Beautiful Chaos (45 page)

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

I
t 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.

I was looking forward to it more than usual this year. It was the first time Amma had baked a pie in months, and part of me suspected the only reason she’d done it today was so no one else would notice. But I didn’t care. Between my dad dressed in his sport coat instead of pajamas like last year, Aunt Caroline and Marian playing Scrabble with the Sisters, and the smell of pies in the oven, I almost forgot about the lubbers and the heat, and my great-aunt missing from the table. The hard part was that it reminded me of all the other things I’d been forgetting lately—
the things I hadn’t meant to forget. I wondered how much longer I would be able to remember.

There was only one person I could think of who might know the answer to that question.

I stood in front of Amma’s bedroom door for a good minute before I knocked. Getting answers out of Amma was like pulling teeth, if the teeth belonged to a gator. She had always kept secrets. It was as much a part of her as her Red Hots and crossword puzzles, her tool apron and her superstitions. Maybe it was part of being a Seer, too. But this was different.

I’d never seen her walk away from the stove on Thanksgiving while her pies were still baking, or skip making Uncle Abner’s lemon meringue altogether. It was time to grow those kneecaps.

I reached up to knock.

“You gonna come in already or wear a hole in the carpet?” Amma called from inside her room.

I opened the door, prepared to see the rows of shelves lined with mason jars, full of everything from rock salt to graveyard dirt. Bookshelves crammed with cracked volumes that had been handed down, and notebooks with Amma’s recipes. It wasn’t long ago that I realized those recipes might not have anything to do with cooking. Amma’s room had always reminded me of an apothecary, brimming with mystery and the cure for whatever ailed you, like Amma herself.

Not today. Her room was torn apart, the way mine was after I’d dumped the contents of twenty shoe boxes all over my floor. Like she was looking for something she couldn’t find.

The bottles that were usually lined up neatly on the shelves, labels facing out, were pushed together on top of her dresser.
Books were stacked on the floor, on her bed, everywhere but on the shelves. Some of them were open—old diaries handwritten in Gullah, the language of her ancestors. There were other things I had never seen in here before—black feathers, branches, and a bucket of rocks.

Amma was sitting in the middle of the mess.

I stepped inside. “What happened in here?”

She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. “Nothin’s what happened. I’m cleanin’ up. Would do you some good to try it in that mess you call a room.” Amma tried to shoo me out, but I didn’t move. “Go on, now. Pies are almost done.”

She pushed past me. In a second, she’d be out in the hall and on her way to the kitchen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I blurted it out, and Amma stopped dead in her tracks. For a second, she didn’t say a word.

“You’re seventeen. I expect there’s more wrong with you than right.” She didn’t turn around.

“You mean like writing with the wrong hand and hating chocolate milk and your scrambled eggs all of a sudden? Forgetting the names of people I’ve known my whole life? Is that the kind of stuff you’re talking about?”

Amma turned around slowly, her brown eyes shining. Her hands were shaking, and she pushed them into the pockets of her apron so I wouldn’t notice.

Whatever was happening to me, Amma knew what it was.

She took a deep breath. Maybe she was finally going to tell me. “I don’t know about any a that. But I’m—lookin’ into it. Might have something to do with all this heat and these darn bugs, the problems the Casters are havin’.”

She was lying. It was the first time Amma had ever given
what sounded like a straight answer in her life. Which made it even more crooked.

“Amma, what aren’t you telling me? What do you know?”

“ ‘I know that my Redeemer lives.’ ” She looked at me, defiant. It was a line from a hymn I grew up hearing in church, while making spitballs and trying not to fall asleep.

“Amma.”

“ ‘What comfort this sweet sentence gives.’ ” She clapped her hand on my back.

“Please.”

Now she was all-out singing, which sounded kind of crazy. The way you sound when you think something terrible is about to happen, but you’re trying to convince yourself that it isn’t. The terrible shows up in your voice, even when you think you can hide it.

You can’t.

“ ‘He lives, he lives who once was dead.’ ” She shoved me out of the room. “ ‘He lives, my ever-living Head.’ ”

The door slammed behind me.

“Now.” She was already halfway down the hall, still humming the rest of the hymn. “Let’s go eat before your aunts get into the kitchen and burn the house down.”

I watched her scurry down the hall, shouting before she was halfway to the kitchen. “Everybody get on into the dinin’ room, before my food gets cold.”

I was starting to think I might have more luck asking my ever-living Head.

When I ducked under the doorframe and walked into the dining room, everyone else was already taking their seats. Lena and
Macon must have just arrived; they stood at one end of the dining room while Marian was deep in conversation with my Aunt Caroline at the other. Amma was still shouting orders from the kitchen, where the bird was “resting.” Aunt Grace shuffled toward the table, waving her handkerchief. “Don’t y’all keep this fine bird waitin’ any longer. He died a noble death, and it’s downright disrespectable.” Thelma and Aunt Mercy were right behind her.

“If you call a noble death a buckshot in the bee-hind, then I reckon you’re right.” Aunt Mercy pushed past her sister so she could sit in front of the biscuits.

“Don’t you start, Mercy Lynne. You know vegetablism is one step closer ta a world without panties an’ preachers. That there is a documentated fact.”

Lena took the seat next to Marian, trying not to laugh. Even Macon was having trouble keeping a straight face. My dad was standing behind Amma’s chair, waiting to push it in for her when she finally came in from the kitchen. Listening to Aunt Mercy and Aunt Grace peck away at each other made me miss Aunt Prue even more. But as I slid into my seat, I realized someone else was missing.

“Where’s Liv?”

Marian glanced at Macon before she answered. “She decided to stay in tonight.”

Aunt Grace caught enough to add her two cents. “Well, that just ain’t American. Did you invite her, Ethan?”

“Liv isn’t American. And yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. I invited her.”

It was nearly true. I had asked Marian to bring her. That was an invitation, right? Marian unfolded her napkin and placed it on her lap. “I’m not certain she felt comfortable coming.”

Lena bit her lip, like she felt bad.

It’s because of me.

Or me, L. I didn’t exactly invite her myself.

I feel like a jerk.

Me, too.

But there was nothing more to say, because right then Amma came in, carrying the green bean casserole. “All right. It’s time to thank the Good Lord and eat.” She sat down, and my dad pushed in her chair and took his own seat. We all joined hands around the table, and my Aunt Caroline bowed her head to say the Thanksgiving prayer, the way she always did.

I could feel the power of my family. I felt it the same way I did when I joined a Caster Circle. Even though Lena and Macon were the only actual Casters here, I still felt it. The buzz of our own kind of power, instead of lubbers chewing up the town or Incubuses ripping up the sky.

Then I heard it, too. Instead of the prayer, all I could hear was the song, thundering into my mind so loud I thought my head would split.

Eighteen Moons, eighteen dead

Eighteen turned upon their head,

The Earth above, the sky below

The End of Days, the Reaper’s Row…

Eighteen dead? Reaper’s Row?

By the time Aunt Caroline stopped praying, I was ready to start.

Six pies later, pecan—and, as usual, Amma—had been declared the winners. My dad was falling into his customary post-turkey
nap on the couch, wedged in between the Sisters. Dinner was cut short when we were all too full to sit upright in our hard wooden chairs.