Now I realized there was another reason.
I didn’t know what I was feeling, but whatever it was, Lena was feeling the opposite. “Then you can help us. We have to find out what happened to Ethan and Genevieve, and what it has to do with Ethan and me, and we have to find out before my birthday.” Lena looked at her expectantly. “The Caster Library must have records. Maybe The Book of Moons is there. Do you think it could have the answers?”
Marian looked away. “Maybe, maybe not. I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m so sorry.”
“What are you talking about?” She wasn’t making sense. I’d never seen Marian refuse help to anyone, especially me.
“I can’t get involved, even if I want to. It’s part of the job description. I don’t write the books, or the rules, I just keep them. I can’t interfere.”
“Is this job more important than helping us?” I stepped in front of her, so she had to look me in the eye when she answered. “More important than me?”
“It’s not that simple, Ethan. There’s a balance between the Mortal world and the Caster world, between Light and Dark. The Keeper is part of that balance, part of the Order of Things. If I defy the laws by which I’m Bound, that balance is jeopardized.” She looked back at me, her voice shaky. “I can’t interfere, even if it kills me. Even if it hurts the people I love.”
I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but I knew Marian loved me, like she had loved my mom. If she couldn’t help us, there had to be a reason. “Fine. You can’t help us. Just take me to this Caster Library, and I’ll figure it out myself.”
“You’re not a Caster, Ethan. This isn’t your decision to make.”
Lena stepped next to me, and took my hand. “It’s mine. And I want to go.”
Marian nodded. “All right, I’ll take you, the next time it’s open. The Caster Library doesn’t operate on the same schedule as the Gatlin County Library. It’s a bit more irregular.”
Of course it was.
10.31
Hallow E’en
The only days of the year that the Gatlin County Library was closed were bank holidays—like Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Easter. As a result, these were the only days the Gatlin County Caster Library was open, which apparently wasn’t something Marian could control.
“Take it up with the county. Like I said, I don’t make the rules.” I wondered what county she was talking about—the one I had lived in my whole life, or the one that had been hidden from me for just as long.
Still, Lena seemed almost hopeful. For the first time, it was as if she actually believed there might be a way to prevent what she had considered the inevitable. Marian couldn’t give us any answers, but she anchored us in the absence of the two people we relied on most, who hadn’t gone anywhere, but seemed far away just the same. I didn’t say anything to Lena, but without Amma I was lost. And without Macon, I knew Lena couldn’t even find her way to lost.
Marian did give us something, Ethan and Genevieve’s letters, so old and delicate they were almost transparent, and everything she and my mother had collected about the two of them. A whole stack of papers in a dusty brown box, with cardboard printed to look like wood paneling on the sides. Although Lena loved poring over the prose— “the days without you bleed together until time is nothing more than another obstacle we must overcome,” —all it seemed to amount to was a love story with a really bad, and really Black ending. But it was all we had.
Now all we had to do was figure out what we were looking for. The needle in the haystack, or in this case, the cardboard box. So we did the only thing we could do. We started looking.
After two weeks, I’d spent more time with Lena on the locket papers than I would have thought possible. The more we read through the papers, the more it seemed like we were reading about ourselves. At night, we stayed up late trying to solve the mystery of Ethan and Genevieve, a Mortal and a Caster, desperate to find a way to be together, against impossible odds. At school, we faced some steep odds ourselves, just getting through another eight hours at Jackson, and it was only getting harder.
Every day, there was another scheme to drive Lena away, or us apart. Especially if that day was Halloween.
Halloween was generally a pretty loaded holiday at Jackson. For a guy, anything involving costumes was an accident waiting to happen. And then, there was always the stress of whether or not you made the guest list to Savannah Snow’s annual blowout. But Halloween took on a whole new level of stress when the girl you were crazy about was a Caster.
I had no idea what to expect when Lena picked me up for school, a couple of blocks from my house, safely around the corner from the eyes in the back of Amma’s head.
“You’re not dressed up,” I said, surprised.