Amma was wrong. I wasn’t sure if she knew it, but I did. “This is something I have to do. If I don’t—you and dad, this whole town, will be gone.”
“I don’t care about this town!” She hissed. “It can burn to the ground! Nothin’s gonna happen to my boy! You hear me?” Amma whipped her head around the room, from one side to the other, like she was looking for someone hiding in the shadows.
When she looked back at me, her knees buckled, and her body swayed dangerously to one side. She was going to pass out. I grabbed Amma’s arms and pulled her up, as her eyes locked on mine. “Already lost your mamma. Can’t lose you, too.”
I lowered her into one of the chairs and knelt next to it, watching as she slowly came back to herself. “Take deep breaths.” I remembered hearing Thelma say that to Aunt Mercy when she had one of her fainting spells. But we were way past deep breaths.
Amma tried to wave me off. “I’m all right. Long as you promise me you won’t do anything stupid. I’m gonna stitch this mess back together. I’m just waitin’ on the right thread.” One dipped in the bokor’s brand of black magic, I was willing to bet.
I didn’t want the last thing I said to Amma to be a lie. But she was beyond reason. There was no way I’d be able to convince her that I was doing the right thing. She was sure there was some kind of loophole, like Lena. “All right, Amma. Let’s get you to your room.”
She held on to my arm as she stood up. “You have to promise me, Ethan Wate.”
I looked her right in the eye. “I won’t do anything stupid. I promise.” It was only half a lie. Because saving the people you love isn’t stupid. It isn’t even a choice.
But I still wanted the last thing I said to Amma to be as true as the sun rising. So after I helped her into her favorite chair, I hugged her tight and whispered one last thing. “I love you, Amma.”
There was nothing truer.
The front door slammed as I pulled Amma’s bedroom door shut.
“Hey everybody. I’m home,” my dad’s voice called from the hall. I was about to answer, when I heard the familiar sound of another door opening. “I’ll be in the study. I have lots of reading to do.” It was ironic. My dad spent all his time researching the Eighteenth Moon, and I knew more about it than I wanted to.
As I walked back through the kitchen, I saw the old Coke bottle sitting on the table, exactly where Amma left it. It was too late to catch anything in that bottle, but I picked it up anyway.
I wondered if there were bottle trees where I was going.
On my way to my room I passed the study, where my dad was working. He was sitting at my mom’s old desk, the light filling up the room, his work, and the caffeinated coffee he’d smuggled into the house. I opened my mouth to say something. I didn’t know what—just as he rummaged in the drawer for his earplugs, twisting them into his ears.
Good-bye, Dad.
I rested my forehead on the doorway in silence. I let things be what they were. He would know the rest, soon enough.
It was after midnight when Lena finally cried herself to sleep. I was sitting on my bed reading Of Mice and Men one last time. Over the last few months, my memories had faded so much that I couldn’t remember a lot of it, anyway. I still remembered one part, though. The end. It bothered me every time I read it—the way George shot Lennie while he was telling Lennie about the farm they were going to buy one day. The one Lennie would never see.
When we read the novel in English class, everyone agreed that George was making this big sacrifice by killing his best friend. It was ultimately a mercy kill, because George knew Lennie was going to be hanged for accidentally killing the girl at the ranch. But I never bought it. Shooting your best friend in the head, instead of making a run for it, doesn’t seem like a sacrifice to me. Lennie made the sacrifice, whether he knew it or not. Which was the worst part—I think Lennie would’ve knowingly sacrificed himself for George in a minute. He wanted George to get that farm, to be happy.
I knew my sacrifice wasn’t going to make anyone happy, but it was going to save their lives. That was enough. I also knew none of the people who loved me would let me make that kind of sacrifice for them, which is why I was pulling on my jeans at one in the morning.
I took one last look around my room—the shoe boxes stacked along the walls that held everything important to me, the chair in the corner where my mother sat when she visited me two months ago, the piles of my favorite books hidden under my bed, and the swivel chair that hadn’t swiveled the time Macon Ravenwood sat in it. I wanted to remember it all. As I swung my leg over the windowsill, I wondered if I would.
The Summerville water tower loomed above me in the moonlight. Most people probably wouldn’t have picked this place, but this is where it happened in the dreams, so I knew it was right. I was taking a lot of things on faith lately. Knowing you don’t have much time left changes things. You get kind of philosophical. And you figure things out—more like, they figure themselves out—and everything gets real clear.
Your first kiss isn’t as important as your last.
The math test really didn’t matter.
The pie really did.
The stuff you’re good at and the stuff you’re bad at are just different parts of the same thing.
Same goes for the people you love and the people you don’t—and the people who love you and the people who don’t.
The only thing that mattered was that you cared about a few people.
Life is really, really short.
I took Lena’s charm necklace out of my back pocket and looked at it one last time. Then I reached through the open window of the Volvo and dropped it on the seat. I didn’t want anything to happen to it when this was all over. I was glad she gave it to me. I felt like part of her was here with me.
But I was alone. I wanted it this way. No friends, no family. No talking, no Kelting. Not even Lena.
I wanted to let things feel the way they really were.
The way things felt was terrible. The way things were was worse.
I could feel it now. My fate was coming for me—my fate, and something else.
The sky ripped open a few feet from where I was standing. I expected Link to step out of the darkness with a pack of Twinkies or something, but it was John Breed.
“What’s going on? Are Macon and Liv okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. Everyone’s fine, all things considered.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
He shrugged, flipping the top of his lighter open and closed. “I thought you might need a wingman.”
“Why? To push me over the edge?” I was only half kidding.
He snapped the lighter shut. “Let’s just say it’s harder than you think when you’re up there. Besides, you were there with me, right?” It was twisted logic, but things were pretty twisted.
I didn’t know what to say. It was hard to believe he was the same dirtbag who’d kicked my ass at the fair and tried to steal my girlfriend. He was a halfway decent guy now. Falling in love can do that to you. “Thanks, man. What’s it like? I mean, on the way down.”
John shook his head. “Trust me, you don’t wanna know.”
We walked toward the water tower. An enormous white moon blocked the light of the real one. The white metal ladder was only a few feet away.
I knew she was behind me before John sensed her and spun around.
Amma.
Nobody else smelled like pencil lead and Red Hots. “Ethan Wate! I was there the day you were born, and I’ll be there the day you die, from this side or the other.”
I kept walking.
Her voice grew louder. “Either way, it won’t be today.”
John sounded amused. “Damn, Wate. You sure have a creepy family, for a Mortal.”
I braced myself for the sight of Amma armed with her beads and her dolls and maybe the Bible, too. But when I turned around, my eyes fell on the tangled braids and snakeskin-wrapped staff of the bokor.
The bokor smiled back at me. “I see you haven’t found your ti-bon-age. Or have you? It’s easier to find than to capture, isn’t it now?”
“Don’t you talk to him,” Amma snapped. Whatever the bokor was here for, it obviously wasn’t to talk me down off the ledge.
“Amma!” I called her name, and she turned back to face me. For the first time, I could see how lost she was. Her sharp brown eyes were confused and nervous, her proud posture bent and broken. “I don’t know why you brought that guy here, but you shouldn’t be mixed up with someone like him.”
The bokor threw his head back and laughed. “We have a deal, the Seer and me. And I intend to fulfill my end a the bargain.”
“What deal?” I asked.
But Amma shot the bokor a look that said Keep your mouth shut. Then she waved me over, the way she used to when I was a kid. “That’s nobody’s business except mine and my Maker’s. You come on home, and he’ll go back to where he belongs.”
“I don’t think she’s asking,” John said. He looked over at Amma. “What if Ethan doesn’t want to go?”
Amma’s eyes narrowed. “I knew you’d be here, the devil on my boy’s shoulder. I can still see a thing or two. And you’re Dark as a piece a coal in the snow—no matter what color your eyes are. That’s why I brought some Darkness a my own.”
The bokor wasn’t here for me or my Fractured Soul. He was here to make sure John didn’t get in Amma’s way.
John put his hands up in mock surrender. “I’m not trying to make Ethan do anything. I came as a friend.”
I heard the sound of bottles clinking. That’s when I noticed the string of bottles tied to the bokor’s belt, like the kind you found on bottle trees.
The bokor held one in front of him, his hand on the corked stopper. “I brought some friends, too.” He uncorked the bottle, and a thin trail of dark mist escaped. It swirled slowly, almost hypnotically, until it formed the body of a man.
But this Sheer didn’t look like the others I’d seen. His limbs were mangled and awkwardly bent in unnatural positions. His facial features were grotesque, and whole pieces were missing where they seemed to have rotted away. He looked like a zombie from a horror movie—torn and broken. His eyes were unfocused and vacant.
John took a step back. “You Mortals are even more screwed up than Supernaturals.”
“What the hell is that?” I couldn’t stop staring at it.
The bokor threw some kind of powder on the ground around him. “One a the souls a the Unclaimed. When families don’t tend to their dead, I come for them.” Smiling, he shook the bottle in front of him.
I felt sick. I thought trapping evil spirits in bottles was one of Amma’s crazy superstitions. I didn’t know there were evil voodoo practitioners trolling graveyards with old Coke bottles.
The tortured spirit moved toward John, its expression frozen in a terrifying and silent scream. John opened his hands in front of him, the way Lena always did. “Back up, Ethan. I don’t know what this thing’s gonna do.”