the perks of bein’ an Illusionist.”
“Larkin?” My heart sank. He was one of them, a Dark Caster. Things were worse than I thought.
“Larkin, what are you?” Lena looked confused, but only for a second. “Why?”
But the answer was staring right at us, in Larkin’s golden eyes. “Why not?”
“Why not? Oh, I don’t know, how about a little family loyalty?”
Larkin swiveled his head, as the thick gold chain around his neck writhed into a snake, tongue flickering against his cheek. “Loyalty’s not really my thing.”
“You betrayed everyone, your own mother. How can you live with yourself?”
He stuck out his tongue. The snake crawled into his mouth and disappeared. He swallowed. “It’s a whole lot more fun being Dark than Light, cousin. You’ll see. We are what we are. This is what I was destined to be. There’s no reason to fight it.” His tongue flickered, now forked, like the snake inside of him. “I don’t know why you’re so worked up about it. Look at Ridley. She’s havin’ a great time.”