I touched my lip, wincing, and looked at my fingers. Blood.
Lena rose to her feet, backing away from us.
I could have killed you.
She turned and bolted into the trees.
"Lena!" I took off after her.
Running through the South Carolina woods barefoot is not something I recommend. We'd been in a drought, and the shoreline around the lake was littered with dry cypress needles, which bit into my feet like a thousand tiny knives. But I kept running. I could hear Lena more than see her, as she crashed through the trees in front of me.
Get away from me!
A heavy pine branch splintered and cracked without warning, smashing across the trail a few feet in front of me. I could already hear another branch groaning ahead.
L, are you crazy?
Branches were fal ing around me, missing me by inches. Far enough away so they didn't hit me, but close enough to make a point.
Stop it!
Don't follow me, Ethan! Leave me alone!
As the gap between us widened, I sped up. Tree trunks and scrub brush flashed past me. Lena was swerving around the trees, not fol owing any distinct path. She was heading for the highway.
Another tree fel in front of me, catching horizontal y on the trunks of the trees on either side of me. I was momentarily trapped. There was an osprey nest upside down in the broken tree. Something Lena, in her right mind, would never have dreamed of hurting. I touched the twigs, checking for broken eggs.
I heard the sound of a motorcycle, and my stomach caved in on itself. I shoved my way under the branches. My face was scratched and bloody, but I made it out to the highway in time to see Lena climb on the back of a Harley.
What are you doing, L?
She looked back at me for a second. Then she disappeared down the highway, black hair flying behind her.
Getting away from here.
Her pale arms were clinging to the biker from the Jackson High parking lot, the tire slasher.
The motorcycle. I final y remembered. It had been in one of Lena's graveyard pictures, the one that vanished from her wal right after I asked about it.
She wouldn't jump on the back of some random guy's bike.
Not unless she knew him.
Right then, I didn't know which was worse.
6.12
Caster Boy
Link and I didn't talk much on the way back from the lake. We had to take Lena's car, but I was in no shape to drive. My feet were cut up, and I had messed up my ankle trying to climb over that last tree.
Link didn't mind. He was enjoying his turn behind the wheel of the Fastback. "Man, this thing can haul. Pony power, Baby." Link's usual worship of the Fastback was annoying today. My head was spinning and I didn't want to hear about Lena's car for the hundredth time.
"Then speed it up, man. We have to find her. She's hitchhiking on the back of some guy's motorcycle." I couldn't tel him the odds were she knew the guy. When had she taken that picture of the Harley in the graveyard? I punched the door in frustration.
Link didn't state the obvious. Lena ran away from me. It was pretty clear she didn't want to be found. He just drove, and I stared out the window of the passenger's seat as the hot wind stung the hundreds of tiny cuts on my face.
Something had been wrong for a while now. I just didn't want to face it. I wasn't sure if it was something that had been done to us, I had done to her, or she had done to me. Maybe it was something she was doing to herself. Her birthday was when it al started, her birthday and Macon's death. I wondered if it was Sarafine.
Al this time, I'd been thinking this was about those stupid stages of grief. I thought about the gold in her eyes and the laugh from the dream. What if this was about different kinds of stages, stages of something else? Something supernatural? Something Dark?
What if this was what we'd been afraid of al along?
I hit the door again.
"I'm sure Lena's okay. She probably needs some space. Girls are always talkin' about needin' space." Link turned on the radio, then turned it off again. "Kil er stereo."
"Whatever."
"Hey, we should go by the Dar-ee Keen and see if Charlotte's workin'. Maybe she can hook us up. Especial y if we show up in this sweet ride." Link was trying to distract me, but it wasn't going to happen.
"Like there's a person in town who doesn't know whose car this is? We should drop it off, anyway. Aunt Del wil be worried." It would also give me an excuse to see if the Harley was at Lena's house.
Link persisted. "You're goin' to show up with Lena's car without Lena? Like that won't worry Aunt Del? Let's stop and get a freeze and figure this out. Who knows, maybe Lena's at the Dar-ee Keen. It's right off the highway."
He was right, but it didn't make me feel any better. It made me feel worse. "If you like the Dar-ee Keen so much, you should have gotten a job there. Oh wait, you couldn't, because you'l be in summer school dissecting frogs with the other Lifers who failed bio." Lifers were the super seniors, the ones who always seemed to be at school and yet somehow never graduated. The guys who wore their letterman jackets years later, when they were working at the Stop & Steal.
"You should talk. Could you have a lamer summer job? The library?"
"I could hook you up with a book, but you'd have to learn to read."
Link was baffled by my summer plans to work at the library with Marian, but I didn't mind. I was stil ful of questions about Lena, her family, and Light and Dark Casters. Why didn't Lena have to Claim herself on her sixteenth birthday? It didn't seem like the kind of thing you could get out of. Could she real y choose to be Light or Dark? Was it that easy? Since The Book of Moons was destroyed in the fire, the Lunae Libri was the only place that might have the answers.
Then there were the other questions. I tried not to think about my mother. I tried not to think about strangers on motorcycles and nightmares and bloody lips and golden eyes. Instead, I stared out the window and watched the trees pass by in a blur.
The Dar-ee Keen was packed. Not a big surprise, since it was one of the only places within walking distance of Jackson High. In the summer, you could pretty much fol ow the trail of flies and you would eventual y find your way here. Formerly the Dairy King, the place had gotten a new name after the Gentrys bought it but didn't want to fork up the money to pay to put al new letters on the sign. Today everyone looked even sweatier and more pissed off than usual. Walking a mile in the South Carolina heat and missing the first day of hooking up and drinking warm beer at the lake wasn't anyone's idea of a good time. It was like canceling a national holiday.
Emily, Savannah, and Eden were hanging out at the good table in the corner with the basketbal team. They were barefoot, in their bikini tops and supershort jean skirts -- the kind with one button left open, offering up a powerful flash of bikini bottoms without ever completely fal ing off. Nobody was in a very good mood. There wasn't a tire left in Gatlin, so half the cars were stil sitting in the school parking lot. Al the same, there was plenty of loud giggling and hair flipping.
Emily was spil ing out of her string bikini top, and Emory, her latest victim, was loving it.
Link shook his head. "Man, those two wanna be the bride at the weddin' and the corpse at the funeral."
"Just so long as I'm not invited to either."
"Dude. You need some sugar. I'm gonna get in line. You want somethin'?"
"No, thanks. You need some money?" Link never had any money.
"Naw, I'm gonna get Charlotte to hook me up."
Link could talk his way into and out of almost anything. I pushed my way through the crowd, as far away from Emily and Savannah as I could get. I slumped down at the bad corner table, beneath the shelves of soda cans and bottles from around the country. Some of the sodas had been there since my dad was little, and you could see the different levels of brown and orange and red syrup, disappearing to the bottom of the bottles from years of evaporation. It was pretty disgusting, I guess, that and the fifties soda bottle wal paper and the flies. After a while, you didn't even notice it anymore.
I sat down and looked at the disappearing dark syrup, my mood in a bottle. What happened to Lena back at the lake? One minute we were kissing, the next she was running away from me. Al that gold in her eyes. I wasn't stupid. I knew what it meant. Light Casters had green eyes. Dark Casters had gold. Lena's weren't completely gold, but what I'd seen at the lake was enough to make me wonder.
A fly landed on the shiny red table, and I stared at it. I recognized the familiar churning in my stomach. Dread and panic, al turning into a dul anger. I was so mad at Lena, I wanted to kick out the glass window next to our booth. But at the same time, I wanted to know what was going on and who that guy on the Harley was. Then I'd have to kick his ass.
Link slid into the booth across from me with the biggest freeze I'd ever seen. The ice cream rose about four inches above where the plastic cup ended. "Charlotte has some real potential." Link licked the straw.
Even the sugary smel of the freeze was making me sick. I felt like the sweat and the grease and the flies and the Emorys and Emilys were closing in on me.
"Lena's not here. We should go." I couldn't sit around like everything was normal. Link, on the other hand, could. Rain or shine.
"Chil ax. I'l suck it down in five."
Eden walked by on her way to refil her Diet Coke. She smiled down at us, as fake as ever. "What a cute couple. See, Ethan, you didn't need to be wastin' time with that lil' tire slasher window basher. You and Link, y'al lovebirds were meant for each other."
"She didn't slash your tires, Eden." I knew how this was going to look for Lena. I had to shut them down before their mothers got involved.
"Yeah. I did," Link said, his mouth ful of ice cream. "Lena's just bummed she didn't think of it first." He could never resist the chance to harass the cheer squad. To them, Lena was an old joke that wasn't funny anymore but nobody could drop. That was the thing about smal towns. No one ever changed their opinion of you, even if you changed. As far as they were concerned, even when Lena was a great-grandmother, she would stil be the crazy girl who busted out the window in English class. Considering most of our English class would stil be living in Gatlin.
Not me. Not if things were going to stay like this. It was the first time I had real y thought about leaving since Lena came to Gatlin. The box of col ege brochures under my bed had stayed under my bed until now. As long as I had Lena, I wasn't counting the days until I could get out of Gatlin.
"Hel -o. Who is that?" Eden's voice was a little too loud.
I heard the bel on the door of the Dar-ee Keen chime as it closed. It was like some kind of Clint Eastwood movie, where the hero steps into the saloon after he's just shot up the whole town. The neck of every girl sitting near us snapped toward the door, greasy blond ponytails flying.
"I don't know, but I'd sure like to find out," Emily purred, coming up behind Eden.
"I've never seen him before. Have you?" I could see Savannah filing through the yearbook in her mind.
"No way. I'd remember him." Poor guy. Emily had him in her crosshairs, target locked and loaded. He didn't stand a chance, whoever he was. I turned around to get a look at the guy Earl and Emory would be kicking the crap out of when they realized their girlfriends were drooling over him.
He was standing in the doorway in a faded black T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed black army boots. I couldn't see the scuffs from where I was sitting, but I knew they were there. Because he was wearing exactly the same thing the last time I saw him, when he ripped out of Macon's funeral.