Link was right. Lena was acting strange. But it had only been a few months. She’d snap out of it, and things would be the way they were before.
I dug through the piles of books and papers on my desk, looking for A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, my go-to book for taking my mind off things. Under a stack of old Sandman comics, I found something else. It was a package, wrapped in Marian’s signature brown paper and tied with string. But it didn’t have GATLIN COUNTY LIBRARY stamped on it.
Marian was my mother’s oldest friend and the Gatlin County Head Librarian. She was also a Keeper in the Caster world—a Mortal who guarded Caster secrets and history, and, in Marian’s case, the Lunae Libri, a Caster Library filled with secrets of its own. She had given me the package after Macon died, but I had forgotten all about it. It was his journal, and she thought Lena would want to have it. Marian was wrong. Lena didn’t want to see it or touch it. She wouldn’t even let it into Ravenwood. “You keep it,” she had said. “I don’t think I could bear to see his handwriting.” It had been collecting dust on my desk ever since.
I turned it over in my hands. It was heavy, almost too heavy to be a book. I wondered what it looked like. It was probably old, made of cracked leather. I untied the string and unwrapped it. I wasn’t going to read it, just look at it. But when I pulled the paper away, I realized it wasn’t a book. It was a black wooden box, intricately carved with strange Caster symbols.
I ran my hand over the top, wondering what he wrote about. I couldn’t imagine him writing poetry like Lena. It was probably full of horticultural notes. I opened the lid carefully. I wanted to see something Macon had touched every day, something that was important to him. The lining was black satin, and the pages inside were unbound and yellowed, written in Macon’s fading spidery script. I touched a page, with a single finger. The sky began to spin, and I felt myself pitching forward. The floor rushed up to meet me, but as I hit the ground, I fell through it and found myself in a cloud of smoke—
Fires burned along the river, the only traces of the plantations that had stood there just hours ago. Greenbrier was already engulfed in flames. Ravenwood would be next. The Union soldiers must have been taking a break, drunk from their victory and the liquor they had pillaged from the wealthiest homes in Gatlin.
Abraham didn’t have much time. The soldiers were coming, and he was going to have to kill them. It was the only way to save Ravenwood. The Mortals didn’t stand a chance against him, even if they were soldiers. They were no match for an Incubus. And if his brother, Jonah, ever came back from the Tunnels, the soldiers would have two of them to contend with. The guns were Abraham’s only concern. Even though Mortal weapons couldn’t kill his kind, the bullets would weaken him, which might give the soldiers the time they needed to set fire to Ravenwood.
Abraham needed to feed, and even through the smoke, he could smell the desperation and fear of a Mortal nearby. Fear would make him strong. It provided more power and sustenance than memories or dreams.
Abraham Traveled toward the scent. But when he materialized in the woods beyond Greenbrier, he knew he was too late. The scent was faint. In the distance, he could see Genevieve Duchannes hunched over a body in the mud. Ivy, Greenbrier’s cook, was standing behind Genevieve, clutching something against her chest.
The old woman saw Abraham and rushed toward him. “Mr. Ravenwood, thank the Lord.” She lowered her voice. “You have to take this. Put it somewhere safe till I can come for it.” Pulling a heavy black book from the folds of her apron, she thrust it into Abraham’s hands. As soon as he touched it, Abraham could feel its power.
The book was alive, pulsating against his palms as if it had a heartbeat. He could almost hear it whispering to him, beckoning him to take it—to open it and release whatever was hiding inside. There were no words on its cover, only a single crescent moon. Abraham ran his fingers over the edges.
Ivy was still talking, mistaking Abraham’s silence for hesitation. “Please, Mr. Ravenwood. I got no one else to give it to. And I can’t leave it with Miss Genevieve. Not now.” Genevieve raised her head as if she could hear them through the rain and the roar of the flames.
The moment Genevieve turned toward them, Abraham understood. He could see her yellow eyes glowing in the darkness. The eyes of a Dark Caster. In that moment, he also understood what he was holding.
The Book of Moons.
He had seen the Book before, in the dreams of Genevieve’s mother, Marguerite. It was a book of infinite power, a book Marguerite feared and revered in equal measure. One she hid from her husband and her daughters, and would never have allowed into the hands of a Dark Caster or an Incubus. A book that could save Ravenwood.
Ivy scooped something from inside the folds of her skirt and rubbed it across the face of the Book. The white crystals rolled down over the edges. Salt. The weapon of superstitious island women, who brought their own brand of power with them from the Sugar Islands, where their ancestors were born. They believed it warded off Demons, a belief that had always amused Abraham. “I’ll come for it, soon as I can. I swear.”
“I will keep it safe. You have my word.” Abraham brushed some of the salt from the Book’s cover so he could feel its heat against his skin. He turned back toward the woods. He would walk a few yards, for Ivy’s benefit. It always scared the Gullah women to see him Travel, to be reminded of what he was.
“Put it away, Mr. Ravenwood. Whatever you do, don’t open it. That book brings nothin’ but misery to anyone who messes with it. Don’t listen to it when it calls you. I’ll come for it.” But Ivy’s warning had come too late.
Abraham was already listening.
When I came to, I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at my ceiling. It was painted sky blue, like all the ceilings in our house, to fool the carpenter bees that nested there.
I sat up, dizzy. The box was beside me, the lid shut. I opened it, and the pages were inside. This time I didn’t touch them.
None of this made sense. Why was I having visions again? Why was I seeing Abraham Ravenwood, a man who folks in town had been suspicious of for generations because Ravenwood was the only plantation to survive the Great Burning? Not that I believed much of anything the folks in town had to say.
But when Genevieve’s locket triggered the visions, there had been a reason. Something Lena and I needed to figure out. What did Abraham Ravenwood have to do with us? The common thread was The Book of Moons. It was in the locket visions and in this one. But the Book was gone. The last time anyone had seen it was the night of Lena’s birthday, when it was lying on the table in the crypt, surrounded by fire. Like so many things, it was nothing but ashes now.
5.17
All That Remains
When I went to school the next day, I sat alone with Link and his four sloppy joes at the lunch table. While I ate my pizza, all I could think about was what Link said about Lena. He was right. She had changed, a little bit at a time, until I almost couldn’t remember how things used to be. If I had anyone to talk to about it, I knew they would say to give her time. I also knew that was just something people said when there was nothing left to say and nothing you could do.
Lena wasn’t coming out of it. She wasn’t coming back to herself or to me. If anything, she was drifting farther away from me than anyone else. More and more, I couldn’t reach her, not on the inside, not with Kelting or kissing or any of the other complicated or uncomplicated ways we used to touch. Now when I took her hand, all I could feel was the chill.
And when Emily Asher looked at me from across the lunchroom, there wasn’t anything left but pity in her eyes. Once again, I was someone to feel sorry for. I wasn’t Ethan Wate Whose Mamma Died Just Last Year. Now I was Ethan Wate Whose Girlfriend Went Psycho When Her Uncle Died. People knew there were complications, and they knew they hadn’t seen Lena in school with me.
Even if they didn’t like Lena, the miserable love to watch someone else’s misery. I had just about cornered the market on miserable. I was wo
rse than miserable, lower than a flattened sloppy joe left behind on a lunchroom tray. I was alone.
One morning about a week later, I kept hearing a strange sound, like a grating or a record scratching or a page tearing, in the back of my mind. I was in history class, and we were talking about the Reconstruction, which was the even more boring time after the Civil War when the United States had to put itself back together. In a Gatlin classroom, this chapter was even more embarrassing than it was depressing—a reminder South Carolina had been a slave state and that we had been on the wrong side of right. We all knew it, but our ancestors had left us with a permanent F on the nation’s moral report card. Cuts that run that deep leave scars, no matter what you try to do to heal them. Mr. Lee was still droning on, punctuating each sentence with a dramatic sigh.
I was trying not to listen, when I smelled something burning, maybe an overheating engine or a lighter. I looked around the room. It wasn’t coming from Mr. Lee, the most frequent source of any horrible smell in my history class. No one else seemed to notice it.
The noise grew louder, into a confusing blur of crashing—ripping, talking, yelling. Lena.
L?
No answer. Above the noise, I heard Lena mumbling lines of poetry, and not the kind you send someone for Valentine’s Day.
Not waving but drowning…
I recognized the poem, and it wasn’t good. Lena reading Stevie Smith was only one step up from the darkest Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar kind of day. It was Lena’s red flag, like Link listening to the Dead Kennedys or Amma chopping vegetables for spring rolls with her cleaver.
Hang on, L. I’m coming.
Something had changed, and before it could change back, I grabbed my books and took off running. I was out of the room before Mr. Lee’s next sigh.
Reece wouldn’t look at me when I walked through the door. She pointed to the stairs. Ryan, Lena’s youngest cousin, was sitting on the bottom step with Boo, looking sad. When I tousled her hair, she held her finger to her lips. “Lena’s having a nerve breakup. We’re supposed to be quiet until Gramma and Mamma get home.”
That was an understatement.
The door was open a crack, and when I pushed on it, the hinges creaked, like I was walking into a crime scene. It looked like the room had been tossed. The furniture was upside down or busted up or missing altogether. The entire room was covered with pages of books, pages torn and ripped and plastered all along the walls and ceiling and floor. Not a book was left on the shelf. It looked like a library had exploded. Some of the charred pages piled on the floor were still smoking. The only thing I didn’t see was Lena.
L? Where are you?
I scanned the room. The wall over her bed wasn’t covered with the remnants of the books Lena loved. It was covered in something else.
Nobody the dead man & Nobody the living
Nobody is giving in & Nobody is giving
Nobody hears me but just Nobody cares
Nobody fears me but Nobody just stares
Nobody belongs to me & Nobody remains
No Nobody knows Nothing
All that remains are remains
Nobody and Nobody. One of them was Macon, right? The dead man.
Who was the other? Me?
Was that who I was now, Nobody?
Did all guys have to work this hard to figure out their girlfriends? Untwisting the twisted poems written all over their walls in Sharpie or cracked plaster?
All that remains are remains.
I touched the wall, smearing away the word remains.
Because all that remained was not remains. There had to be more than that—more to Lena and me, more to everything. It wasn’t just Macon. My mom was gone, but as the last few months had shown, some part of her was with me. I had been thinking about her more and more.
Claim yourself. It had been my mom’s message to Lena, written in the page numbers of books, scattered across the floor of her favorite room at Wate’s Landing. Her message to me didn’t have to be written anywhere, not in numbers or letters or even dreams.
Lena’s floor looked a little like the study that day, books lying open all over the place. Except these books were missing their pages, which sent a different message altogether.
Pain and guilt. It was the second chapter of every book my Aunt Caroline had given me about the five stages of grief, or however many stages of grief people say there are. Lena had covered shock and denial, the first two, so I should’ve seen this one coming. For her, I guess it meant giving up one of the things she loved the most. Books.
At least, I hoped that’s what it meant. I stepped carefully around the empty, burnt book jackets. I heard the muffled sobs before I saw her.
I opened the closet door. She was huddled in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.
It’s okay, L.
She looked up at me, but I wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
My books all sounded like him. I couldn’t make them stop.
It doesn’t matter. Everything’s okay now.
I knew things wouldn’t stay that way for long. Nothing was okay. Somewhere along the way between angry and scared and miserable, she had turned a corner. I knew from experience there was no turning back.
Gramma had finally intervened. Lena would be going back to school next week, like it or not. Her choice was school or the thing nobody said out loud. Blue Horizons, or whatever the Caster equivalent was. Until then, I was only allowed to see her when I dropped off her homework. I trudged all the way up to her house with a Stop & Steal bag’s worth of meaningless worksheets and essay questions.
Why me? What did I do?
I guess I’m not supposed to be around anyone who gets me worked up. That’s what Reece said.
I’m what gets you worked up?
I could feel something like a smile tugging at the back of my mind.
Of course you are. Just not the way they think.
When her bedroom door finally swung open, I dropped the sack and pulled her into my arms. It had only been a few days since I’d seen her in person, but I missed the smell of her hair, the lemons and rosemary. The familiar things. Today I couldn’t smell it, though. I buried my face in her neck.
I missed you, too.
Lena looked up at me. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black tights, cut into all kinds of crazy slits up and down her legs. Her hair was squirming loose from the clasp at the back of her neck. Her necklace hung down, twisting on its chain. Her eyes were ringed with darkness that wasn’t makeup. I was worried. But when I looked past her to her bedroom, I was even more worried.
Gramma had gotten her way. There was not a burnt book, not a thing out of place in the room. That was the problem. There wasn’t one streak of Sharpie, not a poem, not a page anywhere in the room. Instead, the walls were covered with images, taped carefully in a row along the perimeter, as if they were some kind of fence trapping her inside.
Sacred. Sleeping. Beloved. Daughter.
They were photographs of headstones, taken so close that all I could make out was the rough stubble of the rock behind the chiseled words, and the words themselves.
Father. Joy. Despair. Eternal Rest.
“I didn’t know you were into photography.” I wondered what else I didn’t know.
“I’m not, really.” She looked embarrassed.
“They’re great.”
“It’s supposed to be good for me. I have to prove to everyone that I know he’s really gone.”
“Yeah. My dad’s supposed to keep a feelings journal now.” As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Comparing Lena to my dad couldn’t be mistaken for a compliment, but she didn’t seem to notice. I wondered how long she had been climbing around His Garden of Perpetual Peace with her camera, and how I had missed it.
Soldier. Sleeping. Through a glass, darkly.
I came to the last picture, the only one that didn’t seem to belong with the rest. It was a motorcycle, a Harley leaning against a gravestone. T
he shiny chrome of the bike looked out of place next to the worn old stones. My heart started to pound as I looked at it. “What’s this one?”
Lena dismissed it with a wave. “Some guy visiting a grave, I guess. He was just kind of… there. I keep meaning to take it down, the lighting’s terrible.” She reached up past me, pulling the tacks out of the wall. When she reached the last one, the photo vanished, leaving nothing but four tiny holes in her black wall.
Aside from the images, the room was nearly empty, as if she’d packed up and gone to college somewhere. The bed was gone. The bookshelf and all the books were gone. The old chandelier we’d made swing so many times I had thought it would fall from the ceiling was gone. There was a futon on the floor, in the center of the room. Next to it was the tiny silver sparrow. Seeing it flooded my brain with memories from the funeral—magnolias ripping out of the lawn, the same silver sparrow in her muddy palm.
“Everything looks so different.” I tried not to think about the sparrow or the reason it would be next to her bed. The reason that had nothing to do with Macon.
“Well, you know. Spring cleaning. I had kind of trashed the place.”
A few tattered books lay on the futon. Without thinking, I flipped one open—until I realized I’d committed the worst of crimes. Though the outside was covered with an old, taped-up cover from a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inside wasn’t a book at all. It was one of Lena’s spiral notebooks, and I had opened it up right in front of her. Like it was nothing, or it was mine to read.
I realized something else. Most of the pages were blank.
The shock was almost as terrible as discovering the pages of my dad’s gibberish when I had thought he was writing a novel. Lena carried a notebook around with her wherever she went. If she had stopped scribbling every fifth word into it, things were worse than I thought.