“Ethan?” Lena was staring at me, concerned. “Are you okay?”
“No. None of us are.” I looked at John. “If you’re telling the truth, and you aren’t waiting around for Abraham and Sarafine to come to the rescue, I need you to tell me everything you can about him.”
John leaned across the table toward me. “If you think I can’t break out of a little study in the Tunnels, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought. You have no idea what I can do. I’m here because—” He glanced at Liv. “I have nowhere else to go.”
I didn’t know if he was lying. But all the signs—the songs, the messages, even Aunt Prue and the Lilum—pointed to him.
John handed Liv a pencil. “Get out that red notebook, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
After listening to John talk about his childhood with Silas Ravenwood—who sounded like a military drill sergeant who spent most of his time beating the crap out of John or forcing him to memorize Silas’ anti-Caster doctrine—even I was starting to feel a little sorry for him. Not that I would ever admit it.
Liv was writing down every word. “So, basically, Silas hates Casters. Interesting, considering he married two of them.” She glanced at John. “And raised one.”
John laughed, and there was no way to miss the bitterness in his voice. “I wouldn’t want to be around if he heard you call me that. Silas and Abraham never considered me a Caster. According to Abraham, I’m ‘the next generation’—stronger, faster, impervious to sunlight, and all that good stuff. Abraham is pretty apocalyptic for a Demon. He believes the end is coming, even if he has to bring it around himself, and the inferior race will finally be wiped out.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. “I guess that’s bad news for us Mortals.”
John gave me a strange look. “Mortals aren’t the inferior race. You’re just the bottom of the food chain. He’s talking about Casters.”
Liv tucked her pencil behind her ear. “I didn’t realize how much he hated Light Casters.”
John shook his head. “You don’t get it. I’m not talking about Light Casters. Abraham wants to get rid of all the Casters.”
Lena looked up, surprised.
“But Sarafine—” Liv started to say.
“He doesn’t care about her. He only tells her what she wants to hear.” John’s voice was serious. “Abraham Ravenwood doesn’t care about anyone.”
There were a lot of nights when I couldn’t sleep, but tonight I didn’t want to. I wanted to forget about Abraham Ravenwood plotting to destroy the world, and the Lilum promising it would destroy itself. Unless, of course, someone wanted to sacrifice themselves. Someone I had to find.
If I fell asleep, those thoughts would twist themselves into rivers of blood as real as the mud in my sheets when I first met Lena. I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn’t find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.
And I knew just the one. It wasn’t under my bed; it was in one of the shoe boxes stacked against my walls. Those boxes held everything that was important to me, and I knew what was inside all of them.
At least I thought I did.
For a second, I couldn’t move. I scanned the brightly colored cardboard boxes, searching for the mental map that would lead me to the right one. But it wasn’t there. My hands started shaking. My right hand—the one I used to write with—and my left—the one I used now.
I didn’t know where it was.
Something was wrong with me, and it had nothing to do with Casters or Keepers or the Order of Things. I was changing, losing more and more of myself every day. And I had no idea why.
Lucille jumped off my bed when I started tearing through the boxes, tossing the lids, dumping everything from bottle caps and basketball cards to faded pictures of my mom all over my bedroom floor. I didn’t stop until I found it in a black Adidas box. I flipped the lid and it was there—my copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
It wasn’t a happy story, the kind you’d expect a person to reach for when they were trying to chase away whatever was haunting them. But I chose it for a reason. It was about sacrifice; whether it was self-sacrifice or sacrificing someone else to save your own skin—that was a matter of debate.
I figured I could decide tonight, as I turned the pages.
It was too late when I realized someone else must have been searching for answers within the covers of a book.
Lena!
She was turning pages, too—
When Sarafine turned nineteen, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. The baby was a surprise, and although Sarafine spent hours staring at her daughter’s delicate face, the child was a mixed blessing. Sarafine had never wanted to have a baby. She didn’t want a child to live the life of uncertainty that came with being a Duchannes. She didn’t want her child to have to fight the Darkness that Sarafine knew was lurking inside her. Until the child would get her real name at sixteen, Sarafine called her daughter Lena, because it meant “the bright one,” in the futile hope of staving off the curse. John had laughed. It sounded like something Mortals would do, hanging their hopes on a name.
Sarafine had to hang her hopes on something.
Lena wasn’t the only unexpected person to show up in her life.
Sarafine was walking alone when she saw Abraham Ravenwood standing on the same corner where she had first met him, almost a year before. He seemed to be waiting, as if he knew she was coming. As if he could somehow see the war being waged on the battlefield of her mind. A war she never knew if she was winning.
He waved, as though they were old friends. “You look troubled, Miss Duchannes. Is something bothering you? Is there anything I can do to help?”
With his white beard and cane, Abraham reminded Sarafine of her grandfather. She missed her family, even though they refused to see her. “I don’t think so.”
“Still fighting your nature? Have the voices grown stronger?”
They had, but how could he know? Incubuses didn’t go Dark. They were born into the Darkness.
He tried again. “Have you been starting fires by accident? It’s called the Wake of Fire.”
Sarafine froze. She had inadvertently started several fires. When her emotions intensified, it was as if they actually manifested into flames. Only two thoughts consumed her now: fire and Lena.
“I didn’t know it had a name,” she whispered.
“There are a number of things you don’t know. I would like to invite you to study with me. I can teach you everything you need to know.”
Sarafine looked away. He was Dark, a Demon. His black eyes told her everything she needed to know. She couldn’t trust Abraham Ravenwood.
“You have a child now, don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question. “Do you want her to walk the world beholden to a curse that dates back to before you were born? Or do you want her to be able to Claim herself?”
Sarafine didn’t tell John she was meeting Abraham Ravenwood in the Tunnels. He wouldn’t understand. For John, the world was black or white, Light or Dark. He didn’t know they could exist together, within the same person, as they did in her. She hated lying, but she was doing it for Lena.
Abraham showed her something no one in her family had ever spoken of—a prophecy related to the curse. A prophecy that would save Lena.
“I’m sure the Casters in your family never told you about this. He held the faded paper in his hand as he read the words that promised to change everything: “ ‘The First will be Black / But the Second may choose to turn back.’ ”
Sarafine felt her breath catch.
“Do you understand what it means?” Abraham knew the words meant everything to her, and she clung to his as if they were part of the prophecy. “The first Natural born into the Duchannes family would be Dark, a Cataclyst.” He was talking about her. “But the second will have a choice. She can Claim herself.”
Sarafine found the courage to ask the question eating away at her. “Why are you helping me?”
Abraham smiled. “I have a boy of my own, not much older than Lena. Your father is raising him. His parents abandoned him because he has some very unusual powers. And he has a destiny as well.”
“But I don’t want my daughter to go Dark.”
“I don’t think you truly understand Darkness. Your mind has been poisoned by Light Casters. Light and Dark are two sides of the same coin.”
Part of Sarafine wondered if he was right. She prayed he was.
Abraham was also teaching her how to control the urges and the voices. There was only one way to exorcise them. Sarafine set fires, burned down huge cornfields and stretches of forests. It was a relief to allow her powers free reign. And no one got hurt.
But the voices still came for her, whispering the same word again and again.
Burn.
When the voices weren’t haunting her, she could hear Abraham in her head, bits and pieces of their conversations looping over and over again: “Light Casters are worse than Mortals. Filled with jealousy because their powers are inferior, they want to dilute our bloodlines with Mortal blood. But the Order of Things will not allow it.” Late at night, some of the words made sense. “Light Casters reject the Dark Fire, from which all power comes.” Some she tried to force deep into the shadows of her mind. “If they were strong enough, they would kill us all.”
I was lying on the floor of my trashed bedroom, staring at my sky blue ceiling. Lucille was sitting on my chest, licking her paws.
Lena’s voice found its way into my mind so quietly I almost didn’t hear it.
She was doing it for me. She loved me.
I didn’t know what to say. It was true, but it wasn’t that simple. Sarafine was sinking deeper and deeper into darkness in every vision.
I know she loved you, L. I just don’t think she could fight what was happening to her. I couldn’t believe I was defending the woman who had killed my mom. But Izabel wasn’t Sarafine, at least not right away. Sarafine killed Izabel, just like she killed my mother.
Abraham was what happened to her.
Lena was looking for someone to blame. We all were.
I heard pages turning.
Lena, don’t touch it!
Don’t worry. It doesn’t trigger the visions every time.
I thought about the Arclight, the way it pulled me out of this world and into another randomly. What I didn’t want to think about was the last thing Lena said—every time. How many times had she opened Sarafine’s book? Lena was Kelting again before I could decide whether or not to ask.
This one’s my favorite. She wrote it over and over inside the covers. “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be.”
I wondered whose heart Sarafine had meant.
Maybe it was her own.
11.24
More Wrong Than Right
It was Thanksgiving Day, which meant two things.
A visit from my Aunt Caroline.
And the annual bake-off between Amma’s pecan pie, Amma’s apple pie, and Amma’s pumpkin pie. Amma always won, but the competition was fierce, and the judging the subject of lots of noise around the table.