“Nothing is certain. But—” I stood there and waited for the Lilum to answer. “There will be order again. A New Order.”
If I was going to die, there was one more thing I wanted. “And Amma won’t have to pay whatever price she owes the bokor.”
“That bargain was made willingly. I cannot alter it.”
“I don’t care! Do it anyway!” But I knew she wouldn’t, even as I said it.
“There are always consequences.”
Like me. The Crucible.
I closed my eyes and thought about Lena and Amma and Link. Marian and my dad. My mom. All the people I loved.
All the people I’d lost.
The people I couldn’t risk losing.
There wasn’t a lot to decide. Not as much I thought there would be. I guess some decisions are made before you make them. I took a step and found my way back into the light. “Promise me.”
“It is binding. An oath. A promise, as you call it.”
That wasn’t good enough. “Say it.”
“Yes. I promise.” Then she said a word that wasn’t in any language or even any kind of sound I could understand. But the word itself sounded like thunder and lightning, and I understood the truth in it.
It was a promise.
“Then I’m sure.”
A second later, I was standing in Lilian English’s parlor again, while she lay collapsed in the flowered chair. I could hear my father’s voice coming from the other end of the phone in her hand.
“Hello? Hello—”
My brain shifted to autopilot. I picked up the phone, hung up on my dad, and called 911 for the very Mortal Lilian English. I had to put the phone down without saying a word, because Sissy Honeycutt worked dispatch down at the station house, and she’d recognize my voice for sure. I couldn’t get caught at my unconscious English teacher’s house twice. But it didn’t matter. Now they had the address. They would send out the ambulance, like they did before.
And Mortal Mrs. English wouldn’t remember I had been there at all.
I drove straight to Ravenwood without stopping, without thinking, without turning on the radio or rolling down the window. I didn’t remember how I got there. One minute I was driving through town, and the next I was pounding on Lena’s front door. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was trapped in the wrong atmosphere, in some kind of terrible nightmare.
I remember slamming my fist on the Caster moon as many times as I could, but it didn’t respond to my touch. Maybe there was no way to hide how different I was. How incomplete.
I remember calling and crying and Kelting her name, until Lena finally opened the door in her purple Chinese pajamas. I remembered them from the night she told me her secret, that she was a Caster. Sitting on my front steps in the middle of the night.
Now, sitting on hers, I told her mine.
What happened after that was too painful to remember at all.
We lay in Lena’s old iron bed, tangled together like we could never be taken apart. We couldn’t touch, but we couldn’t not touch. We couldn’t stop staring at each other, but every time our eyes met, it only hurt more. We were exhausted, but there was no way we could sleep.
There wasn’t enough time to whisper all the things we needed to say. But the words themselves didn’t matter. We were only thinking one thing.
I love you.
We counted the hours, the minutes, the seconds.
We were running out of all of them.
12.21
The Last Game
It was the last day. There was nothing left to decide. Tomorrow was the solstice, and my mind was made up. I lay in my bed and stared up at my blue plaster ceiling, painted the color of the sky to keep the carpenter bees from nesting. One more morning. One more painted blue sky.
I got home from Lena’s and went back to sleep. I left my window open, in case anyone wanted to see me, haunt me, or hurt me. No one came.
I could smell the coffee and hear my dad walking around downstairs. Amma was at the stove. Waffles. Definitely waffles. She must have been waiting for me to wake up.
I decided not to tell my dad. After everything he’d gone through with my mom, I didn’t think he would be able to understand. I couldn’t stand to think what this might do to him. The way he went crazy when my mom died, I understood now. I had been too scared to let myself feel those things before. And now, when it didn’t matter how I felt, I was feeling every one of them. Sometimes life was weird that way.
Link and I tried to have lunch at the Dar-ee Keen, but we finally gave up. He couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t either. You know how prisoners get to choose their last meal, and it’s such a big deal? It didn’t work that way for me. I didn’t want shrimp ’n’ grits or brown sugar pound cake. I couldn’t keep anything down.
And they can’t give you the one thing you really want, anyway.
Time.
Finally, we went to the basketball court at the elementary school playground and shot some hoops. Link let me win, which was weird because I used to be the one who let him win. Things had changed a lot in the last six months.
We didn’t talk much. Once, he caught the ball and held it after I passed it to him. He was looking at me the same way he had when he sat down next to me at my mom’s funeral, even though the section was all roped off and only the family was supposed to sit there. “I’m not good at this stuff, you know?”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
I pulled out an old comic I had rolled up in my back pocket. “Something to remember me by.”
He unrolled it and laughed. “Aquaman? I gotta remember you and your lame powers with this sucky comic?”
I shrugged. “We can’t all be Magneto.”
“Hey, man.” He dribbled the ball from one hand to the other. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“No. I mean, I’m sure I don’t want to. But I don’t have a choice.” Link understood about not having choices. His whole life was about not having them.
He bounced the ball harder. “And there’s no other way?”
“Not unless you want to hang out with your mom and watch the End of Days.” I was trying to make a joke. But my timing was always off now. Maybe my Fractured Soul was holding on to it.
Link stopped dribbling and held the ball under his arm. “Hey, Ethan.”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the Twinkie on the bus? The one I gave you in second grade, the day we met?”
“The one you found on the floor and gave me without telling me? Nice.”
He grinned and shot the ball. “It never really fell on the floor. I made that part up.”
The basketball hit the rim and bounced into the street.
We let it go.
I found Marian and Liv in the archive, back together where they belonged.
“Aunt Marian!” I was so relieved to see her that I almost knocked her out cold as I hugged her. When I finally let go, I could tell she was waiting for me to say it. Something, anything—about the reason they let her go.
So I waded in, slowly. Giving them bits and pieces of the story that didn’t quite fit together. At first, they were both relieved to hear some good news. Gatlin, and the Mortal world, wasn’t going to be destroyed in a supernatural apocalypse. Casters weren’t going to lose their powers or accidently set themselves on fire, although in Sarafine’s case it had saved our lives. They heard what I wanted them to hear: Everything was going to be okay.
It had to be.
I was trading my life for it—that’s the part I left out.
But they were both too smart to let the story end there. And the more pieces I gave them, the quicker their minds fit the pieces together to create the twisted truth of it all. I knew exactly when the last piece slid into place.
There was the terrible moment when I saw their faces change and the smiles fade. Liv wouldn’t look at me. She was winding her selenometer compulsively and twisting the strings she always wore around her wrist. “We’ll figure something out. We always do. There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.” I didn’t need to say it; she already knew.
Without a word, Liv untied one of the frayed strings and tied it onto my wrist. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she didn’t look at me. I tried to imagine myself in her place, but I couldn’t. It was too hard.
I remembered losing my mom, staring at my suit laid out on the chair in the corner of my room, waiting for me to put it on and admit she was dead. I remembered Lena kneeling in the mud, sobbing, the day of Macon’s funeral. The Sisters staring glassy-eyed at Aunt Prue’s casket, handkerchiefs wadded in their hands. Who would boss them around and take care of them now?
That’s what no one tells you. It’s harder to be the one left behind.
I thought about Aunt Prue stepping through the Last Door so calmly. She was at peace. Where was the peace for the rest of us?
Marian didn’t say a word. She stared at me like she was trying to memorize my face and freeze this moment so she could never forget it. Marian knew the truth. I think she knew something like this was coming the moment the Council of the Keep let her come back.
Nothing came without a price.
And if it had been her, she would have done the same thing to protect the people she loved.
I was sure Liv would’ve, too. In her own way, that’s exactly what she did for Macon. What John tried to do for her on the water tower. Maybe she felt guilty that it was me instead of him.
I hoped she knew the truth—that it wasn’t her fault, or my fault, or even his fault. No matter how many times I wanted to believe it was.
This was my life, and this was how it was ending.
I was the Wayward. And this was my great and terrible purpose.
It was always in the cards, the ones Amma was so desperate to change.
It was always me.
But they didn’t make me say any of that. Marian gathered me up in her arms, and Liv wrapped her arms around us both. It reminded me of the way my mom always hugged me, like she would never let go if she had a choice. Finally, Marian whispered something softly. It was Winston Churchill. And I hoped I would remember it, wherever I was going.
“ ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ ”
12.21
Remainders
Lena wasn’t in her bedroom at Ravenwood. I sat down on her bed to wait, staring up at the ceiling. I thought of something and picked up her pillow, rubbing it against my face. I remembered smelling my mom’s pillowcases after she was gone. It was magic to me, a piece of her that still existed in my world. I wanted Lena to at least have that.
I thought about Lena’s bed, the time we broke it, the time the roof caved in on it, the time we broke up and the plaster had rained down on everything. I looked at the walls, thinking about the words that wrote themselves there the first time Lena told me how she felt.
You’re not the only one falling.
Lena’s walls weren’t glass anymore. Her room was the same as it was the day we first met. Maybe that was how she was trying to keep things. The way it was at the beginning, when things were still full of possibility.
I couldn’t think about it.
There were bits of words everywhere, I guess because that’s how Lena felt things.