Beautiful Chaos (7 page)

Lena should’ve been laughing, but she wasn’t. “I pulled on the thread when I used
The Book of Moons.
”

“Because of me.” I thought about it all the time. She wasn’t the only one of us who had pulled on the one piece of yarn that tied up all of Gatlin County, above and below the surface.

“I Claimed myself.”

“You had to. You should be proud of that.”

“I am.” She hesitated.

“But?” I watched her carefully.

“But I’m going to have to pay a price, and I’m ready to.”

I closed my eyes. “Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m being realistic.”

“You’re waiting for something bad to happen.” I didn’t want to think about it.

Lena played with the charms on her necklace. “It’s not really a question of
if
but
when.
”

I’m waiting. That’s what the notebook said.

What notebook?

I didn’t want her to know, but now I couldn’t stop it. And I couldn’t pretend we could go back to the way things were.

The wrongness of everything came crashing down on me. The summer. Macon’s death. Lena acting like a stranger. Running away with John Breed, and away from me. And then the rest of it, the part that happened before I met Lena—my mom not coming home, her shoes sitting where she’d left them, her towel still damp from the morning. Her side of the bed not slept in, the smell of her hair still on her pillow.

The mail that still came addressed in her name.

The suddenness of it all. And the permanence. The lonely reality of the truth—that the most important person in your life suddenly ceased to exist. Which on a bad day meant maybe she had never existed at all. And on a good day, there was the other fear. That even if you were a hundred percent sure she had been there, maybe you were the only one who cared or remembered.

How can a pillow smell like a person who isn’t even on the same planet as you anymore? And what do you do when one day the pillow just smells like any old pillow, a strange pillow? How can you bring yourself to put away those shoes?

But I had. And I had seen my mother’s Sheer at Bonaventure Cemetery. For the first time in my life, I believed something
actually happened when you died. My mom wasn’t alone in the dirt in His Garden of Perpetual Peace, the way I’d always been afraid she was. I was letting her go. At least, I was close.

Ethan? What’s going on?

I wished I knew.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you. No one will.” I said the words even though I knew I wasn’t capable of protecting her. I said them because I felt like my heart was going to rip itself to shreds all over again.

“I know,” she lied. Lena didn’t say anything else, but she knew what I was feeling.

She pulled down the sky with her hands, as hard as she could, like she wanted to rip it away from the sun.

I heard a loud cracking sound.

I didn’t know where it came from, and I didn’t know how long it would last, but the blue sky broke open, and though there wasn’t a cloud in sight, we let the rain fall on our faces.

I felt the wet grass, and the raindrops in my eyes. They felt real. I felt my sweaty clothes dampening instead of drying. I pulled her close and held her face in my hands. Then I kissed her until I wasn’t the only one who was breathless, and the ground beneath us dried and the sky was harsh and blue again.

Dinner was Amma’s prizewinning chicken potpie. My portion alone was the size of my plate, or maybe home plate. I punctured the biscuit crust with my fork, letting the steam escape. I could smell the good sherry, her secret ingredient. Every potpie in our county had a secret ingredient: sour cream, soy sauce,
cayenne pepper, even parmesan cheese straight out of the shaker. Secrets and piecrust went hand in hand around here. Slap a piecrust up top and all the folks in town will kill themselves trying to figure out what’s hiding underneath.

“Ah. That smell still makes me feel about eight years old.” My dad smiled at Amma, who ignored both the comment and his suspiciously good mood. Now that the semester had started up again at the university, and he was sitting there in his collared teaching shirt, he looked downright normal. You could almost forget the year he spent sleeping all day, holed up in his office all night “writing” a book that amounted to nothing more than hundreds of pages of scribble. Barely speaking or eating, until he started the steep, slow climb back to sanity. Or maybe it was the smell of the pies going to work on me, too. I dug deep.

“You have a good first day of school, Ethan?” my dad asked, his mouth full.

I examined the pie on my fork. “Good enough.”

Everything was chopped up real small, underneath the dough. You couldn’t tell diced chicken from diced vegetables in the tiny chaos of mashed-up pie guts. Crap. When Amma had her cleaver out, it was never a good sign. This potpie was evidence of some kind of furious afternoon I didn’t want to imagine. I felt sorry for her scarred cutting board. I looked over at her empty plate and knew she wasn’t about to sit down and make small talk tonight. Or explain why not.

I swallowed. “How about you, Amma?”

She was standing at the kitchen counter tossing a salad so hard I thought she was going to shatter our cracked glass bowl. “Good enough.”

My dad calmly raised his glass of milk. “Well, my day was unbelievable. I woke up with an incredible idea, out of the blue. Must have come to me last night. During my office hours, I wrote up a proposal. I’m going to start a new book.”

“Yeah? That’s great.” I picked up the salad bowl, concentrating on an oily-looking wedge of tomato.

“It’s about the Civil War. I might even find a way to use some of your mom’s old research. I have to talk to Marian about it.”

“What’s the book called, Dad?”

“That’s the part that hit me out of nowhere. I woke up with the words in my head.
The Eighteenth Moon.
What do you think?”

The bowl slipped out of my hands, hitting the table and shattering on the floor. Torn-up leaves mixed with jagged pieces of broken glass, sparkling across my sneakers and the floorboards.

“Ethan Wate!” Before I could say another word, Amma was there, scooping up the soggy, slippery, dangerous mess. Like always. As I got down on my own hands and knees, I could hear her hissing at me under her breath.

“Not another word.” She might as well have slapped an old piecrust right across my mouth.

What do you think it means, L?

I lay in bed, paralyzed, my face hidden in the pillow. Amma had shut herself up in her room after dinner, which I was pretty sure meant she didn’t know what was going on with my dad either.

I don’t know.

Lena’s Kelting came to me as clearly as if she was sitting next to me on the bed, as usual. And as usual, I wished she really was.

How would he come up with that? Did we say something about the songs in front of him? Have we messed something up?

Something else. That was the part I didn’t say and tried not to think. The answer came quickly.

No, Ethan. We never said anything.

So if he’s talking about the Eighteenth Moon…

The truth hit us at the same time.

It’s because someone wants him to.

It made sense. Dark Casters had already killed my mom. My dad, just getting back on his feet, was an easy mark. And he had been targeted once already, the night of Lena’s Sixteenth Moon. There was no other explanation.

My mother was gone, but she had found a way to guide me by sending the Shadowing Songs,
Sixteen Moons
and
Seventeen Moons
, which stayed stuck in my head until I finally started to listen. But this message wasn’t coming from my mom.

L? You think it’s some kind of warning? From Abraham?

Maybe. Or my wonderful mother.

Sarafine. Lena almost never said her name, if she could avoid it. I didn’t blame her.

It has to be one of them, right?

Lena didn’t answer, and I lay there in my bed in the dark silence, hoping it was one of the two. One of the devils we knew, from somewhere in the known Caster world. Because the devils we didn’t know were too terrifying to think about—and the worlds we didn’t know, even worse.

Are you still there, Ethan?

I’m here.

Will you read me something?

I smiled to myself and reached under my bed, pulling out the first book I found. Robert Frost, one of Lena’s favorites. I opened to a random page.
“We make ourselves a place apart / Behind light words that tease and flout, / But oh, the agitated heart / Till someone really find us out…”

I didn’t stop reading. I felt the reassuring weight of Lena’s consciousness leaning against mine, as real as if her head was leaning against my shoulder. I wanted to keep her there as long as I could. She made me feel less alone.

Every line felt like it was written about her, at least to me.

As Lena drifted off, I listened to the hum of the crickets until I realized it wasn’t the crickets at all. It was the lubbers. The plague, or whatever Mrs. Lincoln wanted to call it. The longer I listened, the more it sounded like a million buzz saws in the distance, destroying my town and everything around it. Then the lubbers faded into something else—the low chords of a song I would recognize anywhere.

I’d been hearing the songs since before I met Lena.
Sixteen Moons
had led me to her, the song only I could hear. I couldn’t escape them, any more than Lena could run from her destiny or I could hide from mine. They were warnings from my mom—the person I trusted most, in any world.

Eighteen Moons, eighteen spheres,

From the world beyond the years,

One Unchosen, death or birth,

A Broken Day awaits the Earth…

I tried to make sense of the words, the way I always did. “The world beyond the years” ruled out the Mortal world. But what was coming from this other world—the Eighteenth Moon or the “One Unchosen”? And who could that be?

The only person it ruled out was Lena. She’d made her choice. Which meant there was another choice to be made—by someone who had yet to make one.

But the last line was the one that made me sick. “A Broken Day?” That pretty much covered every day now. How could things possibly get more broken than this?

I wished I had more than a song and that my mom was here to tell me what it meant. More than anything, I wished I knew how to fix everything we had broken.

9.12