"You planning to take someone out with that thing?"
Link shrugged. "Never know what we're gonna find down there."
I knew what he was thinking. Neither one of us had been back to the Lunae Libri since Lena's birthday. Our last visit had been more about danger than dictionaries.
Danger and death. We did something wrong that night, and some of it had happened right here. If I had gotten to Ravenwood earlier, if I had found The Book of Moons , if I could have helped Lena fight Sarafine -- if we had done one thing differently, would Macon be alive right now?
We made our way around to the back of the old red brick building, in the moonlight. Link shined his flashlight on the grating near the ground, and I crouched down next to it. "Ready, man?"
The light was shaking in his hand. "Whenever you are."
I reached through the familiar grating built into the back of the building. My hand disappeared, as always, into the il usionary entrance of the Lunae Libri. Nothing much in Gatlin was what it first appeared to be -- at least not where Casters were concerned.
"I'm surprised that spel stil works." Link watched as I pul ed my hand back out of the grate, as good as new.
"Lena told me it's not a hard one. Some kind of hiding spel Larkin Cast."
"Ever wonder if it could be a trap?" The flashlight was shaking so badly, the light was barely shining on the grating.
"Only one way to find out." I shut my eyes and stepped through. One minute I was standing in the overgrown bushes behind the DAR, and the next I was inside the stone stairwel leading down into the heart of the Lunae Libri. I shivered when I crossed the Charmed threshold into the library, but not because I felt anything supernatural. The shiver, the wrongness, came from not feeling anything different at al . Air was air on either side of the grate, even if it was pitch-black. I didn't feel magical right now, not anywhere in Gatlin or beneath it. I felt bruised and angry but hopeful. I had been convinced Lena had feelings for John. But if there was a possibility I was wrong -- that John and Ridley were influencing her -- it was worth being on the wrong side of the grate again.
Link stumbled through the doorway after me and dropped his flashlight. It clattered down the stairwel in front of us, and we stood in the dark, until the torches lining the steep passageway lit themselves one by one. "Sorry. That thing always throws me off."
"Link, if you don't want to do this --" I couldn't see his face in the shadows.
It took a second before I heard his voice in the dark. "Of course I don't wanna do this, but I gotta do it. I mean, I'm not sayin' Rid's the love a my life. She's not. That would be crazy. But what if Lena was tel in' the truth, and Rid wants to change? What if Vampire Boy is doin' somethin' to her, too?" I doubted Ridley was under anyone's influence except her own. But I didn't say anything.
This wasn't just about Lena and me. Ridley was stil under Link's skin, in a bad way. You don't want to fal in love with a Siren. Fal ing for a Caster was rough enough.
I fol owed him down into the flickering, torch-lit darkness of the world beneath our town. We left Gatlin for the Caster world, a place where anything could happen. I tried not to think back to a time when that was al I wanted.
Whenever I stepped through the stone archway bearing the carved words DOMUS LUNAE LIBRI, I was entering another world, a paral el universe. By now, some parts of the world were familiar -- the smel of the mossy stone, the musky scent of parchment dating back to the Civil War and beyond, the smoke drifting up from the torches hovering near the carved ceilings. I could smel the damp wal s, hear the occasional drip of underground water making its way down to the patterns in the stone floor. But there were other parts that would never be familiar. The darkness at the edges of the stacks, the sections of the library no Mortal had ever seen. I wondered how much my mother had seen.
We reached the base of the stairs.
"What now?" Link found his flashlight and aimed it at the column next to him. A menacing stone griffin's head snarled back. He pul ed the flashlight away, and it flickered on a fanged gargoyle. "If this is a library, I'd hate to see a Caster prison."
I heard the sound of the flames erupting into light. "Wait for it."
One by one, the torches surrounding the rotunda burst into flame, and we could see the carved colonnade, with rows of fierce mythological creatures, some Caster, some Mortal, snaking around every pedestal.
Link cringed. "This place is messed up. Just sayin'."
I touched a woman's face twisted into carved agony in stone flames. Link ran his hand over another face, revealing massive rows of canines. "Check out the dog. It looks like Boo." He looked again and realized the fangs were growing out of a man's head. He yanked his hand away.
There was a swirl of carved rock that appeared to be made of both stone and smoke. A face emerged from the twists and folds of the column, and it looked familiar. It was hard to tel because there was so much rock around it. The face seemed to be fighting the stone, trying to push its way out toward me. For a second, I thought I saw the lips on the face move, as if it was trying to speak.
I backed away. "What the hel is that?"
"What's what?" Link stood next to me, staring at the column, which was just a column swirled with curving waves and spirals again. The face had been swal owed back into the pattern, like a head disappearing under the sea's waves.
"The ocean, maybe? Smoke from a fire? Why do you care?"
"Forget it." I couldn't, even if I didn't understand it. I knew that face in the stone. I had seen it somewhere before. This room was eerie, warning that the Caster world was a Dark place, no matter whose side you were on.
Another torch ignited, and the stacks of old books, manuscripts, and Caster Scrol s revealed themselves. They radiated out from the rotunda in al directions, like spokes on a wheel, and disappeared into the darkness beyond. The last torch burst into flame, and I could see the curving mahogany desk where Marian should have been sitting.
It was empty. Though Marian always said the Lunae Libri was a place of old magic, neither Dark nor Light, without her the whole library felt pretty Dark.
"No one's here." Link sounded defeated.
I grabbed a torch off the wal and handed it to him, taking another for myself. "They're down here."
"How do you know?"
"I just do."
I plowed ahead into the stacks as if I knew where I was going. The air was thick with the smel of the bent and crumbling spines of old books and ancient scrol s, the dusty oak shelves straining under the weight of hundreds of years and centuries of words. I held my torch up to the nearest shelf. " Toes: to Caste Hair on Your Maiden's. Tongues for Binding and Casting. Toffee: Casts Hidden Inside. We must be in the T's."
" Destruction of Mortal Life, Total. That should be in the D's." Link reached for the book.
"Don't touch that. It'l burn your hand." I had learned the hard way, from The Book of Moons .
"Shouldn't we at least hide it or something? Behind the Toffee one?" Link had a point.
We hadn't gone ten feet when I heard a laugh. A girl's laugh, unmistakable, echoing off the carved ceilings. "You hear that?"
"What?" Link waved his torch, almost setting the nearest pile of scrol s on fire.
"Watch it. There's no fire escape down here."
We reached a crossroads in the stacks. I heard it again, the almost musical laughter. It was beautiful and familiar, and the sound of it made me feel safe, the world I was standing in a little less foreign. "I think it's a girl laughing."
"Maybe it's Marian. She's a girl." I looked at him like he was insane, and he shrugged. "Sort of."
"It's not Marian." I motioned for him to listen, but the sound was gone. We walked in the direction of the laughter, and the passageway turned until we reached another rotunda, similar to the first.
"You think it's Lena and Ridley?"
"I don't know. This way." I could barely fol ow the sound, but I knew who it was. Part of me always suspected I could find Lena no matter where she was. I couldn't explain it, I just knew.
It made sense. If our connection was so strong we could dream the same dreams and speak without speaking, why wouldn't I be able to sense where she was? It's like when you drive home from school, or some place you go every day, and you remember leaving the parking lot, then the next thing you know you're pul ing into your driveway and you don't remember how you got there.
She was my destination. I was always on the way to Lena, even when I wasn't. Even when she wasn't on her way to me.
"A little farther."
The next twist in the passage revealed a corridor covered with ivy. I held up my torch, and a brass lantern lit itself in the middle of the leaves. "Look." The light from the lantern il uminated the outline of a doorway hidden beneath the vines. I felt along the wal until I found the cold, round iron of the latch. It was in the shape of a crescent. A Caster moon.
I heard it again, laughter. It had to be Lena. There are some things a guy just knows. I knew L. And I knew my heart wouldn't lead me astray.
My chest was pounding. I pushed open the door, heavy and groaning. It opened into a magnificent study. Along the far wal of the study, a girl was lying on an enormous four-poster bed, scribbling in a tiny red notebook.
"L!"
She looked up, surprised.
Only it wasn't Lena.
It was Liv.
6.15
Wayward Soul
The first moment hung in the air, silent and awkward. The second erupted into noisy confusion. Link yeled at Liv, who yeled at me, and I yeled at Marian, who waited for us to stop.
"What are you doin' here?"
"Why did you leave me at the fair?"
"What is she doing here, Aunt Marian?"
"Come in." Marian pul ed the paneled door open and stepped back to let us pass. The door banged shut behind me, and I heard her bolt the lock. I felt a surge of panic, or claustrophobia, which didn't make any sense because the room wasn't smal . But it felt close. The air was heavy, and I had the feeling that I was standing someplace very private, like a bedroom. Like the laughter, it felt familiar, even if it wasn't. Like the face in the stone.
"Where are we?"
"One question at a time, EW. I'l answer one of yours, and you'l answer one of mine."
"What's Liv doing here?" I don't know why I was angry, but I was. Could anybody in my life be a normal person? Did everyone have to have a secret life?
"Sit. Please." Marian gestured to the circular table in the center of the room.
Liv looked irritated, and got up from her spot on the bed in front of an impossibly lit fireplace, the smoldering fire white and bright instead of orange and burning.
"Olivia is here because she is my summer research assistant. Now I have a question for you."
"Wait. That's not a real answer. I already knew that." I was every bit as stubborn as Marian was. My voice echoed across the chamber, and I noticed an intricate chandelier hanging from the high, vaulted ceiling. It was made of some kind of smooth, white polished horn, or was it bone? The ironwork held long tapered candles that lit the room with a delicate flickering light, il uminating some corners while leaving others dark and unexposed. In the shadows of the far corner, I noticed the spindles of a tal , ebony four-poster bed. I had seen a bed exactly like it somewhere before. Everything about today was one monster deja vu, and it was driving me crazy.