Beautiful Creatures (32 page)

“What is it?” Savannah demanded. Charlotte pulled her hand back out of her locker. She was holding a Sharpie.

Link shook his pom-pom. “Cheerleaders rock!”

I looked at Lena.

Sharpie?

A mischievous smile spread across her face.

I thought you said you couldn’t control your powers.

Beginner’s luck.

By the end of the day, everyone at Jackson was talking about the cheer squad. Apparently, every one of the cheerleaders who
dressed up as Lena had somehow used a Sharpie to draw the innocuous crescent moon on her face, instead of eyeliner. Cheerleaders.
The jokes were endless.

All of them would be walking around school and the rest of town, singing in the church youth choirs, and cheering at the games,
with Sharpie on their cheeks for the next few days, until it faded away. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Snow were going to have a fit.

I just wished I could be there to see it.

After school, I walked Lena back to her car, which was really just an excuse to try to hold her hand a little longer. The
intense physical feelings I had when I touched her weren’t the deterrent you might have expected. No matter what it felt like,
whether I was burning or blowing out light bulbs or getting struck by lightning, I had to be close to her. It was like eating,
or breathing. I didn’t have a choice. And that was scarier than a month of Halloweens, and it was killing me.

“What are you doing tonight?” As she spoke, she pulled her hand absentmindedly through her hair. She was sitting on the hood
of the hearse and I was standing in front of her.

“I thought maybe you’d come over, and we’d stay home and answer the door for trick-or-treaters. You can help me watch the
lawn to make sure no one burns a cross on it.” I tried not to think too clearly about the rest of my plan, which involved
Lena and our couch and old movies and Amma being gone for the night.

“I can’t. It’s a High Holiday. I have relatives coming in from all over. Uncle M won’t let me out of the house for five minutes,
not to mention the danger. I’d never open my door to strangers on a night of such Dark power.”

“I never thought of it that way.” Until now.

By the time I got home, Amma was getting ready to leave. She was boiling a chicken on the stove and mixing biscuit batter
with her hands, “the only way any self-respectin’ woman makes her biscuits.” I looked at the pot suspiciously, wondering if
this meal was going to make it to our dinner table or the Greats’.

I pinched some dough, and she caught my hand.

“P. U. R. L. O. I. N. E. R.” I smiled.

“As in, keep your thievin’ hands off a my biscuits, Ethan Wate. I’ve got hungry people to feed.” Guess I wouldn’t be eating
chicken and biscuits tonight.

Amma always went home on Halloween. She said it was a special night at church, but my mom used to say it was just a good night
for business. What better night to have your cards read than Halloween? You weren’t going to get quite the same crowd on Easter
or Valentine’s Day.

But in light of recent events, I wondered if there wasn’t another reason. Maybe it was a good night for reading chicken bones
in the graveyard, too. I couldn’t ask, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I missed Amma, missed talking to her, missed trusting
her. If she felt the difference, she didn’t let on. Maybe she just thought I was growing up, or maybe I was.

“You goin’ to that party over at the Snows’?”

“No, I’m just gonna stay home this year.”

She raised an eyebrow, but she wasn’t going to ask. She already knew why I wasn’t going. “You make your bed, you better be
ready to lie in it.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew better. She wasn’t expecting a response.

“I’m fixin’ to go in a few minutes. You answer the door for those young’uns when they come around. Your daddy’s busy workin’.”
Like my dad was going to come out of his self-imposed exile to answer the door for trick-or-treaters.

“Sure.”

The bags of candy were in the hall. I ripped them open and turned them over into a big glass bowl. I couldn’t get Lena’s words
out of my head.
A night of such Dark power.
I remembered Ridley standing in front of her car, outside the Stop & Steal, all sticky sweet smiles and legs. Obviously,
identifying Dark forces wasn’t one of my talents, or deciding who you should and shouldn’t open your front door for. Like
I said, when the girl you couldn’t stop thinking about was a Caster, Halloween took on a whole new meaning. I looked at the
bowl of candy in my hands. Then I opened the front door, put the bowl out on the porch, and went back inside.

As I settled in to watch
The Shining
, I found myself missing Lena. I let my mind wander, because it usually found a way of wandering over to wherever she was,
but she wasn’t there. I fell asleep on the couch waiting for her to dream me, or something.

A knock at the door startled me. I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten, too late for trick-or-treaters.

“Amma?”

No answer. I heard knocking again.

“Is that you?”

The den was dark, and only the light of the TV was flickering. It was the moment in
The Shining
when the dad chops down the hotel room door with his bloody axe to bludgeon his family. Not a great moment for answering
any door, especially on Halloween. Another knock.

“Link?” I clicked off the TV and looked around for something to pick up, but there was nothing. I picked up an old game console,
lying on the floor in a pile of video games. It wasn’t a baseball bat, but some decently solid old-school Japanese technology.
It had to weigh at least five pounds. I raised it over my head and took a step closer to the wall separating the den from
the front hall. Another step, and I moved the lace curtain covering the glass-paned door, just a millimeter.

In the darkness of the unlit porch, I couldn’t see her face. But I would recognize that old beige van, still running in the
street in front of my house, anywhere. “Desert Sand,” she used to say. It was Link’s mom, holding a plate of brownies. I was
still carrying the console. If Link saw me, he’d never let me live this down.

“Just a minute, Mrs. Lincoln.” I flipped on the porch light, and unbolted the front door. But when I tried to pull it open,
the door jammed. I checked the lock again, and it was still bolted, even though I had just unbolted it.

“Ethan?”

I unbolted the lock again. It bolted shut with a snap, before I could take my hand away from it. “Mrs. Lincoln, I’m sorry,
my door seems to be stuck.” I rattled the door with all my weight, juggling the console. Something fell to the floor in front
of me. I stopped to pick it up. Garlic, wrapped in one of Amma’s handkerchiefs. If I had to guess, there was one over every
door and every windowsill. Amma’s little Halloween tradition.

Still, something was keeping the door from opening, just like something had tried to open the study door for me just days
ago. How many bolts in this house were going to just keep locking and unlocking themselves? What was going on?

I unbolted the lock one more time and gave the door a final pull. It flung open, banging against the wall in the front hall.
Mrs. Lincoln was lit from behind, a dark figure in a pool of pale lamplight. The silhouette was unsettling.

She stared at the game console in my hand. “Video games will rot your brain, Ethan.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I brought you some brownies. A peace offerin’.” She held them out expectantly. I should’ve asked her to come in. There was
a formula for everything. I guess you could call it manners, Southern hospitality. But I had tried that with Ridley, and it
hadn’t gone so well. I hesitated. “What are you doing out tonight, ma’am? Link’s not here.”

“Of course he’s not. He’s at the Snows’, which is where every upstandin’ member a the Jackson High student body should be
lucky enough to be. It took quite a number a phone calls on my part to get him an invitation, in light a his recent behavior.”

I still didn’t get it. I’d known Mrs. Lincoln my whole life. She had always been an odd duck. Busy getting books taken off
the library shelves, teachers fired from the schools, reputations ruined in a single afternoon. Lately, she was different.
The crusade against Lena was different. Mrs. Lincoln had always had conviction, but this was personal.

“Ma’am?”

She looked agitated. “I made you brownies. I thought I could come in, and we could talk. My fight’s not with you, Ethan. It’s
not your fault that girl is usin’ her deviltry on you. You should be at the party, with your friends. With the kids who belong
here.” She held out the brownies, the gooey double chocolate chip fudge brownies that were always the first thing to go at
the Baptist Church Bake Sale. I had grown up on those brownies. “Ethan?”

“Ma’am.”

“Can I come in?”

I didn’t move a muscle. My grip tightened around the console. I stared at the brownies, and suddenly I didn’t feel hungry
at all. Not even the plate, not a crumb of that woman was welcome in my house. My house, like Ravenwood, was starting to have
a mind of its own, and there was no part of me or my house that was going to let her in.

“No, ma’am.”

“What was that, Ethan?”

“No. Ma’am.”

Her eyes narrowed. She pushed the plate toward me, as if she was going to come in anyway, but it jerked like it had hit an
invisible wall between her and me. I saw the plate tumble, falling slowly to the ground until it shattered into a million
bits of ceramic and chocolate, all over our Happy Halloween doormat. Amma would pitch a fit in the morning.

Mrs. Lincoln backed down the porch steps warily, and disappeared into the darkness of the old Desert Sand.

Ethan!

Her voice ripped me right out of my sleep. I must have drifted off. The horror marathon was over and the television had broken
down into a loud, gray fuzz.

Uncle Macon! Ethan! Help!

Lena was screaming. Somewhere. I could hear the terror in her voice, and my head was pounding with such pain for a second
I forgot where I was.

Someone please help me!

My front door was wide open, swinging and banging in the wind. The sound ricocheted off the walls, like gunfire.

I thought you said I was safe here!

Ravenwood.

I grabbed the car keys to the old Volvo, and ran.

I can’t remember how I got to Ravenwood, but I know I nearly drove off the road a few times. My eyes could barely focus. Lena
was in such intense pain, our connection so close, that I nearly blacked out just from feeling it through her.

And the screaming.

There was always the screaming, from the moment I’d woken up, until the moment I pressed the crescent and let myself into
Ravenwood Manor.

As the front door swung open, I could see Ravenwood had transformed itself once again. Tonight, it was almost like some kind
of ancient castle. Candelabras cast strange shadows down on the throngs of black-robed, black-gowned, black-jacketed guests,
far outnumbering the guests at the Gathering.

Ethan! Hurry! I can’t hold on…

“Lena!” I yelled. “Macon! Where is she?”

No one so much as looked my way. I didn’t see anyone I recognized, though the front hall was crowded with guests, flowing
from room to room like ghosts at a haunted dinner party. They were not from around here, at least not for hundreds of years.
I saw men in dark kilts and rough Gaelic robes, women in corseted gowns. Everything was black, wrapped in shadow.

I pushed through the crowd and into what looked like a grand ballroom. I couldn’t see any of them—no Aunt Del, no Reece, not
even little Ryan. Candles sputtered into flame in the corners of the room, and what seemed to be a translucent orchestra of
strange musical instruments shifted in and out of focus, playing themselves, while shadowy couples went spinning and gliding
across the now stone floor. The dancers didn’t even seem to be aware of me.

The music was clearly Caster music, conjuring a spell of its own. It was the strings, mostly. I could hear the violin, the
viola, the cello. I could almost see the web that spun from dancer to dancer, the way they pulled each other in and out, as
if there was a deliberate pattern, and they were all a part of the design. And I wasn’t.