My Aunt Prue clicked her tongue impatiently.
That explained my aunt wanting to bring me here—and my mother not wanting her to. Just because you told any two people in my family the same piece of news, that didn’t mean they’d agree about what they’d heard. My mom used to say the people in the Evers family were about the most hog-minded, mule-stuck bloodline you could find—and the Wates were worse. A pack of wasps fighting over the nest—that’s what my dad called the Wate family reunions.
“How did you hear about what happened?” I tried not to stare at the snakes twisting beneath the black hood.
“News travels fast in the Otherworld,” he said, hesitating. “More importantly, I knew it was a mistake.”
“I told you, Ethan Wate.” Aunt Prue looked mighty satisfied.
If it was a mistake—if I wasn’t supposed to be here—maybe there was a way to fix it. Maybe I really could go home.
I wanted so badly for it to be true, the same way I had wanted this to be a dream I could wake up from. But I knew better.
Nothing was ever how you wanted it to be. Not anymore. Not for me.
They just didn’t understand.
“It wasn’t a mistake. I chose to come, Mr. Trueblood. I worked it out with the Lilum. If I didn’t, the people I loved, and lots of others, were going to die.”
Obidias nodded. “I know all of that, Ethan. Just like I know about the Lilum and the Order of Things. I’m not questioning what you did. What I’m saying is that you never should’ve had to make that choice. It wasn’t in the Chronicles.”
“The Caster Chronicles?” I had only seen the book once, in the archive when the Council of the Far Keep came to question Marian, yet it was the second time I’d heard the subject come up since I got here. How did Obidias know about it? And whatever any of it meant, my mom hadn’t exactly wanted to elaborate.
“Yes.” Obidias nodded.
“I don’t understand what that has to do with me.”
He was silent for a moment.
“Go on, tell him.” Aunt Prue was giving Obidias Trueblood the same forceful look she always gave me right before she made me do something crazy, like bury acorns in her yard for baby squirrels. “He deserves ta know. Set it right.”
Obidias nodded at Aunt Prue and looked back at me with those golden-yellow eyes that made my skin crawl almost as much as his snake hand did. “As you know, The Caster Chronicles is a record of everything that has happened in the world. But it is also a record of what might be—possible futures that have not come to pass.”
“The past, the present, and the future. I remember.” The three weird-looking Keepers I saw in the library and during Marian’s trial. How could I forget?
“Yes. In the Far Keep, those futures can be altered, transforming them from possible futures to actual ones.”
“Are you saying the book can change the future?” I was stunned. Marian had never mentioned any of this.
“It can,” Obidias answered. “If a page is altered, or one is added. A page that was never intended to be there.”
A shiver moved up my back. “What are you saying, Mr. Trueblood?”
“The page that tells the story of your death was never part of the original Chronicles. It was added.” He looked up at me, haunted.
“Why would someone do that?”
“There are more reasons for people’s actions than the number of actions that are actually set in motion.” His voice was distant, full of regret and sorrow I would never have expected from a Dark Caster. “The important thing is that your fate—this fate—can be changed.”
Changed? Could you save a life once it was over?
I was terrified to ask the next question, to believe there was a way I could get back to everything I lost. To Gatlin. To Amma.
Lena.
All I wanted was to feel her in my arms and hear her voice in my head. I wanted to find a way back to the Caster girl I loved more than anything in this world, or any world.
“How?” The answer didn’t actually matter. I would do whatever I had to, and Obidias Trueblood knew it.
“It’s dangerous.” Obidias’ expression was a warning. “More dangerous than anything in the Mortal world.”
I heard the words, but I couldn’t believe them. There was nothing more terrifying than staying here. “What do I have to do?”
“You’ll have to destroy your own page in The Caster Chronicles. The one that describes your death.”
I had a thousand questions, but only one mattered. “What if you’re wrong, and my page was there all along?”
Obidias stared down at what was left of his hand, the snakes rearing and striking even under the cloth. A shadow passed across his face.
He raised his eyes to meet mine.
“I know it wasn’t there, Ethan. Because I’m the one who wrote it.”
CHAPTER 11
Darker Things
The room went quiet, so quiet you could hear the house creak as the wind pushed against it. So quiet you could hear the snakes hiss almost as loudly as Aunt Prue’s asthma and my pounding heart. Even the Harlon Jameses slunk away, whimpering behind a chair.
For a second, I couldn’t think. My mind was completely blank.
There was no way to process this—to understand why a man I had never met would change the course of my life, so irreparably and violently.
What the hell did I do to this guy?
I finally found the words, at least some of them. There were others I couldn’t say in front of Aunt Prue, or she’d wash my mouth out with more than soap and probably make me suck down a bottle of Tabasco, too. “Why? You don’t even know me.”
“It’s complicated—”
“Complicated?” My voice started rising, and I pulled myself up out of my chair. “You ruined my life. You forced me to choose between saving the people I loved and sacrificing myself. I hurt everyone I care about. They had to put a Cast on my own father to keep him from going crazy!”
“I’m sorry, Ethan. I wouldn’t have wished this on my worst enemy.”
“No. You just wished it on some seventeen-year-old kid you’d never met.” This guy wasn’t going to help me. He was the reason I was stuck in this nightmare in the first place.
Aunt Prue reached out and took my hand. “I know you’re angry, and you’ve got more right than anyone ta be. But Obidias can help us get you back home. So you need ta sit down here and listen ta what he’s got ta say.”
“How do you know we can trust him, Aunt Prue? Every word that comes out of his mouth is probably a lie.” I pulled my hand away.
“You listen here, and you listen good.” She yanked on my arm harder than I would’ve expected, and I sank back down into the chair next to her. She wanted me to look her in the eye. “I’ve known Obidias Trueblood since before he was Light or Dark, before he’d done wrong or right. Spent the better part a my days walkin’ the Caster Tunnels with the Truebloods and my daddy.” Aunt Prue paused and glanced at Obidias. “And he saved me a time or two down there. Even if he wasn’t smart enough ta save himself.”
I didn’t know what to think. Maybe my aunt had charted the Tunnels with Obidias. Maybe she could trust him.
But that didn’t mean I could.
Obidias seemed to know what I was thinking. “Ethan, you may find this hard to believe, but I know what it’s like to feel helpless—to be at the mercy of decisions that you didn’t make.”
“You have no idea how I feel.” I heard the anger in my voice, but I didn’t try to hide it. I wanted Obidias Trueblood to know I hated him for what he’d done to me and the people I loved.
I thought about Lena leaving the button on my grave. He didn’t know what that felt like—for me or Lena.
“Ethan, I know you don’t trust him, and I don’t blame you.” Aunt Prue was playing hardball now. This meant something to her. “But I’m askin’ you ta trust me and hear him out.”
I locked eyes with Obidias. “Start talking. How do I get back?”
Obidias took a long breath. “As I said, the only way to get your life back is to erase your death.”
“So if I destroy the page, I go home—right?” I wanted to be sure there were no loopholes.
No calling a moon out of time, no splitting the moon in half. No curses that kept me from leaving, once the page was gone.
He nodded. “Yes. But first you have to get to the book.”
“You mean from the Far Keep? The Keepers had it with them when they came for my Aunt Marian.”
“That’s right.” He looked at me, startled. I guess he hadn’t expected me to know anything about The Caster Chronicles.
“So what are we doing sitting around here talking? Let’s get on with it.” I was halfway out of my chair before I realized Obidias wasn’t moving.
“And you think you’ll just walk in there and take the page?” he asked. “It’s not that easy.”
“Who’s going to stop me? A bunch of Keepers? What do I have to lose?” I tried not to think about how terrifying they had seemed when they came for Marian.
Obidias pulled the hood off his hand, and the snakes hissed and struck one another. “Do you know who did this to me? A ‘bunch of Keepers’ who caught me trying to steal my page from the Chronicles.”
“Lord have mercy,” Aunt Prue said, fanning herself with her handkerchief.
For a second, I didn’t know if I believed him. But I recognized the emotion playing out on his face, because I was feeling it myself.
Fear.
“Keepers did that to you?”
He nodded. “Angelus and Adriel. On one of their more generous days.” I wondered if Adriel was the big one who had shown up in the archive with Angelus and the albino woman. They were the three strangest-looking people I’d seen in the Caster world. At least until today.
I looked at Obidias and his snakes.
“Like I said, what can they do to me now? I’m already dead.” I tried to smile, even though it wasn’t funny. It was the opposite of funny.
Obidias held out his hand, the snakes jerking and stretching as they tried to reach me. “There are things worse than death, Ethan. Things that are darker than the Dark Casters. I should know. If you are caught, the Keepers will never let you leave the library at the Far Keep. You will be their scribe and their slave, forced to rewrite the futures of innocent Casters… and Mortal Waywards who are Bound to them.”
“Waywards are supposed to be pretty rare. How many can there be to write about?” I had never met another one, and I’d met Vexes and Incubuses and more kinds of Casters than I ever wanted to.
Obidias leaned forward in his chair, cloaking his cruelly deformed hand once again. “Perhaps they aren’t as rare as you think. Maybe they just don’t live long enough for the Casters to find them.”
There was an undeniable truth in his words that I couldn’t explain. I guess there was some part of me that knew a lie would have sounded different. Another part knew I’d always been in danger, one way or another—with or without Lena.