“Then why does Ryan live with her parents?”
“Ryan is… Ryan. She’s a special case.” She shrugged. “At least, that’s what Uncle Macon says every time I ask.”
It all sounded so surreal, the idea that everyone in her family possessed supernatural powers. They looked like me, like everyone else in Gatlin, well, maybe not everyone, but they were completely different. Weren’t they? Even Ridley, hanging out in front of the Stop & Steal—none of the guys had suspected she was anything other than an incredibly hot girl, who was obviously pretty confused if she was looking for me. How did it work? How did you get to be a Caster instead of just some ordinary kid?
“Were your parents gifted?” I hated to bring up her parents. I knew what it was like to talk about your dead parent, but at this point I had to know.
“Yes. Everyone in my family is.”
“What were their gifts? Were they anything like yours?”
“I don’t know. Gramma’s never said anything. I told you, it’s like they never existed. Which just makes me think, you know.”
“What?”
“Maybe they were Dark, and I’m going to go Dark, too.”
“You’re not.”
“How do you know?”
“How can I have the same dreams you have? How do I know when I walk into a room whether or not you’ve been there?”
Ethan.
It’s true.
I touched her cheek, and said quietly, “I don’t know how I know. I just do.”
“I know you believe that, but you can’t know. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to me.”
“That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.” It was like everything else tonight; I hadn’t meant to say it, at least not out loud, but I was glad I did.
“What?”
“All that destiny garbage. Nobody can decide what happens to you. Nobody but you.”
“Not if you’re a Duchannes, Ethan. Other Casters, they can choose, but not us, not my family. When we’re Claimed at sixteen, we become Light or Dark. There is no free will.”
I lifted her chin with my hand. “So you’re a Natural. What’s wrong with that?”
I looked into her eyes, and I knew I was going to kiss her, and I knew there was nothing to worry about, as long as we stayed together. And I believed, for that one second, we always would.
I stopped thinking about the Jackson basketball playbook and finally let her see how I felt, what was in my mind. What I was about to do, and how long it had taken me to get up the nerve to do it.
Oh.
Her eyes widened, bigger and greener, if that was even possible.
Ethan—I don’t know—
I leaned down and kissed her mouth. It tasted salty, like her tears. This time, not warmth, but electricity, shot from my mouth to my toes. I could feel tingling in my fingertips. It was like shoving a pen into an electrical outlet, which Link had dared me to do when I was eight years old. She closed her eyes and pulled me in to her, and for a minute, everything was perfect. She kissed me, her lips smiling beneath mine, and I knew she had been waiting for me, maybe just as long as I had been waiting for her. But then, as quickly as she had opened herself up to me, she shut me out. Or more accurately, pushed me back.
Ethan, we can’t do this.
Why? I thought we felt the same way about each other.
Or maybe we didn’t. Maybe she didn’t.
I was staring at her, from the end of her outstretched hands that were still resting on my chest. She could probably feel how fast my heart was beating.
It’s not that….
She started to turn away, and I was sure she was about to run away like she had the day we found the locket at Greenbrier, like the night she left me standing on my porch. I put my hand on her wrist, and instantly felt the heat. “Then what is it?”
She stared back at me, and I tried to hear her thoughts, but I had nothing. “I know you think I have a choice about what’s going to happen to me, but I don’t. And what Ridley did tonight, that was nothing. She could’ve killed you, and maybe she would have if I hadn’t stopped her.” She took a deep breath, her eyes glistening. “That’s what I could turn into—a monster—whether you believe it or not.”
I slid my arms back around her neck, ignoring her. But she went on. “I don’t want you to see me like that.”
“I don’t care.” I kissed her cheek.
She climbed off the bed, sliding her arm out of my hand.
“You don’t get it.” She held up her hand. 122. One hundred and twenty-two more days, smeared in blue ink, as if that was all we had.
“I get it. You’re scared. But we’ll figure something out. We’re supposed to be together.”
“We’re not. You’re a Mortal. You can’t understand. I don’t want to see you get hurt, and that’s what will happen if you get too close to me.”
“Too late.”
I’d heard every word she had said, but I only knew one thing.
I was all in.
10.09
The Greats
It had made sense when a beautiful girl was saying it. Now that I was back home, alone, and in my own bed, I was finally losing it. Even Link wouldn’t believe any of this. I tried to think about how the conversation would go—the girl I like, whose real name I don’t know, is a witch—-excuse me, a Caster, from a whole family of Casters, and in five months she’s going to find out essentially if she’s good or evil. And she can cause hurricanes indoors and break the glass out of windows. And I can see into the past when I touch the crazy locket Amma and Macon Ravenwood, who isn’t actually a shut-in at all, want me to bury. A locket that materialized on the neck of a woman in a painting at Ravenwood, which by the way, is not a haunted mansion, but a perfectly restored house that changes completely every time I go there, to see a girl who burns me and shocks me and shatters me with a single touch.
And I kissed her. And she kissed me back.
It was too unbelievable, even for me. I rolled over.
Tearing.
The wind was tearing at my body.
I held onto the tree as it pounded me, the sound of its scream piercing my ears. All around me, the winds swirled, fighting each other, their speed and force multiplying by the second. The hail rained down like Heaven itself had opened up. I had to get out of here.
But there was nowhere to go.
“Let me go, Ethan. Save yourself!”
I couldn’t see her. The wind was too strong, but I could feel her. I was holding her wrist so tightly, I was sure it would break. But I didn’t care, I wouldn’t let go. The wind changed direction, lifting me off the ground. I held the tree tighter, held her wrist tighter. But I could feel the strength of the wind ripping us apart.
Pulling me away from the tree, away from her. I felt her wrist sliding through my fingers.
I couldn’t hold on any longer.
I woke up coughing. I could still feel the windburn on my skin. As if my near-death experience at Ravenwood wasn’t enough, now the dreams were back. It was too much for one night, even for me. My bedroom door was wide open, which was weird, considering I had been locking my door at night lately. The last thing I needed was Amma planting some crazy voodoo charm on me in my sleep. I was sure I’d closed it.
I stared up at my ceiling. Sleep was not in my future. I sighed and felt around under the bed. I flipped on the old storm lamp next to my bed and pulled the bookmark out from where I’d left off in Snow Crash when I heard something. Footsteps? It was coming from the kitchen, faint, but I still heard it. Maybe my dad was taking a break from writing. Maybe this would give us a chance to talk. Maybe.
But when I reached the bottom of the stairs, I knew it wasn’t him. The door to his study was shut and light was coming from the crack under the door. It had to be Amma. Just as I ducked under the kitchen doorway, I saw her scampering down the hall toward her room, to the extent that Amma could scamper. I heard the screen door in the back of the house squeak shut. Someone was coming or going. After everything that had happened tonight, it was an important distinction.
I walked around to the front of the house. There was an old, beat-up pickup truck, a fifties Studebaker, idling by the curb. Amma was leaning in the window talking to the driver. She handed the driver her bag and climbed into the truck. Where was she going in the middle of the night?
I had to follow her. And following the woman who may as well have been my mother when she got into a car at night, with a strange man driving a junker, was a hard thing to do if you didn’t have a car. I had no choice. I had to take the Volvo. It was the car my mom had been driving when she had the accident; that was the first thing I thought every time I saw it.
I slid behind the wheel. It smelled of old paper and Windex, just like it always had.
♦ ♦ ♦
Driving without the headlights on was trickier than I’d thought it would be, but I could tell the pickup was heading toward Wader’s Creek. Amma must have been going home. The truck turned off Route 9, toward the back country. When it finally slowed down and pulled off to the side of the road, I cut the engine and guided the Volvo onto the shoulder.
Amma opened the door and the interior light went on. I squinted in the darkness. I recognized the driver; it was Carlton Eaton, the postmaster. Why would Amma ask Carlton Eaton for a ride in the middle of the night? I’d never even seen them speak to each other before.
Amma said something to Carlton and shut the door. The truck pulled back onto the road without her. I got out of the car and followed her. Amma was a creature of habit. If something had gotten her so worked up that she was creeping out to the swamp in the middle of the night, I could guess it involved more than one of her usual clients.
She disappeared into the brush, along a gravel path someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make. She walked along the path in the dark, the gravel crunching under her feet. I walked in the grass beside the path to avoid that same crunching sound, which would’ve given me away for sure. I told myself it was because I wanted to see why Amma was sneaking home in the middle of the night, but mostly I was scared she would catch me following her.
It was easy to see how Wader’s Creek got its name; you actually had to wade through black water ponds to get there, at least the way Amma was taking us. If there hadn’t been a full moon, I’d have broken my neck trying to follow her through the maze of moss-covered oaks and scrub brush. We were close to the water. I could feel the swamp in the air, hot and sticky like a second skin.
The edge of the swamp was lined with flat wooden platforms made from cypress logs tied together with rope, poor man’s ferries. They were lined up along the bank like taxis waiting to carry people across the water. I could see Amma in the moonlight, balanced expertly atop one of the platforms, pushing out from the bank with a long stick she used like an oar to skate it across to the other side.
I hadn’t been to Amma’s house in years, but I would’ve remembered this. We must have come another way back then, but it was impossible to tell in the dark. The one thing I could see was how rotted the logs on the platforms were; each one looked as unstable as the next. So I just picked one.